Drink to drown our sorrows? No, it’s high spirits!
CONVENTIONAL wisdom has it that when life brings us down we will often look for answers in the bottom of a glass.
But it’s wrong to link boozing with bad luck and the need to drown our sorrows, researchers now claim.
We’re actually more likely to be in high spirits when we raise a glass than searching for an elusive message in a bottle.
A team that carried out a global study set out with the assumption that ‘people are motivated to drink to relieve their negative emotions or to enhance positive emotions’.
In fact, they discovered the opposite to be true, and that periods of sadness and anxiety – which psychologists refer to as ‘negative affect’ – did not lead to the bouts of boozing they expected.
The researchers said they were taken aback by their findings, with 20 of the 38 experts involved in the study admitting that they had expected to ‘find a daily association between negative affect and alcohol use’.
‘People do not drink more often on days they experience high negative affect, but are more likely to drink, and drink heavily, on days high in positive affect,’ said study co-author Jonas Dora from the University of Washington.
‘We found no evidence for a daily association between negative affect and alcohol use. On days they experienced higher negative affect, our model estimated participants to be 5% to 10% less likely to drink and to consume fewer drinks on drinking days.’
The discovery came after researchers at universities around the world analysed 69 previous studies examining associations between alcohol and mood. The participants in each survey reported how many drinks they had on a given day and their mood at the time.
The new study, which gathered findings from over 12,000 participants across more than 350,000 days of observation, found the daily association between alcohol and negative emotions was ‘trivially small’ for more than 99% of people. They also concluded that participants who said they drank to relieve negative emotions or enhance positive ones were ‘more likely to drink and to drink more, but did not exhibit stronger associations between daily affect and drinking’.
Participants consumed an average of 4.69 drinks on days when they had alcohol, and had at least one drink on 31.7% of days.
The study also found that people were up to 10% less likely to raise a glass if they experienced negative
‘People drink to mark the end of the work day’
emotions after their last session – and, even if they did drink, they would consume less.
Helena Nicklin, host of The Three Drinkers TV series, said: ‘Most people have a drink to mark the end of the working day. It’s seen as a reward and I’m sure most people associate that with happiness. Alcohol also seems to be attached to every positive occasion.’