"Whenever a participant reported having had an alcoholic drink....At various points over the following three hours, they then rated the extent to which they felt the drink had “relieved unpleasant feelings or symptoms”, and also provided updated ratings of their levels of those various negative feelings."

I also wonder if this is applicable to procrastination and self deceptive actions in general. If I'm reading some "candy" novel when I should be sleeping but know that I've got to check in 15 minutes from now about how I feel about bedtime procrastination then I'm not going to enjoy the book. The whole point is to immerse myself in something that distracts me from my depression, anxiety and shame at the very process of distraction.

Especially if your research setup is as good as useless ("The team concedes various limitations to the study, mostly to do with factors affecting generalisability. The over-representation of women among the participants (as well as the fact that a large proportion were diagnosed with BPD) certainly means that the results are not necessarily applicable to the general population"), not to mention the methodology is self reporting questionaires.

However, after reading up on how one of the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal is increased anxiety, and hypothesizing that the weekday drinks actually made my anxiety worse overall I stopped drinking on weekdays and limited drinking on weekdays a bit. My anxiety improved after that.

Alcohol will cause you to urinate a lot of magnesium and other electrolytes and can cause deficiencies. Magnesium deficiency is strongly associated with mental health disorders. It will also impair your sleep. This is a double whammy if you are already suffering from symptoms of depression or anxiety, alcohol will likely drive you further in the hole.

Given: They're saying they drink to deal with their symptoms. The symptoms get worse when they drink.

The study concludes: Drinking makes it worse.

But the other option is: Their symptoms would have been even worse without the drinking.

I'm not saying hypothesis is correct, just that the article didn't mention the study addressing it. Unless I missed it.

Many years later I discover that I have a genetic clotting disorder. Blood thinners will quickly fix my severe brain fog.

I use a mix of prescription ones or even just aspirin now.

But I think a lot of my family drink to clear there heads.

My pet theory anyway.

I can’t see how this got past IRB or how they were able to ethically enroll patients. BPD has many psychological manifestations all rolled into one disorder including rage and emotional lability. It’s a mystery to me why alcohol would be a responsible choice here.

Mild/moderate alcohol consumption does often temporarily alleviate anxiety. But it also pushes the concerns to the next day - and that is the positive feedback loop for increasing daily consumption. This leads to worsening health and worsening/chronic psychological issues that are perpetually pushed back by daily consumption.

It doesn't have to be any sport. Things like cleaning your house works as well. Do something repetitive, something that your autopilot is able handle easily. It will eventually clear your mind.

Not only you won't have to deal the with bad effects of drinking but you'll get something good out of it.

Annoying hangovers turn into getting withdrawals for days after having 2 drinks. That’s when the real alcoholism starts.

Its non-opinionated, decentralized but moderated (pun unintended) discussion was a huge help when I quit drinking five years ago.

I'll just add that my path lined up with others who have commented here. Once it dawned on me that it was a crutch, and not just for fun, it felt like time to put it aside and do some work on myself.

However a series of steps or exploring a higher power wasn't what I felt worked for me. /r/StopDrinking turned out to be that sweet spot.

A subset of the population will always be looking for some way to escape reality, but the top 2 (alcohol and tobacco) have relatively disastrous health effects.

Granted, anyone who's fine with reality as-is should be encouraged to stay the course.

Be wary with this headline ... this study does NOT reflect the general population, at all.

Alcohol obviously reduces anxiety short-term, because of its effect on GABA signalling.

Alcohol can excarbate anxiety in long-term.

But there is catch - there are therapeutic drugs that have similar effect, benzodiazepines. Benzodiazepines can be misused (and make recovery from anxiety harder) and can be used for therapeutic purposes to improve patient's quality of life.

Obviously, benzodiazepines are more selective (ethanol affects nearly every system in brain), but I would expect that moderate and rare drinking to cope with single stressful event can be moderately beneficial, but drinking to deal with "stressful live" would be heavily detrimental.