Does Getting Sober Improve Your Memory?
Alcoholism, black outs, and memory loss.
Alcohol and Memory Loss
I used to get so drunk that when I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t remember everything from the night before.
Some mornings, my memories were hazy. On other mornings, I had forgotten nearly the entire night.
Blacking out is scary, but it gets even scarier when it becomes a regular occurrence.
Unfortunately, for years of my life, getting black-out drunk was a normal night for me.
What happens when you get that drunk night after night, year after year? I wish I didn’t know the answer to that question, but sadly, I do.
What happens is that your entire life starts to get blurry. Not only do you forget about specific evenings, but you have a harder and harder time remembering entire months or years.
As this happened to me, I wasn’t even aware of how bad my memory had gotten. The interesting thing about alcohol-induced memory loss is that—at least in my case—it didn’t affect all my forms of memory.
In many ways, I still had a very strong ability to remember things. In some ways, my memory was even far better than the average person.
For example, during three of those heavy drinking years, I was a law school student at one of the top universities in the country. Despite my regular drunkenness, I excelled academically. I was able to read a case and remember it all the next day. I didn’t even have trouble reciting endless case law on my exams at the end of each semester. At the end of those three years, I graduated with honors and passed the bar with relative ease.
Based on my experience in law school, you’d think I have one of the best memories in the world. And yet, during those same three years, I was having trouble remembering how I spent every night. If you asked me what I had eaten for dinner the night before, there’d be about a 50/50 chance I could answer with confidence.
Alcohol wrought havoc on my ability to remember my personal life, and yet it left my ability to memorize facts and figures more or less intact.
I’m no brain scientist, and I couldn’t tell you the exact reason for this. My guess is that it’s because the former was a more passive type of memory while the latter was more active. It could also have to do with what time of day I was doing the drinking.
Whatever the reason, the most important point is that alcohol can damage us in sneaky ways. We can feel like we’re doing fine—that we’re “functional alcoholics”—while some aspects of our lives are actually falling apart.
It takes years for the damage to add up to the point where we begin to notice it. Many of us, myself included, didn’t really understand the ways that alcohol was harming us until after we got sober.
Sobriety and Memory Recovery
So, what happens after an alcoholic gets sober? Does their memory improve? Do they recover the memories that were once lost?
It’s a little different for each person. I’ve heard stories of people whose memory never gets better, but—anecdotally at least—most people seem to experience an improvement.
During the first few months after I quit drinking, my mind was way too much of a mess to remember things clearly. In the long term, however, I’ve definitely noticed a massive improvement in my memory.
First of all, when I wake up in the morning, I can always remember the night before with crystal clarity. Gone are the days of piecing together what I said or did while drunk.
Secondly, however, and perhaps more importantly, my long-term memory is much better too. I have an easier time thinking back to things from a few years ago and even to some events from my childhood.
As for the memories that seemed lost—some of them have come back, but others haven’t. I didn’t suddenly have a flood of memories from every time that I had gotten black-out drunk. However, I was able to remember things from my drinking days that I hadn’t thought of in years. These memories sometimes come back out of the blue and sometimes are triggered by random images, sounds, or even smells.
However, I have to admit that much of my drinking years is still fuzzy. Sometimes I think I’m remembering something correctly, only to later remember it a little differently. I don’t have an easy way to know which is the real version and which is my memory playing tricks on me.
At a certain point, I also begin to wonder whether my current memory trouble is the result of alcohol or simply normal. Nobody remembers every detail of their life. We all forget bits and pieces, whether we are alcoholics or not.
With all of that said however, the most important point is that my memory has gotten much better since getting sober.
I remember when I first quit drinking, I worried that my years of alcoholism had caused permanent brain damage. I no longer fear that to be the case. It took a couple of years for my mind to fully recover, but I now feel just as alert as ever.
Heavy drinking damages our lives, and if we keep doing it, it can end up killing us. However, if we quit drinking, and stick with sobriety, we often surprise ourselves by just how much we recover.
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