Quenching Your Thirst

Here is one of the cleverest parts of this whole confidence trick. Alcohol is a diuretic, which means that it makes you pee. Have you ever noticed how you drink one beer but pee out three? This process dehydrates the body. You may know this already as you have probably experienced the ‘Sahara Desert’ syndrome when you wake up during the night and find yourself trying to pour fifty gallons of water down your throat in a minute flat. You also notice that a man has moved into your head and is mercilessly pounding the inside of your skull. This is because your brain has shrunk. Yes, you read correctly, your brain is now smaller than it was the day before because the brain is mainly made up of water as, indeed, is the rest of the body. The more alcohol you take in, the more water you lose. It’s a simple mathematical equation. What you are feeling is the pounding effect of blood trying to pump through your dehydrated brain.

With water you only need one or two glasses to quench your thirst but because alcohol causes dehydration I managed to get through as many as sixteen pints of lager at one sitting. The more I drank, the more dehydrated I became. The more dehydrated, the thirstier I was. The thirstier I was, the more beer I would drink. It was a vicious circle. Even bearing in mind that the alcohol content of the whole drink is usually very low and the rest of the drink is made up mainly of water,

this additional water is still insufficient to mitigate the diuretic quality of alcohol. Alcohol dehydrates so much that even with as little as 3 per cent alcohol and 97 per cent water, the 3 per cent will not only use up the 97 per cent but also rob the body of its own stores.

I’m not saying for a second that a pint of beer after a game of football or rugby, or a glass of wine at lunchtime on a hot sunny day doesn’t quench your thirst at all, but the alcohol in the beer or wine certainly didn’t do it. You wouldn’t drink neat alcohol to quench your thirst would you? Alcohol itself is incapable of quenching thirst; it actually makes you thirsty. What a product! The people who make and sell alcohol are on to a real winner. They are selling a liquid which makes you thirsty, so you buy more to try to quench the thirst which it created in the first place. Very clever!

This is a subtle part of the pleasure trap and I will soon explain how alcohol is incapable of providing genuine pleasure. However, when you have an aggravation, like thirst or a headache for example, then ending that aggravation is pleasurable. But would you deliberately cause yourself the aggravation to make it pleasurable when it is relieved? Again, the drug is creating a low but deceives its victims that the ending of that low is a genuine pleasure. I could not drink sixteen pints of water in one evening. That is because water is genuinely capable of quenching thirst but alcohol does the complete opposite. So part of the illusion of enjoyment is momentarily ending the thirst aggravation created by that previous drink. In the end, you would eventually

need some water hence the ‘Sahara Desert’ syndrome which is the body’s cry for help.

So if it’s not for the taste, and it’s not to quench your thirst, then it must be for the …