If there are other people in your family with drinking problems, or you have a mental illness, you should probably get professional help with quitting, because the chance of alcohol eventually ruining your life is significantly higher.
Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
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Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#22I recently took a month or so off drinking for health reasons, and found that the latest generation of alcohol free beers really helped.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#23I slept poorly one night and decided that nothing was worth that effect on my wellbeing. I also read that there alcohol is neurotoxic at any dose, and I value my lucidity: https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk/news/new-study-finds-even-moderate...
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#24I don’t have any good advice on stopping drinking, but what I will say is that some people have a physiological addiction response to alcohol that others do not and those who do not usually don’t realize this, so they can blithely say things like, “just don’t drink” without realizing that this is a genuinely difficult thing for others.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#25Failing is human--please never hate yourself for that.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#26I haven't had a drink in 27 days, which is the longest I've gone in a while. Left to my own devices, I tend to settle into a pattern of 2-4 drinks per night, 5-6 nights a week (I actually tracked this for a while with a spreadsheet).
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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#27I too love drinking. I used to close bars every day of the week. I had changes of clothes at work so that I could go straight from the bar to work the next day.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#28So I ended up on a combo of meds that had a “No alcohol” provision. One was your standard mental health medication; but the other was terbinafine for a toenail fungus that wouldn’t die. The latter pretty much got me to stop drinking. Whenever I would have a drink anyway (thinking, how bad could it be anyway) the hangover the next morning was brutal - and way out of proportion to the amount drunk.
A single 12oz beer with moderate (6%) ABV would leave me with a hangover that felt like I’d tried to keep up with a bunch of 26 year olds with a death wish.
Anything more would make me actually wake up with a death wish.
This amount of negative reinforcement made it pretty unbearable to drink for the year plus I was taking the medication, and it just sort of stuck after.
To make this useful advice - maybe try doing something terrible the morning after; perhaps posting a bad programming opinion on the forum of your choice.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#29Long abstinence is the key. I have been able to re-frame my relationship with alcohol successfully---but this is often not the case for long time habitual users. I cut out alcohol, but substituted in non-alcoholic beer (they are VERY good now) and high CBD / low THC cannabis. I felt nearly no "high", but found that it hit the spot that the first beer would. Eventually once the habit was broken I kept drinking the near-beer and stopped the cannabis except for occasionally, and it worked!
This may not be an option for you, but it worked for me.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#30The 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 habit change (which could be assisted by something like forming a new complementary habit).
As for social settings, it takes a lot of personal discipline but I find most people are quite respectful and encouraging if you assert that you have kicked a habit for good.