Did you try non alcoholic beer?
Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
291–300 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#292Try drinking something that isn't alcohol to enjoy the social/refreshment/habit aspects of drinking.
I haven't given up all alcohol, but I've largely switched to non-alcoholic gin spirits for mocktails, and I've been drinking bottled kombucha in place of beer.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#293Fairly sure alcohol takes longer than that to kick in, so perhaps it's not the actual alcohol you crave, more the situation?
Best to work out why you drink on those occasion, and try and figure out how to subsitute
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#294I'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…
Another couple of good ones in Australia are:- * Heaps Normal - Pale Ale (Jordy Smith pro surfer is a co-founder). They also have a lager but I found the pale ale much better. * Hawkesbury - Prohibition Pale Ale
I really like Coopers. It tastes great and is the only brand that isn't almost as expensive as regular beer. I'm resentful of how much profit there must since there isn't alcohol excise to pay.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#295What worked for me was Allen Carr's book Easy Way to Control Alcohol https://amzn.eu/d/89NkrKR I tried several times to stop drinking previously, the longest I managed was for about 3 months. I think the hardest part is really deciding that you want to stop drinking. Once I did that, I read the book and it was easy. I haven't had a drink in about 6 years since. What I like about this book is it doesn't make it into s…
I used Allen Carr's book to stop smoking and it worked like a charm. Reading the book made me happy to quit, instead of the expected struggle that everyone that quits smoking goes through. Now I've spent 500 days without smoking and I've never felt the need to smoke again. I haven't read the Easy Way to Control Alcohol, but if it's as good as Easy Way to Stop Smoking I would recommend it.
I also stopped smoking using Carr's book. As I recall, for the first three days you were required to smoke three cigarettes in quick succession at a fixed time each day, followed by abstinence.
Well, it worked. Then I resumed smoking 6 months later.
"It's easy to quit smoking; I've done it scores of times".
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#296find a meeting and go there.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#297For me what worked was to try and understand why I was drinking. I used to drink (a lot) at night to help me fall asleep (pretty much black out).
Why was I having difficulties falling asleep? Work stress? Diet? Something else? I decided to change two of the simplest things and the ones I had direct control, it was time to go to a gym and start diet. So I just radically changed my lifestyle.
From one day to the other I stopped eating crap and became a lot more mindful of quantities I've been eating and started tracking my macros. Because of that I removed alcohol entirely from the equation as those empty calories didn't fit in my macros. I started going to the gym every morning before work, and been consistently going 6 days a week. Since I'm waking up earlier to go the gym, by the time its evening I'm a lot more tired and don't really need the help to fall asleep.
Been losing weight, gaining muscle, my sleep patterns have never been better. It's been 3 months since I started, and since then I've had 2 glasses of wine on my birthday, and 1 pint of beer when I met a friend I haven't seen in 5 years.
I still enjoy the act of drinking, I like that buzz feeling, I like the taste and the smell, it's all great. But I don't want to ruin the progress I've had since I started exercising and eating better. I've never been in a better physical shape in my life and I like that a lot more than I like drinking. Of course I'll still get drunk on NYE, but at least I won't get drunk the whatever remaining days till then we have.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#298Check out the Sinclair Method, which is basically taking Naltrexone before you drink. Also check out the book "The Cure for Alcoholism: The Medically Proven Way to Eliminate Alcohol Addiction" by Eskapa. I used this method, along with keeping a log of drinks consumed, to eventually quite drinking over the course of a year. I went from having anywhere from 3-8 drinks a night, every night, to eventually stopping comple…
> I found keeping the drink log useful both for charting my progress
I found keeping a drink log helpful just for cutting down. I measured each drink with a measuring cup, and recorded the time and quantity. To my surprise, the act of maintaining a log naturally and painlessly reduced my consumption by 50% (a greater reduction was more of a struggle).
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#299Everyone has different experiences, my path was admittedly much easier than many other people. I haven't had any alcohol in about 2 months. Prior I was consuming 1-3 drinks per week, almost exclusively beer, and almost never 3 drinks in a day. I got sick with COVID, found a podcast episode talking about the effects of alcohol and thought I'd give it a listen. [1] The long and short of it is that alcohol is harmful to…
> alcohol is harmful to a laundry list of biological processes
I was told that there's no organ in the body that it isn't harmful to.
Re: Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
#300Magic Mushrooms during an Amsterdam visit. I was drinking heavily, half a liter whiskey per evening every day for a few years. I also didnt think couldnt stop, the urge to drink, and the inability to stop once i started seemed to be just too strong. And that despite me despising how stupid i got while drunk. It really wasnt a fun addiction and realistically i was on my way to drink myself to death. After the trip the urge was gone and has remained this way for 4 years now. I even tried a sip of my back then favorite whiskey a few times on special occasions but never finished the glass. I can honestly say i am truly over it.
I also dont seem to be the only one having this experience, a cofounder of AA (Bill Wilson) had a similar experience with LSD.
Obviously, read up on psychedelics safe use first.