Written by: Jessica Betancourt, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Without judging yourself or attaching any sort of shame or guilt to the ways that you consume alcohol, give yourself a moment as you’re reading this article to gain some personal insight into this very popular and culturally acceptable pastime and how it may be influencing your overall life experience more than you think.
If you regularly drink after work, whether it is out socializing or stopping by the store on your way home to pick up a bottle of wine or a 6 pack, you may consider that your drinking habits are simply a part of your daily routine. Or perhaps you are a stay-at-home parent and you ‘look forward to’ having some glasses of wine while you’re making dinner.
Or maybe you don’t necessarily drink every day but when you do you drink excessively. And perhaps according to your friends and family and by the reflection of your environmental social norms, the ways that you drink do not necessarily set off alarm bells or set you apart from the communities to which you belong.
Regardless of the nuances of the ways that you drink, however, it is worth examining the trajectory and longevity of your cyclical interactions with alcohol and how these repetitive patterns may be impacting your life in ways that you may not be currently giving them credit for.
As an addiction coach, I see an interesting commonality among people who are becoming present to the fact that perhaps they drink too much for their own well-being despite not being unique in their consumption as compared to the people that they hang out with. And that is, the longstanding lack of awareness of having an issue with drinking. For myself, this was the case as well. I spent nearly two decades in an almost daily drinking habit.
Because the consumption of alcohol is so pervasive and celebrated as normal and customary, most people will continue drinking it in a manner that they would label as normal and harmless. So long as you can recover from a hangover and for the most part, enjoy the buzz and the ritual, there may seem to be little motivation to look closer.
However, aside from alcohol being a drug and a toxin with previously little mainstream media coverage to inform us of its negative effects, the actual HABIT of daily drinking (chronic drinking) or drinking in excess (binge drinking) has an overall compounding effect that you may be attributing to other factors in your life.
Feel what comes up for you when you read the following questions. At the same time, see if you can answer them to the best of your ability without being defensive or dismissive. And if you are answering with an impulsive sense of dismissal or defense, then just notice that you’re doing that. Try to not make anything ‘wrong’, imagine that you’re just taking an objective view of yourself.
Alternatively, you can imagine someone else, who has the same habits with alcohol that you do. Imagine them in their private world, the part that other people may not see. And they have all of the same desires, stressors, symptoms, and circumstances as yourself. Imagine that you are asking them these questions.
1. Do you constantly feel stressed and pressed for time, a lack of time, a constant rushing and then crashing? Then you might consider – How much time do you spend drinking?
Time spent drinking could not only include the act of consuming alcohol itself, but also thinking about when you will get to have a drink, procuring the alcohol itself, and potentially remedying yourself from how much you drank afterward. It all adds up.
For example, if you are a daily drinker, and you tend to have a first drink at 5 pm, and then your last at 10 pm, that is 5 hours multiplied by 7 days a week, which equals 35 hours per week. And let’s say on average, that you spend 1 - 2 hours upon awakening trying to shake it off. That’s an additional 7 - 14 hours plus 35. So, 42 - 49 hours per week are spent enraptured in obtaining, consuming, and being under the effects of alcohol.
If you are someone who feels like there is just never enough time to do everything that you want to do, here is an opportunity to look at where you could gain some time back.
2. Do you feel discomfort, live with disease, or are you generally unwell? How are you feeling physically in your body?
According to HealthLine, all of the following have been attributed to chronic alcohol use: gas, bloating, indigestion, diarrhea or painful stools, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, poor circulation, stroke, heart attack, heart disease, heart failure, ulcers or hemorrhoids (due to dehydration and constipation), inhibited sex hormone production, lowered libido, difficulty getting or maintaining an erection, difficulty in achieving orgasm.
Whether or not you have manifested definitive symptoms or are living with disease or illness, take stock of how you physically feel inside of your body on a day-to-day basis. Especially after drinking the night before, do you wake up with nausea, headaches, or stiff joints? Do you feel rested and that you got quality sleep? Or do you awaken with irritation and general malaise and has it been this way for quite some time that perhaps you assess that this is just your general state of homeostasis?
It is not necessarily that every uncomfortable bodily sensation is due to drinking. The question is rather, if you were NOT drinking at the intensity and frequency that you are currently accustomed to, how much better might you feel? What would be your new baseline as it relates to your health and well-being?
3. Do you like your thoughts? Or do your thoughts seem to be spiraling around a conversation with yourself that tends to make you feel like the undesirable circumstances of your life are unchangeable or difficult to accept and that train of thought then leads you to the action of drinking to not ‘have to deal with it’, or to ‘take a break’ from experiencing them.
Something that I have noticed about alcohol use is that it has a real defeatist nature to it. Yes, I still drink on occasion, about 1 or 2 times per week and around 1-3 units per episode, a very small fraction of what I used to consume which was an entire bottle minimum of red wine nightly.
Yet because I now regularly take days off from drinking, I can see, feel, and appreciate the contrast between days that I drink (any amount) and days that I do not. And invariably, the days following any day that I have consumed alcohol, I notice are much more challenging. And it isn’t exactly because anything is particularly difficult or surprising. Quite the opposite, it is how I manage the regularity of a basic day, doing the same basic things that I normally do: take care of my kids, take care of my house, work in my private practice, create content, navigate life as an ex-pat, etc.; in the aftermath of drinking, the quality of my thoughts is very subpar.
In the aftermath of drinking, our brains are in a period of trying to repair neurons, our livers are working hard to filter our blood, and all of our systems are trying to regain balance which causes us to feel edgy, impatient, and anxious or depressed. And it is the thoughts that we entertain during this process of repair that can then lead to another day of drinking. Thoughts that sound like, “I’m so tired. When is this day going to be over? Why is he/she so annoying? I wish I could be left alone. I don’t have the energy, the time, the money to do what I want…”
It can be hard to break this cycle of drinking because generally, people drink to make themselves feel better! But what ultimately is happening, is that drinking is making you feel worse. However, the first step to creating change is having the awareness that something actually needs changing! If you’ve been engaged in ritualized behaviors with alcohol for some time, you may be very excited and delighted to learn that interrupting your habit can also help you regain a lot of time, health, and peace of mind.
For further investigation and curiosity on how to minimize your drinking, and how a Mindful Drinking approach may benefit you, I invite you to check out my podcast The Mindful Drinking Movement, available on all major streaming platforms. In these episodes, I share my personal journey of going from a very dedicated Wino to someone who can now drink less or not at all and how I help others to do the same.
I also accept applications for private clients for my 6-week program, The Mindful Drinking Method.
Read more from Jessica!
Jessica Betancourt, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Jessica Betancourt is an RTT trained hypnotherapist and Certified Transformational Life Coach specializing in addiction transformation with an emphasis for Alcohol Use Disorder. After having gotten clear that her own drinking habits had become problematic, she successfully re-trained her brain using meditation, hypnosis, spiritual practices and subconscious reprogramming to heal her relationship with alcohol. She now works helping others to do the same with their addictive tendencies, which may have also included but are certainly not limited to: smoking, food, cocaine, marijuana, and sugar. She is a mom of 4 and lives in her adopted country of Spain with her Spanish husband and she dies an ego death every day
