Stuff I like

Back in college, I found myself really depressed over a girl my senior year. Most of my friends decided to completely ignore what was, in hindsight, a completely embarrassing situation. My friend, Jeff (being Jeff), refused to accept my utter debasement and commanded me to go to a bar with him. At 2:00pm on a weekday afternoon.

Whereupon, Jeff proceeded to order me drink and shot after drink and shot, and in roughly an hour I was messed up beyond all belief. I puked my guts out on Columbia's lawn, several times, in the light of day, with stiff-necked Ivy leaguers pretending to ignore me.

As we were heading back, we ran into the cause of my troubles, who proceeded to berate Jeff for poisoning me, while I stretched out on the lawn and turned on my side to puke.

But you know what? It worked.

I felt great, (nauseous, yes), but also great. Since then, I never get into too bad a funk, because I always just go out, get really hammered, and everything always feels better (although I puke less). A regular diet of heavy drinking once or twice a month feels great. I've never recommended this to anyone before, because I've always felt it's just me (and also socially irresponsible). But.

I just came across this paper linked to by the one and only Marginal Revolution blog, which actually builds a pretty strong case for what I've always self-medicated myself with (binge-drinking.)

This is actually one of the tightest pyschology papers I've come across, and can't see any flaws in the methodology. It's nice that they address many of the issues (drinking habits, task difficulty, instrumentation) in the paper.

But more importantly, I already sort of agreed with the hypothesis. In either case, feeling down? Reduce your cognitive dissonance by drinking.

Interestingly enough, the amount of cognitive dissonance had no effect on the rate of drinking for the participants in the experiment. That is, given a rough measure of attitudinal adjust, the amount the participants drank wasn't affected significantly.

So there's evidence that being anxious is not just coincident with drinking, it's that drinking actually relieves anxiety (a causal effect). Which seems to indicate that although anxiety is reduced by drinking, we never really make that connection, even on a subconscious level. That is to say, if Jeff hadn't happened to have shown up that day, and I wasn't the sort of person to analyse everything, I might never have associated my feeling better with the alcohol. That is, we don't associate alcohol with a reduction in cognitive dissonance, even though that's what it does.

Moral: If you have a friend that's really down, go out and get him/her plastered. I mean, totally plastered. Force those drinks down if you have to, until they're vomiting and can't stand. It's science!