Hard week. You know the script. Pour something, feel the shoulders drop, feel the noise in your head go quiet. It works. That's not in dispute, and this isn't going to pretend otherwise.
Most men do feel calmer shortly after a drink. The tension does ease. Something in the chest does unclench.
The question worth asking isn't whether it works. It's what kind of deal you're actually making.
What Alcohol Does To The Brakes
Your brain runs on a rough balance between two systems: one that excites, one that calms. The calming one runs largely on a chemical called GABA. The exciting one runs largely on glutamate.
Alcohol's sedative effect comes from directly boosting GABA's signal while dampening glutamate's, which is why a drink feels like someone easing off your accelerator.
Here's the part that doesn't make it into the toast. Your brain doesn't like being pushed off its own balance point, so it compensates.
While the alcohol is active, your system quietly turns down its own GABA production and turns up glutamate sensitivity, trying to correct for the artificial calm. [1] Then the alcohol clears. The correction doesn't clear with it.
In the day that follows, you're left with less of your own natural calming signal than you started with, and more of the excitatory one. [1] The result is sometimes called rebound anxiety, and it runs on the same general receptor system involved in withdrawal from anti-anxiety medications, just at a much smaller scale.
The clearest documentation of this effect comes from heavier drinking episodes rather than a single modest drink, though the same compensatory mechanism is at work whenever alcohol is involved, only less dramatically. The calm you borrowed gets repaid, at least in part, the next day.