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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I quit drinking cold turkey 4 days ago.
I feel mild anhedonia, experiences I normally enjoy are muted or feel like they're happening to someone else and I'm only watching, if that makes sense. I have too much energy during the day and it's hard to relax fully in the evening. My appetite has dropped a lot, but I still want to eat because I've increased my lifting recently. It's kind of the way you feel hungry when you have a cold. You feel your body's need for sustenance, but no foods are particularly appealing. My libido has dropped considerably, though that may also be due to the extra fatigue from increased lifting. In the evening, light is too bright and noises are too loud, kind of like when you have a bad hangover. My baseline stress level feels higher; on a scale of 1-10, I was previously around a 3 or 4 most days, and now I feel like I'm stuck at 6 all the time. Sometimes I suddenly feel exhausted during the day and want to rest, but I'm too wired to actually relax before bedtime, sort of like when you've had too much caffeine to sleep.
On the bright side, my feels like it's working at 200% speed. While I was doing well at work before, now I'm absolutely crushing it. I don't have heartburn or any other gastric trouble anymore, I don't have much appetite for junk food, and I find temptations to my various vices almost trivially easy to resist. Getting up in the morning is getting a lot easier. I have the focus and the patience to listen to chat with my kids in the evening after dinner. I can handle more chores. I can take care of my wife better. I can control my temper much more easily. I spend probably 1 hour less per day lying on the couch. I picked up a physical dead tree book and started reading it for the first time in many months. I'm not thirsty all the time, and my body doesn't hurt as much when I wake up in the morning. My heart rate gets back down to the low 50s when I sleep at night. My sleep quality is much better. And maybe best of all, I don't feel the sense of guilt and self-loathing I've learned to live with every night when I go to bed and every morning when I wake up. That's probably what keeps me going each day more than anything, I don't feel like I suck anymore.
I was (am? well, hopefully was) a 5-8 drinks a night kind of guy which, while clearly not good, doesn't really seem like "real alcoholism" when you google alcoholism and read stories from people downing a fifth or two of vodka and blacking out every night. But that amount was apparently enough to slowly change my mind and body over months in ways I hadn't even realized, and I'm dealing with the aftermath now. It's very... sobering.
I wrote this as a personal reflection and thought I'd share it in case any other folks are on the same path.
Seriously, great work. Not just in quitting alcohol, but in writing this up so that you can remind yourself of all the benefits of quitting and all the reasons you quit in the first place.
5-8 drinks every 24 hours is alcoholic level. Most men I know who like alcohol seem to drink at least 2 or 3 every night, probably more on weekends. Even that amount seems excessive to me. An expensive habit, isn't it? I don't drink much, but the price is one reason why I want to cut down even more on beer drinking in 2025.
And to co-opt your thread: what does The Motte think about moderate drinking? One glass of red wine a night for heart health and cholesterol and whatnot. I must say, I am skeptical and have been skeptical for a while now. Those were longitudinal studies, and it could have been that the type of person to moderate their drinking to just one drink a night is also doing other healthy stuff.
See for me, I like drinking occasionally well enough, but when I read the recent headlines about alcohol and cancer, the studies were about women who had two drinks every night. Which is a level I literally can't imagine, not so much because I don't drink that much, as because I can't manage to do anything that consistently. I can't remember to wear a wedding ring every day, or take vitamins, let alone have two drinks every single night.
@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola , if you could quit with no problems I wouldn't worry about alcoholism, but I would put 5 drinks a night at a problematic level if you weren't able to quit it.
That level is almost certainly associated with real risks for liver and cardiovascular diseases, but my bigger worry would just be trajectory. It seems to me that if someone can't go down from five drinks per night, there is a pretty significant chance that they will eventually go up instead, and that this is a ratchet.
My drinking crept up after doing solo drinking at home on weeknights. I thought it was harmless to have a beer or two after work, but tolerance is a thing with regular use and that leads to the ratchet like you say. I don't have a liquor cabinet/wine rack any more these days.
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