Drink until you have no memories of it the next day. If the harmful consequences for the health of a too much and too fast alcohol consumption It is undeniable – accidents, risky behavior, long-term brain damage – the reasons why some people drink to black holes or fainting had not yet been precisely studied.
Researchers from the universities of Sydney (Australia), Brown and Miami (United States) have therefore looked into the question. Their results have been published in the review Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research July 10.
Drink to celebrate or forget
To do this, they scoured hundreds of Twitter posts for four days about people who intended to drink excessively. Almost a third of these tweets had repeating keywords and patterns. The most common concerned festivities, such as birthdays, academic or professional achievements, sporting victories or even holidays.
Another frequently cited reason for consuming alcohol was reaction in the face of stress, negative emotions or loss. Sentences “I’m so stressed that tonight I have to get drunk to the black hole” or “I want to drink to forget everything about this horrible year” thus frequently returned. However, such expressions used in public normalize and encourage risky behavior in others, especially young adults who are particularly concerned by this phenomenon of “binge-drinking“, explain the authors of the study.
According to them, these results improve the understanding of attitudes related to drinking, and can thus help identify solutions. For example, awareness raising around what they call “black-out drinking” could be included in prevention campaigns in schools, universities or community groups to reduce this “festive” consumption, they believe.
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