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I agree with everything in this article. Drinking alone is the best, particularly if you like to write while listening to music. The flights of fancy I used to go on!

I wish I could still do it, but I found myself waiting for the liquor store to open up at 7:00 am to get rid of the shakes. Then when I tried to stop I couldn't. Long story short, after several rehabs, more stints in mental health lockup than I care to remember, and burning through more sponsers in AA that I can count, I finally was able to stop.

"Cunning, baffling and powerful" is how Bill Wilson, founder of AA called alcohol for those of us who are "real alcoholics" or if you prefer

“Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.”

— Stanisław Lem

p.s. There is a tradition of the Drunken Zen Master but it's archaic. We all know better now.

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If you don't mind sharing, what finally made it stick when you stopped?

Most "real [1]" alcoholics try over and over to stop like myself and Bill Wilson. The following story from the Big Book illustrates the problem [2]

Yet he got drunk again. We asked him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story: "I came to work on Tuesday morning. I remember I felt irritated that I had to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. I had a few words with the boss, but nothing serious. Then I decided to drive into the country and see one of my prospects for a car. On the way I felt hungry so I stopped at a roadside place where they have a bar. I had no intention of drinking. I just thought I would get a sandwich. I also had the notion that I might find a customer for a car at this place, which was familiar for I had been going to it for years. I had eaten there many times during the months I was sober. I sat down at a table and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Still no thought of drinking. I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk.

"Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn't hurt me on a full stomach. I ordered a whiskey and poured it into the milk. I vaguely sensed I was not being any too smart, but felt reassured as I was taking the whiskey on a full stomach. The experiment went so well that I ordered another whiskey and poured it into more milk. That didn't seem to bother me so I tried another."

Thus started one more journey to the asylum for Jim. Here was the threat of commitment, the loss of family and position, to say nothing of that intense mental and physical suffering which drinking always caused him. He had much knowledge about himself as an alcoholic. Yet all reasons for not drinking were

So the problem here is going into a type of trance or hypnotic state, where you forget that you shouldn't drink. Have you ever gone into the next room and then forgotten why you went there or driven for many miles in the car and not noticed anything, but suddenly you "wake up" and notice where you are? That's a kind of trance. Stephen Wolinsky has a good book called "Trances People Live" [3] That I found helpful. Some people are always in an emotional bind that looks like a trance.

In order to quit drinking I had to wake up and remain awake, develop situational awareness, use tools like meditation and Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and a big one is deal with my traumas. I had some that I ignored or laughed at and minimized, but turns out traumas caused me to "space out" more than anything.

You ask an alcoholic why they drank again and they can't tell you why. They don't know. Drinking because you went in a trance state is a really difficult problem to solve and the reason most alcoholics don't recover.

Hope this helps.

Edit: I forgot to add that doing the 4th step is like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and doing the 5th step is like Cognitive Processing Therapy (for trauma) so you can get those for free in AA

[1] I use the term real because some of us in AA use it to distinguish ourselves from people that have 1 too many glasses of wine in the evening and then go to AA as a social club and call themselves alcoholic. I avoid meetings with too many of those.

[2] https://anonpress.org/bb/Page_36.htm

[3] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Trances_People_Live/yyy...

This is real relatable insight I haven't seen anywhere else. Thanks for sharing. I struggle with eating healthy and order out way too much and relate to the same exact phenomenon - one minute I'm driving home and the next I end up at some random drive-through. No memories, no premeditation, no route planning. I didn't leave the house planning to eat out today, and yet here I am, and well now I have a spot in the line and I'm hungry anyways...

I'm trying to apply what I know to food and failing. Now is the first time I've tried dieting and I have a lot more respect for the degree of difficulty. You're right, the issue is very similar

I've hypothesized that a unique problem with unhealthy eating habits compared to other addictions is that you have to eat. I would think at least with something like alcohol or nicotine, what you need to do as an addict is fairly simple (which of course is different from easy). But you can't just cut out food entirely, so it's a much more complex issue trying to eat in a healthy manner. Especially since even being too restrictive and structured can be a problem as well. Do you think there's anything to that?

