How Listening To Loud Music Could Be Affecting Your Drinking Habits
Posted July 18, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Waking up on a Sunday morning, you realize your head is pounding as loud as your eardrums. You rue the decision to down those last few beers, and wonder why you tend to drink so much at parties and bars.
Most people who notice this tendency attribute it to the friends they go with, the atmosphere of the party, or simply the need to let down their hair and give little further thought to their behaviour.
But a new study suggests that the amount of alcohol you consume may be related to the volume of the music around you. That may explain the ground-thumping, ear-popping decibel level at which most dance clubs play their tunes. Research also found that music will make you stay in a bar longer than if there were no music, and that songs with a quick tempo can make you drink faster.
The experiment, which will be published in the August edition of the publication Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, observed bar patrons over the course of three Saturday evenings and at two establishments in the south of France. Only those who ordered 236mL (8 fl oz.) glasses of draft beer were included in the recordings. Participants were 40 men between the ages of 18 and 25, and were unaware they were being studied.
Researchers recorded the amount of alcohol consumed by each person when the music was at 72 decibels, which is considered normal, and then turned up the music up to 88 decibels and recorded the number of drinks again.
The results appeared to show a relation between the music’s volume and the number of drinks consumed. The average number of beverages went up from 2.6 to 3.4 per person when the sound was cranked, while the time required to down one fell from 14.51 minutes to 11.45.
Experimenters recognize the limitations of the small scale and scope of their testing, and couldn’t determine the reason for the trend with any certainty.
They did, however, provide two hypotheses for the results. One is that high sound levels may provide higher arousal, which made people drink more and faster. The other possible explanation is a social one – that because people can’t talk as much when the music’s loud, they’re more inclined to drink without distraction.
Study co-author Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of behavioral sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, suggested that it’s important to study the relationship between atmosphere and alcohol consumption because of the amount of deaths caused by over-consumption and the number of traffic accidents that involve drunk drivers.
If you’d like to control your drinking with a little more awareness, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) recommends that low-risk drinking comes with consuming no more than two standard drinks a day, and no more than nine drinks a week if you’re a woman and 12 if you’re a man.
Standard drinks are based on the amount of alcohol in them: they include 142mL of wine, 43mL of spirits, 341mL of regular strength beer.
CAMH offers the following tips to keep your drinking within the low-risk guidelines:
- Know what a standard drink is.
- Keep track of how much you drink daily and weekly.
- Never drink and drive.
- Don’t start drinking for health reasons. To keep your heart healthy, eat better and exercise.
- Don’t drink if you’re pregnant or planning to become pregnant.
- Develop an alcohol policy for your home, workplace, school, or community organization.
- If you’re a host, encourage your guests to stay within the low-risk guidelines.
