What is your limit?
It may start with a nightly glass of wine to unwind. Soon enough, one glass becomes two or maybe three … and you begin to associate your evening walk through the door with the sound of the wine pouring into the glass. Maybe you begin to look forward to that moment all day.
Beware when a drinking habit escalates, says George F. Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland: “There's nothing inherently wrong with a 5 o'clock drink, but it can be a problem if you take it further. Two is not better than one, and four is not better than two.”
The consequences of heavy alcohol use are serious and include an increased risk of cancer, dementia, falls and dangerous interactions with medications.
Alcohol-use disorders range in severity from mild to moderate to severe. “You can have a disorder and not fit the stereotype of a drunk falling down in the street,” says Austin Lin, a psychiatrist with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “You can be a high-functioning alcoholic
You rarely turn down wine with dinner, not to mention that second (or third) beer at happy hour—but that doesn’t make you a binge drinker, does it? It depends, but according to a 2015 report by the National Institutes of Health, an exploding number of Americans are in the drinking danger zone. “What’s really alarming is that the intensity of drinking is dramatically increasing,” says George Koob, Ph.D., director of the National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism, an NIH agency that supported the study. “We’re seeing a 5 percent increase—that’s roughly a million more people than 10 years ago—who are knocking back more than 5, 8, or 10 drinks in one sitting.”
JUST SAY NO!!!!!!
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