Well, one of the problems with alcohol and nicotine is that you also can't just cut them out entirely. Withdrawal symptoms are brutal and not compatible with modern 40 hour week jobs. Cutting out food, especially sugary ones, probably would bring about some subset of the same withdrawal symptoms...so the problems are more closely related than they appear, IMO (disclaimer that I have never been addicted to either so I may be completely off).

I was mostly thinking over the longer term.

There is no long term when it comes to compulsions

My point is that once you've managed to quit, what you need to do is simple: not have any. Doesn't mean it's easy, as there are still compulsions. But with food you can't do that—you still need to eat.

Sure, if you stop you're going to struggle against withdrawal symptoms. As far as nicotine goes, the good news is that if you can stop for a week, the temptation dramatically decreases. If you can stop for two weeks, the residual nicotine has completely left the body and you shouldn't be feeling withdrawal symptoms. If you can be disciplined for just two weeks, you can kick the habit.

It took me 7 years to quit nicotine. The first two weeks were the toughest and every minute my mind was screaming at me to go smoke. The next three months were still constant cravings, all the time, all day. After six months cravings were once a day and easier to let go. The entire first six months were difficult.

It wasn't until about two years later until I would have several days without cravings.

10 years later, I get cravings maybe once every few months and they are easy to let go of. Two days ago I got into a Lyft and someone dropped a pack of cigarettes in the back seat. The temptation was moderate to take them.

I think in part the brain hardwires to confuse nicotine as a type of food. Do not eat for two days, and that is what a smoker feels like for the first 2 weeks. Do not eat fir a day and that is what the first 3 months felt like (all the time, constantly). Your mind is telling you that you will literally die if you don't resolve the urge.

I think this is why relapse is so high for nicotine. You have to be consistently strong every time for months to almost be hone free. During that 7 years I had relapses usually after days, a few times I made it a week or two, once I went 3 months, and had gone 6 months twice as well before relapse.

FWIW, a person just has to keep trying. I admitted that 1) I deeply loved smoking. It is amazing. 2) there is no such thing as one last cigarette. Relapse would likely occur, and when that happens, my cessation efforts would continue.

Most of the physical consequences of nicotine go away within a couple of weeks. There's a never ending psychological battle, but that is pretty compatible with holding down a job. Find a way to get two weeks off at once if you have to.

As for alcohol, I'll just say that as incompatible as withdrawal is with holding down a job... being drunk is pretty incompatible too. I think if you can finesse one, you can probable finesse the other.

In general, my observation has been that as horrible as withdrawal is, that's the easiest part of kicking a habit.

You can cut out entire categories of food or drink though. People drink way more calories than they realize. Drink water instead of soda.

It's definitely hard but the "just say no" approach can work. I do recommend taking it one at a time though. Once you've cut out one thing successfully, add another.

I lost 90 lbs with this approach.

Second this. Setting simple rules is the only way I've been able to make consistent change. No soda. No bread. One at a time. I'm probably down only 20 pounds from my max but I feel so much healthier.

Totally does not work for me. It doesn't help that I figured out the "drinking calories" problem a long time ago and mostly drank water already. Cutting things out just seems to lead to eating more of others, because the problem isn't what food I eat.

It's harder, but the biggest trick was learning to pay attention to what my body was telling me, stop when it first gave me a sign to stop, don't start until it gave me a signal to start, and also... realizing that if you're obese (as opposed to an underweight person with an eating disorder), that maybe spending a part of your day feeling hungry is a sign that you are taking care of yourself. That sounds pretty simple too when you write it out like that, but my goodness just doing that is a so hard (yet effective).

> maybe spending a part of your day feeling hungry is a sign that you are taking care of yourself.

