Why Does Drinking Even One Beer Make Me Feel Awful Now?

Growing up, I always considered alcohol to be part of the promise of adulthood. Sure, you could drink too much, and that was bad, but for the unafflicted, a drink or two on the weekend represented the apex of recreation. After all: This was a substance that physiologically relaxed you. For a kid as tightly wound as I was, that sounded pretty good.Fast forward to said adulthood. I’m a 36-year-old husband and father. And I spend most of my free time chasing around my son, a two-year-old who operates largely at 2x speed and relishes ordering me to do things. (“Dada, read Pokey Puppy!”) I love being a dad, don’t get me wrong, but relaxation is at a premium, and so the promise of a drink as I once understood it seems even more appealing—it is a uniquely adult activity in the context of a day largely defined by the desires of a toddler. On top of that, I love the taste of a stiff cocktail, a glass of red wine, or an IPA, so the aesthetic appeal is there as well. And yet: I seem to be too washed to drink it.Increasingly, I’ve noticed that even one pilsner or light white wine will have me waking up in the middle of the night feeling like my brain is filled with mashed potatoes and then stumbling around the next day as if I’d been lightly sedated. God forbid I drink my favorite beverage on earth, a dry martini: I might as well have spent the evening fistfighting a grizzly bear.In my late 20s and early 30s, I tended to push through and deal. After all, I was only drinking a couple of times a week, and no more than two drinks at a time; even with the surprisingly significant aftereffects, it still didn’t feel that debilitating. Then I had a kid, who could not care less if the one night a week I decided to indulge with a beer was also the one where he’d wake me up at an ungodly hour and insist we dance to Raffi.This new reality has caused me to reconsider whether even light drinking, a beverage or two a week, is worth it. And it has coincided with what seems to be a larger reckoning around alcohol. According to a Gallup poll from last year, Americans’ drinking is at a record low, with adults increasingly opting for weed instead. Studies are poking holes in the oft-repeated idea that a glass of wine or moderate drinking can be beneficial, and the World Health Organization stated unequivocally in 2023 that “there is no safe amount that does not affect health.” Story after story after story has suggested that Gen Z, that much obsessed-over harbinger of future behavior, isn’t drinking anything like millennials or Gen X does. (And boomers? Not even close.)In light of this, I wanted to understand two things. First of all, is it normal for even one drink to make me feel like garbage? And second, are the trends that indicate we’re collectively abandoning booze genuine? I started with a call to my doctor, Elroy Vojdani, a functional-medicine practitioner who runs Regenera Medical in Los Angeles and writes about health at his Substack, The Inflamed Generation.Five years ago, Vojdani would have to proactively broach the subject of alcohol’s dangers with his patients, but he’s found that recently, they’re much more likely to decide to drink less alcohol on their own. “I’m certainly of the mindset that alcohol is toxic,” Vojdani says. “Not just like a direct neurotoxin, but in all the things that we do in functional medicine, it’s toxic to the gut lining and therefore toxic to the immune system, and it can trigger all kinds of things.”As the WHO said, any amount of alcohol will have some degree of a negative effect on the body. But that leads to two further questions: Just how negative are we talking? And do these negatives mean a hangover the next day, or a larger and longer-running impact on your health, even in small amounts?“The data is very much mixed in that latter part,” Vojdani says. “You’re not supposed to be a perfectionist in everything you do in life. It’s like, you know, are you having a hamburger every single day? No, but periodically, if you want to consider it, sure. I understand the duality there. But from a long-term perspective, there’s data across the board. There’s data that says that even a single drink is potentially harmful for you, and then there’s also data that says that interestingly, modest drinkers have a longevity benefit.”Vojdani tends to treat each person on an individual basis, but he also thinks that the experience I’m having is a common one. Many of us who have been used to drinking a certain amount for years or even decades are acclimated to the negative effects of alcohol and don’t realize the way it’s making us feel. But after taking a break or quitting altogether—experiments many people are now chronicling online—you might be shocked at how much better you feel. Wearables are also increasing awareness of drinking’s effects. I wore an Oura ring for a few months, and I remember being shocked by the impact even one low ABV beer would have on my sleep.“I don’t think there’s anybody that can fly with significant alcohol intake and not be impacted by it,” Vojdani says. “They just probably don’t realize it.” And ameliorating your hangover, which is a booming industry in and of itself, doesn’t really help: The alcohol remains toxic, even if you don’t notice it.My conversation with Dr. Vojdani reinforced the sense that the change in my habits was neither unjustified nor uncommon: The less I drank, the more I noticed how much of a drag it was when I did drink, and so I was naturally having the instinct to drink even less. I wondered: Was this also happening to everyone else, beyond what was suggested in headlines and TikToks?One of the first signs of just how prevalent sobriety has become is the boom in nonalcoholic drinks, an industry that has exploded over recent years and is only expected to keep growing. A pioneer in this space is John deBary, a bar expert and author who formerly worked as the bar director of the Momofuku restaurant group and, while at the company, introduced nonalcoholic cocktails onto their menu. He discovered that the drinks instantly caused beverage sales to rise, rather than cannibalizing from alcoholic drinks, as you might expect; not including them on the menu “just meant that we were leaving money on the table.” Inspired by this, deBary started a nonalcoholic drink company of his own and then published a book called The Nonalcoholic Bar. All of these efforts benefited from the rise of a type of customer behavior that the industry refers to as “zebra striping.”“Someone will kind of alternate between alcohol and nonalcohol, either in the same session of their dinner in the evening, or in their life,” deBary says. “These people are integrating [nonalcoholic drinks] into their routines.” Compare that to recovering alcoholics, who often won’t drink nonalcoholic beer because it’s too close to the experience they’re trying to avoid.Apparently, I am a zebra-striper, and I am legion. But the reason the horse has these stripes in the first place isn’t solely because people don’t want to feel like garbage the next day: These things have actually started to taste good. As absurd as it might sound to pay $15 for “Thomcord Grapes and Kettl Sobacha force carbonated for a fizzy fanta-esque NA!”—a drink taken from the menu of the canonical LA restaurant Sqirl—they’ve managed to find an audience by offering an experience that still feels worthy of a high-end restaurant. The trick is to not try and taste like alcohol, which is, after all, impossible for chemical reasons.“This nonalcoholic gin and nonalcoholic bourbon, there’s a little bit of an implied sell within their marketing that, like, oh, this is just like a whiskey, but there’s just no alcohol,” deBary says. “Most of these things are ass. They objectively don’t taste good, but also, they’re not good because they’re always reminding you of the better thing that you’re not drinking.”The desire for nonalcoholic drinks also points toward another curious aspect of the decline in drinking. Rather than a rejection of all indulgence, it seems to indicate a shift in the approach. After all, an expensive nonalcoholic cocktail might not get you drunk, but it still scratches the itch of an elevated beverage to dignify a meal or an evening out. Over at her Substack, Rave New World, Michelle Lhooq chronicles behavior around drugs and nightlife, and she’s been tracking this evolution for years. Lhooq might be best-known for introducing the term “California sober” to the popular lexicon in 2019, meaning a person who doesn’t drink but does use weed and other drugs like psychedelics that are perceived as having some sort of health benefit; it took off in April 2021, after Demi Lovato released a song with the same title. Days after I spoke with Lhooq, I heard the phrase on the latest Phoebe Bridgers album.In the years since she first wrote about it, the concept has gone from being a funny meta-joke about Californian idiosyncrasy to a widespread approach to substances.“California sober is such an accepted part of social culture now,” Lhooq says. “It’s almost, I would say, more normal for people to be reducing their alcohol consumption in social settings instead of binge drinking.”As a feature of this trend, Lhooq points to a kind of mirror of what happened when red wine became “healthy”: the idea that substances like mushrooms or even weed are “medicine” rather than drugs, and that others like ketamine can be used for optimization and therapeutic purposes. This line of thinking suggests, in addition to the type of self-reflection that I’m doing, people are responding directly to the narratives around alcohol and other substances. As alcohol becomes increasingly “bad,” and other drugs increasingly positive or beneficial, the former becomes harder to justify and the latter easier.I’ve always found this phenomenon somewhat hilarious, since nearly all of my experiments with weed have resulted in even worse hangovers than drinking. The last time I tried to take a little bit of an edible to relax, I ended up brutally stoned, spending half an hour trying to get the sheets on my bed. I certainly have not increased my cannabis use since decreasing my drinking; for me, they exist in the same category, and Lhooq thinks there’s some justification for this.