Ask HN: Drinking Alcohol While Working?

Same as you, I find myself drinking more with being mostly stuck at home. But I find it completely incompatible with work. I spend part of my time coding, part on project management, and part talking to clients (I have my own business). I would consider it very disrespectful to meet with other people for work while even remotely under the influence. And if I'm working by myself, alcohol makes me lazy and stupid, so I would find it not compatible with getting work done.

To be clear, I enjoy having a drink, almost certainly too much. But I don't see the overlap with work at all. The only real advice I can give (and i don't want to judge) is to make sure drinking doesn't just improve your perception of how well you're working, and actually makes you more productive. And maybe it's better to have a drink to let off some steam after work vs mixing the two. But it's a personal thing so ymmv obviously

At the same time, I once worked with a guy who seemed to be permanently tipsy and topped himself off with a flask during the day. He was useless as a worker and therefore annoying as a coworker.

So obviously there's a counterproductive point. You have to watch it and be honest with yourself about it.

Why isn’t there a Soylent Kumbacha CBD Microdose Kernighan productivity drink already?

Back in the day I would get a brightly colored can of alcopop at the gas station and drink it on the way to the office past the police station back in violation of the open container law assuming that (1) the cops would mistake it for an energy drink and if that failed I could (2) claim I thought it was an energy drink.

Non alcoholic beer can be perfect sometimes, like when it's 5pm and there's a couple of tedious tasks left to do.

I’m not of the mind that no one should drink, but if you’re noticing that it’s hard to work and be productive without alcohol, you might want to explore that more before going back to drinking.

It could be as simple as you’re using alcohol to get past the initial discomfort of starting a task / etc, or it could be that it’s a way of avoiding some deeper emotional issue (anxiety, depression, ptsd, etc).

Regardless, even if you continue drinking, it would be ideal if you could access vitality and excitement and productivity without needing alcohol, so you can freely choose when to drink and when not to. If you can’t be productive without drinking, on some level you’ve developed a dependence on it, and this is not typically a great place to be. Even if you never have major consequences, it just tends to make the joy of everything else a little duller.

The fact that you’ve quit for 6 months and still aren’t feeling more excited seems indicative that something else is going on, whether you’ve replaced alcohol with something else (caffeine, nicotine), you actually don’t enjoy your work, or you were drinking quite a bit and your brain is still recovering. It can take 6-24 months for people who were significantly alcohol dependent to get through “post acute withdrawal” and return to normal brain activity. If you drink during that period, it more or less resets.

Anyways, hope the above is helpful for some context. If you want to talk, drop me a note.

Same with "And no, I don't crave alcohol.". If you feel you have low productivity, low drive, and low passion without alcohol so you're going to restart drinking with hopes all that comes back then... you crave alcohol you have just separated the thing from the effects in an effort to make it seem like it's somehow not the alcohol you crave it's something else.

Now I have no idea what "tripled my drinking" is in quantity or anything but the general attitude about how you view it all makes me just as uneasy about reading the question regardless.

And no being cold isn’t a reason, you can easily run at 0F for hours.

[1] https://xkcd.com/323/

That said, when we were working out of the office, if we went to a group lunch at a restaurant or something, was I opposed to the occasional drink over lunch? No. But would I drink enough to go back to work sloshed? Also no.

Wish I had some advice for you. All I can say is keep experimenting and see what works for you personally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Round_(film)

I think it may not be so bad for brainstorming scenarios and I've definitely been drinking with colleagues in semi-business gatherings like meetings on business trips.

Also I rarely drink alone. It makes me depressed afterwards :) And I never really feel the need to drink in such a situation.

I don't think it necessarily affects quality, but I definitely do things slower when having a drink.

I generally don't drink. Most of my life, I could tell you when I had my last drink in terms of "Three years ago at so and so's wedding."

But I also drank daily for about a year while very sick and not getting adequate medical care. I hate alcohol. I hate the taste of it. As soon as I had better answers, I pursued those and stopped drinking.

I also talked to someone who was drinking extremely heavily and had surgery for some problem and during the surgery they discovered some other organ was beyond salvaging and they removed it.

This person felt enormous guilt over their drinking but it likely saved their life. The surgeon was astonished they were still alive given the state of the organ they removed.

So, maybe you have some unidentified health issue which would be better treated with something other than alcohol.

I know this is rehashing what others in the thread have already said, but if you feel the need to drink to enjoy your work it seems worthwhile to dig deeper into the root cause rather than self-medicating with alcohol.