Welcome to Office Hours. This is our dedicated 101 space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm Dr. Mark Heim in and each week we're going to pull back the curtain and share the insights the research to lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. As at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health and for many of you, your family's health too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power and agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by FunctionHealth, empowering you to live 100 healthy years with over 160 lab tests at just $365 a year. Sign up today at FunctionHealth.com, slash Mark and use code Mark 2026 to get $50 towards your membership. Even if just 30 days could completely change how you feel, your sleep, your focus, your energy, your skin. Well, that's what thousands of people discovered during dry January. Now today I'm breaking down exactly what happens in your body when you give up alcohol for a month and why the benefits go far beyond your liver. We're going to take you through the process week by week and equip you with tools to help you get through the month, alcohol free. Yes, that's hard. It's hard to say. If you want to lecture support, this is exactly what we're focusing on inside the Heim and Heim this month. My exclusive membership community, we're taking on the 30 day dry January challenge together. Whether you're looking to cut back or take a full break from alcohol, we'll meet you where you are and help you build habits that truly last. Now with the support of like-minded people and the community, you're going to make real sustainable change so you can feel firsthand all the benefits that we're talking about. Now dry January has become a global movement, a reset after the holidays, but it's not just a trend. It's a powerful way to see in real time how alcohol affects nearly every system of your body and how quickly those systems can recover. Perfect way to set the tone for a healthier, happier, 2026. All right, so we also know why we drink right to feel good, feel a little happy, to feel a little loose, social lubricant, blah, blah, blah. But what exactly is the buzz we feel when we drink? Why does alcohol seem to make social situations so much easier and more relaxed? Well, let's first define what alcohol is and why it actually gives you that buzz. The active ingredient in alcohol is something called ethanol, that's the chemical name for alcohol essentially. If you want to get a little more nerdy, it's a chemical that's created during the fermentation process when yeast feeds on sugars and greens, fruit, or other plant-based materials. Like yeast is in wine and that's why you get the grapes fermenting to turn into wine. Ethanol is what gives alcohol that's a relaxing buzz. It's also the reason that can be toxic and that is it can kill you directly in large amounts. Paraselis is one of the fathers of modern medicine said the dose makes the poison and that is very true with alcohol, a little bit not going to kill you. But if you drink a lot, it will kill you and I personally see this in my medical career many, many times. Now what is actually alcohol doing? Well, it's a central nervous system depressant. Now despite how it feels, it doesn't actually stimulate your brain, it slows it down. But in the early stages, the buzz phase, that slowdown happens first in the inhibitory centers of the brain, the control centers that keep you reserved or cautious or anxious, right? So the ego essentially, right? When you drink, your inhibition goes down a little bit. You feel more relaxed, more social, more confident, maybe you feel a little euphoric. That's the quote buzz. The other thing that happens in your brain is it works on different neurotransmitter systems. It works on the GABA system, which is the relaxation system. It also blocks glutamate, which is the excitatory system. So GABA is calming in inhibitory and glutamate is stimulating in excitatory. So there's different neurotransmitters that have different roles in your body. Wake up, go to sleep, wake up, go to sleep. For example, Valium is a GABA formula. It basically stimulates the GABA receptors. So it's progesterone, makes you relax and calm. Now alcohol acts like GABA, turning up this inhibition and it's simultaneously blocks glutamate, which is the excitatory neurotransmitter. And it turns down the stimulation. Now this double effect slows brain signaling and causes you to relax, but it also does bad stuff. Like compared to your judgment, it slows your reflexes and it also can reduce anxiety, which is why people drink to self-medicate very often. Now the buzz hits when the balance shifts. Just enough to quiet the brain's noise without making your drowsy yet. And that's okay, but you want to just sort of be in the right sweet spot. A little too much, you're going to get in trouble and you just want to get a little bit so you can have that little sense of buzz and pleasure if you drink, but not too much. And I'll go all by the way, when we look at the literature, I hate to say it folks, it's just not good for us. It affects our sleep adversely. It increases many cancers, increases risk of metabolic dysfunction, got microbiome disturbances, mitochondrial toxin. It's just so many reasons. It's not good for you, but it feels good. So I get it. I occasionally have a tequila, so I understand. How else does it work in the body? It affects the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is your reptile brain. It's your ancient lizard brain. It's the emotional center. It becomes more active leading to emotional openness laughter, which is good. But the prefrontal cortex is the adult in the room. It's responsible judgment for planning, restraint. It goes offline early in drinking, which explains why people feel freer or act impulsively when they drink. Now, that combination