After a night of drinking, you wake up feeling foggy and dull. Possibly your head hurts, your mouth is dry, or your stomach feels woozy.

As you get up from the bed, you remember bits and pieces of last night. Laughter. Loud music. Friends. . .

But there are other snippets of memory, as well.

You might remember something you wish you would not have said. Maybe you recall some awkward dancing you would never do while in a sober mind. Perhaps there was an argument or fight. Maybe something sexual happened that you regret.

And then the thought, “what did I do?! Ahhh. I am such an idiot!”

What makes us feel guilty after drinking?

Alcohol is a depressant.

The hangover from Alcohol can make us feel symptoms of depression: sadness, guilt, and worthlessness.

These feelings stem from the effects of alcohol on the brain, not necessarily from anything we did or said.

Anxiety.

While drunk, alcohol was holding our anxiety down by depressing our central nervous system. But when the alcohol wears off, the central nervous system bounces back up. It becomes even more sensitive and twitchy than it was before we drank. So, as the alcohol wears off, anxiety can surface.

Many times, anxiety leads to critical self-judgment. Anxious people often overestimate how embarrassing their actions were. They may even feel anxiety when there is nothing objectively to be anxious about.

So the after-alcohol anxiety can also increase our feelings of guilt and shame.

Feeling guilty and ashamed for our actions.

Alcohol also impairs our judgment. It causes us to do things we wouldn’t normally do and say things we wouldn’t normally say. That’s because alcohol smothers our concerns about consequences.

For example, you might be able to clearly articulate the consequences of drunk driving, and yet want to drive yourself home after a night of drinking. You know the risk of drunk driving. It’s just that alcohol makes you less concerned about the risk.

The impairment of our judgment makes it possible to do many things while drunk that you might later regret.

Blackouts.

Sometimes when we drink too much, we simply can’t remember what we did. We are so drunk that we can’t even encode memory—and in that state, our judgment is severely impaired. There’s no telling what we might do or say. So, there is no limit to the amount of guilt and remorse we might feel the next day.

The shame cycle.

The combination of alcoholic depression, anxiety, and remorse over our actions can lead to a cycle of drinking more and more.

Feelings of remorse, shame, and worthlessness can actaully make drinking seem attractive because drinking offers us temporary relief from those feelings.

The temporary relief offered by drinking can make the hard work of improving our lives appear impossible by comparison.

We might not even be aware of the power of this cycle until we sober up. As our brains heal and our lives start to improve, we can look back and see how stuck we were.

Conclusion

Alcohol triggers depression and anxiety, both of which can make us feel terrible after a night of drinking.

Alcohol also impairs our judgment and can even cause us to blackout.

The combination of depression, anxiety, and impaired judgment can become a cycle that makes us feel miserable.

CLICK HERE to Learn how to overcome shame

Comment below: What do you think of this explanation of why we feel so bad after drinking? How could it be improved?