How alcohol tricks us into believing it isn’t a problem

I was on a flight earlier this month and I saw the most depressing thing.

It was around 10 a.m., and with the seatbelt chime having gone off, the flight attendant was making her way down the aisle to dole out the sparse service now typical of modern air travel.

And people were making their typical 10 a.m. orders: Coffee, coffee, juice, coffee, water, coffee, juice.

As the clinking cart came to a stop at our row, the flight attendant addressed a women sitting across the aisle from me. She was probably about 10 years younger than me (I’m 41).

“Juice, coffee?” the flight attendant asked.

The woman suddenly had a sheepish look on her face.

“Do you have any gin?”

The flight attendant responded that it was possible and started rifling though her cart.

Coming up empty, she offered, “we might have some rum at the front?”

“Wow, gin at 10 a.m.?” I thought before immediately catching myself being judgmental over a problem I have.

Alcohol’s false sense of security

I decided to quit drinking in late August — exactly 100 days ago at the time of this writing — and had you dropped me into this exact scenario prior to that, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

“Gin at 10 a.m.? Hey why not, you gotta enjoy your vacation!”

Worse, I would have used it as a cover for my own drinking issues.

“Well, I can’t possibly have a drinking problem,” I would have convinced myself. “At least I’m not drinking gin at 10 a.m.”

I wrote about this recently in the context of Sober October, an ultimately positive initiative but one that I think a lot of people probably use to justify their own problem drinking.

If they can “prove” to themselves that they don’t need to drink for 30 days, it means they don’t have a problem (nevermind that they’re counting down the days until the wretched month is over).

I get it.

As I wrote then, I pulled the “I don’t have a drinking problem. I can stop any time I want to. I just don’t want to” thing many times.

This is also why many people have a super judgmental, binary view of those who suffer from alcohol use disorder.

If you so much as admit you think your drinking has become unhealthy and you want to cut down, you risk being labelled an “alcoholic.”

This is something I actually resent, even though I subconsciously participated in it for a moment on that plane!

Fixating on the scale of drinking

I never found myself on a park bench, wasted, having lost my job and family.

I never crashed my car into a minivan, killing a young family.

Yet I was slowly committing suicide by drinking poison every day.

The difference was that I was doing it in a way that is not only socially acceptable, but frequently celebrated!

Alcohol tricks people into comparing themselves to others and rating the scale of a drinking problem rather than just accepting that it’s a problem, period.

“Look at THIS person’s drinking problem! You’re not even close to that! You’re fiiiiine. Just a couple more won’t hurt!”

Yet whether you flame out spectacularly as young person or die of cirrhosis of the liver 30 years later, the final outcome is the same.

Based on the woman’s sheepishness while ordering gin at 10 a.m. on an airplane, I could tell she felt she was straddling the line between drinking that is currently celebrated by society and what people consider to be “alcoholism.”

One-hundred days into my new lifestyle, it was a wake-up call for me to stay vigilent.

I caught myself judging and weighing scale of drinking, yet had it been two hours later, at noon, half the plane would have been ordering red wine for the balance of the flight and thought nothing of it.

Alcohol is always trying to find ways to justify itself. If you’re not careful, it’ll trick you into comparing your drinking to that of others and lulling yourself into a false sense of security.

Don’t get distracted.

Instread, focus on your behaviour and what you want to achieve and go get it!

Thank you so much for reading this post all the way to the end, my friends! If you enjoyed it or found it useful, please give it a few claps so others can find it!