Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?

I recommend the book The Easy Way to Stop Drinking by Allen Carr https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Drinking-Without-Willpowe...

Recommended by Nikki Glaser: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mZrA67ohY0I

Just gave up. It wasn't feeling nice anymore. It's been 8 years or so.

I guess sports help. I'm been training jiu jitsu for 16 years now and I felt drinking in the weekends would fuck my performance up

Context: I still drink, but significantly less than I used to; I don't think I ever qualified for an alcoholism diagnosis. I'm also very much into coffee, tea, and good food: everything that involves olfactory pleasure, basically. (Caffeine addiction is also something I'm acutely aware of.)

I got into alcohol originally for the taste — the same reason I got into coffee and tea — and realised early on I simply didn't enjoy the hangover/morning after, and since my personality is such that I have expectations of myself in terms of productivity in a day and I usually get my best work done in the morning, I realised that was highly detrimental to my emotional well-being: I would end up disappointed and frustrated the day after firstly because I wasn't processing things as fast as I knew I could, and secondly because a pounding headache tends to make people cranky.

So I started analysing why it is that I often ended up drinking more than I "should" at night and came up with a big reason: boredom. My olfaction needs stimulation. Since I can't sleep after consuming caffeine (my hard cut-off for coffee/tea is 4pm) and I don't know of any drinks that are both non-alcoholic and caffeine-free that have the same complexity of flavour, I go for fermented stuff.

I found supporting evidence for this when I realised that, if I had a project I'd started in the morning that somehow hadn't drained my brain by lunchtime and that I was determined to continue into the evening, I would basically forget to drink, even if there was a glass right in front of me. The same has happened to me with forgetting to drink coffee in the morning or even eat all day on those occasions when I've gotten into The Zone shortly after waking up.

Since I drink alcohol for the flavour first, and don't even like most of the effects of ethanol, I also don't drink when I'm tired, because I don't have the cognitive capacity to process the flavours: it becomes a waste of money, a waste of time, and a needless toll on my body. Being tired enough to forego the evening drink often comes from doing exercise during the day; by contrast, if I go to the gym after dinner, I often end up in a situation where I (can) drink a lot, because I'm so energetic after the exercise that I need something to do.

So for me, reducing the amount of alcohol I consumed came down to: - Making sure I had other things to do (whether projects or obligations) - Getting a suitable amount of physical activity into my day - Constantly reminding myself that olfactory pleasure was the original reason for spending so much money on good wine, and that I can't afford, financially, to get addicted to alcohol.

In your case, it sounds like peer pressure also plays a role; I can't offer much on that because I long ago embraced the grumpy introvert side of me and stopped caring so much about that (which I appreciate isn't going to work for everyone).

I certainly will - thank you! This meeting was pretty relaxed and certainly not of the "thumper" category, but it just... hard to explain, but, wasn't for me. I may expand my horizons and try a couple of different places out but almost every meeting I've attended I got the vibe that 90% of them were there just to "hear themselves talk" or collect another few witty quotes to add to their repertoire. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just gets old and didn't feel beneficial to me over spending that time doing an intensely physical and mentally stimulating activity like BJJ.

For me it is the memory of my 5 year old daughter crying and trying to get me away from her mother who I was hurting. Plus realization and memory of a wealth of other fuckups I've been guilty of because of being drunk. But the child's terrified face was the tipping point. I can still see it in my mind. Been sober for 2 years.