Why Weekend Drinking Isn’t Just “Stress Relief”

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]doing research, I was at medical school.

[00:00:03]And during the week, it would be really a stressful week.

[00:00:06]And then on the weekends, I would get headaches, and I would just feel blah.

[00:00:12]I just feel like sitting on a couch and eating my corn chips and not doing anything. And it's that blah feeling that's actually closely related to endorphin withdrawal.

[00:00:22]And if I had a couple of drinks, it helped energize me a little bit. And And normally, alcohol doesn't energize me, but it helped me feel get better. Or if I went for a run, or did something else that got my endorphins going, it actually helped me to feel better. It gave me more energy after a run than I had before the run.

[00:00:42]And at the time, there was this big campaign to get people to drink beer, where they said, "Weekends were made for Michelob."

[00:00:51]I don't know if you remember that, but it was a a big campaign at the time. And And when I started looking at human drinking, most drinking occurs when? On the weekends. Weekends are clearly the most People do the most drinking on the weekends. Now, if you're drinking to reduce stress, you should drink when you're most stressed, right? And when you're most stressed? During the week.

[00:01:11]But no, people didn't drink in anticipation of a stressful week, they drank after a stressful week was over.

[00:01:18]And when is happy hour? At the beginning of the day?

[00:01:21]No, at the end of the day, after a stressful day.

[00:01:25]And why is that?

[00:01:27]And the notion was that you go through a little bit withdrawal, and it turns out And at the time, we didn't know all the biology of it is, but I speculated alcohol could somehow release endogenous opiates.

[00:01:41]And there were some beginning data to show that that was true. And I said, "Well, if you're going through withdrawal from your own endorphins, then maybe you can compensate for that by drinking alcohol."

[00:01:53]And that's what led me to have the notion that if I gave rats now naltrexone, I could block post-stress drinking. That was the thesis.

[00:02:02]And I showed that that was true.

[00:02:05]So, if you block the opiate receptors, rats don't drink after stress.

[00:02:13]Because it was the endorphins that they were trying to get, not stress reduction. So, it's really mechanism one.