How Alcohol Affects Our Cognitive Abilities (E60)
Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcasting app: Apple Spotify Other Apps
Gill discusses cognitive skills, which are skills that the brain uses to understand information, remember it, and apply it. She explains how alcohol impacts our cognitive skills, which ones suffer the most, and how long these skills take to recover in sobriety. You’ll learn about skills like attention, working memory, problem solving, updating our beliefs, memory, self-awareness, and emotional and social skills.
Key Takeaways
The main cognitive deficits that a problem drinker may experience are in executive functioning, memory, planning and strategy, emotional processing, and social skills. Problems in these areas can have a major impact on our ability to get sober. With sobriety, many of our cognitive abilities will recover, while some issues may take years or may not fully recover.
Researchers have found that problem drinkers favor short-term gratification at the expense of their future and long-term consequences. It’s hypothesized that we may struggle with awareness about the future and what will happen if we make the instant gratification type of choice, and/or we may struggle with denial.
Attention, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, short term and working memory, and the ability to update information in our memory improves after the first few months of sobriety for most people. Executive functioning and decision making skills may be slower to recover and can take months to years. Our memory can take more time to recover too, specifically the part that allows us to recall and re-experience past events. This can take a year or more to recover fully. Emotional processing and social skills also take longer to recover and learn, especially the ability to decode facial expressions, so the ability to understand how someone is feeling by looking at them.
Sources
Le Berre AP, Fama R, Sullivan EV. Executive Functions, Memory, and Social Cognitive Deficits and Recovery in Chronic Alcoholism: A Critical Review to Inform Future Research. Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 2017;41(8):1432-1443
Fama R, Le Berre AP, Sassoon SA, et al. Relations between cognitive and motor deficits and regional brain volumes in individuals with alcoholism. Brain Struct Funct. 2019;224(6):2087-2101.
Anosognosia. Treatment Advocacy Center. 2019.
Mograbi DC, Brown RG, Morris RG. Anosognosia in Alzheimer’s disease--the petrified self. Conscious Cogn. 2009;18:989–1003.
Cite this episode
Tietz, G. Episode 60: How Alcohol Affects Our Cognitive Abilities. Sober Powered. 2021.
