It’s Official: According To Scientists, Drinking Alcohol Is Fun


While booze has a really bad rep, scientists have now proven something many of us have known all along – drinking alcohol is enjoyable.

Normally, when speaking on the subject of drinking alcohol, public health officials talk about the awful and negative side associated with both drugs and booze, including alcoholism, mental illness, car accidents, and kids getting high and doing stupid things.

They tell us about the negative effects of alcohol on our bodies, including this charming description published by the federal government:

“Alcohol affects every organ in the drinker’s body and can damage a developing fetus. Intoxication can impair brain function and motor skills; heavy use can increase risk of certain cancers, stroke, and liver disease.”

We know it’s all true, they don’t have to tell us again, but now researchers are exploring another side of the popular pastime of drinking alcohol in its many forms.

For example, when you go to the bar to enjoy a few beers with your buddies, you don’t do it to purposefully “increase the risk of certain cancers.” No, you do it because it’s fun, it relaxes you after a hard day’s work and makes the conversation come easier.

When enjoying a glass of wine with dinner, you don’t set out to “damage a developing fetus.” You do it because the wine is delicious and, again, helps you relax after a long and busy day.

This is where some new research out of England comes into the equation. The study was published in Social Science and Medicine this week and comes from what is dubbed the Mappiness app.

The Mappiness app, developed by the London School of Economics, is set to better understand human well-being and discover just how much happiness we derive from that bottle of beer or glass of vino.

The free iPhone app pings people a few random times during the day to ask them how happy they are, on a scale of 1 to 100. It further asks users who they are with (i.e. friends, family, etc.) and what they are doing at the time (i.e. working, drinking, socializing, etc.).

Looking at the habit of drinking alcohol, so far researchers have compiled two million responses to the app, recorded by more than 31,000 people between 2010 and 2013. What they ended up with was a huge data set that can now be used to answer the question: “Do people report being happier when they’re drinking?”

Surprisingly – or not surprisingly, depending on your habits – the data revealed that “drinking alcohol is associated with considerably greater happiness at that moment – 10.79 points on a 0-100 scale.”

In other words, when you pour yourself a drink, you receive an immediate happiness boost.

As reported by Uproxx, researchers do admit that the habit of drinking booze is normally associated with other factors, including having fun with friends or watching a football game on TV. For this reason, researchers placed controls on the data, including what else the people involved were doing, who they were with at the time, and also the time of day.

This control caused the alcohol-induced well-being boost to go down to four points. However, researchers say this is still highly significant.

According to the study, the timing and the company kept while drinking alcohol had little effect on the overall happiness boost, with the study finding: “There were only relatively small differences in the happiness-inducing effect of alcohol between men and women, or when looking at different times of day, on weekdays vs. weekends, or with different people.”

However researchers did find that the activities people were involved in at the time had an effect, for instance while waiting at an airport, probably one of the most boring times ever.

“Drinking had the greatest impact when it came alongside otherwise unenjoyable activities (traveling/commuting, waiting), and only increased the happiness of already enjoyable activities by smaller amounts (socializing, making love).”

Researchers then had to decide whether drinking alcohol makes people happier, or alternatively, does being happier make people drink. The study was able to control for this by looking at how happy people reported being earlier in the day.

This control found that drinking had a slightly smaller boost on the overall happiness of the person, but researchers still say the effect is significant, as it suggests more that drinking alcohol makes you happy, rather than the other way around.

As the app was free and available to download, the sample of data probably isn’t the most representative of the general public. Normally, app users tend to be younger and wealthier than the overall population.

However, researchers say the sheer size of the data set helps to overcome this, as they also set controls for several demographic variables, such as race, income, and gender, to strengthen their findings.

One thing the researchers do stress is that the happiness boost from drinking alcohol is short-lived and when boozing is overdone it can lead to alcohol dependency, which will definitely not lead to happiness. As with everything good, it is best done in moderation.

[Photo via Flickr by Susanne Nilsson, cropped and resized/CC BY-SA 2.0]

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