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So Daddy Drinks A Little. So What?
Q. "I'm an alcoholic. Help me feel comfortable with my alcohol intake. On average, I figure I consume about 25 units of alcohol per week. I can remember the last day I didn't have a drink. It was six months ago and I was on antibiotics…. Is it reasonable to keep drinking like this given that I'm productive and it makes me happy"?
A. ?
(Photo by Simon Pearson.)
Sign me up for the AAWL meeting.
I actually found myself quoting Balk's statistical research on what is considered a "heavy drinker" to a date this weekend. and yes, for a women, i could be considered one.
Well, we know this can't be Balk, because he'd never go on antibiotics.
See also, "makes me happy."
Pictured are this guy's two kids.
But not everyone who drinks a lot is an alcoholic.
So yes, if you're productive and happy but drink like a fish, you can probably keep doing just what you're doing.
I like you.
I agree. I like you too, City_Dater. I clicked over here to say the same thing. Drink on, fair friend.
Hooray! We can all keep drinking, as long as no one gets hurt!
@C_D: Precisely.
(Tangentially — I remember in some French class of yore translating an article about a treatment of alcoholics that was essentially a sommelier class. The idea was that rather than stopping drinking, they'd be better served by learning about what they were drinking, how to appreciate and talk about it.)
It hurts when I wake up in the morning, and when I randomly cry throughout the day, and when I have to go for more than an hour without a drink, but that still counts as "no one getting hurt" right? Right???
This is what I'm saying! "Alcoholic" is an ugly, ugly word. (She said, between sips of wine.)
(On the other hand, now that I've read this? "I drink basically every day. I always want a drink." I definitely drink every day. But I definitely don't "always" want a drink. I'm really hoping that "I always want a drink" was hyperbole.)
If you ask any self-respecting college kid, 25 units of alcohol per week is for pussies.
35 units of alcohol per week is when you enter the danger zone. Also, academic probation.
are we entering Tom Cruise's danger zone, or something else?
Residents of Knife Crime Island would have the same opinion.
I wish people would remember that there's a difference between being an alcoholic and being a drunk. Alcoholics are sooo depressing – drunks, though, are lotsa fun!
more fun! you go from being a drunk to being an alcoholic in one sitting, very often!
Atta girl!
Lemme guess, "My name is doubled 277 and I"m an alcoholic."?
I wish. wait, no I don't, AA meetings seem BORING. You know what would spice them up? yOu know…
Anyone who can count how many drinks he had in a week is just one shitty drunk, IMHO. Crap, I can't even remember how many I had last night.
Can I get a clarification? Is a unit more or less than a gallon?
I think a unit is equal to a fifth.
A unit is one serving. So this weenie is pounding back a fifth a week. Depending on how stiff his pour is that is 3 – 4 highballs, cans of beers or glasses of wine.
It depends on the country. They can't seem to agree on a definition of a unit, probably because they're too busy "researching".
In the UK a pint is roughly 2 units. A shot is 1.5 units.
So kitten_witawip is correct: this guy is a weenie. Drinking less than 2 pints of beer a day would not make you an alcoholic. He might be termed "dependent".
Drinking a scotch while brushing your teeth in the morning, however, should give one pause.
Reading the thoughtful posts below, I regret calling this dude a weenie. His consumption is at weenie levels. But his compulsion to drink is probably a serious problem.
I went and read the article, and I'm gonna say that anyone who wakes up and wants whiskey every day and counts their drinks religiously is one day going to wake up sick of having the coffee instead of the whiskey and bored with managing their intake. It's not the 25 drinks a week that make this guy an alcoholic, it's the fact that he's fighting the urge to have a drink all the time. I can say from experience that even if you manage to "fight the urge" for a really long time, which most people can't, it's no way to live. You're thinking about booze constantly, when you could be thinking about way awesomer things with all of that time.
This will probably be unpopular, but – No, it's a problem. You want to spend your life vaguely intoxicated? Super. Good for you, have fun (personally, that's my plan!) But you've got kids. Kids who will most likely get fucked over by your constant moderate drinking. Want to spend your life drunk? Cool, don't have kids. But you've already reproduced, so that ship has sailed. I'm not saying all parents need to be teetotalers, far from it, but constant parental intoxication is usually a good indicator that the kids will not be okay.
All of us who have contemplated selling our organs for money know that the liver regenerates. What is the tipping point from exercising our liver to overworking our liver? At which point is regeneration not a solution, and is it a continual process or do you have to cut a piece out?
If kids weren't a part of the OP, would the ask me crowd have been more supportive? Do I smell like a drunk? I mean, is that a thing for people who shower daily?
