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Substance use is often discussed through the language of addiction, recovery or morality. As opposed to what the movies would have you believe, the impact of these substances isn’t always dramatic. In many cases, alcohol and drugs enter our lives socially and impact our personal growth greatly. Say, a little something to “switch off from work mode”, or a drink to unlock the uninhibited version of you. These practices are ingrained in modern culture in such a way that questioning them can sometimes feel stranger than participating in them. 

But science has evidence that might complicate how you view leisure. 

According to the World Health Organization, alcohol contributes to around 2.6 million deaths globally every year. Beyond physical health consequences, researchers increasingly point to the long-term cognitive and emotional effects substances can have on attention, memory, emotional regulation, and decision-making. 

One of the clearest examples is sleep. A 2024 meta-analysis published in Sleep Medicine Reviews found that even moderate alcohol consumption reduces REM sleep. While the body rests, your mind does not get the opportunity to “hit the hay” like it used to. You carry the heaviness of a tired mind, reducing your overall effectiveness, because your mind often does not recover the same way. 

When you add synthetic substances to your body, your brain has no options but to adapt. Studies from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism explain how repeated substance use affects the brain’s dopamine system, which is the circuitry linked to motivation, reward and pleasure. Over time, engaging activities that you once derived pleasure from begin to lose meaning and feel comparatively muted. The result is not always dependency in the clinical sense, but sometimes a gradual narrowing of emotional range and attention. 

This is where the conversation becomes less about the substances themselves and more about the role they begin to play as an emotional crutch for some. Psychologists have long noted that many forms of substance use function as coping mechanisms before they become habits. In many cases, substances are not pursued for pleasure alone, but as a crutch to deal with internal turmoil — pressure, loneliness, uncertainty, burnout or emotional exhaustion. 

The difficulty is that personal growth often depends on facing those exact experiences directly. Discomfort, like in any tale of character development, plays a vital role in self-awareness. Emotional resilience is usually built through repeated exposure to difficult feelings, not avoidance of them. Imagine you spent years digging yourself into a deep trough. One day, you “woke up” and you actively chose to question yourself and acknowledge the discomfort in being buried alive. Regardless of how deep you have managed to dig yourself, you can be comfortable in the knowledge that it could have been deeper still the next day if you hadn’t stopped yourself. 

Carl Jung once wrote in a letter to Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson that the craving for alcohol could represent “a spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.” It remains one of the more compassionate ways of understanding substance use; not simply as self-destruction, but as an attempt to reach relief, connection, transcendence or escape.

Perhaps that is what makes this conversation so complicated. Drugs and alcohol are rarely just chemicals in a vacuum. They are woven so deeply in the ways we emote. You pop a champagne in celebration, or pour a whiskey when dealing with grief, but do substances really help you figure out your identity, ambition, loneliness, and belonging? Or do they create fleeting moments of release while also interrupting the difficult work of fully inhabiting one’s own life?