After a hard day at work, most of us want to relax with a glass of wine. Scientists are discovering that reaching for the bottle is actually our body's natural response to stress.
Increased levels of stress change what the chemical composition of the brain thinks it needs to survive, writes the Daily Mail.
The brain's stress-relieving signals, which are there to protect and calm our bodies, are similar to those given by addictive substances such as alcohol, caffeine and drugs.
Scientists claim that this change in the activated reward center in the brain could lead to excessive alcohol consumption.
The research was conducted by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, who, in an experiment performed on rats, determined that those rats who were exposed to excessive stress voluntarily drank more alcohol than those who were not under stress.
Professor Dr. John Dani concludes that the body's natural response to stress is there to protect us, and addictive drugs actually use these mechanisms and trick our brains, so that we return to them again.
The rats were exposed to acute stress for one full hour, and 15 hours later, the researchers measured the level of sugar water mixed with ethanol that the rats drank.
The team is now talking to other scientists to find a way to stabilize these neurons in the brain's reward center to help control excessive alcohol consumption.
Bonus video:
