511–520 of 600 posts
2. Start a new social circle that doesn't involve alcohol
3. Accept that drinking sucks and don't let people make you feel like you're missing out on something. Misery loves company.
I used to put away a liter of vodka a night. I kept it up for years, accumulating a solid decade of heavy drinking. I was miserable. It was souring my relationship. The stress from work, personal life, and declining mental state of course made me feel even more compelled to drink. I was becoming a shell of my former self, and my dreams were becoming strictly that. I had a confluence of events that changed my course:…
Amazing. I’m coming up on my second year sobriety anniversary, if it’s not too personal could you talk more about this: “A real kind of personal work that most people will never have to put into themselves”?
I was drinking heavily and knew that it would be the quickest and most effective hack towards being a better father and husband. I first stepped into an AA meeting and as the opportunity to speak was going around the room I started seeing many similarities between the people sharing their stories and myself. I thought to myself 'If I were perhaps an alcoholic, what could I share about it and how it may hurt me and th…
Congratulations! One thing I have heard, that I am afraid to test is that if after a period of time of not drinking, an alcoholic starts again, quite quickly they revert to drinking as much or more than they did previously. I played around quitting and starting smoking several times, so I know I have a very addictive personality. It is not worth the risk for me to drink.
When the train hits you, it's not the caboose that kills you.
Complete abstinence is really hard, unless we have some kind of supporting framework.
It's been my experience, that everyone that successfully quits drugs (I consider alcohol to be just another drug, but legal, and easy to get), has some form of Discipline. It may be a 12-Step fellowship, religion, extreme volunteerism, martial arts, spiritual practice, etc.
Magic 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…
A mushroom trip in Vancouver helped me understand the underlying cause of dependency, what I was running away from. That seemed to be all it took. The need was simply gone and the habit broken. Weekends are more like the energizing productive breaks they always should have been.
I've found it easy to stop a great deal of such behaviors by examining not what they promise to deliver, but what they actually brought. I.e. don't look forward, look backward when making decisions. Alcohol promises a great time. Alcohol delivers a hangover and regrets. Junk food promises a great time. Junk food delivers poor health and regrets. Going to the gym promises hardship and struggle. It delivers health. I'v…
> Alcohol promises a great time. Alcohol delivers a hangover and regrets. Maybe I'm not drinking heavily enough, but I don't really get hangovers. I guess I'm sober enough to remember to drink a couple of glasses of water before I go to sleep? I wake up the next morning feeling fantastic.
Like you, I can put down a pint of whiskey and feel mostly fine the next day. This is due to differences in homeostatic mechanisms between people, and the time it takes the brain to resume nominal GABA/glutamate agonism after ethanol-induced downregulation. Some people are much faster than others.
I find it interesting that whenever Anglos speak of "drinking" (alcohol), what they really mean is "consuming alcohol in excess as a means of getting high". To an Anglo, beer and wine are not food, they are drugs intended for pleasure. To an Anglo, there seems to be no healthy middle. It's either "a twelve pack in two days" or "I'm completely sober these days". It's never "I had a mug of ale as a part of my dinner because that's what ale is - a traditional foodstuff". That's what beer and wine are to me - food. Nothing more.
I say this as an American, and I realize my cultural values toward "drinking" are very unusual to other Americans, and Anglos in general.
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> Alcohol promises a great time. Alcohol delivers a hangover and regrets. Maybe I'm not drinking heavily enough, but I don't really get hangovers. I guess I'm sober enough to remember to drink a couple of glasses of water before I go to sleep? I wake up the next morning feeling fantastic.
Many hangover symptoms, specifically the mental fog, fatigue, and general malaise, are caused by GABA receptor starvation, not by hydration levels. Like you, I can put down a pint of whiskey and feel mostly fine the next day. This is due to differences in homeostatic mechanisms between people, and the time it takes the brain to resume nominal GABA/glutamate agonism after ethanol-induced downregulation. Some people ar…
I don't think that it's something that would work on a regular basis, but maybe once a month or two.
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This sort of applies to misguided training as well. If you are into training, training like an idiot with get-jacked-quick schemes like german volume training 7 days a week or the bulgarian method or whatever, that sure may appear sweet before you try it. A torn ACL or rotator cuff later, and maybe it wasn't such a great idea. In retrospect, boring modest training would have gotten you a lot farther.
There are risks that cannot be fully mitigated in your climbing a mountain example - rockfall, avalanche, unstable terrain, sudden storms, etc. Going to the gym and doing boring modest stairmaster will be a lot safer than climbing actual mountains. Yet you seem to recommend the accomplishment aspect of climbing mountains.
Perhaps we shouldn't get out of bed in the morning, we could be injured. There's a non-zero risk that can't be denied. Ammirite?
This allowed me to disconnect the idea that alcohol is needed to have fun in highly social contexts.
I then just quit cold turkey and that was 4 years ago.