This thread has been valuable for someone who has had a problematic relationship with alcohol. My thanks to you all.
I had my first experiences of drunkenness at sixteen, but luckily drinking did not develop into a regular habit at that point. Over the years it got to be more frequent, as meeting up with friends on the weekends involved the use of alcohol. (I never drank on my own.) It got to the point where many times I would end up drinking until I couldn’t any more with black outs and hangovers from hell as end result.
Several times I would beforehand think that this time I would not drink as much, just to find myself go with the flow again. Luckily the drinking was not weekly, averaging maybe once or twice a month in the heyday, getting less frequent after the ”roaring twenties”.
Even though we met up with the friends less frequently, every few months on average, things ended up the usual way; drinking and often for the both evenings of the weekend.
Long story short, in my early thirties I started to realise that the drinking, even though irregular, was starting to take some serious toll: especially on monday mornings at work I would feel that I could not do my best and be present to the best of my ability (I have an occupation where meeting with people has do be handled with discreet, and the technical aspects have to be done with precision).
One monday morning especially was difficult, and then and there I decided that drinking for 2 days in a row would be over from now on.
However, I found out that drinking for one day was enough on its own, with the hangover still lasting for several days (the monday would be troublesome for sure). Also the mental aspects of the hangovers were beginning to be really rotten, with pretty bad feelings of depression.
I started to downsize, sticking with 3 to 4 units, but eventually found out that just a few drinks would still cause very poor sleep and a hangovery feeling that would reverberate for some days.
At this point I had already started to implement the diet information and EE, and possibly my body being in a more tuned state just communicated that alcohol is a no-no in general. (Even though I was avoiding beer, being loaded with gluten).
It’s been now several months since I have had a drink. It’s a curious thing: for years before I reached this point I would repeatedly have this intuition type of thought come to mind, where I would quite clearly realise that I shouldn’t be doing this booze thing to this extent: that it was not to my benefit. Sadly it took quite a long time before I really internalized it.
One thing I thought about when starting to distance myself from drinking were my friends: should I just stop associating myself with them if I end up drinking and with a physical and emotional hangover lasting for days. I came to the conclusion that ceasing contact would maybe be too much, as with few of them I have a genuinely closer friendship going back since childhood. (Most of us live around the country and we tend to meet up as a group to catch up.)
I have found a good strategy now to be to do the catching up and as the athmosphere starts to get too drunken towards the late evening, to just bid farewell in an appropriate moment and depart in time without dragging on until the wee hours (as I tended to do earlier due to my ”make nice” program).
Enaid put it well:
Enaid said:
I have lots of opportunity to be around people who like to drink. It's highly unnerving to watch how the same patterns repeat over and over and how they revert to lose all capacity for thinking and are just a bundle of emotions and feeding. That's why I prefer to avoid it.
With many of the people I know the drinking habits picked up as a teenager seem to persist.
Thankfully the few closest friends of mine that I associate the most with, do not drink to the ”early standards” anymore either.
