How to Stop Being an Angry Drunk
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If you start to experience any of these emotions, that can act as a key signal from your body that it’s time to practice some basic self-care. You may also want to monitor your sugar intake because sugar highs and lows can increase irritability. The FHE Health team is committed to providing accurate information that adheres to the highest standards of writing. This is part of our ongoing commitment to ensure FHE Health is trusted as a leader in mental health and addiction care. When you live with or care for someone who becomes abusive when they’re intoxicated, the consequences may well be more than just hurt feelings.
Since your judgment becomes clouded when you’re intoxicated, a simple misunderstanding can quickly turn into a bar fight. Furthermore, an angry drunk may not feel like consequences matter, making it seem like a good idea from their perspective to create or partake in a dangerous situation. Because alcohol is a psychoactive drug, it temporarily alters your mood, perception and feelings.
Various factors affect the potential for anger arousal with alcohol consumption.
Becoming angry can feel like a way to regain control, because it’s an emotion in our power. To avoid reacting with anger, it’s important to identify what is and isn’t in our control, and manage our expectations accordingly. Whatever the cause, it’s a vital part of the sobriety journey to become aware of your anger and its sources, and develop new ways to manage it. Anger can be one of the most triggering emotions, so it’s important to create a strong plan for handling feelings of anger when they do arise in early sobriety. Ultimately, finding ways to truly process anger will allow it to become less intense, less frequent, and more manageable over time. Treatment should be administered by a recovery specialist at a rehabilitation facility.
Social cues become difficult, emotions are less regulated and critical thinking skills suffer greatly. Alcohol makes it harder for those with anger management issues to judge a situation and prevent a hostile reaction. It’s no guarantee that alcohol will lead to aggression, but there are certain individuals who are more prone to angry outbursts while intoxicated. Those who already suffer from impulse control and focusing too hard on the present tend to anger more quickly when under the influence.
Alcohol and Rage: What You Need to Know
The data for the present study were taken from the project work on correlates of anger among alcohol users, funded by center for addiction medicine, NIMHANS, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. When you’re intoxicated, you experience reduced inhibitions, impulsivity, impaired cognitive function, and low regard for future consequences. If you’ve been struggling with angry emotions or violent impulses, these effects of alcohol can make the situation worse.
When alcohol impairs this area, a person may be more likely to behave in a way they wouldn’t while sober, including getting confrontational (2). The problem is when someone gets stuck in this step and ignores the situation. alcoholic rage syndrome Eventually, they fail to deal with anger which interferes with their recovery progress. When this happens, they’re likely to return to their addiction and have even more difficulty finding recovery once again.
How Alcohol Works Affects Your Behavior
Another study published in 2011 showed that those who focus more on the present than the future were generally more aggressive and had difficulty considering the consequences of their actions. For those who already don’t think about the future, this could easily lead to making a short-sighted decision and possibly getting into drunken altercations. People with anger problems are most prone to becoming angry drunks, but it may not be obvious to others that someone has an anger problem. If you have a problem with silently harboring anger, you may likely let it spill out while drinking. Identifying those factors that might contribute to heightened anger when consuming alcohol is important for individuals who have anger issues and those who treat them. Anyone struggling with anger and their relationship with alcohol is encouraged to reach out to the ARC team today.
- When they aren’t under the influence, you can try speaking openly with them about how their actions make you feel, how they’re affecting your family and why something needs to change.
- We start by diagnosing your anger problems and developing a unique treatment plan based on your personal and medical history and presenting symptoms.
- Alcohol can provoke different emotional responses for different people.
- Or, you may have someone in your life or family who has a problem with a short fuse or a hot temper.
- Most of those guilty of domestic abuse are likely to engage in domestic violence after only a couple of alcoholic drinks, meaning that they are not drunk enough to blame their actions on impaired judgment.
Alcohol and other psychoactive substances are known for reducing our ability to recognize emotions and empathize with others. So it should be no surprise that alcohol makes it harder to recognize when we are threatening or hostile to someone else. Likewise, we may also misinterpret when someone is being normal and think they are acting hostile or antagonizing.
For example, some cases of domestic violence have turned fatal because one person refused to leave when their partner was being abusive to them. In some cases, you can’t change an angry drunk, and you need to make the decision that’s right for you and other members of the household, especially children. Alcohol effects the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the region that moderates things like decision-making. What this means is that people whose personalities make them naturally quicker to become angry than others are even more likely to lose control under the influence of alcohol.
We encourage all those struggling with substance use to seek professional help. Over time Ryan came to better understand factors that contributed to his drinking, including his anger and increased aggression when drinking. Therapy assisted him in recognizing how past wounds contributed to his vulnerability to both anger and alcohol use. After much consideration, he eventually joined an alcohol treatment program as I helped him grieve his wounds and manage his anger. They were also required to respond to the Consideration of Future Consequence Scale (CFC).