is why you might feel just more talkative or affection during this buzz face. It feels good, but it's not necessarily good for you. All right. So what are the negative effects of alcohol in the body? I get what we drink, right? To relax, to connect, to take the edge off. But what actually happens inside the body when we drink alcohol? Why does that one or two glass of wine or tequila hit us the way it does? And why do we pay for it the next day? Well, once your liver can't metabolize ethanol fast enough, then your blood alcohol concentration rises moving from buzz to drunk to even worse sedated, which is black out drunk. Now, the buzz fades and often is followed by rebounding glutamate and cortisol activity, lean to anxiety and fatigue. That's called anxiety. Now, even moderate drinking can impact nearly every organ system in the body. And the reason is it builds this damage to metabolic stress, to inflammation, to impaired detoxification, to affect on hormones, the microbiome, your mitochondria. Pretty much everything is affected by it. Now, what's the deal with brain function, neurotransmitters, and alcohol? How does it all work? I mentioned a little bit, but it's a central nervous system to present. It slows brain communication. And as I said, it increases this calming neurotransmitter called GABA. And it decreases the stimulating neurotransmitter called glutamate, which is why you feel more dull and not so alert. Now dopamine does spike early on during the buzz phase, which is what makes us focus pay attention. But it drops very quickly and it leaves you feeling tired, Aluminum. And I notice this, like when I drink, I feel good for like maybe 15 minutes. And then it's like, yeah, I don't like it anymore. So I think if you pay attention to how your body responds, and you'll see this also, it also, my R ring tells me this every night, if I have something, it prevents you from falling into REM sleep. So you're not able to enter into that deep rest recovery period where your immune system and your lymphatic system, that's the immune system of the brain, it basically cleans out all the toxic metabolites from the day. That's when it's most active at night. And when you're cleaning out all the metabolic waste from your brain, so you don't end up with dementia and worse. And that's why alcohol, by the way, is very powerful linked to dementia, not just because of certain nutritional deficiencies, but for other reasons too. And so we want to have a healthy functioning brain at night. And when we drink, we just don't. When you chronically use alcohol, it rewires the reward pathway. So what does that mean? It means you need more and more to feel, quote, normal. And so whereas, you know, if you're a T totaler, if you have one glass of wine, you're drunk, whereas if you're drinking a bottle of wine every night, it doesn't affect you. And I think you should pay attention to that because when you use more, even though you're not feeling it, it's having even more harm on your body. And so long term, what do we see with long term use of alcohol? But we see memory loss, cognitive decline, anxiety, sleep disruption, as I mentioned, dementia. And basically the idea with alcohol is it sort of numbs you and then it depletes you. Your brain becomes dependent on alcohol just to feel okay. And you see this with alcoholics. They can't feel normal unless they're drinking. What about your liver? Well, the liver's got to metabolize the alcohol before anything else. It's kind of like the worst liver toxin. That's why we have some of you call alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is caused by alcohol. And this is a poison for the liver. And there's an enzyme in your liver called alcohol dehydrationase, which converts ethanol, which is alcohol, into a derivative by product called acetyl aldehyde. Now this acetyl aldehyde is a highly toxic compound. The damage is your DNA, the damage is proteins, and it's really rough on your body. Then the acetyl aldehyde is then broken down by an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase. I'm going to talk about that in something called acetate. Now if you drink too much too fast, this acetyl aldehyde goes up and it causes hangovers, nausea, flushing, all kinds of inflammation. And when you're chronically overloaded with this, you get fatty liver and you get cirrhosis eventually. But even within a few weeks of drinking a lot, you start getting fatty liver. And then over the years, you'll get scarring, and that leads to fibrosis, cirrhosis, and ulcer liver failure and death. And what else happens when you drink alcohol? If that wasn't enough, right? This poor. You get an impairment tapelism of fats and sugars and hormones. So your whole metabolic system is hijacked. And hijacked your liver's capacity for detoxification, like even estrogen clearance. For example, if you are taking estrogen, you are going to get much higher levels when you take alcohol. And even if you're not taking estrogen, when you drink alcohol, you increase your estrogen levels because your body can't detoxify it and you end up with more breast cancer. In fact, one drink a day, or seven days a week for a woman, is linked to a 40% increase risk of breast cancer. That's a big deal. So just women out there, you pay attention because you can get really messed up with estrogen and alcohol. So when the check engine light comes on in your car, do you ignore it? Of course not. You take it to the mechanic and fix it before it's a bigger problem. Your body is no different. It's constantly sending signals. Inflammation. Blood sugar is rising. Hormones are shifting. But if you don't look under the hood, you won't know what needs attention. And that's where function comes in. It's your body's personal dashboard. It's designed by doctors, including me. And it's trusted by leading physicians and hundreds of thousands of