Common realizations when you're quitting drinking

People are no doubt well aware of the possibility of withdrawal symptoms when they quit drinking. It’s a concept that’s out there in popular culture (Sterling Archer of the hit cartoon Archer constantly jokes about how quitting drinking would LITERALLY kill him, for example - and he’s not wrong, given his drinking level on the show) and people know enough to be careful when they’re stopping drinking cold turkey.

But what you may be less prepared for are some of the more mundane but ultimately longer-lasting and therefore more threatening challenges associated with quitting drinking.

Here are just a few we’ve seen in our experience, and our friends’ and members’ experiences:

  1. You have way too much time on your hands. What is this time? This is the time you used to spend passed out on the couch from too many mimosas. This is the time you used to spend at parties with people you didn’t like all that much, getting wasted. This is the time you used to spend recovering from brutal hangovers the morning after a big night. That’s why one of the most important things to do early on is identify other ways to spend your time.

  2. Alternative addictions pop up to take alcohol’s place. When we first quit drinking, I found myself suddenly spending 2x the norm on online shopping. My need for dresses hadn’t risen, but I was filling the hole left by alcohol with something else that gave me that rush of dopamine to the brain. Others find themselves eating more, or eating worse food, to try to compensate for the loss of something that gives pleasure. It is important to seek out other rewards, but important to make sure they are things that are good for you (your health, your bank account, etc.) long term. Try exercise, for example!

  3. You feel emotional, and it’s not just mourning the loss of booze. Guess what? Alcohol is a great way to avoid feelings. It delivers a dullness and a light euphoria for a short amount of time that makes it a common form of self-medication for anxiety. But when alcohol is no longer around, you are confronting hard days, bad weather, mean people, career frustrations, money problems, and more without that boozy shield. It’s hard. It sucks. And it is also part of life. Building up your skills to confront problems without drinking is one of the most important things you can do when quitting

These are just a few of the patterns we’ve seen. Please feel free to leave a comment if you’ve seen others.

As always, if you are considering quitting or reducing drinking, please give Drinker’s Helper a shot! We’re designed to help people in this situation in a variety of ways (a support group, motivational exercises and more!) and we hope we can help you.

How people quit or reduce drinking: Setting goals

We’ve been around for a little while now, and we wanted to start sharing some of what we’re learning from our community of members with you. Of course, we won’t share anything specific to any person or small group - just overall averages and percentages. But we think even this high-level info can be helpful to get a sense for what people do when they set out to quit or cut back on drinking.

Let’s start with setting goals. What does that look like?

Here are just a few things we’ve learned about the goals people set in Drinker’s Helper:

  1. People seek help with just cutting back on drinking, not just staying sober. Only 25% of those using Drinker’s Helper have set weekly drinking goals of 0. It’s often overlooked that people who are cutting back on drinking (not just those who are quitting) still want encouragement, advice, and support. It’s tougher than you might think!

  2. People will generally set a reasonable drinking limit, if you advise them as to what that is. We’ve seen less than 5% of our members set daily drinking limits higher than those recommended by the NIAA, and less than 6% set higher weekly drinking limits. It’s encouraging that given the right information, people will make good choices!

  3. People like to start out with a pledge. Fully half of our members set a pledge on their first day using the app. A pledge is a promise to stay sober for a certain number of days. Making a formal pledge can help to strengthen commitment to change, and staying sober can help a person see what life without alcohol is like, and understand their own level of addiction to it.

  4. People are generally able to stick with their goals. We were delighted to find that 78% of our members who checked in were within their drinking limits. Obviously, for those who don’t check in, we have no way of knowing how they’re doing. But it’s encouraging to see that something - the tracking, the goal-setting, the group, the commitment - appears to be working for them.

We’ll keep coming back to you with more insight on what we’re learning in the Drinker’s Helper app. For now, if you are interested but haven’t explored the app yet, please do check it out! We help people quit or cut back on drinking with a combination of drink and urge tracking, insights, a personalized support group, and our library of exercises.


Quitting drinking without AA

A lot of people wonder if it’s possible to quit drinking without Alcoholics Anonymous, the organization that is the leading provider of services to help people quit or cut back on drinking.

Surveys have found that about 75% of those who’ve recovered from drinking problems did so without the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Many people, in fact, recover without any formal help at all. In some cases, people believe there isn’t a good program for them, because all they know about is Alcoholics Anonymous (which, per previous posts, isn’t always suitable for everyone) or a formal rehabilitation program (which can be quite expensive, out of the reach of many people who need help).

