Liquid confidence: need a drink to loosen up? Maybe not. New research has found other, better ways to drown your inhibitions.(Inhibited?)

NEARLY EVERYONE HAS TAKEN a stiff belt to shake inhibition. Whether you're mustering the courage to cut loose on the dance floor, approach someone gorgeous, or make a point at a dinner party, a glass of wine can loosen lips and hips while eliminating self-doubt. But our sudden confidence can't be explained by intoxication alone, which is just the result of alcohol interfering with nerve signals. Recent research suggests drink does much more than make us stupid or incautious: It boosts levels of a brain chemical that calms anxious thoughts. And these findings indicate that you can achieve the same effect without booze.

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Scientists have been turning up links between anxiety and alcoholism for a couple of decades, though few had spent much time figuring out how the two are related. A couple of years ago, Subhash Pandey, PhD, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, began offering rats a drink--rats that had been bred to dislike alcohol and others bred to crave it. After analyzing a section of the rats' brains known as the amygdala--it's where emotions are processed--Pandey found that the drinkers were suspiciously low in a protein called CREB that helps nourish key neurotransmitters in the amygdala. Pandey theorized that when the rats--and by extension, humans--are low in CREB, those neurotransmitters wither, and communication between neurons suffers. The outward result is anxiety, driving the urge to hit the ...