Yes - may as well feel positive associations with hunger.

It'd be near impossible to become obese (or remain obese) if you just cut out sugar and processed foods. Nobody ends up in an electric scooter by pigging out on vegetables and chicken breasts. If you want to get shredded you'll have to do much more, of course, but if you just want to look and feel like a normal weight human, it really doesn't have to be any more complex.

Just as many alcoholics can't handle a glass of wine with dinner or a beer with a friend on a Friday night, many food addicts just can't handle sugar or fast food at all, and would be better off cutting these things out of their lives entirely. It's a more hardcore lifestyle change, but it can also be a psychologically simpler ruleset to follow.

> It's a more hardcore lifestyle change, but it can also be a psychologically simpler ruleset to follow.

It's a hardcore change but "simple" to follow? Isn't that part of the problem? The physical and mental are tightly interwoven. Telling someone they should just eat vegetables and chicken breasts ignores all of the other problems, mental and physical, that could be leading someone to unhealthy habits. In fact, a "ruleset" like this could contribute to further psychological problems and then further physical problems. This is the issue with diets, they ignore all the other factors outside of food.

One way to cut calories is to go fasting. Either you eat or you don’t eat all. It’s easier to control your urges compared to eating smaller meals.

Thank you for elaborating. Seeing familiar information in another context, another story-wrapper, is helpful. All this resonates with me, though for other escapes than alcohol, and what finally tipped the scales to learning and practicing was The Blindboy Podcast, particularly the mental-health episodes where he covers CBT, transactional analysis, and how he handles anxiety. Thankfully for me, my family and personal history is similar enough to his (he seems careful to stay within the limits of his experience and knowledge). He also interviews people who know more than he shoes, like Sabrina Brennan and Paul Liknaitzky.

Can you point me to the relevant episodes? I scrolled through and I'm not sure I'm going to find it with titles like "why i want to f Captain planet"

Thank you for sharing. That was an incredible insight into the process and a good behavioral pattern to watch out for, especially because it resonated so much with my difficulties eating too much. I know, that doesn't generally compare to problems with alcohol, but I guess some of the mechanisms are the same. Thank you for being so gracious in providing this.

Do you mind if I ask what was your trauma?

I ask because on the one hand it’s fair to say that I’ve never suffered. Not like my wife. Not like many on this board.

On the other I have have a pain, and I know where it’s from, but it seems so idiotic compared to what others have suffered.

And yet I seek escapism, the trance state where I try to forget my existence.

Not op - but it’s all relative. And if it’s enough for you to go into the trance state then I would think that’s what matters…

It doesn’t matter how it compares to others’ trauma if it is causing you pain.

Perhaps part of you views it as “idiotic” because it is reluctant to address it?

I have very strict rules I follow for alcohol consumption, if for no other reason than I'm the son of a man who was a functioning alcoholic for most of his life.

I've read the big book, and consider it a source of wisdom, even if I perhaps don't follow all of the tenants contained within.

The serenity prayer, which is AA adjacent if not (now) directly part of the AA wisdom is my personal lodestar, it's great wisdom on how to deal with life's challenges.

From it I ascertained that the first two questions one should ask are when encountering something in life are, "is this actually important?" and "is this a problem I can actually solve or make a meaningful difference in helping solve?" - anything one can answer "no" to either of those questions one should just let go of, and try to focus one's energies on other problems.

Also, I'm glad for you, that you found sobriety.

What tools do you, or other HNers for that matter, have to share about breaking alcohol addiction? Especially covering the hard parts: what are the major hurdles to overcome?

For me, reading the AA Big Book[1] was a powerful start. I actually went to meetings for a while, and while I realized I had the same tendencies as the people there, I mostly had a problem with binge drinking. I created rules around alcohol consumption which I follow with some loose structure that helped a bunch.

