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Comment by soggybutter | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little over a week without alcohol, but I drank every day because I have a lot of difficulty winding down and relaxing. I still do, but I've made the personal decision to prioritize my physical health. How do you square this advice with people who drink because the alternative is highly stressful evenings? Evaluating the history, I can see that drinking _eventually_ led to poorer health, but over the course of years also helped me to wind down and relax when I otherwise couldn't

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That's sort of a false dichotomy. The options aren't

1. Drink alcohol to calm down

2. Stay anxious and stressed

The options are more like

1. Drink alcohol to calm down and impair your sleep ensuring you'll get stressed more often and need to have a glass of calming juice again soon

2. Wear yourself out at the gym to calm down and improve your cortisol regulation and reduce the need to calm down

3. See a therapist and learn better stress coping strategies and reduce the need to calm down

4. Remove stressors from your life and reduce the need to calm down

5. Eat healthier and sleep better and improve your cortisol regulation and reduce the need to calm down

...

N. Stay anxious and stressed

Of course, all of those other options are actually difficult in certain ways. 2+3+4+5 can all be expensive. 3+4 are stigmatized in many cultures. 2+5 require knowledge that not everyone has.

That said if you're having trouble calming down in the evening, assuming you see a doctor for routine physical examinations, you can discuss options with them. They will know this list and more, and occasionally they can convince your insurance to cover the cost of something. It's better than developing a substance habit.

It's both and, instead either or. We don't all want to reduce stressors, but find ways to deal with it better.

Sometimes you push hard, and a good glass wine is exactly what you need.

Sometimes you push hard, and you had enough wine the week before.

Therapists are overrated, no scientific backing in learning how to deal with high stress situations.

I recommend everyone working out, but when you had a stressful day or week, a gym workout might just add more cortisol.

> Therapists are overrated, no scientific backing in learning how to deal with high stress situations.

Huh. I've had a lot of success with therapy in this regard. Wouldn't recommend something I haven't tried.

I've had a couple bad therapists and a good therapist.

The good therapist discouraged me from worrying too much about using a drink at the end of the day as a tool to unwind (I was considering quitting alcohol to try to help my anxiety).

Therapy can be great, but it's not a commodity. Success is highly correlated to a strong relationship between patient and therapist, and finding that is very challenging for me and others I've discussed that with.

For me alcohol increased my baseline anxiety. When I stopped drinking my anxiety basically went away completely. It was a licensed alcohol and drug therapist that clued me in to that. So the experience of the therapist may matter.

I also started cold exposure and breathing exercises. Now I was skeptical of that stuff for sure at first but I think you can increase your stress tolerance and also train and reconnect your bodies nervous systems. It's a neurobiological thing.

I do the breathing exercises when I get stressed and that takes 5-10mins of effort. After which I've forgotten what I was stressed about. So it breaks the rumination cycle for me.

Yeah your advice is for people to be more careful. That's one way that works a bit. And normally is what you come to with therapists. Then there is also a way to be more wild, not take things to serious and push further. That's a narrative that's very powerful but missing very much lately.

Funny, frequent exercisers seem to drink more than other people

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2015.0015...

> Sometimes you push hard, and a good glass wine is exactly what you need.

Because it makes you feel good? You certainly don't need it. It's a crutch. For socialization, sure. But to "wind down" or "de-stress"? That's not healthy in the long term.

> I recommend everyone working out, but when you had a stressful day or week, a gym workout might just add more cortisol.

Huh?

I was also a daily drinker for years. My experience was after a while, the booze was not really helping me unwind. It was increasing my base level of anxiety, creating the “need” to use it to unwind. I could only see this after I stopped for several months.

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