I enjoy the act of drinking - literally having a drink, or the feeling right after a drink. I hate how I feel an hour later, the foggy head feeling. I have a hard time saying no to a drink if everyone else is having a drink, I have done it before and am not afraid of what they think, more so, I enjoy having a drink, but I really don’t want to any more. I think it is something I would be better off without, completely but just can’t seem to get there.
I don’t buy it for weeks at a time, then cave and have a 12 pack in a weekend and feel like garbage most of the time.
Any tips on cutting out something completely and how to get out of just hating yourself when you fail?
I had a confluence of events that changed my course:
1. I attended a tech conference where someone I personally knew who had went through rehab was hosting and speaking, and he was filled with a vivacity I hadn’t seen from him before.
2. My spouse gave me an ultimatum to quit or he’d be out the door. It wasn’t the first time he had said this, but I had a feeling it was probably going to be the last.
3. My progression in life was stalling. I couldn’t keep up commitments anymore, and I was starting to feel like I had already passed my peak.
So I quit. Cold Turkey. It was a dangerous, stupid thing to do, but I knew if I tried to taper off, I’d just slide back. The withdrawals were nightmarish, and I was lucky I didn’t die from it. But I pulled through, and then started to do some heavy soul searching for why I ever picked up the bottle — what was I escaping from? And I found those answers, and got to work — A real kind of personal work that most people will never have to put into themselves.
Since then, I have been a cofounder, jumped multiple levels in my career, and have been working towards several academic publications, on top of drastically improving my personal life. It’s been nearly five years since I put down the bottle. And every day I choose to never pick it up again.
For anyone else who’s drinking at this level (a litre a day of vodka) please don’t quit cold turkey without seeing a doctor. It genuinely can be lethal. There are temporary medications that dramatically mitigate that risk.
I’m coming up on my second year sobriety anniversary, if it’s not too personal could you talk more about this:
“A real kind of personal work that most people will never have to put into themselves”?
1. These feelings were never going to go away.
2. I needed to, and could, do something about it.
So I began transition. It was not easy, and communities like hacker news unfortunately are not typically kind about the subject, which is why I generalized to say it was a real kind of personal work that most will never have to endure.
Before I started doing this work I approached everything logically. "I shouldn't feel this way, because x, y and z are objectively good." "If I present things this way, I'll get people to agree with me." "I don't want to do x, but it will make so-and-so happy."
It never worked for long, and alcohol has a nice way of suppressing those feelings, as well as the little negative voice in your head that tends to accompany those suppressed emotions.
Rather than trying to logic my way to acceptance and contentment, I've had to learn how to wade into my emotions and figure out productive ways to express what they're telling me.
It's work to improve the relationship you have with yourself; it's still a work in progress for me.
You need chemical assistance, typically rather a lot of valium over about 5 days, under skilled supervision (so, in a clinic; or at home with a companion, and with daily visits from a clinician). The valium prescription will require assessment by a psychiatrist. The clinician will adjust the valium dose regularly based on his observations.
That's not really cold turkey, because most of the withdrawal symptoms are suppressed. But you have to stop dead, a good 12 hours before you start on the valium. If you're at home, the clinician will check you for alcohol on your breath, check blood-pressure etc.
Mixing alcohol with large doses of valium is a total no-no, and the clinician will cease treatment immediately.
This is why people with serious drinking problems find the "I drink a beer every night I must be an alcoholic" chat a bit offputting. And look, a bottle of vodka a day leaves some room for a few sober hours, so it's actually not as bad as the people who get withdrawal unless they stay topped up 24/7.
It's not like, ruin my life, wake up in a gutter type situation, but it leads to just feeling somewhat crappy all the time, and I didn't like it, so I wanted to stop.
Some things that helped / are helping:
I have an app Habit Tracker. It's a pretty simple app with a list of habits you want do do, you can set on some schedule. When you do them, you tick them off and it keeps track of how many times, so you build up a streak. I made a "don't drink" habit, and check it off in the morning if I didn't drink the day before. It also shows a notification bubble on the app if you don't check it off and I hate that. It's like this little negative reinforcement that I have to live with that bubble all day if I drank the day before. It's silly, but it helped.
Reading the book This Naked Mind and listening to The Huberman Lab podcast episode about alcohol (#86) also helped. Alcohol messes up your body in a lot of ways, even at what's considered "moderate" or "normal" levels of drinking.
/r/stopdrinking on Reddit
Alcohol is an addictive drug and when you stop after using it regularly, you're going to feel cravings. It's not a moral failing, it's physiology. They do get less intense and less frequent after the first two weeks or so.
This is where I would settle as well, except some Saturdays when I'd have a bloody mary in the morning then just nurse gin and sodas from noon until 2am Sunday. Just enough to keep a little happy buzz going, I really don't like getting drunk at all.
My daughter started a practice of not buying alcohol for her home. I started doing that and it's actually working quite well. Still will get a beer or glass of wine with dinner when we're out but I don't burn down handles of rye or gin over the course of a week.
