The Battle Against Booze

Man always seeks pleasure and a way to hide from fear, sorrow, and misery of life. Unlike other animals, human needs are complex. The man has a lot of concerns other than finding food and mating. He invented the concept of recreation. Finding pleasure has become the lifelong quest of mankind. The man has a verity of ways to get pleasure in which drinking alcohol plays a prominent role. Consuming alcohol or in other words “Drinking” is not only a recreational habit but also a part and parcel of the culture.

The root of drinking goes back to the prehistoric era. Before man settled down for farming in valleys they lived a nomadic life doing from place to place seeking shelter and food.  Alcohol was introduced when man accidently discovered fermentation when they drink wild barley fermented water. They surely started falling love with it because it has the “feel good effect”. That fermented drink resembled beer. Barley was one of the first crops to be domesticated thus introducing agriculture which shaped the human civilization. People no longer needed to roam from one place to another to gather food instead they grow them. In medieval times, Europe was literally drunk because the only drink safe to consume was liquor. Drinking water was mostly polluted but alcohol brewing process requires boiling so unknowingly Europeans kill the bacteria in the water used. Drinking has been evolved from generation to generation along with the culture.

Why people like alcohol this much? We all like to get pleasure and forget our worries. Alcohol precisely does that. When someone consumes alcohol, it goes to the small intestine through the stomach. Walls of small intestine quickly absorb the alcohol and add them to the blood stream through which it goes to all of the organs in our body while the Liver tries to remove alcohol from the bloodstream. However, it takes very little time for the alcohol to reach the brain. Alcohol decreases the activity in brain’s some neuroreceptors and increases activity in others. It also increases the chemical dopamine in the brain’s pleasure center causing the “feel good effect” that occurs after taking a drink. Dopamine is called the “Pleasure hormone” because of this effect. According to a report published by World Health Organization, world average alcohol consumption is 6.1 liters of pure alcohol [1]. Alcohol also results in 2.5 million deaths per year [2] surprisingly more than the number of deaths from AIDS

Temporary effects of alcohol will be gone after several hours and the drinker will be back to the normal sober stage. Alcohol makes a person’s mind free, his animalistic nature is somewhat revealed. A drunken person seems to be open and fearless. Drinking makes social gatherings possible, people tend to meet up others over a round of drinks at a pub or bar. Even in ancient times, pubs have become a center of human interaction and sometimes intellectual discussion forums for great philosophers, artists, and revolutionists. Even today alcohol plays the main role in social occasions and becomes a tool helping to get socialized.

Although alcohol consumption opens up a person for good, it has many adverse effects; physical and psychological.

There are safe limits for alcohol consumption for both men and women. Pregnant women are advised to retain from alcohol consumption. Weekly maximum alcohol dose for men is 21 units. For women, it is no more than 14 units. A unit of alcohol is 10ml of pure alcohol (100% proof). It is also recommended to have at least two alcohol-free days per week for both sexes [3]. Alcohol is highly addictive. It affects not only the drinker but also his family, friends, and community. Psychological trauma caused by him on his family especially children can be very harmful in the future.

Alcohol is the cheapest method to get the “feel good effect”. Alcohol production, distribution, and consumption are highly regulated by governments but illicit liquor production which is highly dangerous and black-market trade is rapidly growing. Taxation on liquor is highly profitable for the government. Generally, alcohol taxes and ultimately liquor prices are going up every year but those price hikes didn’t help to reduce consumption. An addicted person may find money by whatever means to pay for drinks.

Liquor companies maintain close ties with the authorities and the government. Most of these ties are serving a more sinister purpose. By political lobbying, sponsoring and bribing liquor companies to protest against progressive steps to inform the public the harmful effects of alcohol. People are getting wasted every day while profit margins of liquor companies grow.

Some religions such as Buddhism and Islam forbids alcohol consumption while Christianity usually tolerates, nevertheless regardless of the race or religion, people get drunk. The only practical thing to do is to educate the masses about the adverse effects of alcohol and retain our young people from becoming alcohol addicts. Telling the people to drink not more than their limits is effective than telling them to stop consuming alcohol at once. Gradually anyone with a strong willingness can come out of alcohol addiction easily.

Drinking is bound with one’s culture. Separating people from drinking completely seems impossible. Although drinking helps us to be socialized, to temporary forget hardships in life and to feel joy it has always been a silent killer. Since all out war against liquor is improbable, the best thing left is to tell others to drink responsibly according to safe limits

Photo courtesy : http://imgarcade.com/

 [1][2] http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alcohol_report/en/index.html

[3] http://www.patient.co.uk/health/Alcohol-and-Sensible-Drinking.htm

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Boys Don't Cry???