I found the Personal Stories/Testimonies section to be pretty relevant for me, others may find other things. AA fundamentally is the best tool you can find to get you sober, and keep you sober, but it in some ways IMO, works as an addiction transference program. But if you need to stabilize your life, and find your own path to permanent sobriety, AA is literally the best tool you can find to do it.

[1]https://www.aa.org/the-big-book

A different answer from AA, but there are medications such as naltrexone or campral that can help reduce cravings.

I personally have not tried it, but some people use a system called The Sinclair Method (TSM) whereby you take naltrexone prior to drinking, and it is supposed to reduce both the enjoyment you get from alcohol as well as your craving for it, so you would end up drinking much less than normal. I know on reddit, r/Alcoholism_Medication/ has a lot of discussion and resources on it.

reddit.com/r/dryalcoholics has a decent community

The hardest parts for me at the moment is quitting the habit itself, and after that the physical withdrawal symptoms, which are not fun.

How much do you drink a day, if its not too forward to ask?

The answer varies where I might send you to seek help.

Enough that im horrified by it

http://sipandsuffer.com/

Some people are horrified by a six pack a night, sone people are horrified because they keep a bottle in their desk to even things out during the day. Those require different treatment strategies.

Make sure you are never hungry and drink lots of water. Stay busy with people doing things you cannot do if you are hungover or intoxicated. Sometimes just having impending responsibility to others can be enough if it’s merely just temptation. Also getting a monthly injection of time released naltrexone can remove the possibility of satisfaction from drinking. Not advice just possible strategies.

For me, Naltrexone was an incredible help in reducing cravings in the first few months. I came off it after around six months and no longer need it, though I think many people take it for much longer and there's not much downside to doing so.

I avoided AA due to the quasi-religious aspect, but Smart Recovery meetings helped me in the initial phase (https://www.smartrecovery.org).

I was always concerned about the longer term aspect of replacing alcohol in social settings, and there is still some awkwardness there but non-alcoholic beers have really helped for me. The scene has exploded in recent years and they're really quite good, see Athletic Brewing for some excellent craft non-alcoholic beers (https://athleticbrewing.com). In a social setting you could be drinking one and nobody would have to know. I don't hide it but I'm still glad to have something "special" to drink at an occasion. And I drink them alone too: they fill that role of something to drink when I want to relax, and I enjoy that placebo effect.

I had a kid. So I just quit.

Congratulations! Whatever it takes to get off that wagon! Your child will thank you in old age for being around as a parent and not just dead.

It's still a fringe treatment, but Baclofen turned off my alcohol cravings like a light switch.

It did nothing for the underlying causes of my wanting to be inebriated of course, but the "I can't think about anything else until I've had a drink" just disappeared.

High-functioning alky, here 6-10 9%+ cans of beer in an evening not a problem for me, day after day. On my days off I can start with the cans for breakfast. I 'preload' for social occasions, and time my 'sobriety' to be ok to drive.

Breaking the habit? Have the will to stop. That's both hard and easy. But you didn't ask the question because you don't want to carry on so there's a plus.

I drink as much regular milk as I can when I feel the urges: this is because whacking down beer after it just feels sloshy in the stomach: not unpleasant, just 'sloshy'. And pointless..it takes too long to get drunk.

So, I've pretty much banished the beer of late.

To keep away the demons - when I absolutely feel a binge coming on, I keep a mouthful of liquorice 26% alc in my mouth for as long as possible (as well as having had the milk).

Happy to say I've not been fucked up for well over two months now, and have done several stretches of 5-8-10 and a 14 days with zero alcohol in the last three months.

That's a success, as I've been pretty much drunk for the last 8 years.

And, I didn't stop to buy a crate of beer today - there's none in the house, either.

Where does the desire come from?

I don't drink alone for the exact same reason.

How some people can function while drinking every night is beyond my comprehension.

Have you met SREs?

