Positives and Negatives of Excessive Drinking: Class Activity

Previously known as Climate Schools, OurFutures was developed by researchers based at the Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of Sydney, Australia. See the OurFutures website for more information.

Class activity.

Print or electronically share the attached class worksheet "Positives and Negatives of Excessive Drinking" for students to take notes during the discussion (optional). 

Ask the class to create a list of positive (pros) and negatives (cons) for drinking too much alcohol. Write the items on the board as students write notes in their worksheet.

If the students come up with positives associated with alcohol, it would be important to clearly distinguish if those positives only occur at low levels of consumption or whether they are also true when people consume lots of alcohol. For example, if a class member says a positive is that alcohol makes you relaxed, it will be good to point out that this is only at low levels of alcohol consumption. Beyond low levels, your mood is more likely to become quite extreme.

The structure of a good table for completing this activity on the board can be found on the attached worksheet. In the case of this example, you would then write “relaxed” in the cell labelled “Positives if low consumption only”. You would then also add “extremes of emotion usually negative/ bad” in the negatives column.

• Understanding the motivations for drinking and not drinking alcohol.

Secondary teachers reviewed this and other OurFutures activities, with 92.3% rating these activities as good or very good. This particular activity was among the most popular activities selected for implementation by teachers.

The benefits of implementing individual activities from OurFutures has not been examined. The benefits of implementing the entire 6 session OurFutures program has been supported by multiple research studies, see OurFutures: Alcohol Module.