Different drinks make me a different drunk! Myth or fact?
Beer makes you rowdy, wine makes you sleepy, and tequila makes you bounce off the walls. Many drinkers maintain that different drinks make you a very different kind of drunk. This long-standing cultural belief has been investigated by psychologists, through a number of experiments involving getting drunk in a lab. Through their research, we have been able to understand that this effect is actually purely placebo. In this article, we will deep dive into the reasons behind why we feel we act so differently when we drink a tequila shot versus a pint of cider.
The reason why this is such an interesting phenomenon is that scientifically, the component making you drunk – ethanol – acts the same with any and all drinks you consume. Once swigged, the ethanol heads to your liver for processing, and any excess stays in your blood. From here, the ethanol continues to be pumped around your body – most relevantly to the parts of the brain where mood is regulated. Because of this, any differential feelings when you are drunk on spirits, wine, or beer are fundamentally a placebo effect. However, this does not detract from what people feel they experience – we all know someone who claims that wine is laced with libido juice, and then sends you off to sleep. We know that surely cannot be the same kind of drunk as slamming back trays of pints in the local pub. The fact that we experience this difference is due to the emotions that people associate with different drinks in the first place.
The emotions that people have linked to different drinks has been investigated through a worldwide study[1], which compiled data from 30,000 people across 11 languages. This extensive study revealed that different drinks do elicit strikingly different emotional responses from people. Spirits, for example, elicit the strongest emotional response across all axes – meaning that people often report either very positive and very negative emotions after drinking them. Equally, 29.8% of respondents said they felt aggressive when drunk on spirits, compared to a meagre 7.1% feeling aggressive when wine-drunk. These differences show that clearly there is some experiential difference here, which does not marry up with the straight facts of blood alcohol concentration.
The way emotions play into how different drinks make you feel a different kind of drunk is through the mechanism of expectations. As with many things, your expectations of how something will be will influence how you actually perceive it. For example, people rate food[2] more negatively if they are told it will taste bad, than those who are told it won’t taste that bad. With regard to drinks, our alcohol-related beliefs are extremely important in how we experience our drunkenness. Research[3] shows that people tend to agree on the fact that wine has both a relaxing effect and a disinhibitory effect on one’s sexuality, in comparison to the effects of beer and spirits. These commonly-held and very beverage-specific opinions simply reinforce the expectation of how one will feel, and thus, how one actually feels when one drinks them.
These kinds of alcohol-related expectancies have been shown to emerge as early as childhood[4]. This occurs before children even take their first sip of alcohol, and is often as a result of social modelling – such as seeing their parents drinking wine in a relaxing setting. The social contexts where we drink are also highly influential upon these expectations. We might feel loosened up when drinking wine, because it is very commonly drunk in a relaxing setting or with dinner. The so-called “craziness” of tequila shots often occur within the setting of a club or bar, which is not exactly renowned for its calming atmosphere. These links between the drink, the environment, and your own emotions are strengthened, whether consciously or not. Even the choice of drink you make in a grimy club versus a nice restaurant is often inadvertently based[5] on the emotions associated with each drink within each setting. Our pre-existing expectations and associations, formed as far back as childhood, thus can change what kind of drunk we feel like on different drinks.
The only effect that is truly substantiated for making you feel different kinds of drunk is the percentage of alcohol of the drink. Of course, a short of 40% liquor will hit quicker and stronger than a pint of 5% beer. All alcoholic drinks show relatively stable changes in aggression, extraversion, disinhibition and emotional regulation, and this has been repeated across many psychological studies. This appeals to the idea of “drunk you”, which people often talk about as a separate and unwieldy counterpart to their sober self. To test this, one study investigated the reliability of personality changes[6] in people when sober and when drunk. Having dosed participants up with vodka sprites, it was found that people aren’t actually that good at recognising their own emotions when drunk. There was a vast difference between friends’ perceptions of the change in their personality and the self-perceptions that people reported. In fact, the only notable change agreed on by people and their observers was an increase in Extraversion. Indeed, people tend to say that the emotions you experience whilst drunk tend to be an emphasized version of your traits or moods that were there prior to drinking. In other words, drunk you is just “you but louder.” But crucially, this effect is not different for different drinks.
Therefore, the feeling that you are “sleepy drunk” on wine, or “aggressive drunk” on spirits is purely a placebo. However, people do in fact experience a different kind of drunkenness on different drinks, but only because of their beverage-specific expectations of how it will affect them. Even our own concept of our “drunk personality” is biased, when it comes down to ratings from observers. Thus, our commonly-held beliefs about being wine-drunk or tequila-drunk are nothing to do with the drink itself, but are all down to the cognitive workings of our brain. And that won’t stop you feeling sleepy after a few glasses of wine!
References
[1] Ashton, K., et al. (2017) Do emotions related to alcohol consumption differ by alcohol type? An international cross-sectional survey of emotions associated with alcohol consumption and influence on drink choice in different settings. BMJ. 7,10. Available at: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/10/e016089
[2] Nitschke, J.B., et al. (2006) Altering expectancy dampens neural response to aversive taste in primary taste cortex. Nat Neurosci. 9,3. 435-442. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16462735/
[3] Pederson, E.R., et al. (2010) Differential Alcohol Expectancies Based on Type of Alcoholic Beverage Consumed. J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 71,6. 925-929. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2965491/
[4] Smit, K., et al. (2018) Development of alcohol expectancies and early alcohol use in children and adolescents: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review. 60. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322987351_Development_of_alcohol_expectancies_and_early_alcohol_use_in_children_and_adolescents_A_systematic_review
[5] Ashton, K., et al. (2017) Do emotions related to alcohol consumption differ by alcohol type? An international cross-sectional survey of emotions associated with alcohol consumption and influence on drink choice in different settings. BMJ. 7,10. Available at: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/10/e016089
[6] Winograd, R., et al. (2017) An Experimental Investigation of Drunk Personality Using Self and Observer Reports. Clinical Psychological Science. 5,3. 439-456. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2167702616689780?journalCode=cpxa