People get drunk because it’s fun, U.K. study finds

British researchers confirm drinking boosts happiness by a significant margin

Public health discussions about drug and alcohol use tend to be dour, humourless affairs. We talk about all sorts of terrible things associated with drug use, such as car crashes and mental illness and kids getting high and people killing themselves and others.

Take a look, for instance, at how the U.S. government describes the effects of alcohol: “Alcohol affects every organ in the drinker’s body and can damage a developing fetus. Intoxication can impair brain function and motor skills; heavy use can increase risk of certain cancers, stroke and liver disease.”

All of this is true, of course, but it’s incomplete. You don’t pour a glass of wine with dinner to “damage a developing fetus;” you do it because the wine helps you relax after a long day. You don’t go out to the bar and down five beers with your buddies to “increase the risk of certain cancers;” you do it because the beer helps the conversation and camaraderie.

In other words, most people get drunk because it’s fun.

This is why some new research from England is so important: It attempts to quantify exactly how much happiness we derive from that glass of wine or bottle of beer. And it does so using a massive real-time data set: the Mappiness app, a free iPhone app that pings people a few random times a day and asks them how happy they are on a scale of 1 to 100.

The app, developed by the London School of Economics in order to better understand human well-being, also asks users whom they’re with (friends, family, alone, etc.) and what they’re doing (working, socializing, drinking, etc.). For the alcohol study, researchers compiled two million responses to the app that more than 31,000 people recorded between 2010 and 2013. What they ended up with was a large data set that could be used to answer the question: Do people report being happier when they’re drinking?

The answer to that question may not surprise you: “Drinking alcohol is associated with considerably greater happiness at that moment — 10.79 points on a 0-100 scale,” the researchers found. In other words, pour yourself a drink and voila: an immediate happiness boost.

Of course, drinking alcohol is itself associated with all sorts of other factors known to boost happiness, such as hanging out with other people or watching a game.

So when the researchers controlled for all of these things — including what else people were doing, who they were doing it with, where they were and what time of day it was — the alcohol-induced well-being boost dropped to four points. A smaller positive effect, but still highly significant, according to the researchers’ models.

Interestingly, they found the timing and the people with whom you drink had little effect on its overall happiness boost: “There were only relatively small differences in the happiness-inducing effect of alcohol between men and women, or when looking at different times of day, on weekdays versus weekends, or with different people,” the study found.

But they did find that drinking had different effects on happiness depending on what other activities people were doing at the time.

“Drinking had the greatest impact when it came alongside otherwise unenjoyable activities (travelling/ commuting, waiting) and only increased the happiness of already enjoyable activities by smaller amounts (socializing, making love).”

Finally, the researchers found that the happiness boost from alcohol is a fleeting one. Looking at a different longitudinal survey, they found that, while alcohol consumption was associated with transient happiness, it was not linked to long-term satisfaction. And to the extent that more drinking is associated with more alcohol dependency, it can actually make you worse off in the long-term.

In the end, the research is a useful confirmation of what most of us know from experience: Drinking is fun. It’s a crucial fact that often gets lost in public-policy debates. The harms of excessive drinking are wellknown.

But if you want to diminish those harms, it helps to understand why people drink in the first place.