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Oh I’ll take this one.
I considered drinking to be fun, part of how I made friends and took stress off. Most of my friends are in the hospitality industry.
At 37 I realized it was not doing me any favors, making it hard to stay in shape, always hungover, feeling bad about myself and just drinking and moping.
I quit last summer and the first thing I noticed is I had like 3 more hours every day in the morning being clear headed instead of hungover. That made it easy to quit (for me) and I really don’t think about it much anymore.
Similar story here- 34 at the time and a regular social drinker, I decided not to drink one day on a whim (actually just intended to see how hard it would be to abstain for a while) but felt so great without hangovers and just generally so much more energy that I stuck with it. 5 years now and really happy with that development. I have book club 9am on Sundays now, that would have absolutely been out of the question in the before-time.
It really feels like an insane hack in the beginning, how much more time and energy there is.
Thank you for your comment!
I love my wife. She deserves better than what I am when I drink.
Nothing “made” me stop. I just chose to not want to drink anymore.
Migraines. I started getting a savage headache if I drink more than about 50ml of it. The pain created an aversion very quickly.
Unsurprisingly but not exactly obvious when I first read about it, alcohol addiction is strongly correlated with alcohol tolerance. I have come to understand intolerances like yours as protection mechanisms of the body (not a scientific claim!)
I suspect my neurologist would agree with you (if I could afford her time.)
I developed fatty liver disease.
I got to the point where I was drinking 8 rum and cokes etc. to get to a point of drunk where I might, might, feel happy for like 20-30 minutes, followed by passing out, and hours of feeling horrendous, only to do it again the next day. And I was spending a fuckton on booze. And I was like, the ROI of feeling good vs feeling awful, and trashing my body just is not making sense. What am I doing? And I stopped and never looked back.
I never drank much but I enjoyed a glas of wine sometimes with food or a whiskey after. But [email protected] got so bad I fear that even a little alcohol will make everything much worse for me.
The hangovers kept getting worse over the years. At 3-day hangovers followed by depressive symptoms every time I drank (too much of course) I stopped. It’s not worth it to ruin 4 days for a couple hours of fun.
Family obligations that were being neglected and too many sorry mornings.
The bottle was empty and I have social obligations today.
I heard that the toxic limit of alcohol is half a glass of wine per year. It’s linked to many diseases and at high dosage and harmful even at low dosage. Alcohol has never been my drug of choice but that stat made me think twice about the small amount of drinking I did. Nothing against drinking or people who enjoy it but it is a dangerous drug.
I heard that the toxic limit of alcohol is half a glass of wine per year.
This doesn’t sound correct. People would be dieing from eating ripe fruit.
It seems low because alcohol is socially acceptable and ubiquitous but ethanol is a poison and a fuel. A toxic limit indicates the amount of a substance consumed over a period of time before degradation occurs. There is a toxic limit for ionising radiation, carbon monoxide, ultra violet and many other things. We limit our exposure to these sources of harm for good reason.
Oh, alcohol can be very harmful. And everything is carcinogenic to some degree.
It’s the precise measurement of half a glass of wine per year I’m questioning. That’s an almost homeopathic dosage.
My source was David Nutt’s research group, who were tasked with assessing the effects of alcohol in order to inform public policy in the UK. The toxic limit is not precise, it’s variable depending on many factors but I would imagine it’s lower than most people would guess, considering the legal status compared to substances that are non-toxic like LSD, heroin, cannabis, psilocybin, etc. Our laws and attitudes to substances often don’t make sense, when considering the overall harm that they do.
Alcohol use, especially in large amounts and prolonged periods, increases the risks of a variety of diseases. Drinking large quantities of alcohol causes harm to the liver, stomach, heart, and other vital organs. It also increases the risk of a variety of cancers, like bowel cancer, mouth cancer, and breast cancer.
But I’m pretty sure a wine/water ratio greater than 150ml/1500L is not considered a large amount.
I don’t think it’s the ratio of dilution so much as the volume over time. Weaker beverages like 2% beer are less harmful than spirits because it’s much harder to binge but they still do some damage. I don’t think they are arguing for prohibition, their emphasise is on harm reduction. A world without alcohol might not be desirable and if we are informed about how to use alcohol in a sustainable way that is surely better than what we have now.
I lost my job over it, and was damn close to losing my partner over it too. I realized that I am powerless over alcohol and that my life was unmanageable.
I don’t like strangers and people but alcohol made me fearless and charming. The following weeks would be followed by people trying to talk to me and other consequences of my actions. I didn’t like who I was when drunk and had no reason to keep drinking except for some food pairings. Eventually the joy of really excellent Taiwanese tea and weird fruit juices replaced wine and beer at dinner. It took a while, old habits being old habits.
A combination of wanting to be at my healthiest for my medical transition, and the god awful stomach issues that came about from drinking after my medical transition.
I used alcohol as a means to escape, and I don’t need to do that anymore. It makes me feel absolutely miserable and it was time to let it go.
In my early twenties the house I rented with four friends was partying headquarters as our combined friend groups converged and gelled well. Bunch of punk culture infused tech nerds. I do not regret the self destructive binge drinking we did regularly for four years. Life was otherwise fucking rancid for us back then in every way except socially. We were dirt poor working awful jobs. A lot of aimless/hopeless feelings. The outlet was needed.
Eventually however I had my first memory black out. I hadn’t even been all that drunk that night but seeing photos of myself when I had zero memory of what I had been doing was so disturbing to me I just went cold turkey then and there. Didn’t matter too much because I was moving out soon having finally landed an okay job at the time.
I didn’t get moderately drunk again until last summer, so 11 years later. It was fun but I like my legal weed way more and it’s a lot cheaper.
None of us became alcoholics in the end. Not like I recommend what we did, but there’s no bad ending in our case.
