The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I posted last week about trying to drink less. I went 5 days sober, which is at least past the alcohol withdrawal hump. I'm on vacation currently, and a bit of peer pressure and boredom led to me breaking my very short sober streak. I'll continue sobriety experiment when I get back from vacation. Which sounds like famous last words, but I will follow through. The first five days of no drinking was easy enough, and the results felt good.
212 days sober here.
What's your goal in regards to 'drinking less'? If it's literally just getting the number of drinks over a week / month down, then all you should worry about is tracking your drinks (plenty of apps for that) and looking for a gradual trend down. Eventually you'll find a sustainable level.
But is there something else? Are you worried your drinking is getting you fat and out of shape (it is) or that it's just sort of generally reducing your cognitive sharpness even if you aren't hungover every day(it is) or maybe that it's having a mild negative effect on mood stability? (it is)
If you want to quit. Quit. Hard sober for the rest of your life? Not necessarily. I think a good goal is to do 365 days sober and keep a log of how you're feeling about every 10 days or so. You'll learn a lot. You'll learn how to deal with out of nowhere cravings. You'll understand more about emotional and stress triggers. "Sober Octobers" aren't long enough and I feel like "stay sober for as long as you can including up to forever" creates an all-or-nothing kind of thinking that can lead to hard relapses (fun fact: a lot of programs have definitions of sober that allow for some level of drinking. I think this is absurd, but that's a personal opinion).
In my experience so far, the physical and mental health benefits are obvious and unambiguous. Social situations aren't difficult to navigate after you've said "no thanks" about 10 times. (As another aside, just use "No, thanks" or "I'm not drinking tonight" as your responses. Don't get into any more detail than that - that's when people get weird. Be ready to repeat yourself. A lot. )
The tradeoff is that my life is fundamentally more boring. Alcohol, like other drugs, is a quick hack to emotional regulation. How it manifests will be person dependent. For me, I no longer have any reflex to drink if I am sad, stressed, overwhelmed etc. That's a great thing. I miss drinking now when I am feeling very good. A Big Business Thing happened at work a few weeks ago and, when it did, I really wanted to tie one on on a friday night knowing that not only did I have nothing to do on Saturday, but that I could probably take a few days off the next week because of the big win.
I cleaned out some old home depot boxes in my garage instead. Anti-climactic.
I'll tie it off here. Start at the beginning; what do you want your drinking life to look like?
Talked about it in last weeks thread. But id like to be a social drinker, having a few drinks one night a week if I'm out with friends or something.
Right now I'm closer to averaging about 4 drinks a night every night. That's too much and the health effects seem noticeable.
I slowly and unintentionally shifted into heavier drinking. I think partly as a treat for myself as I struggled to eliminate sugar from my diet.
I find stopping the drinking to generally be easier than stopping sugar.
I'm in better shape and health than I was pre-pandemic when I actually was a social drinker. Not saying the alcohol helped at all. But I started exercising weekly, cut out sugar from my diet (and cut carbs a bunch, but not entirely), and started intermittent fasting.
I don't want to entirely quit drinking for the one negative you've stated: life is more boring. My life is already very boring as it is, and it honestly frustrates me. Especially during extended periods where I have no social activity outside my immediate family. Drinking allows me to have fun at social events. I'm too much of an introvert when I'm sober.
I'm in pretty much the same boat as you. I'm not an alcoholic, but I do drink pretty much every night. Mostly out of boredom. Every night is like:
choice A: stay home alone. Watch TV, play some pointless game, do a pointless hobby. boring. only fun with drinking. choice B: go out to socialize. All of the "sober crowd" activies are incredibly boring, people are just much more fun to socialize with when everyone is drinking at least a little. And it's more fun with more drinks, with a pretty damn high upper limit.
It doesn't help that one of my activities lately has been listening to comedy podcasts or standup. Those are both significantly better with drinking.
I do disagree on the "upper limit" part. I like it best just being a little tipsy. I'm a little louder, a little more willing to talk instead of just listening, and laughs come a little easier. Getting too drunk I get too loud, I talk too much without listening, and I laugh at dumb things that aren't fun to remember the next day. Also I throw up easily, so too drunk is just a bad time for me.
I also enjoy standup and yeah. there's a reason so many of them require you to purchase at least 1 drink. I hate the people who go there stone-cold sober and just sit there refusing to laugh or show any emotion like "this is very serious business and I will not laught for anything less than the very highest levels of comedy."
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