"But I can feel it working"

By now you may be thinking that this is all very well, but you know what a drink feels like. There's a warmth about ten minutes into the second glass that no amount of taking your shoes off will produce. You're right, and this is the chapter where the title has to give some ground.

At the amounts most regular drinkers have, alcohol does several real things. It sedates you. It slows your reactions. It narrows your attention, as chapter 3 described. It loosens your judgement, including your judgement of yourself. In company it produces more smiling and more talk. None of that is belief. In the Sayette experiment, the people who only thought they'd had vodka didn't show the extra smiling and talk.

I'd make two points about the real part. The first is that it's blunter than the words we use for it. "Confidence" and "relaxation" sound like things added to you. What the drug does is take things away. You get less attention, less alertness and less self-monitoring. Sometimes less is what you want, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the reduced self-monitoring that lets you talk to the cousin is the same reduction that has you telling the campervan story twice, and that makes the third drink look like a sound idea. The drug can't tell the inhibitions you'd like to lose from the ones that were doing a job.

The second point is tolerance, which means a smaller effect from the same amount after repeated use. A 2021 review from the US National Institutes of Health called it a critical yet understudied factor in alcohol addiction. It has been among the formal signs of an alcohol problem for decades, and the NHS list of signs includes needing increasing amounts of alcohol to get the same effect.

You don't need to be anywhere near that list for tolerance to apply to you. It's a matter of degree, and you can check it against your own memory. There was a time when one glass of wine made itself felt. If you drink most days, one glass now does very little that you'd notice, and the warmth you're thinking of arrives during the second.

This puts the regular drinker in an odd position. The part of the effect that's real is smaller for you than for your friend who drinks twice a month. You take the drug more often and get less from each dose. The ten to seven glass still seems to work as well as it ever did, and I'd argue that's because the setting and the belief were always doing most of that particular job, and they don't wear off.

Tolerance leaves two roads open. Either the amount creeps up to chase the old effect, or the amount stays put and the credit the glass receives gets less deserved every year. Look back five years. A small glass may have become a large one, or one may have become two, or Friday and Saturday may have become Thursday to Sunday. If so, there's no moral in it. That's what tolerance does to anybody. It's useful to know which road you've been on.

So yes, you can feel it working. What you feel is a real, fairly blunt sedative effect that has shrunk with use, arriving half an hour after the relaxation it gets praised for.