members. And the 100 most critical lab tests covering every major system. From hard to liver to kidneys, to metabolism, hormones, toxins, nutrients, and more. You can get real numbers, real data. So you can take action and make improvements and track them over time. And that's how you prevent disease instead of just treating it. So check your system. Start testing. Go to function.com slash mark. And if you're one of the first 1000 people this week, use the code mark 2026 for a $50 credit to your $365 membership. It's time to stop guessing. You're testing with function. Also when you, when you're, labor's not working, you're not going to be able to remove environmental toxins. You're not going to be able to burn fat. And then you're going to have all kinds of bad things like gain weight. You're going to get blood sugar swings and cortisol swings and adrenaline up and down. And that means you become more insulin resistant. And that means you become more likely to gain fat, particularly belly fat or visceral fat. And for women, as I mentioned, you know, when you drink alcohol, and this is up your estrogen metabolism that causes a high risk of breast cancer and uterine cancer. So really proud. Now for men, does the kind of opposite lowers testosterone, lowers burn quality and function. And it leads to men growing, you know, beer bellies and also got a comasture, which is large breasts. It's just like women because testosterone gets converted to estrogen. And that's why testosterone is up lower. So that's what happens with alcohol. It's not a good deal. It also screws up thyroid signaling. That makes you feel tired, sluggish, and the slow metabolism. Alcohol turns off your body's metabolic repair mode and it throws your hormones out of balance. And you want to not drink for that reason too much. Occasionally drink, I probably just to be here, I probably drink maybe one or two drinks a month. Literally. It's fun if I go out or with friends or want to just have something when I'm a nice dinner, I'll do it. But otherwise, I just stay away because I know how it affects me. What else does it do? Well, if that ain't enough, there's more. It affects the gut, it affects your microbiome. What is it doing? Your gut is a very delicate system. And there's only one cell between you and a sewer. Your entire lining of your intestinal tract is just one cell thick. And when that lining gets damaged, you get leaky gut, which means the proteins from food and food reactions happen like food sensitivities and bacterial toxins get into your system. And by the way, your immune system, 60% of your immune system is right underneath your gut lining. And that creates inflammation throughout your whole body. So it's another way that alcohol causes inflammation. It also messes up your bacteria. So if you have a healthy microbiome, great. But if you drink a lot, you won't. And so people with alcoholics have really unhealthy microbiomes and they increase the growth of bad bugs in your gut. And they can also cause gut symptoms like bloating, nutrient absorption, gen inflammation. And a lot of nutritional deficiencies happen with alcohol. Like you just to pleads all your B vitamins, you get vitamin B, one or thymine deficiency, because B12 deficiency, folate deficiency. So you see a lot of nutritional deficiencies in alcoholics. But even if you're not, it's still using up a lot of these nutrients to just get rid of it. So bottom line, this whole gut brain access disruption, it just also causes other issues like anxiety, mood changes. So alcohol basically turns the gut from this healing system into a inflammatory trigger. Really bad news. Any other systems affect the bowel call? Well, yeah, pretty much everyone. Next one is the cardiovascular and immune system. What does alcohol do if consumed regularly and along per basis? It raises your blood pressure and it raises your triglycerides and it increases your cardiovascular heart attacks. And ultimately, there's something called alcoholic cardio myopathy. That's a big mouthful. But what it means is you get heart failure from drinking alcohol. It's a well-known condition. I've seen it many times in practice. It also suppresses immune function. So even one night of heavy drinking reduces your immune cell activity for up to a whole day. So alcohol is an immune suppressor, basically the skies as a social lubricant. And what about cancer? I mentioned that. Alcohol consumption is a third lean cause, third lean cause, a preventable cancer in the United States after tobacco and obesity. Well, actually obesity is the first. Only 45% of Americans are aware of the link between alcohol and cancer. So most people don't even know about it. And the risk of cancer goes up for a lot of reasons, right? DNA damage from the seal-out-eyed production, increased free radicals and oxyp stress, changed the hormones like estrogen I mentioned, increasing the absorption of carcinogens like cigarettes. So when your body is processing alcohol, it creates a toxin that damages your DNA and makes it easier for cancer to get going. You don't want that. So that's another reason to not drink so much. Okay, what about hangovers? What is a hangover? A hangover is your body's emergency cleanup after a chemical storm. And what's going on here? Well, a seal-out-eyed toxicity is the reason. Now, this is the byproduct of ethanol, as I mentioned before. The liver can't keep up metabolizing it, so it basically builds up in the toxic byproducts build up. And that caused it. It's a dehydrating compound. Alcohol blocks this hormone in your brain called ADH or anti-diarrhetic hormone. Why is that a problem? Well, when you are not preventing yourself from peeing, you're going to pee more and you're going to lose more water, ingles more electrolytes, and become more dehydrated. So alcohol basically makes you pee more and lose water and electrolytes. Also, you