John Robins, a comedian and Adrian Chiles who has written a book on moderation chat about it. One has stopped because has no off switch and the other who managed his moderation via a spreadsheet. It is an interesting discussion and I like the way they challenge some of the usual stuff “ problem drinkers” get thrown at them.
Abstinence v moderation – an interesting discussion
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Adrian Chiles has been banging on about this for several years now in his boring Graudiad coiumn (typical example “If they can fly a man to the moon, why can’t they stop my glasses slipping down my nose?”).
The key reason AC seems to be paid by the Graun isn’t the insightful or thigh-slapping nature of his copy, it’s the fact that he is married to. certain Catherine Viner who just happens to edit the paper
To stop glasses sliding down the nose affix a piece of sandpaper to the bridge to increase friction. Alternatively do away with gravity.
Err yeah, never heard of her or him for that matter. But anyway, back to the article.
Indeed, as, tho’ Chiles largely annoys me, he is thoughtful and insightful on booze, and this is a very worthwhile read. I sent it to the wife as she has packed it in for similar reasons to Jon. She can leave it, but taking it has no off switch. I am more of an Adrian, content enough with a couple of lunchtime pints at weekends, needing then not to keep going all day and night. (I used to, mind, 40 years ago, that being normal for my peer group of the day, soo I guess I did enough damage then.)
Read this with interest this morning: I am one of those drinkers with a faulty “off” button. I would love to have a nice glass of wine with my evening meal and then not say, “Mmm, just one more then.”
Tis why I, marooned in one of the world’s largest wine production regions, normally drink but three days a week. Tis why I sometimes post late at night and next morning think “Oops.”
I’ve banged on about this in the past. I have an autoimmune disease and to damp it down, I’m on immunosuppressant meds (quite similar to the stuff used in chemotherapy). One of the many side effects is something akin to stage 2 kidney disease. So I decided about a decade ago that it was probably wise to give up the grog, and not put any more strain on my organs (cue: Moosey).
It wasn’t hard for me to stop entirely, as I didn’t drink every day anyway, giving up coffee was much harder.
I now have a couple of glasses of fizz each year (Christmas and birthdays), fall over/asleep soon after, have night sweats and dodgy guts, and wonder why I bothered.
If you want to stop, just stop. It isn’t (wasn’t) hard (for me).
Life with better sleep and without hangovers has a lot going for it, even if it can be a little more dull.
Can I now have a paid newspaper column, please?
I’ve fortunately never been addicted to anything in my life. I’d have an alcoholic drink once each couple of months, never smoked, drink the occasional cup of tea to be social (but will happily drink none for months) and have never dabbled in opioids etc.
I’m not saying any of this to be virtuous, more to admit that I genuinely have no idea what addiction feels like. It takes 4-5 days to pass through the acute stage of alcohol withdrawal, a week or so for heroin. To me, it seems like that is a tiny amount of time to flex some self control, however it obviously isn’t that easy, or quitting would be trivial. Nicotine is a bit trickier, but even then it’s a couple of weeks, a month at most.
For some context, I decided earlier this year that I needed to shed some weight and get back into good physical condition to see out my 50s and beyond. I radically changed my diet and started doing weight training 5-6 times per week. I’m six months in and there has been a vast change in my appearance and health but it will take another 12 months or so to get where I want to get and then a lifetime of maintenance. It takes huge willpower, but I made that commitment to myself and have stuck with it. If I could reach my goal in days, or a week at most, it would be ludicrously easy.
So I’m genuinely interested in someone who has suffered addiction explaining the difficulties to me, and why, as fentonsteve has opined, you can’t ‘just stop’ if you genuinely want to (and I understand that the last bit is a huge part of it). What does addiction actually feel like?
I think that we used to differentiate between a physical addiction and a psychological addiction. So, with alcohol if someone is physically addicted to booze (and I think that this might be over 16 units a day over a period of time) they could go through a medical detox over the course of a week or more and so no longer have the physical addiction. The psychological addiction is different.
If you always did a particular thing (lets say drinking on a Saturday night) it’s going to be really hard not to do that unless you replace it with something else. Could be you switch drugs, or you take on a new hobby that gives you some sort of dopamine hit. There is an element of routine (you always do it) and reward (you earnt it) to this sort of thing and I guess that it creeps up over time. Changing it can be really difficult, particularly if someone used alcohol “as a handrail” in social situations, or to manage social anxieties.
My own personal situation is we (sort of) stopped drinking nine months ago, but have the occasional trip to the pub now. Even so, coming home from work on a sunny Friday evening I can think of anything I’d rather do than sit in the pub for a couple of hours, with a few cold beers. Not doing that makes me a bit antsy, a bit on edge and frankly quite bored. I count the minutes down until bedtime (or until I know the local shops shut) safe in the knowledge that I’ll be absolutely fine the next day.
