How alcohol tricks us into coming back

One morning, about 60 days into my first attempt at permanently quitting daily drinking (I’m on Day 24 of this round), I was at a restaurant chatting with a fellow coach of one of my son’s sports teams.

On the rare occasion we’d have a 6 a.m. practice, many of us would head over to a nearby diner afterwards for a team breakfast.

So the coach told the table about how he’d decided to try “Dry January,” or go at least a month without drinking. He told us it was hard to quit at first because he’d made a habit of chasing stressful days at work with red wine, but that his wife, a non-drinker, told him: “well, you’ll get over it.”

And he did! At this point he’d even pushed Dry January into early February and said he hadn’t felt this great in years.

I loved the story, because one of the big reasons I wanted to quit drinking the first time was that I was tired of feeling completely washed at early morning practices.

I hadn’t regularly drunk enough to get hangovers since my late 20 or early 30s, but I did drink too much every night and had come to despise feeling just … bleh …. the morning after.

Alcohol disrupts both your sleep and your digestion, so even if you get seven hours or so of sack time in, it’s not really going to be like you had a full night’s sleep.

You’re up all night peeing, you’re waking up constantly and having to fall back asleep, and, in the morning, the mix of beer and pizza from the night before is going to leave your guts in complete disarray.

At this point, the coach mentioned he had a trip down South with his family booked.

“So are you going to keep going with the no-drinking thing there?” I asked.

He laughed.

“Oh God no!”

Alcohol makes us forget what it’s like to feel healthy

Isn’t it wild what alcohol does to us? Here is a person who has shaken free of the bonds of daily drinking and declared that he’s never felt better, and yet there was no question in his mind that he’d go back to it.

The thing I realized after stopping drinking for long periods of time and then re-starting regular boozing is that alcohol has a sneaky way of making you forget what your baseline health is.

You start to feel better, so you think you can start reintroducing regular alcohol consumption into your life. You might even be able to drink for a bit and still feel energetic and healthy because of all the health gains you’ve made due to quitting.

But I can tell you that the compounding effect is guaranteed to catch up with you. You’ll start to rely on alcohol to solve the bad feelings and fatigue that the alcohol is causing and, before you know it, you’ve spiralled right back to where you were before you quit in the first place.

Suddenly, your “alcoholic health” is your new normal again, so you accept it for what it is and work within it.

Don’t fall into the trap. Being aware of alcohol’s little tricks is the only way to avoid falling back into its clutches.

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