How Alcohol Affects Our Mind and Body

of us are affected by it. Even if you're not addicted, the chances of you knowing someone who abuses alcohol is pretty high. According to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, almost thirty million Americans had an alcohol abuse disorder in twenty twenty three. Anyway, let's bring on my guest. His name is Joe Jurillo. He's a marriage and family therapist and he also has over twenty years of experience

treating people with chemical use disorders. Hello, Joe, Welcome, Welcome to the podcast.

our whole family. I started falling in with friends that were drinking and smoking weed, and so my life took off on a trajectory where I normalized getting high to manage my emotions and stuff like that, getting drunk just about every day, drinking probably most days of my life until the age of forty two, when I stopped. From the time I was fourteen, oh wow, other little things

that between there, but alcohol was always the constant. I found out when I was about twenty five that my grandfather had been a horrible alcoholic up until we grandchildren were born, but I had no consciousness of that beforehand. Suffice to say, I got jobs in career I was not interested in after college and sales and marketing and

stuff like that. And around the age of thirty six, I decided to go back to school to become a therapist because when I had come home from college, included with my heavy drinking and stuff, I had pretty much what you would call a nervous breakdown and became very suicidal. Got into therapy with MFT, who helped me tremendously to be able to kind of back away from the ledge and find a way to value myself and my experience in life. I kept drinking, though, and then I went

back to do my master's Marriage and Family therapy. Took like a one unit course in alcoholism that they were teaching as part of the curriculum, which I think is horrible, but that's pretty much the standard these days. You don't get a lot of training in it unless you work in the field with it, so that happened. I got married for the first time at the age of forty two, to a girl I had a mad crush on in high school, and we were very happy and we drank

together a lot. I have to say that before that part even I got a career for God, like about seven years where my life was about selling wine and spirits to retail, which allowed me to become a professionalized drunk because I was able to drink every day and it worked really good for me, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the vast majority of it. Got married at

forty two. Two years later. My wife and I, who drank together for fun all the time, my wife was getting sick and we couldn't figure out what it was, and it turned out that she was. What was happening was she was literally dying of alcohol poisoning because she was drinking so much, and she had developed a syndrome where she couldn't hold any food down, so she would vomit. You know, when she woke up in the morning, she would drink wine or commerr stomach down. Anything she ate

during the day she'd throw back up. And after about a month of not being able to hold anything down except alcohol, she was really really messed up. Now, it's not unfamiliar for alcoholics to vomit in the morning when they've gone long enough without alcohol that they start to go into withdrawal symptoms. We got her into treatment over at Los Andinas in Pasadena. I As far as I'm concerned, they pretty much saved her life and our marriage. But

she did the hard work by staying sober. But I quit with her at the same time and realized just a couple of days later how far down the path I had gone without even realizing it, because we just kept normalizing it over and over again, getting drunk, being hung over all that stuff. It's only wine, all the stuff that goes on in your head, because the nature of alcoholism is to kind of minimize and justify and rationalize all the consequences and behavior that you're going through.

I've never liked it. I'm like, I'm poisoning my body. My brain feels different, I'm sluggish, I have a lot of brain fog. But I would ignore it just for the sake of I'm drinking because it's a way to socialize, and you know, I'm not going to be any fun or can I have fun without alcohol? And right now that you said wine, I just recently stopped drinking hard alcohol. And now I'm like, oh, but wine, it comes from grapes,

and it's it's natural, it's natural, it's better. So I've been I was in New York a few days ago and I hadn't drink in a while, and I'm like, I'm just gonna have a glass of wine. And I told myself just one. But I felt it right away, and I didn't feel as bad as I do with Thiki Lab. But still i can see it in my eyes and in my energy level, and I'm like, okay, I need to just cut this, just nip it in the bud. Which is why it's so perfect that you're

on the podcast. But you've been sober now for how long I've.

