3 Brain Studies That Could Change How You Drink
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. Today I'm going to start off with a situation that might sound kind of familiar. So let's just say that you decide you're not going to drink tonight. No big real reason behind it.
Speaker 1:You just want a night off. But then let's say you're making dinner and you start thinking, you know what? A glass of wine or a beer would really hit the spot right now. So you go back to what you're doing and a few minutes later, you're thinking about it again. But you push it aside and you just go back to what you're doing.
Speaker 1:And then a few minutes later, you're already thinking about it again. Maybe one would be fine. Maybe I'll take tomorrow off instead of today. And you're doing this negotiating and you can end up actually spending a pretty big part of your evening, that you were supposed to be enjoying, thinking about the things that you already decided that you're not going to do. So what do you do with that?
Speaker 1:Because you can have a really good reason to drink less and then still really want to drink when that moment comes around. And I think we all have this very familiar situation. So today I want to talk about three studies that looked at some pretty unusual ways of working on this. One used Tetris. Remember the Game Boys back in the nineties?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that game. Another one used a joystick and pictures of drinks. And then a third had people imagine something that they were looking forward to. So let's start with the Tetris. I don't know where your high score was.
Speaker 1:I don't remember what Brain was, but I do remember loving that game. But I think this is probably one of the last things most of us would really think about to try when we want to drink. The researchers followed 31 university students for a week and they checked in with them throughout the day about what they were craving and how strong it felt. Some of the students then played Tetris for three minutes and then raided the craving afterwards. And what they found was, on average, their cravings were less intense after they played three minutes of Tetris.
Speaker 1:Now, this was a small study and alcohol was one of the several things that people were craving. There was also food and caffeine and other things. So what they found was that there was a change in how people wanted something in that moment. They didn't necessarily establish that playing Tetris would lead to drinking less over time. However, that might be something you might give a try.
Speaker 1:I know I'm pretty interested in doing that. But I think there's something interesting about what they did try. When you want a drink, there's often a picture of what goes along with it. You're imagining maybe opening a bottle or cracking a beer. You're thinking about sitting down, taking that first sip, and then kind of being finally done with work or whatever stress or whatever celebration you want to settle into.
Speaker 1:And sometimes you've spent quite a bit of time enjoying that drink in your head before you've actually even had it. So the idea behind Tetris is that those pictures take some of our mental effort to keep them going. It might not even feel like effort, but when you're playing Tetris, you're actually using some of those resources to turn the shapes around and to figure out where they fit. And the theory is that doing that can make it harder to keep imagining the things that you're craving, which is a little bit more specific than just telling somebody to try and distract themselves when they have a craving. But you might be thinking, let's say you're watching TV and you're still thinking about how good that glass of wine or that beer would be.
Speaker 1:Now you're technically still doing something else, but you haven't really stopped imagining that drink. So instead, try something different. We're going to use the Tetris example, which is pretty easy. So the next time that you're going back and forth about it, notice how strong that urge feels, grab something that you can play and then check again. Maybe you still want it, or maybe it feels a little less urgent so you can get back to making dinner.
Speaker 1:You don't have to get to the point where the alcohol suddenly sounds terrible. If it just helps you to stop spending the whole evening thinking about it and resisting it, then that would be a pretty useful result. Okay, the next study uses a joystick. And this one looked at a response that can happen before you've actually spent much time thinking about it at all. So researchers worked with two fourteen people who were in treatment for alcohol.
Speaker 1:Some did four brief training sessions with pictures of drinks on a screen. And they practiced pushing the pictures of alcohol away and then pulling the pictures of non alcoholic drinks toward them. When they pushed, the picture actually got smaller as if it was moving away. When they pulled, it got bigger. What they were trying to do was change something called approach bias.
Speaker 1:Basically an automatic tendency to move toward alcohol. After the training, their response on the computer task had shifted toward avoiding alcohol. The trained groups that had better treatment outcomes? That was the control group, the ones that actually used it. Of course, they were also getting inpatient care.