If you’re not going to get formal treatment or go to Alcoholics Anonymous (or to a similar alternative group - see previous posts on this topic), you should seek out out a few things those programs typically provide that can make it easier to quit drinking.

  1. A strong support system: All these existing institutions that help people quit drinking provide a community that allows people to see that they’re not alone in battling addiction to alcohol. It can be encouraging to know that others believe in you and support you in achieving your goals. You can get this from a partner, from family, or from friends.

  2. Accountability: When you turn up to a regular meeting, expected to account for your behavior over the past week or month, you feel a sense of responsibility to stick to your goals. You can get this on your own by really tracking your drinking, so you can see progress over time; and rewarding yourself when you do well. You can even rope in friends to help keep you accountable.

  3. A wake up call: If you’ve firmly decided to quit drinking (or get back down to moderation limits), then great. If not, AA and rehab can provide a helpful push to make sure you’re committed to making changes. Seeing others struggle with more serious problems can provide helpful motivation. If you’re going to quit drinking on your own, it can help to do your research on the health consequences of long-term heavy drinking. Scare yourself with the possibilities, so that they don’t become realities.

  4. Strategies to deal with urges: Each of the programs provides attendees with tips and tactics to figure out how to deal with the stresses of life without alcohol. If you’re going to quit drinking on your own, without AA or rehab, you need to develop your own strategies. Read books about how others have quit. Write down what works for you. Stay away from your worst triggers, and make plans to deal with others

We hope you are successful in your journey to quit or cut back on drinking, and if you want some lighter-weight help, we hope you’ll consider using Drinker’s Helper, our app which we believe provides all of the above in your pocket.

Apps to help people quit drinking

While we of course hope that you use and love Drinker’s Helper, we also want to be sure you have all the tools at your disposal to quit or cut back on drinking. Many of our members use multiple apps, and we want to let you know about some of ones we’ve heard work well.

The benefit of using an app (or more than one app!)

Here are some of the top rated apps that can help you quit or cut back on drinking:

  1. Sober Grid (rated 4.9 stars): This app is great for finding people near you who are also trying to go sober, and getting encouragement from the community. It also helps you track your progress and feel a sense of accomplishment by hitting particular milestones.

  2. I am Sober (rated 4.8 stars): The core of this app is a sobriety counter that helps you track how long you’ve been sober and celebrates successful attainment of sobriety milestones. People also seem to love the motivational quotes, and the ability to make daily personal pledges to strengthen their commitment to sobriety.

  3. Nomo (rated 4.8 stars): Although it also has a simple sobriety clock, this is one of the most feature-complete apps in terms of offering many different tools to quit or cut back on drinking. They offer games to distract yourself instead of drinking, a journal, community encouragement, milestone celebrations, the ability to find accountability partners and talk to them, and more.

We encourage you to explore the apps that are out there and find what works for you. There are quite a few apps that are designed to help people quit or cut back on drinking. You can see more profiled here on Healthline).

Our app, Drinker’s Helper (rated 4.5 stars), combines three important pieces of the process: support groups, tracking and insights, and motivational exercises.

We have our own unique take on all three. For the support groups, we think it’s important that you talk to people similar to you, so we match you with others who have similar past drinking habits.

For the tracking and insights, we think it’s important not just to track drinking, but also to track urges to drink and the circumstances behind each. That helps you get an idea of what drives you to drink, so you can more effectively fight our urges.

Finally, for the exercises, we drew from two evidence-based therapies: cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy.

We believe that using the app, you can get valuable support to quit or cut back on drinking. Join today!

Moderation programs

It’s not as common to hear about people working to moderate their drinking (vs. quit drinking entirely), as many of the more prominent programs that help problem drinkers focus on total abstinence from alcohol.

However, cutting back on drinking is a much more palatable goal for many people, and some may avoid seeking help until it’s too late because they don’t want to go fully sober.

In addition, moderation programs can be especially helpful for people who have not yet developed a dependence on alcohol, but who do drink in a risky manner. There is strong and mounting evidence of their long-term effectiveness (see here for just a few relevant studies).

Even for those who intend to go 100% sober in the future, moderation can be a helpful stepping stone, building the self-confidence and understanding necessary to make more difficult habit changes.

So it might be worth knowing how to pursue a goal of moderate drinking. Let’s look into some options!