ever worked with before. But there was a team of us that worked there for that time. I was there in there for like seven years, and I learned so much about addiction on the daily basis because I worked in the rehab section, which was called the Briar Unit, where we had people come in. We would help them detox medically, you know, because Okay, there's only two types of chemicals that you really need to detox in a hospital for one is alcohol and the other is benzodiazepines

like adavan, xanax, klonip and stuff like that. Because both of those you try and do it on your own you run a high risk of seizures, blood pressure spikes, strokes, death. I've seen people die detoxing at home. Okay, it's yeah, And most people don't know this. Mostly people think it's like heroin and meth or the bugaboos and stuff like that. Those don't kill people by themselves, but you mix any

of that with alcohol, it will. And if you don't detox in the hospital when you're an alcoholic, if you've been drinking daily, you really need to be under nurse's care and on a medical protocol to survive it, because it's serious stuff.

You know that your husband's going to leave you, or your wife's going to leave you because they've had it with you already, and you've made ultimate promises. You know for weeks, months, and years that you're not going to drink anymore. You're starting to get sick, you're starting to feel ill, you're starting to not feel yourself, and yet you still continue to drink. Any number of different things

that are consequences. You get your driver's license taken away, or you get two DUIs, three DUIs, and you still drink and drive, of course, because the idea of not driving yourself to your drink is ridiculous. But those are literally the types of things when you start to recognize that you choose to drink no matter what the danger is, or what the threat is, or what the thing is that could you could lose your career. Everybody could turn

against you. We've seen it in the media a million times. Yeah, as long as somebody is partying and they're holding it together, everybody thinks they're so cool, And as soon as something bad happens to them, everybody thinks they're a total loser.

condition as well. A lot of people get nervous about talking about that, but I'm quite used to talking about it. And it's a physical problem because your body, your brain, all your organs become a customed to a chemical that's actually killing it over time, and then it can't function without it. That's why in later stage alcoholism, you can't get started for the day unless you've had a drink

or two. You can't function calmly without a couple of belts in you, And it just goes on and on like that, and you're convinced this is the way you survive. The other way to look at it is what are the things that stop happening when you stop drinking? As

proof that alcoholism is what's going on. I used to change jobs every two to three years all through my thirties and early forties, even my twenties as well, and it was amazing because I would always either have to quit a job because my boss was an ass, or I would get fired because, well, my boss was an ass. And I had probably the world's record of getting hired by asses beyond anybody else's comprehension. When I got so for some reason, I wasn't getting fired anymore from any jobs.

And I found that I was staying places five years, ten years, twenty years, and leaving for a better opportunity, not running before everything came crashing down, and not because you know, I was waiting to get busted, you know, thoroughly expecting it, because that was my story. So when you kind of put those things together, you get a sense that obviously something's not working here, and I maybe I don't even understand entirely what it is, but I

should probably pay attention to the writing on the wall. Yeah.

bit of peace, So thank you for that. I did want to ask you, do you think that it's okay now? Knowing what alcohol more than ever, what it does to the body, what it does to the brain, and I want to get a little into the brain because that's like my main concern. But do you think that even having a glass of wine once a week is okay?

Or do you feel like if you were telling your daughter or your sister, whoever, that someone that you truly love, would you tell them no alcohol at all or once in a while?

hard liquor. As long as you're not getting really drunk each time you do and losing track of how much you're drinking, and as long as you're conscious of any kind of consequences that are occurring in terms of your decision to drink, then, like I said, it's not really a problem unless it's a problem.

When you mess with the ability to your body's availability to handle the electrostatic charges in your brain, it's going to cause brain damage. It's going to cause cell destruction, et cetera, et cetera. Even small amounts of alcohol cause small amounts of brain damage. If you drink less than your body is reproducing in terms of brain cells, then it's not a problem. But if you're drinking every day, and you're drinking heavily, you're binge drinking, it can take

a big chunk out of it. If you look at cat scans of an alcoholic sprain at the time of their autopsy versus someone about the same age there wasn't an alcoholic, you see tremendous differences in like the cavities that are supposed to be open and filled with fluids that the brain produces to regulate itself, and the mass material of the brain actually has shrunk over time. Quite often you have what they call water on the brain because the chambers are actually breaking down inside the brain

