The link between alcohol consumption and anxiety had been established long before the stressful early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the world will mark the fifth anniversary of the global lockdown in the coming weeks.
For many young adults with anxiety sensitivity — the fear of experiencing anxiety symptoms and the negative health, social and emotional outcomes associated with them — alcohol use became a way to cope with those fears. But as a new Concordia study shows, drinking to cope with fears of anxiety probably made them feel worse.
The study, published in the Journal of American College Health , reveals that drinking to cope put young adults with anxiety sensitivity at further risk of problematic drinking and the negative consequences associated with it.
Anxiety sensitivity was also found to predict higher alcohol use — heavy but not the kind of problematic drinking that significantly interfered with school or work. This higher use was mainly ascribed to perceived stress and drinking for enhancement or sociability.
"We were surprised to find that perceived stress did not explain the link between anxiety sensitivity and problem drinking," says lead author Charlotte Corran , a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Science .
The researchers suggest that people high in anxiety sensitivity are at increased risk of drinking to cope regardless of their level of stress — a finding they describe as unexpected.
They speculate that the unique circumstances of the pandemic may have confounded their own expectations, and/or that the baseline level of hypervigilance to stress among people with anxiety sensitivity was already elevated.
"For those cases, the pandemic didn't add anything new: 'I'm already stressed all the time, so this isn't anything different.'"
Lessons from a stressful time
"These findings confirmed the risky pathways to drinking that we knew of pre-pandemic and gave us an interesting snapshot of what was going on with these people who are high in anxiety sensitivity during the pandemic," Corran says.
The study used data collected from 143 undergraduate students in May 2020 and April 2021. These included a 16-point self-report Anxiety Sensitivity Index questionnaire assessing sensitivity to anxious symptoms and fear of negative consequences, a four-item Perceived Stress Scale to assess subjective stress (e.g., "In the last month, how often have you felt that things have gone your way?") and a 28-item Modified Drinking Motives Questionnaire modified to capture drinking motives during the pandemic.
The latter comprised five subscales measuring coping-anxiety ("You drink because it helps you when you feel nervous"), coping-depression ("You drink because it helps you when you feel depressed"), enhancement ("You drink because you like the feeling"), sociability ("You drink to be sociable") and conformity ("You drink to fit in with a group you like").
Participants were also asked to record how many drinks they consumed during a typical week since the start of the pandemic and complete a 24-item questionnaire assessing problem drinking behaviour frequency (eg., "I passed out from drinking") during a typical week.
"These findings will continue to inform clinical practice, intervention, psychotherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, understanding the mechanisms of risks and trying to find more adaptive ways to cope other than turning to alcohol," Corran explains. "It can also help us continue to try to understand the beliefs or cognitions that are involved in problematic behaviour."
The Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) provided funding for this research.
Professor Roisin O'Connor from Concordia's Department of Psychology and Paul Norman of the University of Sheffield contributed to this study.
Read the cited paper: " Young adult drinking during the COVID-19 pandemic: Examining the role of anxiety sensitivity, perceived stress, and drinking motives ."
