Feeling shaky this morning? Chances are, you felt the need for sensory rebellion by Friday night and you blame long working hours and high levels of stress for doing things to excess on the weekend. Modern life does tend to lend itself to bingeing, but our nationality may play a part too. “From the thousands of patients I have seen from all over the world, there is no doubt in my mind that the British character is uniquely repressed,” says Dr Mark Collins, a consultant psychiatrist at The Priory, Roehampton, “and this is naturally linked to a binge culture. Countries embracing the siesta culture work to create joy and harmony as part of their everyday lives; they have more than just a few allotted hours per week in which to enjoy themselves, display their emotions and talk. In Britain, we tend to hold back, drink, and then say it was the alcohol talking.”
Bingeing isn’t especially good for our bodies, of course, even if we allow days, even weeks, of recovery time before the next blowout. But, according to Collins, going on a binge can have its benefits. “Letting your hair down can release tension,” he says. “But you need to weigh up how much it is helping you to do that, against the toll it is taking.” So, the question is: how much is too much, and is it better or worse to overindulge every so often, or to indulge sensibly every day?
SMOKING
You smugly tick the non-smoker box when filling in forms at the doctor’s surgery, and yet, every few weeks, usually on a night out with friends, you reach across and light up, and by the end of the night, you’ve been through a packet. Can the occasional smoking binge really damage your health? Yes ... and no, say the experts.
Smoking triggers physiological changes: an increased heart rate, changes to the immune system, and the anaesthetising of the part of the lungs that prevents us breathing in bacteria. And, of course, there’s the nicotine hit. “Nicotine is a highly unusual drug,” says Professor Martin Jarvis, a smoking-cessation specialist at University College London. “You can’t binge on cigarettes in the same way as alcohol or cocaine, because nicotine is aversive. That means, if you go over a very small dose, you will feel ill and throw up. What happens after the first cigarette during a smoking binge is the person probably won’t be puffing as hard on the cigarettes that follow because they’ve reached their dose.”
So, is bingeing less harmful than regular smoking? “It’s less harmful to smoke 10 cigarettes all in one night and then abstain for a fortnight than it is to smoke one or two a day regularly,” says Jarvis, “That’s because your system gets the chance to recover, and the overall level of smoke exposure would be less.”
The bad news is that binge smoking plays havoc with the immune system. “Bingeing on cigarettes after stopping can make you more vulnerable to mouth ulcers and throat infections due to changes in immune function as the body reacts to withdrawal,” says Gay Sutherland of The Maudsley hospital’s Smokers’ Clinic. “You might also get a temporary bad cough because newly smoke-free lungs start shifting the muck out.”
ALCOHOL
Drinking many of your weekly alcohol units at one sitting is much more harmful than moderate daily intake, because the toxic effects of excess alcohol put a huge strain on the body’s vital organs. The results of a Scottish study published in the British Medical Journal showed that there was an excess of deaths due to coronary heart disease on Mondays (3.1% above the daily average of deaths). The journal argued that these deaths were partly attributable to weekend binge drinking, which accounts for 40% of all drinking occasions by men and 22% by women in Britain. When you compare that to France, where binge drinking accounts for only 9% of all drinking occasions by men and 5% by women, it is clear that Collins has a point about Brits and bingeing. Alcohol Concern warns that apart from feeling terrible the morning after, there also are several long-term physiological consequences of binge drinking: high blood pressure, risk of liver cancer and cirrhosis, reduced fertility, weight gain, blood-sugar problems, stomach inflammation and bleeding, and increased risk of having a stroke.
COCAINE
The most rampant of party drugs, cocaine and bingeing often go together. “Cocaine raises the heart rate dramatically within minutes,” says John Ramsey, a toxicologist at St George’s Hospital Medical School. “Because of that, the immediate health risks to the person snorting a single line are highly unpredictable: it depends on individual body chemistry.”
The drug produces an instant feeling of euphoria by causing a surge of chemicals in the brain that lasts only about 20 minutes. This is what makes cocaine such a prevalent binge drug — the intense sensations a binger experiences from snorting the first line makes them want more. However, physiologically, you cannot get more high than the initial hit; all you can do is take more to maintain the buzz.
So, which is more dangerous to health, bingeing excessively once in a while or using the drug in moderation regularly? Bingeing does carry an increased risk of having a heart attack. Cocaine constricts the coronary arteries — the blood vessels feeding the heart — which decreases the amount of oxygen and nutrients it receives. Taking a lot in one session increases the risk. A coke binge can also cause a more intense comedown than moderate use: cocaine desensitises the brain to its natural levels of serotonin. A binge can mean it takes longer to rebalance brain chemistry, and feelings of anxiety, depression and paranoia often kick in. With bingeing, there is also an increased risk of nosebleeds due to increased blood pressure. However, cocaine is excreted from the body quickly, so the recovery time is far quicker than, say, with alcohol or cannabis. Because of the addictive nature of the drug, it is generally still thought to be better to succumb to the odd binge than to use a lesser amount on a more regular basis.
SEX
While the effects of having a wild weekend with a loved one may be no more than physical exhaustion by the time you reach your desk on Monday, for some people the desire to binge on sex is a compulsion that carries serious health risks. Sex addiction can cause the need to seek out multiple partners on a frequent basis. The physical hazards of this include cystitis, unwanted pregnancy and chlamydia. Chlamydia is a bacterial infection that is now the most common STD in the UK and often has no symptoms. Sex addiction can also be bad for your heart. Dr Graham Jackson, a cardiologist, found that 75% of deaths during sexual activity occur in extramarital affairs.
EXERCISE
Vigorous exercise releases endorphins. Exercise bingers want more of these feel-good chemicals and therefore often overdose on strenuous gym or jogging sessions. Sports scientists believe that burning more than 3,500 calories a week can weaken the immune system and increase the risk of injury. For a woman who weighs 10 stone, that represents 10 half-hour sessions of fast running. Shin fractures and torn ligaments are common in exercise bingers. Another hazard is drinking too much water while exercising; this can lead to water intoxication, where sodium and other body salts get diluted in the blood, causing dizziness, respiratory problems and sometimes collapse.
Action on Addition: 020 7793 1011; www.aona.co.uk