over time. Because you've got a very sick brain that does and work. They call there's a condition called wet brain that when people who are in late or end stage alcoholism develop a kind of dementia. Alcoholic dementia. Wet brain is when you can't think straight, when you are hallucinating, when you are I mean, you might as well have Alzheimer's and stage Alzheimer's because it looks very much like that, which is a direct cause of the alcohol's effect on

the brain. Men usually hit the wall around the age of fifty or just before that where they really need to have help if they're going to stop using. Women hit it closer to the age of forty. Now, that's completely anecdotal, okay, from my experience working in rehab and

stuff like that. So if you quote me to somebody who's a statician, they're going to say, I don't know if that's necessarily accurate, but it was a constant that I saw the majority, the majority of women were hovering around forty and the majority of them were right hovering around fifty when they finally said, I can't get this anymore.

of dismissed it as being the role of alcohol. But when you take alcohol out of there and you're still having problems with memory and stuff like that, then you recognize that this is like something that's left over from a long time ago that's not going to necessarily clean itself up completely. Now. On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that the other organs of the body outside of the brain are also getting damaged in

the same time. Cardiovascular system, all the veins and arteries and stuff like that take a real beating when you're flooded with alcohol. All right, again, don't forget when you're drinking alcohol is replacing water and being chemical that your body is trying to produce. Your kidneys will start to fail after a time. Your liver is basically the oil filter of the body, right if you can imagine, the

liver is the filter. Which is why I can never understand why people go to a restaurant and order liver for dinner because it's a filter. Why would you eat the filter?

they see is what they call elevated liver enzymes. That means that enzymes that are usually in a certain kind of balance in the liver that the liver produces are suddenly now way out of whack. All of a sudden, You've got more of these types of enzymes in those and it's not in balance anymore. The second phase is

called fatty liver. Fatty liver means your body is no longer breaking fats down because the liver is not capable of helping with that, and the other organs of the body that help break down fats that are coming in and fats that are stored can't do their job anymore, and it starts to show up. The fat that's not getting processed jams the liver up, and then it can't clear them, so your liver does a worse job than ever.

The third is called cirrhosis, and cirrhosis the liver is is to the liver what emphysema is to the lungs basically, which is where the baffles that are physical baffles that catch and collect garbage and get rid of it so that it doesn't destroy the filter itself start to break down. That's what happens when people die of enthysema. They have nothing left to breathe into anymore. They're just like these.

They used to have tons and tons of these little teeny sacs that would transfer oxygen out of the blood and stuff, and now the sacks broke and they don't do their job anymore. The liver does the same thing in cirrhosis. Everything is reversible up to the point of cirrhosis, that is, if you stop early enough. Okay, So it's very serious stuff. And this is the thing when you're younger, all this stuff sounds so remote, like.

you know. I'm like, Okay, no alcohol for ninety days, and right now my body's just not wanting it the way it used to again. Because I'm on this, I want to be the healthiest version of myself. I'm about to hit forty. I want to love myself, and part of that is saying no to alcohol and learning how to still enjoy a dinner or a party without it. I want to be on a natural high, and I

think I'm doing pretty damn good at it. To be honest, I'm like, Okay, it's gonna take some time, but I like how I'm feeling so good.

doesn't have alcohol. That stuff usually doesn't taste very good, but the newer stuff they have a process where they actually make wine and then they remove the extract the wine by osmosis. They remove the alcohol from the wine and some of the stuff is amazing. I would not recommend it for someone who's trying to stop drinking in the very beginning. I think it's fine for people who maybe have a couple of years of sobriety but they miss the taste of the grape. They can actually get that.

But there are other there's whole shops that are open up where they make alcohol alternatives, things like like fake vodka. The mixes with other mixers and gives you kind of like the bite of vodka or gins or bourbons and so forth that are not bad replicas of the same type of thing. All you have to do is just go online and look at a las full of them. Highland Park has got a number of them, and Echo Park, i believe, has a shop. Yeah perfect.

I enjoyed it very much. You're very you make me feel at ease and just very calm, so I love your energy. So thank you so much, Joe.