By Cristina Tarruella González-Camino
It always begins innocently… the pulse of music, a glass raised, a warm laugh rolling through a crowded room. At university, drinking has sunk into tradition. A silent agreement. Something shared, expected. Drinks are not always poured for joy, but as a shortcut to courage, to connection, and to forgetting. While drinking culture promises fun, it rarely admits how often we drink past the moment. Not out of desire, but out of habit. And so, the line between celebration and excess begins to blur.
Alcohol is a slow unravelling, a gentle thief. An inhibitor. A central nervous system depressant, offering comfort at first. Easing the grip of social anxiety , softening the edges, as GABA and dopamine neurotransmitters, swirl though the brain offering calm and lift. But as the drinks keep coming, your brain’s balance tips. And it’s deeper mode of action hits: inhibition, governing the prefrontal cortex, section of the brain responsible for reasoning. Impulse control. Self-awareness. All beginning to dim.
You think you’re fine… but biologically, you’re no longer in a position to judge.
And so, thresholds are crossed not in rebellion, but in silence. In laughter. In forgetfulness. The next day, we pay in quiet currency: that grey fog of a brain stretched too far. Lost time. Fractured sleep. A memory that stutters. Cortisol surges. The body, still working through the chaos of the night, can’t quite return to baseline. A celebration now became a cost. A night erased; a day quietly lost.
And the cost runs deeper than we let on.
Even when spread across weeks, repeated heavy drinking reshapes the brain. Cognitive neuroscience show that frequent intoxication disrupts the hippocampus. The memory keeper. And the Hangover, often laughed off, it not just a headache. It’s the brains recalibration of its chemistry; dopamine depleted and cortisol peaking. A system seeking balance, finding static instead.
What if the fullness of the experience of the night lies not in more, but in almost? The almost-dizzy. The almost-tipsy. The fragile space where warmth meets clarity, where you can feel everything, and still remember it all. The night does not require to vanish to be beautiful. It can linger in soft focus, in slowed breath, in a loosened laughter, not a loosed bile.
This is not a call for abstinence. Just… presence.
To leave a little space between you and oblivion. In tasting, not chasing. In choosing to feel it all: the awkward, the tender, the real.
This is not a warning. Not a lecture. Not a moral decree.
It’s a reflection for a generation taught to treat hangovers as badges of honour and forgetfulness like freedom. To drink consciously is not to deny joy. It is to reclaim it. To understand the body is to respect it.
Because when we do, we still get the night.
But we also keep the morning.
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