Personal anecdote: I don't drink during the day, only after 9:30pm. It started out as weekends only, i.e. Friday and Saturday. Then I started doing it on Sunday. Then Thursday. Soon enough, I was drinking every day of the week, only after 9:30pm. I'd stay up until about 1am or 2am, sometimes 3am. This worked fine, until I started having to attend work meetings at 9am on the dot. I wormed my way out of some with excuses about personal commitments (my manager understands that not everyone can be available at 9am on the dot).

I need about 150ml vodka and 3 beers to get to the state I want. It wasn't always that way, of course, but it escalated gradually. I don't sleep well, but oh well. It's worth it, in a way. I can forget about my troubles, my bad pay, and my work pressure by drinking and watching movies or playing video games at the same time.

The next day? Sometimes I wake up with a headache. Not often, now that I know exactly how much water I need to drink before I sleep to avoid that. But the next day is always normal and I'm pretty well functioning, if lazy and procrastinating. I just need a 20 min nap after 12pm and I'm pretty much set to function.

Will I stop? I don't know. These things on my mind may seem utterly trivial to some. I wasn't abused, I haven't lost anyone in my family, I live fairly comfortably. But I need to get my mind off those thoughts. I can go days at a time, even weeks, without feeling the need to drink, so long as I just forget about its feeling. But why would I do that? When I have a 2L bottle of vodka and an 18 back of 5% beers? With them, I can enjoy the night more than I would otherwise. That's got to be worth something, at least to me.

> From it I ascertained that the first two questions one should ask are when encountering something in life are, "is this actually important?" and "is this a problem I can actually solve or make a meaningful difference in helping solve?" - anything one can answer "no" to either of those questions one should just let go of, and try to focus one's energies on other problems.

This puts succinctly something I try to practice that I likely got from the same source. My parents were both in AA for the entire time I knew them and I was carried along to many meetings and, later, went along with them of my own volition. I have a great respect for the organization and, especially, the people humble enough to recognize their need for support.

Sometimes I find others who have the same life philosophy that I have, and I'd always wondered where they came to it from, but its just not one of those things you can ask.

I'm really glad there are others that were able to absorb the AA adjacent wisdom, and transform it into something productive like I was.

I don't drink that much, though it goes up and down over time. I do have a few rules I follow: I never drink on Mondays. I take January as a month of sobriety.

The Monday rule is two fold. First it is a weekly check on alcohol seeking behavior. It is also because all the reasons I can think of for drinking on a Monday are not reasons I want to be drinking. Having a rule helps avoid bad habits.

Why just on a Monday? I feel like not drinking on Sunday to Thursday would be more useful.

You can do alot of liver damage in 2 days per week. If you think those 5 days sober give you free reign on the other two then you should reconsider your strategy. Although, the same also goes for 1 day per week sober.

Indeed, and most weeks I don't drink Sunday to Thursday, but Monday is where I draw the line.

The true upside, social aspects of drinking happen for most on the weekends, due to everyone else also cutting loose on the weekends. This is why I have liver scarring at a ripe young age, but to ignore the upside altogether is also foolish.

This is also a teaching of stoicism. Focus only on those things you can actually change and understand that your reaction to external things is under your control

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…” – Epictetus

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” ― Marcus Aurelius

We’re not all alcoholics. Substances affect people in vastly different ways. A key problem is that people do not understand this, that substances and substance abuse don’t work the same across the board and one person’s experience does not extend to the rest of humanity. It is more like there are tribes that don’t understand each other.

This is true. I feel for people that struggle, I really do but it should also be acknowledged that many good and enduring relationships—-romantic and platonic—-were catalyzed by alcohol. Maybe the alcohol wasn’t strictly necessary but empirically it sure helps. That’s not something we should be so quick to dismiss when weighing costs and benefits.

I really appreciate this insight. Met my wife at a nightclub 19 years ago, me inebriated, her much less so, and we're still going strong!

