everything I did to manage, slow, and ultimately stop my drinking

how I’m learning to let alcohol go when wait but I love drinking and I don’t even drink that much and it’s not even a big deal and will everyone stop talking about how they quit drinking

I stopped drinking on December 26th, 2024. Oh, fine. Go ahead and stop reading now, I am unsurprised! Not drinking is about as stylish as going vegan was ten years ago or getting a flip-phone is today. Which is to say that it feels somewhat trite to even mention it.

But I will mention it and more here, for the first and probably only time, because there are so many things I don’t see talked about when it comes to stopping drinking, and I want to attempt to fill some of the gaps. If you are curious about your own drinking, maybe this will offer some validation. It is certainly not advice, though you may find helpful bits here and there. It is also not a condemnation of alcohol; I do not care if you drink or not.

This is simply what it looked like for me, a frequent but by no means binge drinker, someone who never hit rock bottom, to spend a decade-plus trying to manage, slow, and ultimately stop my drinking.

Below, you’ll find…

• an non-exhaustive list of everything I did to manage my drinking

• eight things that helped me slow my drinking

• nine things that helped me actually quit drinking

• five things that made it really fucking hard to quit

• how I feel now, 70 days in

Let’s go.

A non-exhaustive list of ways I tried to manage my drinking:

1. Taking at least two consecutive days off drinking every week

2. Only drinking three times a week

3. Only drinking twice a week, once during the week and once on the weekend

4. Only drinking on weekends

5. Only drinking outside the house

6. Only drinking in the house (during a “self-care” night)

7. Only drinking a total of 7 drinks a week

8. Limiting myself to 3 drinks in any given night

9. Limiting myself to 2 drinks in any given night

10. Limiting myself to 1.5 drinks in any given night

11. Limiting myself to 1 drink in any given night

12. Making sure I ate a good meal before I drank

13. Making sure I drank water before I drank

14. Making sure I drank electrolyte-infused water before I drank

15. Making sure I drank electrolyte-infused water while I drank

16. Cutting out liquor and just drinking wine

17. Cutting out wine and just drinking hard seltzer

18. Only drinking hard seltzers with no more than a 5% ABV

19. Only drinking on special occasions

Things that helped me slow down:

1. A new friend calling me out for unsafe behavior. “Sometimes we hang out and you have a few drinks and then drive home… this doesn’t seem good to me.”

2. Quitting pool league. Something about a dive bar and wielding a 19oz against women twice my age… I needed that whiskey ginger.

3. Starting nights out or social gatherings with an NA beverage. Something about ripping the band-aid off first thing makes not drinking for the rest of the night that much easier. Even if I did drink, starting my night with a soda helped me drink less overall.

4. Drinking silly little prebiotic sodas out of my favorite wine and cocktail glasses. (I should clarify again here that I am not giving advice - I know recovery programs generally frown upon this practice and probably for good reason. But for me, it helped to have an NA replacement for the ritual of pouring myself a drink.)

5. Learning that just one drink can mess with your REM sleep. I LOVE sleep. This is a point of pride for me - I’m a good ass sleeper. I’m protective over that shit.

6. Understanding that alcohol is an addictive substance, period. Like nicotine, like opioids, like crack.

7. Related to 5 and 6: Reading Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker.

8. Writing down the reasons why I didn’t want to drink and then referring to it when I really wanted to drink, just a couple, just one, please omg it’s not a big deal. Some examples included:

   1. Even just one drink makes you bloated and gassy by the time you go to bed. Wouldn’t you rather not toot the night away? Maybe have sex and sleep well instead?

   2. Heart palpitations. Even if you take your heart meds, why risk it? You literally have a family history of heart disease. YOU have a history of funky heart rhythms. A cardiologist has recommended you stop drinking! HELLO.

   3. Drinking tonight means you’ll want to drink tomorrow. That’s just how it works.

   4. Brain fog. It’s already an issue for you because of your sensitive gut and ADHD and period issues, do you really want to make it worse tomorrow?

   5. Disappointment. You said you wanted to stop, so drinking any amount is only gonna make you feel bad about yourself. Let’s not erode our self-esteem more than we already have.

Things that helped me actually quit:

1. When I had a craving, I waited 15 mins. I don’t know the science behind why this works but the way I actually don’t give a shit about having a drink after just waiting a few minutes is WILD.

2. Family members stopped drinking. My family lives thousands of miles away, yet for some reason the knowledge that my mom, dad, and sister were all ditching their Coronas helped me feel like I could do it, too.

3. Discovering more about my dad’s biological parents. He was adopted, and a few years ago New York State finally allowed adoptees to access their paperwork. We discovered many wonderful and heartbreaking things, but learning that my grandparents suffered from heart disease, breast cancer, and alcoholism shook me. If drinking was in my blood, so was its effects.

4. Getting older and the gradual worsening effects of alcohol on my mind, body, and psyche.

5. Getting diagnosed with ADHD and learning that drinking releases dopamine and can also ease understimulation. I started asking myself, Do I really want to drink right now or am I just understimulated and need a dopamine hit? This was very clarifying.