There are two well-known formal programs that do a great job helping people stick to moderation goals:

  1. Moderation Management: We especially love this program because its founder focused heavily on cognitive behavioral therapy in developing their strategies to help people stick to moderation goals. There are online forums as well as in person meetings, online drink tracking, and resources in the form of handbooks to help you quit or cut back.

  2. ModerateDrinking.com: This online, self-directed web app program helps people stick to moderate drinking goals, and has been proven effective in a randomized clinical trial funded by NIH/NIAAA.

Both Moderation Management and Moderate Drinking are included on the SAMHSA National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP), which means they have been shown to be effective for some people to quit or cut back on drinking.

You can use either of these programs in conjunction with Drinker’s Helper, and many of our members use multiple approaches at once to have the best chance of success.

If you’re looking to cut back on drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an iOS app that provides an anonymous support group of people with similar drinking histories for encouragement and advice, a drink tracker for insight into the triggers that make you want to drink and the reasons you want to change, and a library of over 100 short motivational exercises to help you stick with your moderation or sobriety goals. You can try it out for free for a week before joining.

Alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous

When people decide to quit drinking, there’s usually one answer - from friends, family, employers, or counselors: go to Alcoholics Anonymous.

It’s the largest, oldest, and best-known program that helps people fight drinking problems. However, it has some features that might make people hesitate to join or stick with it, and so we’ve compiled a list of alternatives to AA that people can consider, and why they might be attractive.

To be clear, we consider Drinker’s Helper (our app which provides a personalized support group in your pocket, helps with drink and urge tracking, provides insights on your progress over time, and provides motivational exercises) to be a complement to any of these programs, rather than a substitute. Many of our members use multiple approaches as they attempt to quit or cut back on drinking.

First, why might people find AA not to their liking? Here are some of the most common reasons:

  1. It has a religious component. Several of the twelve steps rely on giving up control to a higher power. Non-religious people may find it difficult to start the twelve steps if they don’t believe in a higher power of any kind.

  2. It is perceived to be for people with very serious alcohol problems, who have let their entire lives fall apart due to alcohol. People with milder issues, who still have their jobs and their family life, may be turned off by socializing with people in very different circumstances.

  3. It has a heavy focus on the past. You make amends for past wrongs. You make a real inventory of who you are as a person. This may turn off people who are more action-oriented or who want to stay positive by focusing on the changes they’re making.

  4. It requires a person to admit that they are powerless over their addiction. While it can help some people to realize how out of control their drinking has become, some people (who are more individual responsibility oriented) might be turned off by the idea that they can’t help themselves. At Drinker’s Helper, we certainly believe that a person can do quite a bit to help themselves get free of addiction to alcohol.

Here are some alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous that also offer in person anonymous support groups dedicated to quitting drinking that we think can be very helpful to people:

  1. Women for Sobriety: This one is obviously for women only, but the differences don’t stop there. The other two biggest differences with Alcoholics Anonymous are: 1) They focus on the future, not the past, which can be empowering and 2) rather than admitting powerlessness, they seek to make their members feel empowered.

  2. Smart Recovery: We particularly love this option because it uses so much of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the two therapies we drew from in creating Drinker’s Helper. It heavily emphasizes developing your skills and strategies to deal with urges to drink.

  3. Secular Organizations for Sobriety: As the name suggests, this organization is not religious. They also heavily emphasize helping yourself through addiction, and sharing stories of how you have managed to stay sober to help others by sharing useful tactics.

  4. LifeRing Secular Recovery: This is a very similar group to SOS that heavily emphasizes building up your mental skills to counteract urges to drink.

We hope you find these suggestions helpful, and if you want additional help on top of what these groups can provide in person at set times, we hope you’ll give the Drinker’s Helper app a try! We provide a personalized support group in your pocket, plus over 75 exercises you can do to motivate yourself to keep going with your goal of quitting or cutting back on drinking.

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A bottle of wine costs $3,150?

That’s the startling conclusion of a new study written up in the Mirror here.

Of course, that won’t be the sticker price. In general, a respectable bottle of wine costs about the following by country:

  • 15 dollars in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (in their respective dollars)

  • 7 pounds in the United Kingdom

  • 12 dollars in the United States

But the study found that the following additional hidden costs of drinking alcohol were as follows:

  1. Memory loss and attention problems (reduced focus, increased reaction time)

  2. Insomnia

  3. Employability (because of the first two, your ability to get a job, or to do well at a job, can be impaired - research has found that memory loss and attention issues in particular persist well into the day after you drink)

  4. Increased risk of depression

  5. increased risk of physical violence

These add up over time, making the bottle of wine a good deal more expensive than list price.

