The Role of Glutamate in Alcohol Use and Its Impact on the Brain

You’ve just finished a long week at work, and you’re hoping to wind down with your favorite takeout meal and some reality TV. You pour a couple of glasses of wine as a “nightcap,” hoping to get some deep sleep before an eventful weekend. While your eyelids start to feel heavy and you're out before you know it, you find yourself up at 4 a.m. still feeling drained but not able to go back to sleep. This could be alcohol’s effects on glutamate (a key brain chemical) at play. 

Alcohol causes glutamate to fluctuate, leading to negative effects during, after, and in the long term. These fluctuations are what ties glutamate and addiction, which we’ll get into more later. Let’s take a deep dive into how alcohol affects this important brain chemical and what consequences it leads to so we can make better decisions that improve our health and well-being.

What Is Glutamate?

Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter (chemical messenger) in our brain that stimulates brain activity. Receptors on our brain cells take in glutamate, and glutamate tells the cell to perform its function. For example, if glutamate stimulates a motor neuron, it can send a signal for our muscles to contract. Essentially, glutamate stimulates brain activity, which helps us perform various functions. As our brain’s most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter, it also plays a key role in our learning and memory. 

Glutamate also affects our emotions and reward system. This is because glutamate contributes to the regulation of dopamine, which is a key hormone in our brain’s reward system that gives us a sense of pleasure and keeps us coming back for more.

Since alcohol impacts our central nervous system (our brain’s messaging center), it can throw our glutamate levels out of whack, impacting our cognitive function, reward system, and emotions. Let’s further understand alcohol’s extensive impact on glutamate.

Neurotransmitters and Alcohol: Neurobiology of Alcohol Use

To understand how alcohol affects glutamate, it’s also important to get an idea of how alcohol affects GABA, glutamate’s opposite. GABA is a chemical messenger in our brain that gives us a sense of calm and relaxation. 

When we drink, alcohol suppresses glutamate and mimics GABA, slowing down brain function and helping us relax. But not for long. When alcohol’s effects wear off, our GABA levels dip and glutamate activity surges to help us find balance again. This is why we often feel anxious or restless after drinking.

Over time, regular drinking has conflicting effects on our brain chemicals. We produce less GABA, its receptors reduce as a result, and glutamate activity increases to compensate for this. This becomes our brain’s new balanced state, leading to problems when we quit or cut back. Let’s take a closer look at the consequences.

Body, Brain Function, and Drinking: Alcohol’s Impact on Glutamate

1. The Honeymoon Phase

While we drink, we experience what feels like a honeymoon phase of alcohol consumption. GABA increases and glutamate decreases, which helps anxious thoughts slow down, releases muscle tension, and boosts our mood. But this is short-lived. 

Since alcohol suppresses glutamate, which is essential for proper cognitive function, there can be consequences. Here are some:

• Fuzzy memory
• Impaired judgment 
• Lack of motor coordination 
• Blurry vision
• Increased chance of risky behaviors
• Slower reflexes 

The GABA/glutamate balance helps us maintain proper brain and body function, affecting everything from how we think, feel, and act. When alcohol gets metabolized and eliminated from our body, this balance is thrown off again, leading to even more issues.

2. The Anxious Aftermath

When alcohol leaves our body, our GABA levels drop and glutamate is no longer suppressed. But since GABA is low, glutamate can go into overdrive, ensuring that our brain and body function properly. This hyperactivity can cause the following consequences (these might sound familiar if you’ve ever had a hangover): 

• Restlessness
• Anxiety 
• Sleep disruptions
• Trouble focusing 
• Headache
• Muscle tightness 
• Irregular heart rhythm

So, even though alcohol might help us feel calm while we’re drinking, it actually has the opposite effect in the aftermath, contributing to alcohol withdrawal symptoms and overall poor well-being. But since our body adapts and builds up tolerance to alcohol over time, its effects on our brain chemicals don’t end here. 

3. The Toxic Cycle

Regular drinking can have lasting effects on our brain chemicals. Although alcohol increases GABA when we drink, over time it can lead to our brain naturally producing less GABA. When our brain has less GABA, GABA receptors, which pick up on those signals, also reduce as a result. And when GABA is low, glutamate picks up the slack.

This glutamate overdrive ensures that our brain and body are still able to function with alcohol’s depressant effects on GABA. This suppressed GABA and elevated glutamate becomes the new “normal” in our brain. But when glutamate goes unchecked, it can cause nerve cells to get overexcited, a phenomenon known as excitotoxicity. Excitotoxicity ultimately leads to death of brain cells. This can cause damage which is associated with many health conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

But that’s not all. This new “balance” of GABA and glutamate can also make it difficult to stop drinking. When we quit or cut back, this “balance” gets disrupted, and while our brain and body adjust, we may experience alcohol withdrawal. 

A common symptom of alcohol withdrawal is alcohol cravings, which can create a cycle of dependence that's hard to break. Research shows that excess glutamate and addiction are linked. So, even though we may want to stop, the severe impact alcohol has on our brain chemicals can make overcoming dependence or addiction challenging (but not impossible). Let’s get into ways we can prevent or overcome this toxic cycle by maintaining the balance of our brain chemicals.

Restoring Brain Balance

There are many factors that affect our brain’s chemical balance. Here are some positive practices we can implement to maintain balance and promote overall well-being.

• Quit or cut back on alcohol. As a mind-altering drug, alcohol throws off the chemical balance in our brain. Coaching at Reframe can help you develop manageable goals, learn positive coping strategies, and support you during the ups and downs. 
• Get regular exercise. Physical activity releases brain chemicals such as endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin, which boost our mood, attention, and motivation. Try to find enjoyable ways to stay active so it’s easier to stick with it!
• Eat a balanced diet. A healthy diet ensures we get all the vitamins and nutrients we need for our brain cells to function properly. Opt for seasonal produce or try out new recipes to have some fun with fruits and veggies.
• Supplement with vitamins. Supplementing with B vitamins, magnesium, theanine, alpha lipoic acid (ALA), and more can be beneficial in maintaining brain chemical balance that alcohol disrupts. Just be sure to discuss options with your doctor for more individualized medical advice. 
• Reduce stress. Have you noticed you might get sick more easily when you’re stressed? This is because our mental health also affects our physical health. Try stress-reducing activities such as yoga, meditation, journaling, and more.
• Get enough sleep. Sleep promotes repair and flushes out excess toxins to maintain proper chemical balance in our brain. Try developing a bedtime routine, such as dimming the lights an hour before sleeping, doing a quick meditation, or swapping out scrolling with reading a book for a more restful sleep.
• Explore hobbies and passions. Doing things we enjoy and learning new things can release happy chemicals in our brain like dopamine and endorphins. Get active with some outdoor hobbies or tap into your artistic side with more creative ones.
• Find your people. Social interaction can boost endorphins, which reduces stress and boosts our mood. Lean into the things you enjoy and you’ll find people with similar interests and mindsets.

Our habits affect our brain health, and while brain damage from alcohol is reversible to some degree, the best bet is to prevent it from happening by supporting our brain health by limiting our alcohol intake and maintaining healthy lifestyle choices!

Key Takeaways

Glutamate is our brain’s most abundant excitatory chemical messenger, which means it’s pretty important for all things brain function. Alcohol not only slows things down when we drink, but it disrupts the balance between GABA and glutamate in the long run, contributing to alcohol withdrawal and the cycle of dependence and addiction. By limiting disruptions to our brain chemicals through quitting or cutting back on alcohol and other healthy habits, we can help ourselves feel and function best!