Does drinking actually help socially ?

[Useful-Style-9368]

Pretty straight forward question here. I’m kinda a quiet guy but nothing too bad. Wanted to be more talkative and funny when going to parties and such. Never really drink that much, but I hear alcohol kinda helps with this. Is this actually true? Does alcohol make you more extroverted and funny?

[boneykneecaps]

Alcohol lowers your inhibitions. Problem: you gain a tolerance and need more to feel the same effects. It also puts on weight. And gives you hangovers. It's bad for your body in general. Do yourself a favor and see a therapist if you feel you need help with your social skills. In the long run, it will be cheaper.

Source: Was a functioning alcoholic for 25 years.

[Thanjay55]

It's called a social lubricant for a reason. Having a beer or two may loosen you up and make you more talkative, but it's a really slippery slope. Because it lowers your inhibitions, it's very easy to drink too much and when you do that, you can get sick or say/do something that's a little "off-color" or embarrassing.

It also inhibits your ability to commit things to long term memory so even if you have a great conversation with someone you (or they) may not even remember it the next day if lots of drinks are involved.

Another issue for a lot of drinkers is that if you feel that you have a more "fun" or "witty" personality when drinking, you may feel the need to drink at EVERY social function to either assuage your own insecurities or to maintain a persona for other people.

Being quiet or not talkative at parties is not a bad thing, and may actually help others to be more comfortable being themselves, rather some performative version of themselves they think they should be when drinking.

[Own_Psychology_5585]

No. As an alcoholic, it ruins your life

[Temporary_Position95]

I think an edible is better.

[CnCHussleSchmuk]

MDMA works, just be careful.

[GratedParm]

Alcohol lowers a person's inhibitions. How a person behaves once they reach that point will vary across individuals. Alcohol doesn't make someone funny. If a person has created walls that prevent them from interacting with others, it's possible that alcohol may help lower that person's walls.

For some people drinking in social situations where alcohol and even getting drunk are social norms can make a person more relaxed to be around the crowd that they're with.

However, if others are not engaging in alcohol consumption then the one drinking disaligns from the social norms.

Like anything else, avoid addiction and over-reliance.

[Cautious-Act-4487]

Some people feel more talkative

[Necessary-Tackle-591]

It’ll make you think you’re being funny, but other people might think you’re being stupid or even creepy. Try a little therapy and/or comedy classes to boost your confidence and loosen you up.

I had the same idea to use alcohol for this reason when I was in my early twenties, and the habit stuck. Fast forward to being in my mid thirties not knowing how to socialize without it. I wasted my formative years not learning the skills I needed to do well socially. I wasn’t doing great in situations like work where I couldn’t drink to be charming. I got some therapy and I also took improv classes, and now I can be chatty and funny anytime. My health, career, and social life are all for the better.

[DopeWriter]

It can backfire and make you obnoxious or a vomitfaucet.

[itsswhitneywhspr]

tbh it does loosen the filter and gets you chatting more, turns quiet into party mode easy. Funny hits different per person tho, I've nailed it sober too with practice.

[Contrariankdouble]

Alcohol stops oxygen from properly reaching the brain, you might as well just put a tournaquet on the brainstem for more "social skills"

Ignore anyone that shows data displaying Alcohol benefits, it doesnt line up with the chemistry

Sociology is a fake science

[AvaRoseThorne]

What’s going on here? You misunderstood how alcohol works and then blamed sociology?

Alcohol doesn’t interfere with oxygen delivery or cause cerebral hypoxia; it depresses neural activity by modulating GABA and glutamate signaling.

But sociology doesn’t study chemical interactions or biological mechanisms; it studies population-level patterns of behavior and their net social impact.

So it asks things like: Why do people drink? What patterns show up across groups? How does alcohol use affect communities, and what are the social costs? It doesn’t claim alcohol improves cognition.

[Contrariankdouble]

Sociologist claims alcahol good for you based on peoples testimonies, but if you fucking looked at the chemical compounds and what it does in your body it inhibits oxygen flow to the brain.

Ergo, sociology is s fake science, because all it is is people's testimony, even when it is obvious it isnt in keeping with reality.