If you’re ready to quit or cut back on drinking, try the Drinker’s Helper app!

How to make popular drinks without alcohol

One of the biggest challenges with quitting or cutting back on drinking is figuring out what to drink when you do want to celebrate or feel special (see previous posts on this topic).

If you’re more into strong beverages like martinis, you’ll have a bit more trouble, but there are a lot of substitutes for sweeter, lighter drinks.

We’ve taken a look at a few popular drinks and figured out the tricks for making something like them without alcohol. Enjoy!:

  1. Daiquiri: These can be paid with fruit (strawberry, mango), sugar, and lime juice, but the missing ingredient is rum, of course. The trick here is rum extract. It tastes like rum but comes in low- and no-alcohol forms.

  2. Margarita: These are similar to the daiquiris (requiring fruit, ice, sugar, and lime juice), but the missing ingredient is tequila. Most recipes also use orange juice, and if you really want the tequila taste, you can try a non-alcoholic tequila extract (usually used for baking).

  3. Bellini/mimosa: The key here is to replace the champagne with something else sparkling like ginger ale. Otherwise, you need some sugar, lemon juice, and fruit juice (cranberry, peach, strawberry, ).

  4. Aperol Spritz: The key with an aperol spritz is non-alcoholic bitters like SanBitters. You can add lemonade and/or soda to add the familiar fizzy, citrusy effect.

  5. Sangria: Non-alcoholic sangria can have lots of the same flavors. Beside fresh fruit, adding carbonated water and/or spices like cinnamon can help. But the key is what fruit juices to use. Multiple recipes recommend apple juice or apple cider, orange juice, lemon juice, and grape juice.

We hope this is helpful as you figure out your plan to quit or cut back on drinking, and encourage you to explore the Drinker’s Helper app to help along the way.

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Can moderation work?

There is a widely held belief, in the US especially, that if you have a drinking problem (a ‘real ‘drinking problem, or alcohol abuse disorder) that your only option to get better is to stop drinking alcohol entirely. This is partly because of the prevalence of Alcoholics Anonymous as the only brand name treatment for alcohol abuse disorder - they advocate for abstinence and maintain it is the only possible course of action to resolve a drinking problem.

This belief in the US was strengthened by the death of the founder of Moderation Management, a popular online moderation program, in a drunk driving accident (however, it should be noted that said founder had actually returned to Alcoholics Anonymous and was trying to quit entirely at that point).

While there are benefits to quitting drinking (see our previous post on this topic), there is strong evidence that moderation can work well as a goal, and actually has some additional side benefits.

As for the proof that moderation can work, here are just a few examples of studies showing that programs designed to reduce drinking rather than eliminate drinking can work:

  1. One University of New Mexico study followed people 3 to 8 years after completing moderation-focused goal-setting and self-monitoring therapy for problem drinking, and found 65% were doing better than they were originally. It suggested moderation could work for all but the most heavily addicted to alcohol.

  2. A University of Texas study followed up with people a year after an 8-week drinking reduction program, and found they had reduced their drinking by 64%, and that those who still used the strategies from the program were most likely to be controlling their drinking.

  3. Two surveys published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that of people who resolved their drinking problems on their own, without treatment, 40-60% were successfully moderating their drinking.

Now, for the side benefits:

  1. Better awareness of your problem: If you start moderating your drinking (and tracking it, using an app like Drinker’s Helper), you become more aware of how much you’ve been drinking and how strong your desire to keep going after 1 or 2 drinks is. If you simply quit, you miss the booze, but it’s easier to convince yourself that you might not have had a problem in the first place.

  2. More people getting help. More people are comfortable with the idea of moderating their drinking than quitting entirely (in fact, one study found that when people are given the option, 80% choose moderation over abstinence). If you try to ask for a change as significant as quitting entirely, you may just get a no. But once someone is moderating, it is much easier to then contemplate taking that further step.

The most interesting part is that aside from having a LOWER level of dependence on alcohol, one of the biggest contributing factors to success with moderation is BELIEF that you can do it.

So go forth and do it! We believe you can, and we can help, with Drinker’s Helper.

Signs you may have a drinking problem

One of the most common questions we see people worrying about it “am I an alcoholic?” We’ve written previously (search through our past blog posts) about the standard tests one can take to show that you have a drinking problem. They diagnose alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence (used to be considered two things; now it’s just considered one: “alcohol abuse disorder” in varying degrees).

