Short-Term Effects of Alcohol on Your Health

While alcohol can initially boost your mood, these effects are temporary and wear off quickly. Alcohol impairs the brain’s ability to regulate emotions, and mood changes are common. As the night wears on, you may notice your cheerful feelings soon begin to shift to irritability, sadness, aggression, or anxiety. By Geralyn Dexter, PhD, LMHCDexter has a doctorate in psychology and is a licensed mental health counselor with a focus on suicidal ideation, self-harm, and mood disorders. Alcohol use can damage the hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for memory and learning. Some studies have found that even light or moderate drinking can lead to some deterioration of the hippocampus.

General Health

This makes speech and coordination — think reaction time and balance — more difficult. That’s one major reason why you should never drive after drinking. Alcohol use can begin to take a toll on anyone’s physical and mental well-being over time.

What Is Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism?

Alcohol also weakens the immune system, making individuals more susceptible to infections and illness. The short-term effects of alcohol are also impacted by other factors, including gender, weight, and age. Young people tend to binge drink or heavily consume alcohol more than those who are old. Those in their 20s, and even younger than 21, tend to drink socially. It’s not uncommon for younger people to encourage each other to drink heavily in parties and other social settings. In addition, women biologically have a lower tolerance to alcohol than men.

Mental Health and Psychological Effects

People who choose not to drink make that choice for the same reasons. Knowing your personal risk based on your habits can help you make the best decision for you. “I think one way to think about alcohol’s health impacts is to think about it in terms of its right-now effects, and then its long-term effects,” said Martinez. If you have one drink a day, your health could be impacted ― but the powers that be aren’t doing much to make that fact known. They may have an intolerance, insensitivity, or allergy to alcohol or another ingredient in a drink.

Drinking alcohol, especially heavily, can damage your lungs and weaken your immune system. This can make you more susceptible to diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis. Alcohol increases your body’s production of dopamine and serotonin, which is why there are some desirable effects of drinking. That being said, drinking can quickly take a turn for the worse if not done responsibly.

Chronic alcohol use can negatively affect relationships, careers, and overall quality of life. Alcohol consumption irritates the lining of the stomach and intestines. A night of drinking can cause uncomfortable symptoms like diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting. Chronic and excessive alcohol use disrupts the balance of bacteria in the gut microbiome (dysbiosis). Over time, this imbalance triggers chronic gastrointestinal inflammation, leading to a higher risk of gastrointestinal diseases.

This antioxidant, found in grape skins, may prevent inflammation and clogged arteries by reducing the oxidation of harmful LDL cholesterol. “In most cases, severe symptoms from detoxing from alcohol peak within the first hours. However, symptoms like anxiety and insomnia can last several months,” Dr. Hildahl says. When a person stops drinking, their symptoms may differ based on how much or often they drink. “Drinking impacts many aspects of the body that interfere with your ability to recover from an illness.

Signs and symptoms of withdrawal generally peak at around 72 hours after last intake. Alcohol can have a serious effect on the developing brain, from fetal development to the end of adolescence. If a woman consumes alcohol during pregnancy, the child may be born with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Alcohol affects every body system, so it can cause health problems throughout the body.

• This can often go hand-in-hand with increased susceptibility to infections.
• When you drink too much alcohol, it can throw off the balance of good and bad bacteria in your gut.
• Alcohol’s impact on cognitive functioning can also make it challenging for people drinking alcohol to form and verbally express coherent thoughts.
• Alcohol has long held a prominent place in many societies and cultures.
• The short-term effects of alcohol appear quickly, typically within minutes after consuming your first drink.

The gap between men and women may be explained by differences in how the metabolism of alcohol produces feelings of pleasure. Among deaths from acute alcohol poisoning, nearly consequences of alcohol all were due to accidental poisoning – more than 16,000. This was over 30 times greater than the number of alcohol poisoning deaths judged to be intentional. These data show that when individuals die of severe alcohol poisoning, it is nearly always unexpected.

When it comes to alcohol, if you don’t drink, don’t start for health reasons. A previous version of this story stated Canada had adopted new alcohol guidelines. Canada last updated their recommendations in March 2025, and much of it reflects what is recommended in the United States. The Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction released lower drinking recommendations in 2022, but these are not official country guidelines.

If you’re concerned with your alcohol consumption and attitude toward drinking, talk to a healthcare provider as a first step. In low to moderate alcohol consumption, antioxidants may provide some cardiovascular benefits. We can all experience temporary and long-term effects of alcohol, depending on our consumption. Over time, this can give drug addiction treatment you ulcers and chronic inflammation in your stomach, esophagus, and gut. It can also make it harder for your intestines to digest important nutrients like B12 and thiamine. Alcohol can also cause a buildup of digestive enzymes in the pancreas, leading to a condition called pancreatitis, or an inflamed pancreas.