Yep going to bed early. I did that more when off the piss.
Luckily I’ve never been addicted to anything, and you’d be surprised what you can do with enough willpower (it helps that I’ve always been a bit of an awkward sod).
I was presented with two options at age 44: carry on drinking and eating what I liked, and have my intestines removed, fed through a tube and in need of a kidney transplant within a decade. Or take the meds, restrict the diet and stop the grog.
I’m 53 now and healthier now than I was at 43 (or 33), so I think I made the right choice. Not very rock and roll, though. I have embraced the dullness.
To quote James McMurtry, “I don’t want another drink, I only want that last one again”
I read this earlier and while I like Adrian Chiles I find his insistence that there is no such thing as alcoholism unhelpful. I confess I haven’t read his book though I have seen several interviews with him about it. As John Robies points out there is a distinct set of people who, whether through biology or psychology, are powerless to control alcohol unless they manage to stop altogether.
I come from a family with a strong history of alcoholism through at least 3 generations, added to which I’m from Glasgow where it could be hard to distinguish (and I do make the distinction) between alcoholics and people who just drink far too much. It’s a bullet I dodged but my experience is such that I can’t accept Chiles’ apparent belief that most problem drinkers could just cut down.
Yes , I found Robins more persuasive on that.
Adrian Chiles sounds like a man in denial. Still, it pays the bills.
That is where Chiles is certainly wrong. Alcoholism is a plague and a curse and very very real; I see and (try to) treat lots of it at work, my bro’ going one step better and becoming a psychiatrist specialising in addiction and running treatment centres, to boot. (His specialty in a specialty is drunk Drs and dentists, he having to become/accept he was one of them, before realising there was an issue both in himself and in (many of) his colleagues.) He can tell very scary tales around top end specialist hoovering up drink and drugs concurrently being top-end Profs and consultants. He is also my weathervane in knowing I don’t have an issue, even if once I may have had.
I’m in no way excusing my own problems with alcohol (by the way, I barely drank anything till my forties, that’s for squares, man) but saying “willpower” and “resolution” doesn’t work for many. A lot, a lot, of people like getting drunk. It’s a drug, don’t you know.
When I lived in the UK I used to imagine the police breathalysing every middle-class housing estate on a Saturday night and realising 98.73% was drunk.
I still think future generations will look back at alcohol and, rather like cigarettes, say “What on earth were they thinking?”
I am Adrian Chiles, kind of. I don’t think I ever managed 34 units in a day though. I have written before here about some struggles I had in the past, I was basically a 4 pints a night man, maybe I took one day off a week (not always). I do still drink, but now a total of 2 or 3 pints maybe twice a week, I also occasionally take weeks or months off without being too bothered about it. I don’t really ever get drunk. Add up those units and I guess I drink a third or a quarter of what I used to. Maybe I should give up completely but I enjoy the taste of beer (other alcohol not so much), so I don’t plan to change too much
I hardly drank til I was about 24 but I was smoking a lot of weed. I have stopped drinking a few times to determine whether I could do it. And I can. But I get bored. And I do like that change of state. The comment how subsequent drinks are really about chasing that initial change of state hit home.
I drink every day, generally. Sometimes I go back to 2 or 3 AFDs then I get bored. I think being retired exacerbates this.
So I am not like Robins or Chiles – somewhere in the middle with a layer of guilt.
The article seems to make a distinction between an alcoholic, who is someone who can’t stop and therefore can’t start, and a heavy drinker who can do half a bottle of wine every night but then stop. I was the latter for a bit and even if you don’t call it addiction, it’s dependency and that’s not a whole lot better. I’ve cut down my intake significantly, not because I was afraid of not being able to turn back from the path I was on, but because the next-morning mental side effects aren’t worth the short-term bump.
There are also alcoholics and “functioning” alcoholics. The former need a drink when they wake up and can end up losing everything and living on the street, the latter may drink almost as much, but can live relatively normal, even successful lives (on the surface)
I wouldn’t call someone who has half a bottle of wine in a night a heavy drinker. But I guess that’s what the article is about. Drinking is on a spectrum, and the idea that it’s only harmful if you’re pouring pernod on your cornflakes can create a lot of problems for people.
I definitely have an alcohol problem but I’m not sure I’m an alcoholic. Debating that question with myself has perhaps masked the real issues, which is that I do drink far too much, regardless of whatever label you want to apply to me.
Used to be a very heavy drinker from my early 20s to mid-40s. Mainly beer – only occasionally touched wine and seldom ever spirits. Never affected my work as I rarely ever took days off for anything. Only downside was that my boozing almost certainly stood in the way of having had more meaningful relationships, but I guess that’s the price I paid.
