Eight Things That Could Be Stopping You From Quitting Alcohol
Eight Things That Could Be Stopping You From Quitting Alcohol
On November 19th 2022, I finally cracked the code and had my last alcoholic drink.
Quitting alcohol is a challenge littered with often overlooked obstacles. In the past, I have tripped, stumbled and fallen over most of them.
I tried a sober year in 2007 but ended up going back to it. I cut down to a max of 1 day a week during COVID lockdown but once the world re-opened it started to sneak back in again.
Below are the biggest reasons that it took me so long.
I’m not an alcoholic
The concept of alcoholism as a binary state is a misleading fallacy.
Imagine the disastrous picture we often paint of the alcoholic - blacking out every night in a gutter, drinking in the mornings, shaky hands during every sober moment, neglecting the family, being fired from the job, getting arrested.
As long as I’m not checking all those bad boxes then I’m doing fine, right?
Far more useful is the government-defined spectrum of Alcohol Use Dependency - starting at ‘mild’ if you answer ‘yes’ to 2 or more of the 11 questions. Here are the first two questions:
In the past year, have you:
Had times when you ended up drinking more, or longer, than you intended?
More than once wanted to cut down or stop drinking, or tried to, but couldn’t?
I found this was a far better benchmark to judge myself against. I was a long way removed from the traditional ‘alcoholic’ persona but this spectrum gave me food for thought on smaller sets of chains I might free myself from.
Everyone else is doing it
No, they aren’t. As I drinker I normalized my consumption and used every available piece of evidence as fuel for my confirmation bias.
Early in my sobriety journey, I was startled to find that nearly 40% of adult Americans don’t drink alcohol. Surely that’s wrong…how could this be?
The answer was I just wasn’t looking for them.
As I’ve become more open about my sobriety, more and more non-drinkers make themselves known to me - friends and colleagues. All those social occasions…how could I not have noticed?
The answer is I was probably too busy drinking.
Everything in moderation
I’m sure you’ve heard that alcohol in moderation is good for the heart.
There are, indeed, studies which show that moderate amounts of alcohol can increase ‘good’ (HDL) cholesterol. You can achieve this same effect, however, with vegetables, fruit, wholegrains, seafood etc.
If you use alcohol for this purpose, you also get the negative health effects of alcohol - which are far more comprehensively documented (but far less appealing to confirmation bias).
It’s also important to define ‘moderation’.
In his tour de force podcast episode “What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain and Health”, Dr. Andrew Huberman concludes that 2 drinks or less per week should not have significant long-term impacts to health.
Huberman’s signature style is simply presenting the facts and not telling anyone what to do. I found it a great way to spend 2 hours to become more scientifically informed.
I'm more fun when I'm drinking
I used to aim for the perfect number of drinks to become that ‘best version of myself’; the hyper-social life and soul of the party.
Alas, un-inhibiting social anxiety also un-inhibits everything else - reasoning, judgment and the restraint needed to resist the temptation of more drinks.
I didn’t often record video of myself at my estimated ‘best version’ moment but I’m sure I occasionally misjudged, similar to some of the stars of the recent first drink vs last drink trend.
On deeper reflection, many of the moments of which I am least proud happened when I was under the influence of alcohol. Perhaps I wasn’t as much fun as I thought.
Advertising and movies
If I was an alien landing on Earth to learn about humanity based on what we put on screens, I would think drinking alcohol was the coolest thing.
For a list of prime examples, here’s a feature on the ‘10 Greatest Drinking Moments In Movie History’.
This study shows that exposure to each additional 1000 movie alcohol occurrences was significantly associated with increased relative risk for trying alcohol in adolescents.
When I was in the midst of watching ‘The Wire’, I certainly found myself drawn to drinking shots of Jameson, so I could be broody and cool like Detective Jimmy McNulty.
Alcohol advertising does at least come with a ‘please enjoy responsibly’ warning but that wording plays straight back into the personalized views on moderation I mentioned above.
Cheap dopamine
Dopamine acts on areas of the brain to give you feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. Dopamine activates the reward pathways in the brain increasing desire for the activities that generate it.
You get a dopamine hit when you exercise, when you achieve a long-term goals and in the glow of a happy relationship.
You also get a dopamine hit with alcohol - it’s that first drink buzz. This is also true for gambling, video games and other vices. In all these cases the hit is instant and the sources are easily accessible.
Two problems with getting this from the latter group:
By activating the reward pathways like this you’re setting yourself up with a strong desire to repeat, often immediately.
By taking this shortcut it can, over time, become harder to derive satisfaction from the more worthwhile things in life.
I’m not saying I never want to have any type of fun again and I’m certainly still a video gamer - but awareness of the self-encouraging cycles that these shortcuts create has been really valuable for me to be aware of.
Alcohol as the companion to everything
Celebrating? Alcohol.
Commiserating? Alcohol.
Vacationing? Alcohol.
Wedding? Alcohol.
Mourning? Alcohol.
Watching sports? Alcohol.
Tough day? Alcohol.
Great day? Alcohol.
Friday? Alcohol.
These societal and cultural ties are strong, ever-present and were pretty hard to break for me.
Over the last year and checked off ‘my first sober…’ for each major event like a rung on the slippery ladder of habit, looking for positives in the new ways I was experiencing them.
I particularly enjoyed my first sober gig. Sam Smith, one of my favorites, and I remember so much more of the experience. I will say that is partly due to not having to run out the arena to the bathroom multiple times during the show.
Dealing with emotions is hard
Without doubt this was the toughest part of sobriety for me. Having relied on alcohol’s ability to gently numb my emotional state when things got tough, my capabilities to actually process and deal with tough emotions had been left to rust.
I found that alcohol had actually never cured anxiety, it only delayed it. Without that protection in place the floodgates opened on the backlog.
I spiraled on minor medical issues. I lay awake late at night and early in the morning thinking and processing so many situations and conversations. I struggled to cope with my changing identity.
13 months on I’m in a better place than I started but the ‘get worse to get better’ part of that cycle was not fun and I understand why I’d turned away from facing it before.
I’m not trying to preach or tell anyone else what choices to make with their body or their life and I am certainly not free from unhealthy habits myself.
If you’re happy in your place of moderation with alcohol then I’m happy for you. The perch of moderation with alcohol was just too slippery for me to land on.
If you're contemplating a change or already on the journey, you’ll know the path to sobriety is neither straight nor easy but it’s one that I found a valuable one to walk.
I hope some of this hard-won insight will help enable you to hit whatever goals you have to cut back.
Special shout out to Instagram soberfluencer kelz_living_well who shared her rock bottom story and, with her posts and messages, was of far greater inspiration and support to me on this journey than she realizes. Just paying it forward, Kelly.
Happy January. I hope all your year is off to a great start.
Cheers,
Graeme