Speaker 1:This is something added to that treatment. But it's pretty interesting that the four sessions of practicing a response to pictures could actually help alongside everything else that they were doing. So I want you to think about what happens when you open the fridge and you see the beer that you normally drink. You might already be reaching for it before you even stop to think, wait, I'm actually not drinking tonight. Now that's an everyday example to help explain the idea.
Speaker 1:The study itself used a specific computer task, but I think it gives us a different way to look at the moment. Because it's easy to get frustrated with yourself. You meant it when you said it. You wanted to drink less. Then when you see a beer, your first response might be, that looks good.
Speaker 1:I might grab that. And then sometimes when that happens, we can take that as a sign that we're not really serious or not even able about making these changes. But wanting to change and having a familiar response to alcohol, those both can happen at the same time. And in this study, researchers worked directly on that response itself and we see that they were able to change it with practice. So if you notice or catch yourself in that automatic reach, it might help to pay attention to what happened right before it.
Speaker 1:Did you actually want a beer or did you see it and start doing or thinking what you usually do? I think that's the question that study should make us all think about. Now, the third study is one that gives you something a little different to try on your own drinking. It's called episodic future thinking, which is a complicated name for imagining a specific event in the future. Something positive that you're looking forward to, with enough detail that you can picture it actually being there.
Speaker 1:And a small randomized trial included 52 people with alcohol use disorder who wanted to cut back or to stop. And in one group, they practiced imagining future events and used reminders to bring them back to top of mind. In contrast, the comparison group thought about more recent events. The group imagining the future reported a bigger reduction in daily drinking. And I think the idea behind this makes total sense when you think about what you're actually considering in the moment that you want to drink.
Speaker 1:Let's say it's Friday night and you're thinking about, oh, let's just say a glass of wine, but you also want to feel good tomorrow. The wine is right there. You know what it tastes like. You know what you're looking forward to about having it, But you're also thinking, you know, I want to feel good tomorrow. Now that's pretty general.
Speaker 1:But if we ask, what are you actually looking forward to tomorrow and get more specific, maybe you're meeting a friend for breakfast. You've been trying to get together for a month. And then you finally have a morning where neither of you have to rush through anything. You can picture where you're going to sit. You know what you're usually going to order.
Speaker 1:Maybe there's something that you've been wanting to catch up about and you're looking forward to like having fun, laughing, just, you know, connecting with somebody. So now when you're thinking about that next glass, you've got something more specific to consider about the morning too. Not just, I want to feel good tomorrow. You can think about whether you want another drink or how you want to feel when you're sitting there with your friend catching up in the future. So the researcher's idea is that imagining the future in this way may help it matter more to you in the decision that you're making right now.
Speaker 1:And this doesn't have to be some ambitious plan. You don't need to picture yourself running 10 miles at sunrise. Maybe you finally have a morning where you have nothing scheduled and you just want to enjoy it with coffee, maybe read for a while without feeling crappy. Use something that you actually want, not what you think that you should want. And the people in the study practiced this repeatedly and had reminders to do so.
Speaker 1:So if you want to try a very simple version of it, just spend a minute picturing one real thing that you have coming up and then put a few words in your phone that's going to remind you about it. And then when you're deciding about a drink, take a look at it, think about that experience again and see if it changes how you feel about having one or having another. And we're all adults. You might decide that you still want to have that drink or that extra drink, but you've also spent a little bit of time thinking about something else that you want and that might just make the decision feel a little different. So that's what I'd like you to try this week.
Speaker 1:Pick one thing that you're looking forward to and make it specific enough that you can actually imagine being there. And then see what happens when you bring that to mind at that very point when you normally either break a commitment or keep drinking. Okay. Thanks for hanging out with me this week. If you got something out of this, please rate and review.
Speaker 1:And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.
Creators and Guests
