Featured Image Credit: Sally Anscombe/Getty / Insider Science/YouTube
We've all been there - had a bit too much to drink the night before, but when you wake up you can't remember a single thing.
It's a strange phenomenon that many chalk off as simply having too much fun, but it could be harmful to your body, brain, and overall health, so you might want to avoid going too far in the future.
Strange things have been shown to happen to your body when you consume alcohol, and while your phone might be able to tell whether you've had a bit to much soon, simulations have shown the horrifying reality of what happens when you drink and drive.
If you're sensible enough to not sit behind the wheel, but perhaps lax enough to drink beyond your limit, then you might run into a situation where your memories of the night before have strangely vanished.
Advert
This situation has thankfully been explained by Insider Science, and it's all to do with the different functions of your brain and how they interact with excessive alcohol consumption.
Science explains that your prefrontal cortex is where your brain stores short term memories, which eventually develop into fully structured long term memories in the hippocampus.
For these two functions to work your brain requires neurotransmitters like N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) and Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), yet alcohol stops these from working correctly.
All levels of drunk aren't created equally either, as the amount of alcohol you consume - alongside its strength - directly correlates to how affected these neurotransmitters are, and consequently how much you remember.
Let's say you're male and around 73kg/160lbs - it would only take you around eight shots in an hour to reach a blood-alcohol level of around 0.2%, which is likely to put you in a 'greyout' or 'fragmentary blackout' state where you'll be able to remember some things the next morning, but with big gaps or holes.
Keep drinking beyond this though and you put yourself in danger of reaching a full blackout, which you scarily won't even realize until the next morning when you're left with no recollection of the events that occurred the night before.
You could be behaving perfectly normally - at least for someone who's had a lot to drink - yet your health could be at danger, and drinking much more beyond this could even put you at risk of death.
How much you're affected by this very much depends on factors like your sex, weight, and family history, but if you're finding that you consistently don't remember nights out then it's maybe something to think about.
Many of the comments reflect this sentiment, as one user explains: "Yup my blackouts are bad. Losing control and memory is terrifying. No more."
"I remember the first time I had a black out," another user details, "It's so scary the next morning because all you remember is doing something normal then literally black. I have no idea what happened that night but I know it was really bad."
Sometimes it's best to put your health first, even at the expense of a fun night out - it's not like you'd remember it anyway!
