A Story Of A Successful Man that Quit Drinking

In August 2013 I woke up on a couch in Montreal in the middle of the night.

A dark room tilted and spun on an oblique axis. The hard futon, which I had stretched on earlier in the night, threatened to lay me in the abyss between its edge and the couch table. My mouth tasted foul.

The Universe punished me with a spear of pain from my neck to my right thigh, stiffened and immobilized this side of my body.

But the danger tore in my guts. So I clung to furniture and tried to navigate the unfamiliar apartment of my friend. My hands on the wall found a door knob and a light switch. Fluorescent light beating on my retina. Linoleum tile I blinked, peered around for the toilet. A rushing noise in my ears grew louder.

And then it was too late.

Discounting some poor decisions in high school, I’ve never been a heavy drinker. This day in Montreal was no exception, although it remains the one time I remember vomiting. It was the end of the summer break after my sophomore year of college. I visited a friend in the French-Canadian city, and we did the rounds of some local breweries. A sip here and there just started my alcohol intake faster than I had imagined.

For years this is my go-to “alcohol is freaking poison” anecdote. I bet most adult readers have a similar (or more): that time you’ve drunk far too much. These incidents can be funny, and hopefully they are rare enough to be no problem in your life. They teach us to drink in moderation. Your lesson is that a pair of glasses at a time is a responsible choice as long as you do not go overboard.

Years passed before I realized that binge drinking was not my real problem with alcohol. The real problem was the whole way it confused my body and my life while I was trying to be careful.

Asked how many alcoholic drinks they had consumed in the last week, the lower 60% of Americans reported an average of less than one. The lower 30% did not drink at all.

But the top 40% of Americans held up from two to many dozens of glasses in just one week. The top 10% average a whopping 73.85

For five years I drank about two or three beverages in a week – sometimes a little more, sometimes much less. That brought me close to the 60th percentile. In other words, I drank a bit more than average, but was good in the normal range.

Maybe once a week I would have a beer in the evening with my roommate after class or work. Another downed on a Tuesday bar-trivia night, and then maybe another when I went on a weekend.

With only one or two exceptions in half a decade, I never drank more than I intended or woke up. So I thought myself an easy, responsible drinker and never had any health or personal problems associated with the liquid drug

Now let me tell you what happened when I stopped drinking.

It happened by chance. I graduated from college and moved into an apartment of non drinkers, ran low on cash, and switched to ordering club sodas at bars and started dating with someone who did not drink at all. All the little clues that had caused me to drink drifted away, and months passed before I noticed it.

But in the meantime my life has improved. My chronic insomnia has been easier to manage. I had more energy, spent less time watching TV and more time reading, writing and exercising. When I went out (to the same bars and shows), I felt more present and took home better memories of the evenings. And while I sometimes craved beer or liquor, I never missed the experience of drinking.

In short, I became a healthier, happier person, without even noticing that I had given up something.

Now my body is neither a temple nor a controlled experiment. I can not prove that the abandonment of alcohol has changed my life, and I certainly do not know it will change that. But my experience pursues with the best available science when drinking, which tells us that even in small amounts of alcohol can make you less healthy and less happy.

Even if the liquor can knock you out, the alcohol consumption correlates strongly with a severe insomnia. And it can lower sleep quality even in healthy sleepers, which makes them tired during the day. Drinking is associated with a higher risk of weight gain and obesity, and it makes you likely to contract diseases like hypertension, oral cancer, pancreatitis, and liver cirrhosis. This is true if you are an alcoholic or an “easy drinker”. And alcohol does not just make you sick. It increases the risk of dying at an early stage.

There are some (often over-hyped) studies that suggest health benefits for small amounts of alcohol consumption. The most notable of these are a set of papers that suggest smaller cardiovascular benefits for very small amounts of alcohol, especially red wine. For the time being, let us put aside new research that has doubts about the conclusions of these studies. Instead, we will focus on this fact: Most regular drinkers exceed the small quantities that could offer advantages, and even researchers who are sympathetic to the idea write that we all need to cool it with the booze.

But maybe you’re a “live fast, dying young, enjoy it while you can?” You should know that also drinking light correlates with misfortune and life dissatisfaction in college students. “And over age groups, people tend to drink when We can try to shorten our path to happy life with liquor, but it will probably not work (except perhaps for those of us who are older women, but that is a topic for another day).

All these negative effects of our favorite toxin result in enormous, painful problems for individuals, families and society as a whole. These are problems that without them we would be better.

This is not to say that quitting is easy. I was not perfect to abstain from alcohol. After the cold turkey for the last eight months of 2015 I have a few drinks in 2016. And let me tell you: There’s nothing like peeling your chemical tolerances to show how nasty these drinks really are. I am a fairly healthy 180+ pound, 24-year-old. But also a small glass of Heineken calls you pieces of this night in Montreal: dizziness, headaches and a sleepless night.

Because alcohol is poison. And we should all stop bringing it into our bodies.

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