Over the years, I’ve steadily cut down my intake to the point where I can happily go several weeks without a drink and can easily leave booze in the fridge without giving it a second thought. Several of the guys who I used to drink with weren’t so disciplined or so lucky. One or two of them even ended up paying for their habit with their lives.
As really cannot see the point of having one drink, I tend to hit the grog quite hard on the 60 or so times annually I’m on the lash – usually about 10 to 15 units – beer when I’m out and wine when I’m at home.
Can’t see me reaching a point where I might consider stopping altogether
The one thing I read in this article that had me nodding straight away was the comment about the 14 units per week being so low as to be ridiculous.
It’s just not credible and a limit so low most people will ignore, same as the faulty BMI measure. Everyone’s got to die of something so to be so draconian, well what is the point of life to deny yourself everything?
It’s meant to be a maximum safe level, not some kind of ration. And about a bottle and a half of wine a week doesn’t sound that low to me. The recommendations do vary significantly from country to country though, and there must be an element of licking a finger and sticking it in the air.
A bottle and a half of wine a week is nothing honestly…
Everyone has a limit but that’s not a lot of alcohol. That’s a good night!
Re BMI: I saw an ex colleague recently who hasn’t really changed in the 37 years since I met him. He said that a doctor had told him that losing half a stone would help his back, which he did and it did but they also told him what they thought he should weigh and in his words “I’d look like a fucking broom stick”, which is true as he carries almost no extra weight. Maybe we’ve just got used to people being heavier.
In truth, the 14 units is not even deemed “safe”, the “advice” being any alcohol is dangerous, however little or much, and that <14 units “might” be deemed saf-ER. I am not supporting that stance, merely clarifying. It is all a bit daft, as the variations, genetically, ethnic origin, luck(?) of the draw are so huge as to render no one size fitting all. But something had to be done, as liver disease is at an all time epidemic and is killing off younger and younger folk somewhat exponentially over the last 100 years in these islands. That’s our age and the 30 to 50 year olds. Not sure the public ready to believe that 14 might tip you over the edge. Not sure I do, but our kids and grandkids seem to be getting it and saying not really bothered by or with booze, please.
Fascinating. Meanwhile I am looking forward to a couple of lunchtime sharpeners with Mr @pencilsqueezer on Friday, as me and Mrs Path travel to indulge in some wild water swimming, for a week, in the Llyns of Eryri (Snowdonia to the non Celtic heathens.)
Cheers!
I was just thinking earlier that we hadn’t seen Pencilsqueezer around here for a while. Pass on my best regards. As it happens I’m going to my first beer festival since before Covid tomorrow evening, so come Friday lunchtime I may still be staring at the inside of my eyelids.
I used to drink to oblivion on pretty much a daily basis. Anything cheap and stacked with as high a percentage of alcohol as possible. John talks about personality traits I can hardly bear thinking about. Only really stopped when I was put on warfarin in 2010. I didn’t suffer any withdrawals.
These days, in a rare social setting such as a wedding, I can have one drink and not progress to the second when I would be lost. My off switch is feeble but not totally non-existent. I like to be the designated driver. It’s not easy. The damn drug is everywhere.
I never thought of myself as addicted. Just a miserable get.
I know you’ve posted about this before but didn’t realise it was still difficult for you. Best wishes Tiggs.
Thanks, dave.
I wonder if, for some of us, our bodies are effective in telling us when to lay off. I’ll have a few over most weekends – less than when I was younger – but by Monday I just don’t want to think of it for a few days.
I was interested to read that Chiles doesn’t quite believe alcoholics exist? I know the definition is quite nebulous, but I’ve met a few alcoholics – it’s had an utterly deleterious effect on their lives. One woman I know lost everything: husband, great job, even access to her kids for a while.
I think they exist too, a school friend of mine also lost everything, job, family, house. And he died at 42.
An ex colleague could never say no to anything. When we were made redundant, he went to work in rock and roll, becoming a well respected camera director on really big shows. The drink took over and he lost work, eventually dying penniless back in the seaside town he left decades earlier. His ex wife had to crowdfund his funeral.
Very sad, perhaps I should have also mentioned my friend was a doctor., his wife found him dead in the dosshouse he was staying in after he had not been seen for a week or so, not a pleasant thing for her, they had 3 kids, Terrible
We are booze free Monday to Thursday then Friday/weekend have a bit so in terms of the OP we are moderating. I used to drink more though never sustained excess but even so I found it a bit odd not drinking during the week to start with. To @chiz ‘s point, I do really like waking up with a clear head though.
