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.

Have you met SREs?