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Mostly it’s about having other options. On the weekends when you crave for drinks, try mixing complex virgin cocktails. They’ll probably bring the same kind of guilty pleasure you’re after, without the drunkenness. You can also get into tea or herbal stuff. Just get into something else that requires you to pay attention to what you’re drinking.
Three months of intensive rehab. Eight and a half years sober so far.
I starting dating someone who was sober. For the first two years, I never drank around her - only if we were traveling apart. Then I just decided to quit altogether so that she wasn’t cast as the party pooper. It’s been three years since then and the first two were really hard. But in the last year, my addictive attraction has transitioned in to revulsion. I now feel pity for people who drink. I never saw this coming…
I had the same transition process from omnivore -> vegetarian and vegetarian -> vegan. It was hard at first, largely because of ingrained habit, but it gradually became revulsion as you describe. You have motivated me to try sobriety, thanks.
Mostly I was just afraid of damaging my brain and my liver. Being healthy when I am older is much more important to me than being drunk now. I just tell people no thanks when they offer a drink. At restaurants and bars I'll go for a zero proof cocktail if they have them or a soda or water. No one seems to care. As a general rule, you think about yourself much more often and critically than other people think about you. If someone insists I laugh and tell them I did enough drinking in 20 years to last several lifetimes, I'm good.
Once exercise has become a critical routine you start feeling terrible for killing your performance because you were too sluggish from drinking the night before. You begin questioning your life choices. At some point you get over the mental hump and can start dialing things back. Maybe even outright quit depending on your goals.
I started weight training 3 years ago and as of this year hit that sincere performance stride where I'm seeing genuine gains. I haven't outright quit drinking yet, however, these days I'm only downing a limited amount about once every 1-2 weeks as opposed to getting shitfaced 3-4 days per week.
The moral of the story is to engage in something that has its positivity stolen by alcohol and gets you angry enough about it to quit.
It may not work for everyone. It takes a lot of personal discipline to get started with exercise, let alone consider quitting alcohol. It could be a mental hole too deep for some people suffering from alcoholism to get out of, at which point I'd say try the numerous other options mentioned in this thread.
I've cut back by switching to non-alcohol beer. I've found that I enjoy the taste of beer, but I don't enjoy how shitty alcohol makes me feel. NA beer tends to solve that for me. Lots of good options coming out. * Just the Hazy by Sam Adams is top tier. * Athletic brewing is solely NA beer - lots of different varieties. * Heineken 0.0 is great * O'Douls amber is surprisingly passable as well I suspect the options wil…
The thing that I find holds me most accountable is exercise. If I'm preparing for something (a race or a bout) then drinking undoes all the hard training and it's evident in my performance. The longest I went was about a year. I still enjoy the odd drink and very occasionally might have a bigger night but I feel fairly well moderated. If you're really going for zero (or close to zero) then it's going to need a bigger…
For me, exercise kills my appetite for garbage food, cures me of snaking.
The "feel good" hormones - endorphin, seratonin, oxytocin, dopamine - are released during exercise, and continue long after you are done exercising. These hormones life you out of a depressed mood or level out a too high mood and de-stresses and de-anxieties people. Those times are when one wants to drink, eat, smoke, whatever. Not everyone, maybe, but a lot of people start with bad behaviors when stressed or anxious. So exercise helps you level out your mood and prevents stress eating, stress smoking, stress drinking.