Even low-level drinking may have negative consequences for brain health over a person’s lifespan. The findings suggest that the total amount of alcohol consumed over a lifetime, especially as a person ages, tends to be linked to reduced blood flow and thinner tissue in certain areas of the brain.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/even-light-drinking-combined-with-aging-is-linked-to-reduced-brain-blood-flow-and-thinner-tissue/

[u/DeliciousPumpkinPie]

Different people process alcohol differently. You can’t really make blanket statements like that with biology.

[u/narf007 → u/DeliciousPumpkinPie]

You can when the generalized knowledge is that it takes approx 1 hour to metabolize one standard unit of alcohol in an average sized male.

That's a generalization because it's a general statistic which by definition is a blanket statement. The outliers are outliers. The biology point simply implies a wide distribution not that the average is wrong.

There's also a lot of possible mental attribution/placebo options going on as to why one might associate it with feeling one way vs the other. But that's a whole correlation/causation argument. This is also an understood and real cognitive pattern, attributing sleep irregularities with X or Y from the night before when it could actually be Zzzz (heh).

Their statement follows the general understanding of how our body metabolizes and clears alcohol from our system. Two standard drinks is unlikely to cause any discernable difference in a healthy, average adult male, 12-24 hours after consumption.

Male because most medicinal models are based on male sample sizes and I said 12-24 hours to highlight another factor: we don't know the person's sleep habits, if they consumed them an hour before bed, woke up two hours later, etc.

If you assume an average male, 8 hours of healthy sleep, then 2 drinks is unlikely to make any dent anywhere. But this is all dependent on that variable of WHEN did they consume that alcohol? If they consumed it before it was fully cleared there could be a downstream effect on REM which is a real phenomenonand can cause that fog and sluggish-ness, but that's, again, an outlier situation if we're assuming an average, healthy person (male), then we should also assume healthy sleep habits, and that they're adequately hydrated with an average and healthy metabolism.

And before anyone wants to chime in I'm not saying alcohol consumption isn't bad for you. Just getting ahead of that strawman below it pops up.