I have always worked in boozy businesses but I’ve noticed a number of colleagues reducing their intake lately. Personally, I’ve discovered Guinness Zero, which is exactly like canned draught Guinness so hits the spot as I really dislike soft drinks. I’m hoping Guinness make it available on draught in pubs as it’s so much better than any other zero beers.
Never been addicted to alcohol – can take it or leave it. Can go weeks without any and then go out and have 7 or 8 pints in a night.
Like wine with a meal and am partial to a gin and tonic but neither beat tea which I am addicted to.
Smoking was a motherfucker that dominated my life for over 30 years – it was only my daughter telling me at the age of 5 that she didn’t want to die that gave me sufficient motivation to quite. Smoke free for close to 30 years I am the Worlds worst ex-smoker.
I like tea and coffee, not coke, lemonade etc
I remember attending a lecture in Trinity College Dublin by an eminent expert in the field of addiction and alcoholism. He told his audience of social workers that the term alcoholic was not a useful focus for working with people as you could become bogged down in “yes you are, no I’m not”, and even if you achieved agreement, it didn’t really help much. He suggested the term problem drinker and working to agree what linked problems exist for the drinker and people around them was a more useful start. I remember he said that defining what constituted alcoholism was also problematic and suggested that a working definition for Ireland was “someone who drinks more than his GP”.
As for the moderation debate, my own experience as the child of a very toxic and selfish alcoholic was to always try to test my own ability to abstain on a regular basis. Dry January was perfect for this and I was always able to adhere to it without any significant withdrawal symptoms or struggles. I was a heavy drinker in my 20s and 30s but “functioned”, with it, never missing a day’s work or being arrested or hospitalised through drinking, not to say there were no unfortunate incidents. In my 40s I got into the habit of drinking every evening at home, ironically while my father was fading away and eventually dying. Around 15 years ago a medical check and a liver scan snapped me out of that. My return to good health and moderation was shortly before (probably not coincidentally) the time when I met my now wife. Nowadays I drink small amounts at weekends when the kids have gone to bed and I’m not really up to drinking to excess any more. The odd and probably fortunate thing is that I’ve discovered a taste for whiskey late in life. I’m quite sure it would have been a disaster if I had a taste for spirits as a younger man.
A very interesting post, Bamber. I can see myself using the Irish definition from now on!
That was always one of the funny har hat definitions spun in the 70s and 80s, when , possibly, many GPs had a problem, if hidden in broad daylight and tolerated/accepted by patients who just knew to avoid evening surgery, if they wanted a decent opinion. The “official” definition was “more than 4 pints a day”, of beer, with wine and spirits totted up to match. Clearly has become less and less, as years go by, to exert the raised eyebrow of concern, as discussed. But, my eventual point, alcohol is now very frowned upon as a lubricant in medical meetings. Boozy drug dos (pharmaceutical company sponsored bashes to promote a new drug) are a long distant memory. Most young docs are very Spartan and puritanical compared to the boozehounds present when I started.
I’m glad to say that despite all the dabbling in illegal drugs that I did as a teenager and young man, I don’t appear to have an addictive personality. I tried just about everything available at the time but steered well clear of needles.
I was never a heavy smoker when I indulged in the foolish habit, so giving up the cigs wasn’t too difficult.
Alcohol is a very likeable drug but, yet again, I’ve never been a serious drinker.
I’ll have two or maybe three beers at a gig these days, if the bar is in the same space as the stage. If it isn’t, I probably won’t bother. A couple of beers with a meal out is the norm but I don’t eat out that often. I’ll have a few beers or polish off a bottle of wine during the regular Friday night Zoom sessions some mates and I have. I may have a G&T after dinner if the mood takes me, but it’s not a regular thing.
I’ve never been much of a Pub person since my 30s. Doing bar work for a couple of years put me off.
Gotta say , there’s a helluvalota moderation amongst the Massive.
I must say, the comments above are far more interesting and informative than the Guardian article I looked at briefly after reading them. I got sticky bored and irritated by their pontificating.
I do like beer, wine and whisky and will happily indulge in any of them when the opportunity or desire arises. Wine, particularly red, is the one which is most likely to lead to overindulgence, because it can be so tasty and I can knock it back without thinking about it, only realizing later that I’m drunker than I want to be. It’s a tempting slippery slope to bad habits, so I try to caution my appetite, which is generally not too difficult.
Very sensible and balanced Sal, we are as one on this.
Thanks Twang. As a Lib Dem supporter, I regard you as the very voice of modération, so it is heartening to have your stamp of approval.
Small edit to my comment above. I meant to put ‘quickly’, but auto suggest* gave me ‘sticky’. It’s a quirky, tactile alternative, which I quite like, but it wasn’t the adjective I chose.
* My new phone often prompts multilingual alternatives – spot the unnecessary accent in the first paragraph.