Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
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?
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It was pretty hard to change my habit at first. What made the biggest difference was working out. I have a long history of fitness, and could recall that in my most fit era, I rarely drank. Like maybe once a month I'd have a beer.
It's really hard to be in great shape and average 10 beers a week, even if it's limited to 2 per event. Knowing that it's a limitation to my goals is very powerful in reducing my intake. I really just love beer and all its variety, so I miss it, but it also makes it much nicer to enjoy when I have it.
I started climbing with my son a few evenings a week and felt that even just a bit of wine for dinner affected recovery. Nowadays I rarely drink but still enjoy a beer or a glass of wine, maybe once a month.
I hated the feeling of running or working out hung over and used that as motivation to not drink. Would rather feel good working out and feel good after the work out.
The other piece was combining many different levers: social support, replacement activities, rewards, motivation statements etc. You need as many tools as possible because addiction is tough.
For more on this type of approach check out the book Change Anything... Helped me more than any other source.
A key idea they discuss are "critical moments" - ie that time when you're buying the 12 pack. You need to figure out when and why that happens and design a plan to address it.
Drink water, and more water along with the alcohol.
There are many sources, but I recently saw this one from Dr. Andrew Huberman, which seemed more comprehensive than a lot of what I've read before.
[1] What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS1pkKpILY
You have two problems: 1. Desire for instant gratification 2. Lack of other things that alter your mood positively
You can work on both in parallel. Exercise solves both at the same time.
The last meta thing to keep you focused on longer term healthy routes of solving this problem is to realize that:
1. You’re weak minded if you keep giving into instant gratification and should strive to be a stronger person 2. You have a deficit of things that give you positive emotion which is decreasing your quality of life
There are a lot of good ideas in this thread on what could replace drinking for you but you need to seek what works for you.
Pretty soon after that I could have water with ice - turns out my body just wanted something cold at a certain time as a cue to relax.
Still going strong 6 years later!
1.) I realized that drinking was a symptom of bigger issues in my life, and I was self medicating. Resolving those issues wound up with me giving up my excessive drinking with almost no effort.
2.) When I do recreationally drink, I limit myself to evenings only, I give myself extra time to sleep it off, and I force myself to consume single tall drinks only.
3.) I maintain awareness that I tend to self medicate, and reflect on the problems in my life that I can control.
Cutting drinking out completely is likely going to require a person to hold you accountable, and swapping in a different hobby to divert your focus. I find that when I'm idle, I tend to wander in the kitchen.
Good luck!
Personally I think they taste even better, they look interesting just like a cocktail, and can be part of the same social ritual.
Naltrexone works for me
I take a tablet on Wednesday to Saturday before bed.
I don't get any side effects (YMMV) but what it DOES do is basically take away the majority of the buzz from drinking, I lose interest after 2 or 3 drinks
Those weekends I want to go out and get smashed with friends, I just don't take the tablets.
Talk to your doctor, its cheap, low level side effects if you do have them - but its the one thing that works for me, I now have a couple of social drinks on weekends and I never thought I would be that person
Having kids does not solve substance abuse issues, mental health issues, relationship issues or any similar problems. People may believe that having kids will fix whatever problem they're facing, but instead find that it just adds tremendous amounts of stress, burden and additional hardship on them.
But you’re right, this isn’t a substitute for any improvement of any other serious issues in my life. It’s a positive relationship which helps me navigate those serious issues better, but it isn’t a solution. When my mental health is in bad shape, it can deteriorate the relationship the same way it does with my friends.
I agree but don’t want to emphatically agree with your point, because finding actual positive bonds whatever they are is part of how people stop reproducing negative cycles for themselves. It’s not enough, but it’s not always inherently selfish and negative either.
Most of the time I reach for a drink, I realized it was more about habit than any need to be drunk, so simply replacing real beer with Heineken 0.0 helped me “scratch the itch” without the alcohol.
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.
You don't seem to be in a bad place, but you should talk to your doctor about some mental health counseling.
Specifically, you should try to get down to the bottom of what causes you to feel a need to binge on a 12 pack in a weekend when you can live without alcohol for weeks otherwise.
Good luck.
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.
Eventually I had to want something else more than I wanted to drink. I started adding up the financial toll of my drinking and looked at how much that set me back from other goals. Then later it was my health.
But finances was the biggest thing. Social drinking was like buying a brand new car every year. It kept me from going anywhere in life.
Making that connection is what worked for me.