But what are the less scientific, higher level signs that you can look for as someone who’s concerned about your own drinking?

Here are some of the key signs that you might have a drinking problem, alcohol abuse disorder, or alcoholism:

  1. You rely on booze for _____. When you believe drinking is doing something for you, and even worse, when you think drinking alcohol is the ONLY way to get that thing, it becomes very difficult to stop drinking alcohol. You are in a place where you depend on booze, which you definitely don’t need, for something else that you actually do need, like happiness, relaxation, stress relief, fun, etc.

  2. You don’t typically drink just 1-3 drinks in a night: you are in it to get hammered. If you are binge drinking on the regular, you are much more likely to develop an addiction. Also, drinking that much suggests that you have developed a taste for being drunk, not just for being tipsy. That means it’ll be that much harder for you to moderate your drinking, rather than just quit.

  3. Your friends have a nickname for drunk you. This is highly correlated to the previous sign, but a little harder to fudge. If your friends say they love “Drunk Leslie,” you might have a drinking problem. Why? Because that means you are drunk enough, often enough, that it was worth putting a label on it. That means those same people have seen you drunk FREQUENTLY. That’s not normal.

  4. You get worried you may not have enough booze. This is a thought pattern that is hard to conceive of if you don’t have a problem, but very common if you do. When you go to dinner parties, or actual parties, do you worry that you won’t have enough to drink? Do you bring more booze than is required, just in case? If so, you are in a state where you feel as though you need alcohol, or else the evening won’t be worth your while, and you might not be able to enjoy it. That’s not right. You’re supposed to be able to enjoy evenings with friends completely sober. After all, they’re your friends, right?

  5. The thought of life without drinking is horrifying. This is highly correlated to the previous one. If someone suggests quitting drinking, and the thought is enough to make you cry (or want to), then alcohol has become too important in your life. After all, would you feel the same way about having to quit eating sugary foods? Maybe you’d feel sad - but not as though your life was over. It’s time to quit - at least temporarily - and see if your fears are founded or not (hint: they’re not).

If you’re ready to quit or cut back on drinking, download the new version of Drinker’s Helper today!

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Introducing an all-new Drinker's Helper!

Hi all,

We are very proud and excited to bring you v3 of Drinker’s Helper. We believe we’ve made the app not only better, but also much easier to use. Let’s see how:

To begin with, we are making tracking easier. We know many people simply want to set a goal and track their drinking against that goal. Tracking drinks is now quick and easy, entirely free for anyone using Drinker’s Helper. Try it out today!

For our members, things get even better with new visual insights. Members can now more easily get a sense of the circumstances of their drinking as well as understand how it is changing with time. It’s now much easier to see how you’re doing!

We are also introducing a wealth of new content. Over 75 exercises are now available to members in our library, and you can save your favorites to your toolbox for easy access. These exercises cover tips to deal with urges to drink, among other things.

To try out Drinker’s Helper, find us on the App Store today!

Best,
The Drinker’s Helper Team

PS. If you have suggestions for our next version, please contact us.

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How medicine can help

No pill does any good if you decide you want to drink. After all, you can just stop taking it at any time.

But if you are struggling to quit drinking and trying everything you can, medication for alcoholism can help make it easier to quit in a few distinct ways:

  1. Naltrexone works in a fascinating way, by making alcohol produce no pleasure for you. That giddy feeling you typically get either while drinking or in anticipation of drinking is gone. New research confirms that it appears to have no serious negative side effects.

  2. Disulfram makes you feel nauseous if you drink (not just if you drink too much). It can be unpleasant, but that’s kind of the point.

  3. Acamprosate makes withdrawal less unpleasant, reducing the anxiety, insomnia and depression often associated with quitting drinking. If you’ve been drinking heavily for a long time, you shouldn’t stop drinking without consulting a doctor about the potential health risks, which can include seizures and even death.

If you’re cutting back or quitting drinking, we’d love to help you! Try out Drinker’s Helper by downloading it here.

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A new surprising risk factor for drinking problems

We all have our own ideas as to what might make some people more likely to develop an alcohol addiction.

Some of it is genetic, for sure; some of it may be drinking because of anxiety or boredom that becomes overwhelming.

But one study found that, surprisingly, perfectionism is a character trait that is correlated with drinking problems.

