How can you prevent blackouts

If you are not thirsty then you will drink more slowly and not spike your BAC so much. Pace Yourself Slow down your drinking speed.

One way to do this is to alternate non-alcoholic drinks with alcoholic drinks. Another technique is to time your drinks with your watch. Weaker Drinks Avoid drinking straight shots of booze if you have blackouts. As a general rule, the weaker the drink the longer it will take to drink it.

Strong tasting drinks also often take longer to drink than tasteless ones. Teachers can help by teaching young people about the factors that increase their chances of having a blackout. Parents can also play an important role in helping their children learn to have a healthier relationship with alcohol by doing things like reducing their own binge drinking and not supplying alcohol to anyone under the age of Read the original article here.

Wing See Yuen and Amy Peacock. What is a blackout? Related Tags Health Alcohol. These include drunk driving, property damage, and unplanned sexual encounters. A person in a blackout will have no recollection of these activities once sober. Because many people continue to engage in conversation and act normally, it may be hard to determine if someone is experiencing a blackout.

Common signs and symptoms that someone is experiencing an alcohol blackout include:. The more alcohol a person drinks and the higher his or her blood alcohol content, the more likely he or she is to exhibit signs of a blackout. Binge drinking is the primary cause of an alcohol blackout. The more alcohol a person consumes in a set amount of time, the more likely he or she is to experience a blackout.

A rapid rise in blood alcohol levels is what ultimately causes a blackout to occur. This means that, during a blackout, someone may be able to recall something a few minutes after it happened but not remember it several hours later. Consuming alcohol while dehydrated or on an empty stomach can increase the risk of a blackout.

This is because these conditions allow blood alcohol levels to rise much quicker than when someone is hydrated or has recently eaten. During a blackout, the hippocampus in the brain is unable to form long-term memories. These gaps happen when a person drinks enough alcohol to temporarily block the transfer of memories from short-term to long-term storage—known as memory consolidation—in a brain area called the hippocampus.

There are two types of blackouts; they are defined by the severity of the memory impairment. This type is sometimes referred to as a grayout or a brownout.

With this severe form of blackout, memories of events do not form and typically cannot be recovered. It is as if the events simply never occurred. Blackouts tend to begin at blood alcohol concentrations BACs of about 0. At these BACs, most cognitive abilities e.