STUPID JUICE
We all had no idea just how stupid teen drinking really is.
And the results aren’t good. Read what they found out by clicking the topics, below
The studies are in. Teen drinking = Stupid.
Medical schools across the U.S. have researched the brains of teenagers who drink compared to the brains of those who don’t. Here are the results of two of those studies.
Dr. Susan Tapert at the University of California - San Diego, invited high school students (non-drinkers and drinkers) to have an MRI done on their brains. She gave the volunteers, who were all sober at the time, identical thinking tests which appeared on an overhead screen during the MRI. Teens who admitted to heavy drinking (right) showed much less brain activity - visible by the absence of red color - than the non-drinkers (left).
Dr. Daniel Amen, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist in Southern California, used SPECT scans to study the brain. These SPECT images show brain activity levels of a healthy non-drinker (left), and of a sober 21-year-old with a four-year history of heavy alcohol use (right). The "holes" indicate areas of reduced brain activity.
Bottom line: Think hard before you drink as a teenager, because it’s harder to think after.
Alcohol hurts two areas of the brain worse than others.
The first is the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain right behind your forehead. This is the part of the brain that changes most during the teen years. It’s responsible for good judgment, planning, decision-making and impulse control, and it determines a lot of a person’s adult personality and behavior. Damage caused to the prefrontal cortex by teen drinking can be long-lasting or permanent.
Teen drinking hurts the second area of the brain, the hippocampus, even worse than the prefrontal cortex. The hippocampus is deep inside your brain, about level with the temples on the sides of your head. It’s responsible for learning and memory, and it’s up to 10-percent smaller in teens who drink a lot. Frequent teen drinkers sometimes never catch up to non-drinkers when it comes to memory and learning, because alcohol interferes with the brain systems that store new information.
The damage caused to your brain by drinking as a teenager can mess up the rest of your life. As a result, you might constantly make bad decisions, do poorly in school, struggle with your jobs, and fail to achieve what you want to in life. It’s just not worth it.
Teenagers become addicted to alcohol much easier than adults.
Why? Because teen brains produce lots more dopamine (the feel-good chemical) than an adult brain does.
Brains release dopamine when we have fun, and as a result, we feel pleasure—anything from an intense emotional high to just feeling happy and satisfied. Alcohol, however, tricks the brain into releasing dopamine when people drink it, and a teen’s brain releases more dopamine than an adult’s. As a result, a teenager’s brain can quickly go from liking, to wanting, to needing alcohol.
Pretty soon, nothing seems as fun as drinking, and even activities and things that people enjoyed before stop making them happy. All they care about is getting that next drink, and it takes more and more alcohol to create the same amount of pleasure as before. Alcoholism is a sad, nasty trap to get stuck in, especially for a teenager.
Of the 16 million alcoholics in the United States, 1 in 4 is a teenager. Many of the other alcoholics are genetically pre-disposed to alcoholism, meaning that their brains naturally react stronger to the dopamine released by drinking alcohol. If you have a relative who is an alcoholic, it’s probably safer not to drink at all, even as an adult.
Other horrible things alcohol does to teenagers.
Plus, traffic accidents are the #1 killer of teenagers, and more than one-third of teen traffic deaths are alcohol-related. Never drive drunk or get in the car with a drunk driver.
It causes you to make bad decisions. Research shows that teens who drink are also among the most likely to get into fights, do poorly in school, have unprotected sex, be depressed, get pregnant, experience unwanted sexual advances, get arrested, get seriously injured, attempt suicide and more.
It leads to using other drugs. Two out of every three teenagers who start drinking before the age of 15 will go on to use illegal drugs. Teen drinkers are 22-times more likely to use marijuana than non-drinkers, and 50-times more likely to use cocaine. Further, 95% of meth users began drinking before the age of 15.
Teen drinking is stupid. Fortunately, most Tooele County teenagers don’t drink.