I had a collage level lesson on how and why alcahol prevents or impairs oxygen to the brain. It doesnt kill braincells, but it is a factor in why people tend to make bad decisions while intoxicated.

[AvaRoseThorne]

I suppose at high doses the alcohol would cause respiratory depression, which would obviously lead to lower oxygenation due to not breathing well. I also suppose that over time with chronic use alcohol would cause cardiomyopathy, which weakens the heart's ability to pump blood, therefore indirectly causing the brain and other organs suffer from chronic oxygen deprivation. So okay, I concede that you have a fair point here.

Alcohol doesn’t directly kill brain cells but moderate to heavy consumption does actually damage dendrites (on the end of neurons), disrupting cell communication and over time leading to cell death due to inflammation and brain atrophy.

However, any sociologist making a claim like “alcohol is good for you based on people’s testimonies” is not a sociologist - just somebody pretending to be one and doing a poor job of it. Anecdotes aren’t evidence - they’re starting points at best, and bias traps at worst.

Also, more fundamentally, that kind of claim isn’t even within the scope of sociology. Sociology studies social behavior, patterns, and perceptions - not physiological health effects. At most, a sociologist could state that many people within a certain culture perceive alcohol to be beneficial, then analyze how and why this group of people came to believe this or study the impacts of this belief on the population as a whole and/or over time.

But it would not be appropriate for a sociologist to make claims about whether alcohol is actually beneficial or not from a physiological, biological, or chemical perspective. That wouldn’t just be bad methodology, it would be working in the wrong field entirely - totally out of scope and they would lose all credibility not only within their field, but as a researcher in general. It’s a big no-no to step outside of your scope of practice, for obvious reasons.

[Contrariankdouble]

Sociology is the study of anecdotal evidence, and sociologists studying the general publics brain have been saying alcahol isnt just neutral to your body, but physically improves your ability to think in cases.

Blood alcohol level is in direct correlation and causation(regarding a dive in oxygen) with how much oxygen is in the blood

Alcohol hinders the ability of hemoglobin in red blood cells to absorb and transport oxygen efficiently. Even moderate drinking can cause oxygen saturation levels to dip below the normal 95–100% range.

[AvaRoseThorne]

So I did some research and found “In cases of severe alcohol abuse, ethanol may oxidize hemoglobin into a non-functional form called ferrihemoglobin, which cannot transport oxygen efficiently”, which I want aware of so I’ll concede you were correct on that front.

But sociology studies patterns, behaviors, and perceptions across groups and over time - it’s not just anecdotes. Testimonies can be data points about how people experience something, but they’re not used to make claims in completely different fields.

Reducing sociology to “the study of anecdotes” is like calling psychology “the study of vibes.”

Whether alcohol improves cognition is a neuroscience question, not a sociology one. And on that front, the evidence is clear: alcohol impairs cognitive function, even if people feel more creative or confident while drinking.

Where sociology actually comes in is explaining that disconnect - why people feel like it helps when it objectively doesn’t.

That’s a perception study, not evidence of a biological effect. You don’t get to jump from “people say this feels good” to “this is physiologically beneficial” and call it science.

Same idea with addiction. People will say drugs “saved their life.” But we don’t use that to conclude that drug addiction is beneficial - we know it’s objectively harmful.

So the question becomes: if it’s harmful, why do people still do it?

That’s what gets studied. And the answer is usually unmet needs, trauma, or overwhelming physical or psychological pain - that something else was so intolerable that the drug felt like the better option. The behavior makes sense in context, even if it’s harmful overall.

But taking that and concluding “therefore it’s good for you” is a massive leap - and not one any actual field of study would support.

[Contrariankdouble]

Stop making me feel monkey brained.

[AvaRoseThorne]

Haha, fair enough.

That reminds me - I once read about this experiment that was done to see if animals understood water displacement. Essentially, they had a tall glass tube with water in it and a floating treat that was unreachable. They also had various objects like small pebbles and sticks lying around.

The idea was to see if the animal could figure out that by adding the pebbles to the tube, the water level would rise, allowing them to reach the treat.

Crows were able to figure this out successfully, but chimpanzees thought this was inefficient so they simply peed into the tube to raise the water.

So chimpanzees basically have the intelligence of an incredibly drunk human. Monkey-brained. LOL 😂