This has been working for me, too. For a few years in my late 20s I was doing 1-2 drinks per day on average, with a fair number of completely sober days in there as well. Never "problem" territory, but as I got into my 30s, I realized I felt way, way better on the days where I didn't have anything at all to drink the night before. So if I was ever waffling on whether to have a drink, I'd choose not to. Earlier this year I ran out of beers in the fridge and I've just not restocked it. We have some wine and stuff, which I drink with my wife when we have a nice dinner cooked, but it's probably one night a week now or even less. That feels OK to me.
I drank about half as often as you.
Enough to want to cut back, not enough to let me hit rock bottom.
Have gradually been moving towards sobriety myself if only because I'm finally taking it a little more seriously.
Huberman rec is great too.
The meetings made me feel good at first as I kept telling myself that my stories could potentially help someone else. I did not end up sticking with the AA program but the meetings really launched me into the right direction and finding my own path. I do drink NA beer and as many others in the comments have pointed out, there is a lot offered in that arena as of lately.
I am a very social person and navigating that lifestyle for the first time without alcoholic beverages was the biggest challenge for me. But I learned to like the challenge and found that sparked a lot of conversations with friends that were interested in quitting or dialing it back. It also identified and strengthened a lot of friendships where people normally wouldn't drink while doing whatever it was we are doing, but they did because I was 'the drinker.'
Next week marks my first year of sobriety, so I am certainly no expert, but feel free to reach out if you ever need to hash some things out.
When the train hits you, it's not the caboose that kills you.
Complete abstinence is really hard, unless we have some kind of supporting framework.
It's been my experience, that everyone that successfully quits drugs (I consider alcohol to be just another drug, but legal, and easy to get), has some form of Discipline. It may be a 12-Step fellowship, religion, extreme volunteerism, martial arts, spiritual practice, etc.
I've found that I enjoy the taste of beer, but I don't enjoy how shitty alcohol makes me feel. NA beer tends to solve that for me. Lots of good options coming out.
* Just the Hazy by Sam Adams is top tier.
* Athletic brewing is solely NA beer - lots of different varieties.
* Heineken 0.0 is great
* O'Douls amber is surprisingly passable as well
I suspect the options will get even better over time. It sounds like Gen Z aren't big drinkers and alcohol companies are responding to that with better NA options.
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Lastly, I've discovered that I have an issue with wheat and/or gluten. Impact varies across beers (based on their mash), but it became really obvious that some beers would make me feel absolutely terrible.
I'd also add that NA beer also tricks my brain into not feeling awkward when I'm at a bar with friends who're all drinking.
Have also noticed that some NA beers make me feel elements of what I previously attributed to being hungover.
It might be histamine intolerance.
Part of what makes you 'feel hungover' is the fact that parts of the beverage has been converted to histamines/contained histamines already. It's the part that makes headaches. It's particularly bad because of the de-hydration part of drinking and histamine problems are a concentration thing, as in being low on water or having enough water in your system w/ the same histamine amount can be the difference between headache or no headache. Histamines are both present in alcoholic beverages in the first place and alcohol inhibits the DAO enzyme from breaking down histamines. Now the problem with NA beers for example is that even though there's no (or way less) alcohol to inhibit DAO, if you're low on DAO for example, this can still be enough to make you feel hungover as histamines are still present/going to be created from the beverage, even though it's no longer a 'double whammy'. Certain foods will be able to do the same if this is what was causing it for you.
An example of what might happen if that's what you have:
Non-alcoholic beer -> headache One piece of lasagna a day, no problem One piece of lasagna for lunch and another one for dinner from the left overs -> headache Drink one tiny bottle of Actimel -> headache
The exact amounts may vary for different people, some foods are worse than others etc. E.g. it might not happen with tomatoes for you but may happen w/ certain cheeses (e.g. blue cheese might be an issue, so don't eat that whole 200g package of Roquefort all at once even though it's tempting).
Basically anything that contains histamines (or biogenic amines in general) or gets converted into histamines (such as histidine - also added to some vitamin/mineral pills for example) can now give you a "hangover headache".
Not to mention what lots of yeast can do to your digestive tract if you happen to drink all the yeast that had gathered at the bottom of that bottle of Hefeweizen.
I mostly enjoy IPA non-alcoholics, or a Weizen. But for regular NA pilsener I would recommend Grolsch, it's a bit more hoppy then Heineken.
Another good brewery: https://rationalebrewing.com/
Guiness even offers a non alcoholic now that isn't bad.
I think Athletic is way overrated compared to the above though and wouldn't start there.
I have exactly this problem but only with wheat beer, not other wheat products. It makes me feel awful, kind of lightheaded and I crash 30 minutes later and feel exhausted.
I don't have a problem with wheat or gluten though. My partner runs a bakery and if I had a problem with gluten I'm pretty sure I'd know about it. I have also tried elimination diets in the past to deal with migraines and wheat/gluten never showed up as an issue.
I also don't get this effect from non-wheat beer. So my guess is that some other chemical is created from wheat during the brewing process and I'm sensitive to that.