“I’ve heard this so many times: that weed is just way too strong for a lot of people that grew up smoking these gentler strains,” she says. “I think that these monster strains that you’re seeing in dispensaries these days with crazy THC levels are really a result of market forces that have developed after legalization, and so growers are optimizing these because it’s what’s selling and fulfilling mass-market consumer demand. As a result, they’re not including a lot of the more cannabinoids and terpenes that would create a more balanced high.”Market forces have yet to meet a thing they couldn’t ruin, and I expect they’ll soon come for the rest of the “medicines” currently being pushed as healthy alternatives to alcohol. But market forces also play a role in this story in another way, and that’s in their effect on Gen Z. As I mentioned above, Gen Z bears a substantial amount of the responsibility in many media accounts for why alcohol has started to ebb. At the same time, though, we have BuzzBallz, which are 15% ABV and have skyrocketed in popularity. This seems to create a kind of Jekyll and Hyde quality to the Gen Z story: They’re either not drinking, or they’re downing cheap, candy-colored, super-boozy cocktails.“I do think the headline that Gen Z is the sober generation, or is the mocktail generation, is not true,” says Casey Lewis, who writes about youth culture at her Substack After School. She points to a recent study that came out from the industry group IWSR that suggests Gen Z is drinking on par with other demos, and that moderation is happening across generations. While these studies often seem to contradict each other, this recent data at least suggests that the health reckoning around alcohol seems to be universal rather than limited to any one group. In Lewis’s eyes, the bigger factor in Gen Z’s consumption patterns is economic.“It comes down to price,” she says. “They’re extremely value conscious, and also, so many of them are broke. And so I really think a big part of it is simply that they can’t. Gen Z, and more and more Gen Z men especially, are living at home with their parents. They’re not getting drunk because they live at home. They’re going on fewer dates because they’re broke. Therefore, they’re not drinking on dates. There’s just so many reasons that they’re having fewer opportunities to drink alcohol.”Taking all of this into account, it isn’t hard to see why BuzzBallz have exploded. They occupy a similar place for Gen Z that Four Loko did for millennials back when we were in college: They’re funny, they’re cheap, and they get you drunk fast.“It’s similar to Cutwaters, too, which are really popular,’ says Lewis. “They’re just really strong and they pack a punch in a way that a Miller Lite doesn’t, and they’re so silly and colorful and are eye-catching in TikToks and Instagrams.”BuzzBallz, of course, are the antithesis of the kind of drinking experience that I would want to have. And herein lies the complexity of this subject. As Dr. Vojdani identified, every person has to form their own individual relationship with alcohol. That relationship is going to be modulated by any number of things: their expendable income, their family situation, their social environment, their mood, their health, what they consider important. It isn’t hard to understand why a 20-year-old might choose BuzzBallz and a 40-year-old might decide not to drink at all. At the same time, plenty of people still want to drink, and it seems highly unlikely that this thing we’ve been doing for 10,000 years or more is going anywhere any time soon.“[After] this period of run clubs and abstaining from vices, will the pendulum swing the other way specifically for these young people who were sober-curious when they were in their 20s?” Lewis says. “I don’t know.”Regardless of how the zoomers behave when they’re my age, what seems to be universal is the sense that alcohol is no longer as entrenched as it once was in our culture. Deciding not to drink doesn’t have to be the product of problematic habits or religious beliefs, and it won’t necessarily destroy your social life.At the same time, it also doesn’t have to be some sort of definitive forever decision. Part of being an adult is weighing the costs and the benefits of everything, whether it’s braving a dinner out with your rambunctious toddler or having an alcoholic beverage. When I ran into a dad friend on the street yesterday, I asked him if he wanted to grab lunch and he suggested we meet for cocktails instead. I said sure. Maybe I’ll be tired the next day. But there’s always nap time.