6. Talking about it in therapy. I’ve spent much of my adult life in therapy, yet I never talked about my attempts (and failures) to stop drinking, not once, until a few months ago. Saying the words, “I don’t think I can quit drinking without help,” helped my effort become more real to me.

7. The buzzed feeling stopped being euphoric. Honestly, if it hadn’t, idk if I would feel so confident in quitting. But somewhere along the way, that truly perfect, slightly fuzzy feeling was replaced with dread. As soon as I’d start to feel the effects of my first sips of alcohol, I started feeling actual fear. Fear that I’d wake up with heart palpitations in the middle of the night, fear that even if I didn’t wake up with heart palpitations I’d wake up with racing thoughts, fear that I’d ruin the next day when I’d planned on being productive, fear that I’d get breast cancer like my grandma and aunt, a-fib like my mom, or meet an early death like my grandpas.

8. Starting this newsletter. Who knew writing these chaotic little missives to you freaks would help me, but I think it really has.

9. Trying all the above to manage and slow my drinking. Seeing them listed above, not even in their entirety, makes me feel insane. But honestly, I think I needed to try a bunch of things and make progress and lose progress and find my way through this thing. I am someone who needs to learn things from the bottom-up, not the top-down, so I had to mad scientist that shit and test every option I could think of. It was not efficient by any means, but I had to figure it out for myself.

Things that made it really fucking hard to quit:

1. My negative side effects were highly inconsistent. Sometimes I had one drink, slept fine, felt fine the next day. Sometimes I had one drink, woke up with heart palpitations, felt like I had scrambled eggs for brains the next day.

2. I kept forgetting all my negative side effects. As soon as I’d consider having one measly drink, all my reasons not to drink would vanish from my brain. Poof.

3. It seemed like everything I was reading said that I just needed to love my life enough to not want to numb out from it. I’m sorry but I did not love my life any less than when I was drinking (at least I don’t think I did, idk it’s still early days). Either way, this was deeply unhelpful advice to me.

4. My favorite one-on-one hangs with friends included alcohol. It’s one thing not to drink at a bar or a party when there’s a bunch of people and you can just sip on your ginger ale and no one even notices or cares. It’s another when you’re an introvert like me and have two whole friends in your little city and your routine is going to a yoga class then grabbing happy hour once a week. That shit felt sacred. I did not want to taint it or change it.

5. Until I got a therapist who specialized in nervous system regulation and neurodivergence, I did not really understand how desperate for dopamine my ADHD made me, nor had I put it together that alcohol provided that dopamine. Every time I read about people “self-medicating” with alcohol, it was in terms of depression, anxiety, or grief. It didn’t make sense how much I was self-medicating until it was put in terms of dopamine.

70 days in, how do I feel?

I used to love drinking because it allowed my rigid lil neurodivergent brain to finally ease up. Like, ease up enough that even I felt more comfortable being around me. I loved drinking because it slowed my always-racing, always-overlapping thoughts and sent my words flying—finally, the freedom to just come out with it, I’d think, feeling like a real Philly bitch. I loved drinking because it was the only tool I had for celebrating, and I loved allowing myself little celebrations. I loved drinking because my family loved drinking, because our culture loved drinking, because I loved feeling that I was part of a whole.

Since I stopped, I’ve proceeded to ease up, speak my truth, celebrate, and connect with people just fine. I’ve managed to laze about in the desert over New Years Eve, attend a friend’s engagement party, go out for a night of 80s dancing, go on multiple date nights, have dinners with friends, and even venture home to Philly to throw my sister a baby shower, hang with my Delco aunties, and watch the Eagles win the Super Bowl with my mom… all without drinking.

Which is all to say that not drinking feels, well, really good. Actually, my primary feeling thus far is one of sheer relief. I feel utterly relieved, like physically and psychically lighter, that I don’t have to go to bed wondering about which symptoms may or may not appear in the scary hours of the night (you know the exact ones I mean) or over the course of the following day. I feel relieved every time I have a weird pain or palpitation or tummy ache, knowing that alcohol did not cause it. I feel relieved every time I spend time with friends and family and realize once again that I am just as mouthy, bitchy, and capable of connection as when I’m drinking, if not more so.

Every time I do something sober that I’d normally do with a drink in my hand, the more fine I feel. And the more fine I feel, the greater is my relief.

Honestly, quitting for me was not really about what drinking that one time would ruin or disturb or hurt. I’d ask, “What’s the harm?” while looking at the can in the fridge or sidling onto a bar stool. And the answer was always, “Not much! Cheers.”

I quit because of what drinking opened the door for. Inevitably, one drink always opened the door to more drinking. Nothing else came through that fucking door. Not the ease, not the freedom, not the celebrating, not the connection, not the love. Just more drinking.

That is the only promise alcohol ever kept: if I drank, I would keep drinking. So I closed the door. It turned out that everything else I craved was already in the room with me.

CRIERS TO THE COMMENTS 👇🏻

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