get blood sugar fluctuations. After this insulin surge, your glucose crashes and you can get shaking for tea. You know, I'm wearing systemic inflammation. Alcohol irritates the gut and the liver. At least it's something called cytokines. Now, these are the body's chemicals that are used for infection. That's why, you know, basically when you have a hangover, you feel like you have the flu, you have the cytokine storm during COVID, when you have the flu, you feel achy. That's because of these immune-message or molecules we call cytokines. So sleep disruption is another big problem with alcohol. Alcohol blocks REM sleep, which is your dream sleep. And then it causes this rebound overactivity when you stop it. So when you get this rebound chemistry, it's alcohol fades, it's stress, chemical spike, you get anxiety, restlessness, anxiety, and that is a huge problem. So bottom line, alcohol taxes every major system in your body, especially your liver, your brain, your hormones. Now, hangovers are the bodies emergency cleanup after a neurochemical and metabolic storm. But the good news is, after 24 to 72 hours of abstaining, your body starts to repair itself. So what happens when you stop drinking? Well, I want you to understand what happens week by week when you stop drinking. So week one, and this is where we're going to do a 38 challenge together, week one is when your body starts to detoxify and you start to have a reset. Your sleep initially may be a little disrupted at first. Your blood sugar and your cortisol stress hormone starts to recalibrate. Your liver starts processing this whole backlog of toxins. You stop being dehydrated, you have more energy if you were headaches. So that's week one. Week two, your gut and your brain starts to rebound. Your serotonin and dopamine starts to stabilize. Your gut inflammation drops. Microbiom starts healing. Leaky gut starts healing, hopefully if you're not drinking. You're craving for sugar and alcohol. Obviously go down. You get more mental clarity, less brain fog. Week three, inflammation drops. You get liver fat going down. Systemic inflammation going down a lot. Blood pressure tends to get more normal. Your skin looks clear. A lot of alcohol causes puffy. You've seen those red puffy faces. That's alcohol. It causes inflammation. You see in people's faces, it causes rosaceous skin issues. You also get more stable mood, less anxiety swings. And then finally week four, you get a lot of additional metabolic and immune benefits. More insulin sensitivity. So your body's able to lose weight. You're a stronger immune response. You're not getting sick as much. You have better deep sleep. Bounce hormones, especially cortisol and testosterone. And you see a big change in energy, confidence and focus. So one of the takeaways, one of the benefits, here's a quick recap of the key benefits we just covered in the body. Improve liver detoxification and function. Lower inflammation of blood pressure. One of the tables in the digestion, with your brain, you get better mood, better focus, better sleep quality, less anxiety and depression. And long term, you're going to have a recalibrate relation with alcohol, which is great. So you don't have to be stuck with it. You can make a choice. So the question is, how do you make more mindful choices? How do you set yourself up for success when cutting out alcohol? Well, there's some real challenges, both physical and the mental. Well, social pressure, obviously. Just have one drink. Come on, what's the big deal? I call those drug pushers. Cravings happen and will power. So what's the best way to navigate those challenges? Well, social pressure, maybe just say, hey, I'm taking a reset this month. Just have to normalize a choice. For cravings, you can modify that by eating protein, hydration and certain adaptogens, and herbs, and even nutrients like theine, which is a relaxing molecule from green tea or magnesium glycinate, which is also helps you detoxify. Sleep disruption can initially be a problem, but it'll improve with things like magnesium, epsom salt baths or meditation. Mindset, focus on curiosity, not deprivation. So it's not all or nothing, right? Just kind of learn what's going on in your body. Listen to how you feel. Pay attention to the change in your life when you stop drinking. Really important. Okay, so why does it make such a difference to do these kinds of challenges with the community rather than on your own? Well, if you want to see what happens when you give your body this 30-day break, just join the high of January challenge. We'll guide you, we'll track your process and your progress, we'll share stories. Everything is better together. Community is medicines. And it's super easy to sign up. Just go to drahimon.com and sign up for the Heimeneipe. So your body has an incredible ability to heal. And often it just needs you to take your foot off the gas and give yourself a break from the things that are making it not feel well. Try it for three days. You're going to be amazed at how different you feel. Thanks for joining me for office hours. I love diving into these topics with you. Remember, you are the CEO of your own health. And every choice you make can move you closer to healing and vitality. I want to keep these episodes as relevant and useful as possible. So tell me, what do you want to explore next? What questions are you wrestling with? What breakthroughs are you chasing? Share your ideas in the comments on social media or through the link in the show notes. I'm listening. Until next time, keep taking charge, keep asking questions and keep showing up for your health. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions, neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultra wellness center.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. 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