I believe there's some evidence that pesticides commonly used with wheat can actually be the source of the issue for some people. I recall having a colleague who said they'd import European wheat because they didn't have bad reactions to it. I believe the reasoning was Europe didn't allow a certain type of pesticide.
I've had the same issue with cigarette smoke since I quit ~20 years ago. The smell is awful and I seem to be hyper-sensitive to it if someone is smoking even remotely nearby.
I'm often driving when I'm out with friends, so I've sampled a lot of alcohol-free beers over the years.
There's an alcohol free wine called Fre. It tastes mostly like a dry grape juice, but it's fairly sippable.
In last couple years NA beers really got way better than they used to be.
Guinness NA is great. Heineken 0 is great. Clausthaler Grapefruit is great.
I, fortunately, am not among those who have the addictive response and when, as an undergraduate, I realized that my drinking was getting very problematic, it was easy enough for me to cut out the worst aspects of my drinking (straight vodka in a 20oz tumbler—definitely not recommended) and restrict myself to beer and wine and these days I almost never drink that either.
But I know people for whom doing things like making it through a month without a drink is a serious challenge.
I think your best bet is to find some form of support, whether that’s AA¹ or just a trusted friend who can help you stick to your choices.
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1. The literature on AA points to mixed efficacy, if I recall correctly, but I think the whole concept of having a network of trusted peers you can turn to for support whether you succeed or fail is probably the key aspect of what makes it work and since it’s so widespread, if you’re in any decently populated area, it’s likely you can find a meeting any day of the week and can drop into one whenever you need it.
Now I drink only beer socially and very rarely wine at home, say once in a month.
First off, let me say that it took many tries for these abstentions to stick - that is normal, and you should remember that. Be kind to yourself. It's a skill and a habit you are building, and those things will take time. It took me years to finally gain real duration in my abstention.
Second, the fact that you are considering abstaining should be enough of a signal to you that something in you wants to stop - and this is enough to base the new behavior on. You don't need anyone's permission to stop. When I stopped I always heard about how "I wasn't enough of a drinker" to worry about it, etc. Many comments of this nature came my way. Just know that you know yourself best, and if these thoughts are arising, you should explore them.
And third, remember that if you are feeling unfulfilled in some aspect of life, substance abuse (of most types) will cloud this bad feeling, and give you an instant uplift. What happens then is up to you, but for me it led to a persistent drain on my ambitions. Thus I wasn't doing what I wanted, but at the end of the day, comfort awaited in the form of my drug of choice. This was my revelation that I eventually used as motivation.
Drinking 3-4 days a week seems like "okay". However, it basically means drinking whenever withdrawal symptoms kick in. This is creating a feedback loop, that is very hard to notice, because it is mild, and also socially accepted.
If you really want to know how addicted you are, stop drinking completely for a week.
If you find yourself unable to sleep, or sweating all over the place, or having weird stomach or muscle pain, or have unexpected mood swings: you already have a physical addiction to alcohol.
> "Alcohol exerts numerous pharmacological effects through its interaction with various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. Among the latter, the endogenous opioids play a key role in the rewarding (addictive) properties of ethanol."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9040115/
Hence, being addicted to alcohol is comparable to being addicted to opiates (to some degree) and that seems to explain why withdrawal symptoms are fairly similar.
Psychologically, I think it helps one quit if you think of alcohol as comparable to laudanum use and old-school opium addiction. Junkie or alcoholic, it's not that great of a life.
I thought it was just "I'm getting old and drinking a lot, this is normal", but it sounds like withdrawal symptoms are more accurate.
Dead Comment
Social drinking is very much a thing in Spain. However, most social drinking is light or moderate: walk to a nearby bar, have two beers with the family or with close friends (with free tapas, which accounts for dinner), then walk back home. In rare occasions (at least in my personal experience) things degenerate and one goes out for "just one beer" and gets back home at 5am with a vague recollection of chanting down the street.
My point is: every time that things get past the two-three beers limit in an evening, I am very conscious that I'm deviating from "social drinking" and "this is a meal" and entering "getting drunk" realm.
My personal point of view: having a responsible drink every now and then is a lot easier than cutting out completely. Here's what I do:
* If I want to enjoy a drink, I have a healthy meal with it. Can't open a second bottle of beer if the meal isn't finished, and by that point I'm full and happy.
* If I'm in a social situation where drinking is expected, I have a first drink, then switch to tap water (or sparkling water when plain water just won't do).
* More irresponsible drinking is an option. It's not verboten. However, it's reserved to very special occasions (New Year's Eve, my birthday party, a good time with friends not seen in years, …), and by the fourth beer I'm already sleepy enough to need a rest.
* On a tangent: Real tapas are *free, never paid*, and come with every drink ordered in a bar (including non-alcoholic drinks). I am certain this helps curb alcoholism to a significant degree in my hometown.
This is just me. YMMV.
https://themaritimeexplorer.ca/2015/12/01/tapas-in-spain/
So far it's about 1-2 times a year when I exceed this, and even then I don't go crazy but it's normally enough to make me wait a good few months before doing it again!