Here’s the full story, but the TL;DR is:

  • When you’re a perfectionist, you want to be SEEN as perfect, so sometimes, you drink to cover up imperfections

  • When you’re a perfectionist, you want to BE perfect, so sometimes, you drink to cope with having made mistakes any normal person would make

Read up, and if you’re interested in quitting or cutting back on drinking, download the app here!

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New research on alcohol and the heart

Many studies purport to show some kind of health benefit from drinking (usually red wine) in small amounts. These studies often fail to account for differences in income that might actually cause the health benefits (moderate drinkers may be better off than those who don’t drink).

However, more and more studies are showing that drinking generally causes harm. Many delicious things do (bacon, sugary foods, you name it), but it’s good to know what kind of harm alcohol can cause, even in (relatively) moderate amounts.

See here for the details, but the TL; DR is:

  1. Alcohol disrupts electrical signals in your heart

  2. It does so by causing scarring

  3. The signal disruption means that it can cause an irregular heartbeat

  4. An irregular heartbeat raises the risk of heart attack or stroke

If you’re thinking of quitting or cutting back, let us help you! Download Drinker’s Helper here.

What happens when you tell people you've quit drinking

One of the things that makes it so hard to contemplate quitting drinking for good is how heavily socializing revolves around drinking. It’s not just parties; it’s wine tasting as an activity; it’s also brunch, game night, tailgating and networking events, like art gallery openings or work happy hours.

But it’s also hard to tell people you’re quitting (or deciding not to drink at a given event), because people make uncomfortable assumptions.

Here are some typical reactions you can expect when you tell people you’ve quit drinking, and a quick recommendation for how to respond to them:

  1. “Why? You don’t have a problem…”": Friends who say this may be coming from a supportive place, but it’s one of the most dangerous responses, because it can make you question your decision. They may be trying to avoid hurting or insulting you. To respond to them, you need to change the way they think about your choice. Try something like “This isn’t about having a problem. This is about what I want to do. I feel better when I don’t drink.”

  2. “Oh, yeah. You did seem to drink a lot.”: People who say this may be worried about their own drinking, and trying to draw a line that separates their behavior from yours. Try to focus the conversion on the benefits of cutting back on drinking, rather than on the downsides of drinking. It’s easier for them to acknowledge that quitting drinking can lead to weight loss, or fewer awful hangovers, than it is for them to contemplate too hard the idea that drinking too much causes serious problems.

  3. “Have you tried just cutting back?”: If you’re quitting and not just moderating, you may get this one. Friends who say this are trying to avoid mentally bucketing you along with ‘alcoholics’ who ‘have’ to quit. The typical mental image of alcoholics is a tragic one - people who’ve lost their livelihoods or families over devotion to alcohol. You may or may not be in such a dire situation, but even if you’re not, there are good reasons to just quit. Try explaining the problems you had with moderation, like finding it hard to stop after one or two drinks, or finding you ended up craving the few drinks you allowed yourself.

The core of how to respond to these questions is clarifying that what you’re doing is your choice, made by considering the costs and benefits, rather than being something you have to do, or something you don’t want to do.

If you' are choosing to quit drinking (or just cut back!), we can help! Download Drinker’s Helper here.

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What is alcohol withdrawal, and why does it happen?

Alcohol withdrawal is a set of symptoms, ranging in severity, that happen when you quit or cut back significantly on drinking.

Withdrawal happens, of all things, because your body is fighting back against the calming effects of alcohol. As you probably know, alcohol is a depressant. When your body fights back, trying to maintain your emotional equilibrium, it therefore makes you anxious and excited to counteract the depressant.

It doesn’t have to be the case that you’re severely dependent on alcohol and quit in order to experience withdrawal - you could be drinking a lot and then drinking less, and you still might get the milder end of the symptoms. However, if you are severely dependent on alcohol and want to quit, you should definitely speak to a doctor before doing so, as that end of the withdrawal spectrum can be so severe it’s fatal.

That’s part of how alcohol gets us addicted - it appears to help deal with anxiety because of its calming effects, and then withdrawal causes more anxiety, and you have to drink to treat symptoms caused by drinking in the first place.

The milder symptoms include:

  • Physical: shakiness, nausea, headache, insomnia, dehydration

  • Emotional: anxiety, irritability

The more severe symptoms (also known as delirium tremens) include:

  • Physical: hallucinations (seeing, hearing or feeling things that aren’t there), seizures, high blood pressure, fever

  • Emotional: confusion, agitation

The symptoms start about 6 hours to a few days after you quit or cut back, and can last for a few days. If you see a doctor, they can help by prescribing medication to deal with the symptoms.