(Photo Courtesy https://goodmenproject.com )

I’ve come across a post published by one of my friends regarding crying and its gender dynamics. The social norm is that it is not for the boys to cry and crying is something acceptable for girls. As boys when we had tears in our eyes, the grown-ups humiliate us saying ‘don’t cry like a girl’. When boys (from now the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ are used to depict the male and female gender and it includes people from all age-groups). Several questions have been raised from the idea of crying. Some say that it is a method of expressing the emotions while some speculate the helpfulness of crying dismissing it a weakness if it is done by men.

Why do we cry?

The ‘Crying’ discussed in this article is not just the process of having tears in the eyes. Crying should be separated from the response to chopped onions, tear gas or yawning and should be associated with emotions especially painful and sad ones. It may be related to the emotional outbreak and a may be triggered to show someone’s distress, the need for social support from the others around you. The ultimate objective of crying may be to act as a signal of emotional distress to others so that they come to help and comfort you. When the words cannot show the true state of mental and emotional anguish, crying comes to the rescue. This is evident in infants and toddlers whose verbal skills are not developed but are able to communicate their distress through crying. A crying baby grabs the attention of all around him/her and those who are close will immediately come to the aid comforting, nurturing and soothing him/her. When children grow and come into adulthood, the inherent show of distress through crying doesn’t change. What has changed is the response to the crying. We don’t respond to a crying adult the same way as we did for the babies.

Men v. Women; crying

Do male toddlers cry less than their female counterparts? Or does the society respond differently to male infants? It is not clear that who cries the most and usually when the infant is small, we tend to attend the emotional needs regardless of the gender but when the child grows, gender will play a role. That is why ‘Don’t cry like a girl!’ the response comes out from the adults when boys who passed the toddler-age cry while totally opposite comforting response will be directed towards a girl. This growing separation of responses will continue towards adulthood. The reaction, when grown up women cry, has little or no change while for the men, it is considered as the weakness and something which the men cannot and shouldn’t do.

Do men feel emotional pain as much as women?

Even though there are differences in the male and female brain in relation to the emotional sensitivity men also feel emotional pain as deeply and severely as women do. The difference lies with the long-lasting effect and what men/women do in response to pain. Men often feel the emotional pain less intense than their female counterparts nevertheless the pain is highly likely to remain with men for a long time. Especially in rejections, the pain remains even if the times and conditions change over time thus scars remain until he dies. Women, on the other hand, feel the pain intensely for a significantly shorter time than men and the pain may subside over time. The response is also different for men and women. While women try to express their emotional pain and sadness as it is, men tend to channel it in different ways, most probably through anger or self-destructive behavior such as recklessness, substance abuse or potentially life-threatening behavior.

 It is so unfair to conclude that men don’t feel the sadness. They do feel it but they are either reluctant to directly express it or channel it out as it is. That’s when the crying comes. Because of the established social norms forcing men to appear strong and refrain from showing their true vulnerable emotions, most of us think that men have little or no feelings. It is the unspoken, un-cried and hidden despair shows the real emotional nature of men. It is the guy who smiles and happy all the time hides the most painful secrets.

Is crying beneficial today?

When the society gets changed, individualism has been promoted. Today, the sense of community and altruism was not the norm of the present society. This is most prominent in relationships. With this change, there will be less and fewer people whom we can truly trust. A person’s emotional support network is shrinking and he/she must be very lucky to have even a few individuals with whom he/she can be emotionally open. In the times when trust is a luxury, it is highly likely that crying and showing emotional pain to others will end up in more hurt, pain, and humiliation for that person. Thus regardless of the gender, it is wise to cope with your problems by yourself, thus invalidating any need of crying or seeking for emotional support.

Summing up

The essence of what we’ve discovered above is not only about crying, but also about the changing ways of showing the emotional distress to get the support from the people around you. It doesn’t mean that crying alone is a weakness or not a ‘manly’ thing. If it helps to sooth the pain, it would be the healthiest thing to do even for men than channeling the pain to self-destructive behavior. In fact, most of the men who appear to be strong have cried in silent and put a brave space along with a mask of a smile to the outside world.

In conclusion, it can be said that the act of crying to show the mental distress hoping to get emotional support may not the best thing to being done at present for both men and women. In times, when crying makes you vulnerable and gets you humiliated and most importantly when no one around you can be trusted, the best thing to do is to endure the pain and suffering silently and try to get over it. It is applicable for both genders thus it is not ladylike to be crying and it is not only manly to hide your feelings. Everyone should hide their tears to make themselves immune to more hurt and pain from the untrustworthy people around you.

PS:                                                                                                                          

I wonder how the phrase ‘boys don’t cry’ comes to use. But I discovered it from a song performed in 1979 by the English Rock Band ‘The Cure’. It depicts a heartbroken boy who smiles because it is not acceptable to shed a tear on his loss.

 The song is listed below. 

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