Incontinence and Alcohol

We've just finished Aristotle's long inquiry into the problem of incontinence. Probably the clearest case of human incontinence lies with alcohol, where very often we have known that another drink isn't the best choice and that we have to get up tomorrow, but we're out with friends or listening to moving music and decide that just one more won't hurt. There are many similar cases, so many that it has filled libraries with folk songs and country music, and hardly any blues music fails to mention 'the whiskey.' 

Readers know that I do an annual alcohol fast of 30 days, which I used to do in January but decided this year that I would move to another time of year. (January is miserable enough.) This time I chose to do it now, and am a week into it as of today; the reason is that I am combining it with training for a Strongman competition that is coming up on the 18th of October. 

To help myself with it this time, I decided to try one of the several apps that claim to be of use on the point of reducing one's drinking. Some of these use hypnosis; I didn't want one of those both because I doubt the efficacy of hypnosis. Others had social groups you could join, but I don't like socializing nor people all that much. There were several other options, alcohol as mentioned being one of the chiefest of human trials and many people having issues with it. 

I picked one called Reframe, which promised that it would "use neuroscience" to assist. What it turns out to mean by that is that it explains the neuroscience to me, a bit at a time and day-by-day. This is actually an excellent approach for me personally, even if it isn't the right one for everyone; I enjoy learning new things and find the information persuasive in a way that other things might not be for me. 

What I have learned so far is that alcohol has both immediate and long-term effects on several important hormones and receptors that affect the brain and have follow-on effects on your emotional state. It causes spikes in dopamine and seratonin, affects glutamate and GABA receptors. The effects of all of these interactions are to increase your sense of happiness and well-being, while reducing your ability to feel troubled about things. Over time, the natural production of all of these things can be affected such that your body adapts to what had been spikes by producing less of its own feel-good things. 

That provides a ready explanation for how something like 'incontinence' can develop. The right rule that was developed out of youth's good upbringing and study runs into what is in fact an altered reality: the brain is no longer capable of generating the world of youth, and has come to rely upon alcohol at some level to carry part of the weight of creating what was once a natural sort of happiness and well-being. 

This of course underlines the importance of things like these 30 day fasts in order to allow the brain to trend back to normal, and to give the self another opportunity to redraw the lines and enforce proper limits. 

It's information that also might have made the puzzle of incontinence less troubling to the Greeks, had they known of it. To put it in Aristotle's terms, alcohol makes the brain into something like the Lesbian Rule, because the brain as the measuring device ends up being bent and adapted to the world. 

This doesn't disqualify Aristotle's general approach, however: it remains true that one's habit ends up informing and even defining one's character. We understand the mechanism better now, and can make better decisions thereby.