If you decide to quit or cut back on drinking, in addition to seeing a doctor in case of severe withdrawal symptoms, try Drinker’s Helper, our app that helps people quit or cut back on drinking.

What is binge drinking, and why shouldn't I do it?

Continuing in our series of important definitions (see previous post about what a drink is), this post explores what binge drinking is.

For a binge drinking definition, we turned to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (also supported by the CDC and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)).

Binge drinking is a much lower level than what you might think is commonly considered heavy drinking - you might not even think you’re drinking too much. Binge drinking is defined as any drinking that brings your B.A.C. to above the US national legal driving limit of .08. That’s only about 4-5 drinks in a 2-hour period. Any night you set out to get drunk, you’re probably binge drinking.

The effects of binge drinking are much worse than drinking in moderation - in fact, of all the costs to society caused by alcohol, binge drinking causes fully 77% of them. Often, people who don’t think they have a problem with alcohol will go days without drinking, but then binge on the weekends, thinking this means they’re in the clear.

Here are some of the most common binge drinking effects:

  1. Poor decision-making: Because binge drinking makes you drunk, rather than slightly tipsy, it leads to poorer decisions. If those decisions are related to sex, they can cause sexually transmitted diseases or unintended pregnancies. If those decisions are related to acting on anger, they can lead to violence.

  2. Accidents: Again, because binge drinking makes you drunk, rather than slightly tipsy, it leads to extreme physical impairment. If you’re driving, of course, this leads to car accidents, but it can also lead to other types of accidents like falls.

  3. Chronic disease: This is the scarier part, especially for those that don’t generally think they have a drinking problem. Binge drinking (over time) can actually lead to chronic diseases like cancers of several kinds, heart or liver disease, high blood pressure or stroke, even if the person doesn’t have an alcohol dependence.

If you’re convinced to quit or cut back, try setting a goal and tracking your drinking in Drinker’s Helper. Download it here today!

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How can I tell if I might be an alcoholic?

First off, we don’t love the term ‘alcoholic,’ both because it has so many negative connotations from popular culture and because it suggests that alcohol dependence is a disease you have or don’t have, rather than a progressive addiction that develops over time in anyone who drinks above a certain level.

With that out of the way, we wondered a few times in life whether we might have a drinking problem, and we weren’t sure what to look for in terms of signs or symptoms of alcoholism.

Based on scanning several popular tests used for diagnosing alcoholism (see our previous post on this topic, called ‘Am I an alcoholic?’, for a list), these are the simplified things to look for that might indicate a drinking problem severe enough that you ought to do something about it.

Signs or symptoms of alcohol abuse or dependence:

  1. You find it difficult to stop after one or two drinks. This one is perhaps the easiest to spot. Do you often have drinking nights where you have one or two glasses of wine - or does it become the bottle pretty much every time? Do you drink for that initial feeling of tipsy-ness, or drink to get drunk? (The latter isn’t good).

  2. Your tolerance has gone up - significantly. Your tolerance for alcohol is always going up, but if you notice that it takes twice as many drinks to feel as good, that’s not a good sign.

  3. You’ve tried to quit and failed. We experienced this one ourselves. Not failing to quit, exactly, but by attempting to quit, we realized how much we WANTED alcohol. We didn’t think we were addicted until we stopped.

  4. You keep drinking even though it’s causing harm to your career, your personal life, your emotional health or your physical health. This can be a tricky one. A lot of high-functioning alcoholics are perfectly capable of holding down a good job and having a respectable family/social life. But this can be true even if you just notice that alcohol causes you to embarrass yourself, or get in dumb arguments, and yet you keep it up.

  5. Friends or family have suggested you cut down. Again, this is a tough one, because in certain settings, like college or business school, it’s unlikely anyone’s going to call you out on your drinking. But if someone has expressed concern, you should take it seriously, because they may have felt concerned for a while and only just worked up the courage to say something.

  6. You’ve experienced withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal makes a person very anxious, typically, as your body fights off the calming effects of alcohol. You get nauseous and sweaty, with your heart racing, and find it tough to sleep. Sometimes people don’t even recognize this as withdrawal, because they’re expecting seizures, or seeing things that aren’t there, but withdrawal can also show itself as just very strong anxiety.

If you’re noticing some of these symptoms, and you want to make a change, download Drinker’s Helper today! It’s our app that helps people quit or cut back on drinking with a combination of therapeutic exercises, an anonymous, personalized support group, and tracking of your drinking, with insights on what makes you want to drink.

