Drinking

April kicks off festival season in New Orleans, but can you party without alcohol? With April being Alcohol Awareness Month, now is a good time for a little self-evaluation.

April begins one of the best festival seasons in New Orleans: French Quarter Festival, Jazz Fest, Oyster Fest, ESSENCE Festival, and more! April is also Alcohol Awareness Month and a good time to check-in and see if you can party without alcohol. Can you?

Early Signs of an Alcohol Problem

One of the common early symptoms of alcohol abuse is the inability to abstain from alcohol without experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Watch for some of these symptoms of withdrawal when you abstain from drinking alcohol: feeling of jumpiness or nervousness, anxiety, irritability or changes in mood (esp. volatile or rapid changes), depression, fatigue, or difficulty thinking.

According to The Alcoholism Guide, some common warning signs of a drinking problem are:

Hint: It’s not a lack of willpower that makes it so hard to quit drinking.

A common resolution made as the New Year rolls in, is to quit drinking. But like many resolutions made with the best intent, the end of January often finds people struggling to reach their goal of sobriety. Why is this? Why is it so hard to quit drinking? 

It’s important to stress that being unable to stop drug or alcohol use on one’s own is not because of a lack of willpower or moral failing (Psychology Today, 2012). To understand what you’re up against, you have to realize what  alcohol does to your brain. It hijacks the reward center of your brain, the part that controls motivation, desire, pleasure, memory, impulse. All of the things you need working for you, are working against you because of an imbalance in your brain chemistry caused by chronic use of alcohol.

Teen drinking carries its own set of risk factors. Teens are especially vulnerable to alcohol use and abuse. Their age also requires a unique approach to educating, preventing, and addressing alcohol problems. During April’s Alcohol Awareness Month, we are focusing on ways to recognize alcohol abuse, talk to your teen about it, and help prevent it.

The scary fact is that teens who start using alcohol before the age of fifteen are four times more likely to become alcohol dependent as they get older. This is why education and prevention are so key. A brain compromised from alcohol abuse will cause a teen to miss important developmental lessons, so early intervention is crucial.

With October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it’s a great time to talk about breast cancer risk, alcohol and NAD therapy. It’s important to remind our readers that there is a strong correlation between drinking and increasing one’s risk of breast cancer. Hundreds of thousands of women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year and the numbers are increasing. It’s important for women to know that there are behaviors that can reduce their risk as well as others that increase their risk, one being drinking. 

Research is consistently showing that all alcoholic beverages (beer, liquor, and even wine) increase a woman’s risk of hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. This is because alcohol can increase the levels of estrogen and other hormones associated with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. Alcohol might also increase risk because it damages DNA in cells which can contribute to the development of cancer.