some notes on moderate drinking
So a handful of people messaged me last night about cutting back on drinking. There’s not a lot of resources out there for people who are alcohol-dependent and want to/are able to rebuild a healthy relationship with alcohol instead of going 100% sober, so I thought I’d share a few things:
WHAT WORKED:
-Time, quantity, and situational restrictions seem to be pretty effective. My current ones are: not drinking hard liquor or mixed drinks, not drinking when the sun is out, not keeping alcohol in the house (so if I want a drink I have to put on pants and shoes and go to a store, rather than walking to the kitchen), and only buying one 750ml of wine to limit how much I can consume.
-Going step by step and doing one behavior-modification thing at a time. I started by eliminating the thing that got me in the most trouble (whiskey), getting comfortable with that, and then moving on to the thing that got me in the next most trouble (day drinking).
-Asking the deity I’m closest to for help. If that’s too AA-like or woowoo for you, I don’t care; he got me past a major milestone and I need to give him a shout-out for that.
-Journaling. Yeah, you gotta. For me, growing up in a family where work was (and still is) a 16 hours a day, 7 days a week thing, I learned that the only way I could feel justified in not working was to get so incapacitated that I literally wasn’t able to. Now I have a new rule: no working nights or weekends, EVER, for any reason --- and since reclaiming weekends, I’ve noticed a huge reduction in my urge to get drunk.
-That damn blueberry tea Celestial Seasonings makes. I think it has something to do with the astringency of the blueberries, but it’s particularly good at killing wine cravings and keeping them gone. Its Amazon product page has this coterie of teetotalers who order it by the case.
WHAT DIDN’T:
-White-knuckle discipline. It’d work for a while, but then I’d have a really bad day and say fuck everything.
-Behavioral restrictions (e.g. not drinking when I’m feeling upset or stressed), these mainly made me feel worse by piling shame on top of it. Deprivation in general seems to be a binge trigger for me, I have the same problem with food.
-Only drinking when out with others. For one, this put an incentive on getting together with people in order to drink, instead of in order to hang out. For another, drinking in bars where I live is beyond expensive. For the cost of one PBR in a bar in LA, I could literally black out in a cornfield in Central Illinois.
-Expecting immediate results. Things didn’t get fucked up overnight and they aren’t going to get un-fucked overnight. This whole process has taken me about 3 years.
-Assuming that there were set recovery rules I had to follow, or else I Failed. I mean, that’s ultimately the advice I can give people --- is it working? If yes, good job. If no, do something else.