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Am I an alcoholic?

Or as some might ask the question, “How do I know if I have a drinking problem?”

You may be surprised to learn there isn’t one universal definition of what is considered an alcoholic. Most of the definitions revolve around being someone who is not in control of their drinking - who continues to drink even though it is doing them obvious harm.

For reasons we share in depth in the Drinker’s Helper skill library (download the app today!), we do not subscribe to the idea that some people are alcoholics and some aren’t - that there are some people who just will never become addicted to alcohol because of their genetic makeup. It’s a very addictive drug. It works on pretty much everyone. But that’s beside the point.

While there’s no one universal ‘am I an alcoholic quiz,’ there are a variety of tests out there that can help you decide if you want to change your drinking.

  1. You can ask yourself these 11 questions to get a sense of whether you might have alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence. These diagnostic questions from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism are intended for use by a doctor and come with instructions for what a doctor would say to a patient who responded in certain ways.

  2. The WHO (World Health Organization) created the AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test ). This 10-question test is probably the most widely used screening test. It can be taken online right here.

  3. The alcohol dependence scale is another widely used, valid, reliable test.

  4. Finally, the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition) is the standard from the American Psychiatric Association for diagnosing alcohol abuse disorder. This article in Psychology Today takes you through the steps and tells you how to score the test.

If you’re wondering if you might have a problematic dependence on alcohol, take one or all of the above and consult your doctor! If you want help to deal with quitting or cutting back, look no further than the Drinker’s Helper app, available on the app store.

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What is a "drink"?

When figuring out if you’re drinking too much, you might look up something like “how many drinks is too many?”, or “how many drinks per week to stay healthy?”

When you do so, you’re likely to realize that many definitions rely on a certain number of drinks. But what is a drink? After all, the gigantic bachelorette party jug full of strawberry daiquiri certainly seems to get you more drunk than the tame glass of wine at home.

So: what is a drink, and how many is too many? The guidelines for moderate or healthy drinking vary by country, it turns out. We’ve sampled just a few in our guide here:

US: (Source: NIAA)

  • What is a drink? A drink is a 5oz glass of wine, a 12-oz glass of beer, or 1 shot of liquor (so cocktails that are doubles count as doubles!). This is because all of those contain roughly 14g of alcohol based on typical % by volume (12%, 5%, and 40%, respectively).

  • What is healthy drinking? Healthy drinking (or low-risk drinking for developing alcohol use disorder) means:

    • For men: no more than 14 drinks per week or 4 per day

    • For women: no more than 7 drinks per week or 3 per day

Canada: Canada’s system is similar to that of the US, with distinct limits for men and women, but has higher weekly and lower daily limits. (Source: Canadian Center on Substance Abuse)

  • What is a drink? A drink is a 12oz glass of beer, a 5oz glass of wine, or a 1.5 oz shot. All of those contain roughly 14g of alcohol.

  • What is healthy drinking?

    • For men: no more than 15 drinks per week or 3 per day

    • For women: no more than 10 drinks per week or 2 per day

UK: The UK guidelines are stricter (actually some of the strictest on record), and don’t vary by gender. (Source: NHS)

  • What is a drink? The UK thinks of alcohol in terms of units, not drinks. A unit represents 8 grams of pure alcohol, so a lot less (about half the size, actually) than the US standard drink at 14g.

  • What is healthy drinking? Healthy drinking is no more than 14 units of alcohol a week. It’s a little harder to do the math, but that’s about 8 5oz glasses of wine, 12oz glasses of beer, or 1.5oz shots per week.

Australia: Australia splits the difference, with a UK-like non-gendered units-based system that is closer to the same definition of a ‘drink’ that Canada and the US use.

  • What is a drink? A drink is 10g of pure alcohol, lower than the US/Canadian definition. That means a 1.5oz shot is about 1.4 drinks, as is a 5oz glass of wine or 12oz glass of beer.

  • What is healthy drinking? The guidance is simplest of all - no more than 2 drinks a day, for anyone (which translates to no more than 14 per week). That’s about 10 5oz glasses of wine, 12oz glasses of beer, or 1.5oz shots per week.

There you have it. Somewhere between 8 and 15 drinks a week is considered low risk, depending on your gender, based on current guidance.

If you are looking to quit or cut back on drinking, you can set a limit and track your drinking against it in Drinker’s Helper. Check it out and download it here.

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