Yeah, alcohol helps us strip away our stuffy adult self and be children again, enjoying life in the moment nevermind the consequences. Thing is, with enough practice and humility, we can express a childlike nature without alcohol. Becoming a parent helped me do this; now I don’t much care what other people think. And, I’m more willing to ask questions of strangers or people I want to get to know. Getting older and accepting death may help with this, too.

I reread what I wrote and don't see where I said what happened to me happens to everyone who drinks

I thought I was an alcoholic beyond help but it turns out I was just selfish. I used to drink to get drunk almost every day when I was living with someone, they drank too but not to the excess I did. Then one day they were gone, they passed away and suddenly I found myself alone and responsible for maintaining a home and taking care of several animals. I realized I could not risk something happening to me in my drunkenness and have no one around to help me or call for help, end up dead and leave my animals alone in the world with no one to care for them. So I quit, no shakes, no depression just a few cravings now and then for it but far greater of a feeling of loneliness and missing my best friend in the whole world than wanting a drink.

I don't know if it makes a difference but my alcohol of choice was beer and I consumed between 10-15 every night for around a decade. I still would consider myself an alcoholic because if I drink even one beer, I am going to keep drinking until they are all gone, but I guess I have the ability or wisdom to choose not to have that first drink, or maybe I'm just co-dependent without anyone to make it happen. Lucky for me I suppose.

I have a theory about this which may or may not be correct. When you drink the first drink it has much larger effect on you than the second.

So first beer has an effect and you can make the decision whether you want that effect (with its pros and cons) or not. But if you say yes, then there is less reason to say no to the 2nd drink. After 2nd drink there is even less reason to say no to the 3rd and so on.

So when you contemplate taking that first drink ask yourself: If I do, is there any reason why I wouldn't keep on drinking after this first drink? And by the logic above, there really is less of a reason to say no to the 2nd drink than the first and so on.

But curiously and luckily this logic means that there is also a big reason to NOT have that first drink, because you can assume that its effect is not only the effect that one glass has on you, but also the effect that it makes you drink more. That is a good reason to not drink the first drink. If you don't say no now, why would you say no later?

So I wouldn't consider you an alcoholic just because your first beer leads to the 2nd and so on. You are not alcoholic you are just being logical. If you have a reason to drink the first beer then you also have a reason to drink the 2nd and so on. But luckily because you are logical you can see that it is not a good idea to drink that first beer in the first place.

My favourite way to blow of steam is what I call drunken arma3.

The sheer insanity of that game suits a few (by which I mean 2-3 beers, not much of a drinker) every couple of weeks.

It’s incredibly relaxing.

I drank way too much in my twenties (shitfaced every weekend which was normal in the uk back then), stopped entirely for my thirties and now stick to 2-3 once every few weeks.

Not been drunk drunk in 14 years, good on you for getting yourself sorted.

Can someone explain what Stanislaw ment?

Gabapentin + Clonidine

What are you suggesting these medications be used for?

A recovering alcoholic can die from "not drinking" -- delirium tremens, the "shakes" that they get in the morning, are a physical manifestation of the transcriptional changes that have occurred in their brains as a result of being adapted to ethanol. The drugs mentioned all modulate neurotransmitters pharmacologically and are often part of the recovery process (the details are quite complex).

Baclofen, titrate up until you reach indifference to alcohol.

People use gabapentin recreationally?

I don’t even take my full low dose during the day as I don’t like the way it makes me feel (though it’s a very effective drug for me).

No to stop drinking

Don’t know anything about Clonidine.

Gabapentin is often prescribed for depression. It can be taken with other antidepressants. I’ve heard it can cause severe weight gain via water weight and bloating.

Try magnesium chloride daily. Morning and evening preferably.

NAC a couple of hours before your drinking escapade.

A five hour energy drink the morning after. The B’s + folate really help to feel”normal” the after.

Adult drinking is preparing for and mitigating the day after effects. :)

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