Lastly, alcohol also greatly impairs your decision-making and judgment skills, which makes controlling your anger much more difficult. Do you ever feel like a completely different person when you’ve had too much to drink? Unfortunately, this is common for many struggling with substance abuse and mental health issues. Alcohol can make people do things they wouldn’t normally do, like become angry or aggressive. Between 50-86% of aggressive and violent episodes involve alcohol, according to a study published in the Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.
Get Help Creating Your Personal Roadmap
Receive encouragement from people worldwide who know exactly what you’re going through! You’ll also have the opportunity to connect with our licensed Reframe coaches for more personalized guidance. Consider cutting back or abstaining from alcohol, identifying triggers that make you angry, and practicing stress management techniques like meditation. Executive function is a term used to describe the processesin the brain that control functions like working memory, reasoning,attention, planning and inhibition of impulses.
Anger Management and Alcohol Addiction
They might process a situation differently than if they were sober. According to a study, people with alcohol addiction were more likely to misread a person’s emotions and behaviour. The link between alcohol and anger has to do with alcohol’s ability to remove your inhibitions and disrupt your emotional regulation. When you drink alcohol, parts of your brain that manage anger are suppressed, making it more likely for angry feelings to bubble to the surface.
Anger and Alcohol Risk Factors
However, there is a higher incidence of violence among chronic drinkers. Studies have estimated that up to 50% of alcohol-dependent males display violent behavior. Identifying those factors that might contribute to heightened anger when consuming alcohol is can alcohol cause anger problems important for individuals who have anger issues and those who treat them. Increasingly, research offers answers to determine this interaction. When you heavily consume alcohol, your prefrontal cortex becomes damaged, altering your decision-making capabilities. Therefore, people who rely on drinking as a coping mechanism can be more inclined to make rash choices, such as having unprotected sex or getting into a car with a stranger.
- However, even a mild disorder can escalate and lead to serious problems, so early treatment is important.
- This may explain why they are angry more often and act more aggressively than someone who does not have this personality trait.
- Alcohol can make people do things they wouldn’t normally do, like become angry or aggressive.
- Similarly, in nearly 40% of violent incidents, surveyed individuals from the United Kingdom said they believed their perpetrator was under the influence of alcohol.
- Rage can be triggered by many things, over words at a social gathering, being refused another drink, or even from perceived slights.
Why does alcohol make some people angry?
And, of interest, exposure to self-awareness cues only reduced aggression for heavy drinking men who endorsed certain traits that suggest receptivity to self-introspection (Purvis, Gallagher, & Parrott, 2016). My colleagues and I have conducted several studies which support this idea. In these studies, male participants drank a dose of alcohol that placed them above the legal limit for driving a car – an average breath alcohol concentration of .09%. Then, they engaged in an aggression task, which was framed as a reaction time competition in which they could also behave aggressively toward another participant. Alcohol factors into nearly a third of all murders in the United States.