How alcohol makes your 4 common life problems much, much worse

What is your problem?

Is it job stress? Are you overworked and underpaid? Did you choose the wrong career and now you regret it?

I’ve had that — it’s actually the main reason I started drinking alcohol in the first place.

Are you in a crappy relationship?

Are you a frazzled, exhausted parent?

Do you have financial stress? Are you deep in debt? Are you struggling to pay bills?

Now let me ask you another question: do you think not exercising, not sleeping, and not having the energy to make any positive changes helping you or hurting you?

This is one of the greatest tricks alcohol plays on us all. It presents itself as the solution to all your problems, no matter what they are. If you drink, all your problems are gone.

But they’re not, are they?

They’re just waiting for you to wake up tomorrow from another crappy night feeling more terrible than you did before you had that first sip.

Alcohol pretends to make all your problems better and winds up making all your problems worse.

Common life problems become much worse when you’re drinking (Licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

Alcohol isn’t the solution — it prevents the solution

Throughout your life, alcohol companies and the pop culture presentation of the poison they dispense have likely led you to believe that alcohol can solve some or all of the life problems listed above.

Well, as someone who has faced them all at some point in time, allow me to walk you through the reasons alcohol makes each and every one of them worse.

Job stress

Everyone faces job stress, whether it’s a crappy boss, too much work (and not enough time to complete it all), employment uncertainty, or just a general malaise over having to spend your finite hours on this planet doing something you absolutely hate.

As I mentioned, this was one of the reasons I started drinking alcohol in the first place.

As I wrote in my second piece on this site back in August (has it been that long already?!), dissatisfaction over my career choice (combined with a crappy boss) gave alcohol the toehold it needed to completely take over my life.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“I was still young and I was completely miserable at work. I knew I had chosen the wrong career despite having just started it. I was good at my job and was something of a star employee for someone in their early 20s, despite my dislike of it. My happiness and job satisfaction plummeted further thanks in large part to one boss who bullied his staff on an almost daily basis.

“I teetered a bit, then moved into a position where I was happier, but I was still very depressed and unsatisfied.

“So one night after work (I was on evening hours at the time), I decided to try what I’d seen on TV and in movies a million times.

“In university, I’d drink alcohol once a week with my friends at the bar or whatever. When I wasn’t in that situation, I didn’t give alcohol a second thought. And it stayed that way until that one night, when I did that one dumb thing.

“Sitting on top of our fridge was a bottle of whiskey that had been left over from some previous party or visit and that had sat dormant for some time. I went over, put a couple of ice cubes in a glass, and poured myself just one drink.”

If there was one decision I could go and take back in my life, it would be that one.

As you might guess, drinking alcohol didn’t solve my problem. It didn’t change the fact that I disliked the career I had chosen and my boss was a dick.

All it did was allow me to hide from the problem for a few hours and then be less equipped to deal with it the next day because I was so tired from drinking.

Your stressful job will still be there in the moring. (Licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

Relationships

Stuck in a relationship you don’t want to be in?

It’s certainly easier to have a bunch of drinks every day than to face up to the fact you’re stuck being around someone you no longer care for.

I definitely get the rationale — for people who are married, splitting up is a huge deal. Not only in terms of lifestyle and finances but it affects other people as well (i.e. your kids, if you have them).

My favourite quit alcohol author is Craig Beck, and in his Quit DrinkingComplete Collection (that’s an affiliate link … listen to the audiobook for free by grabbing a trial membership to Audible here) he talks about how quitting alcohol actually brought his unhappy marriage to an end.

Finally, he had the clarity and courage to deal with a problem that had been hanging over him for years.

This isn’t a bad thing!

Yes, getting sober can mean having to deal with uncomfortable situations of all kinds, but surely that’s better than letting them fester.

Now, I have a happy marriage and I have no personal experience with divorce, but I can say that my patience for dealing with interpersonal relationships of all kinds is much higher when I’m rested and have a clear mind.

I also have the courage to stick up for myself and end relationships that bring toxicity into my life.

Whatever your issue, remember that alcohol isn’t relieving any pressure on you.

In fact, it’s the cap that ensures pressure builds until there’s an explosion later.

Parenting

Parenting is the most rewarding job in the world. It’s also arguably the most difficult.

There are incredible moments of joy, but also incredible moments of stress.

Becoming a parent is also extremely jarring! Your whole life gets turned upside-down and you lose a whole chunk of your former identity. Suddenly, you aren’t №1 in your life anymore.

Add the fact that you’re probably exhausted and emotionally drained and it’s no wonder “mommy wine culture” is a thing.

Personally, my highest nighttime alcohol intake was when I had young kids.

But here’s the thing: in retrospect, it made everything that much more challenging.

Recently I wrote about the actor John Stamos and his decision to quit alcohol prior to having kids. Here’s what he said:

“I know who I am certainly by 57 now,” Stamos told E! News recently. “It’s been close to six years in June that I sobered up. I never could have been a father during some of the more — some of it was really fun and some of it got to be very unhealthy.”

Now he gets up at 5 a.m. to spend time with his son.

Stamos is fortunate to have the wisdom of being 50+ while dealing with this stuff.

For the rest of us, drinking was a way to cope with the stresses of becoming a new parent while juggling the rest of life’s responsibilities.

But it’s not a healthy or helpful one in any way.

If you drink at night, you may get a small window of fake “relaxation”, but your demanding responsibilities will still be there in the morning — and now you’ll feel like s**t on top of it all.

Without alcohol, you will be a more patient, engaged parent. (Licensed under the Unsplash+ License)

Finances

Again, alcohol is an incredible trickster here.

Debt and bills don’t go away just because you’re drunk. You may feel like they do temporarily, but the envelopes will still be on the counter when you come to.

Worse, it costs a s**t-ton of money to have an alcohol addiction.

A few months ago, I calculated approximately how much I spent on alcohol when I was deepest in its clutches.

Trust me, this was a deeply depressing exercise.

These were the numbers I came up with:

Regular drinking: 325 days x $12 = $3,900

Restaurants: 32 x $25 = $800 (in retrospect, this was probably a low-ball estimate)

Holidays/parties = $250 (this was almost certainly low)

Vacations = $200 (again…)

Total: $5,150 per year

I drank almost every day for more than 10 years.

It hurts to even write down how much money that would add up to, so I’m not even going to do it!

You get the picture though. Drinking is costing you life-changing money.

Taking it a step further, I calculated what my drinking habit would cost when combined with the opportunity cost of not putting that money into investments.

In summary, if you put the $12 you spend on a bottle of wine every day into something yielding the average return of the S&P 500:

After five years at 8 percent, compounded monthly, you would have $26,745.58.

After 10 years, you would have $66,592.36.

After 15 years, you would have $125,957.91.

And after 20 years, you would have $214,403.43 (!).

Alternatively, it would be a lot easier to clear your debts if you had this cash on hand.

In summary

I think that most of us instinctively know that alcohol is making our lives tougher rather than easier.

That’s how drugs are designed to work. They trick you by offering temporary relief in exchange for compounded misery later.

I can say that, since quitting alcohol, my own life is so much better on all these fronts.

If you can get through the toughest part — the first two weeks of withdrawals — when everything seems 10x worse, I think you’ll find over time that everything gets 10x better.

Thanks very much for taking the time to read this post all the way to the end! If you enjoyed it or found it inspiring, please give it a clap or two so others can find it.

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