25 units is a weird way to put it – do they mean they're starting the day off with a drink, then staying tipsy-ish throughout? Are they drinking 3-4 beers a night? Or are they just binging over the weekend?
From what I understand, it's when and why they drink that matters, not how much they drink.
(Personally, I'm a fan of option #1 on Sundays, option #2 the rest of the time.)
Sometimes you have to disguise the pain, mental illness, etc to move forward with your career and family life. Gin saved my Dad's life. http://ow.ly/2nmk1
You are one fucked up in the head person to go to mental illness.
Then again, I don't expect many people who have been trained like little monkeys by their tv's and shittastic educational indoctrination system to understand the physiological aspects of the human body – which includes the brain.
Do you even understand the chemical/structural makeup of the brain and the interactions with something as simple as nutrition?
Naw, permanent deficiency is the default setting. No wonder so many kill themselves. All these "degreed" experts who ignore the fact that the brain is organic and subjected to the same cause/effect the liver or the kidneys are in terms of – fuck it. No comment could counteract 20 years of socialization/indoctrination in our "higher" education system.
you're saying you were home-schooled?
Jeff Barea emerged from the mind of God fully formed and educated.
"Do you even understand the chemical/structural makeup of the brain and the interactions with something as simple as nutrition?"
sure do. my statement was a satirical one. you got an itchy comment trigger finger, pal. you must have had a bad day! glad i could assist in your bowel-loosening!
off to my indoctrination camp….
When you have to walk back your own comment that probably means comment fail.
test
sibilant
"I'm an alcoholic."
If that first statement is true, the questioner is fucked. Alcoholism is a progressive illness as recognized by the AMA. Over time, the physical compulsion to continue drinking once that first drink has been consumed becomes stronger, while the will to resist picking up that initial drink in the first place becomes weaker. So, while this guy may be able to control and enjoy his drinking now, if he is an alcoholic in time he will be unable to. Wanting whiskey in the morning will become having whiskey in the morning, and so on.
That said, right now he's able to control his drinking. He may be a normal drinker or moderate daily drinker, or he may be a potential alcoholic. If it's not causing you (or the people around you) any problems, then by all means drink. But if you find that when you honestly want to, you cannot stop entirely or when you start you have little control over how much you drink, you're probably an alcoholic. And if that's the case, your drinking over time will always get worse, never better.
Yeah, alcoholism is fun for the whole family. It's great to have your Dad embarrass you in front of friends, work on home improvement projects that turn out looking like he was drunk at the time (he was), going to look for him and finding him passed out in his car in broad daylight in front of a bar, or having him pull over on the highway with his car full of little kids in the back waiting for him to sleep it off. On the side of the highway. For several hours. Three of those kids grew up to be alcoholics, too. The rest did not but some of the rest married alcoholics so they could find their spouse passed out in their car in front of the house, having pissed all over their clothes. Try dragging *that* into the house by yourself- it build your upper body strength!
Or so I've heard.
Sis?
Bro?
I am a recovering alcoholic who (yes) goes to AA. During my days drinking, I would do several things to convince myself more than anyone else that my drinking had not yet rose to the level I THOUGHT was alcoholically. One was to continuously cap that one drink so that it never ended and I fell asleep with it still at least half full. Secondly, I would say I had "a few" drinks. Well, if you are an alcoholic you know what a few drinks means. I NEVER drank only 2 drinks unless there was either NO MORE to drink, or I was too ashamed to get more in the crowd I was with. In that case-I left. I also knew I was an alcoholic long before I chose to stop drinking. Hopefully, you are that lucky.
*hugs* Good luck to you.
Another symptom of my denial/alcoholism before I shut up. I always surrounded myself with people who drank like me, or worse.
Well, yeah I think that's pretty common.
The liver is evil; it must be punished.
i thought a lot about the OP and the comments left here over the last 2 weeks. thanks to all.
i too drank a little almost every day over the last year and it was bothering me. I wasn't drunk all the time, usually once a week, but I'd still have a beer or two every evening after work (I work at home and it demarcated the day, helped me relax etc.). there are 3 things I want to say to the OP, actually there are four, the first is thanks for making me think.
2. the comments about your kids needing you to be sober as they get older so you can ship them around is a good and practical one.
3. you are not an alcoholic, you just have a very high potential to be one, probably like me. your life hasn't come apart at the seams, so so far so good. if something really shit happens, you will lean on drink and lean hard. there's already something making you want to drink, something deep you need to deal with. unfortunately the only way to deal with this, whatever it is, it to deal with it. sounds silly but it is. find way, talk to those you love about it, and deal with it. you will come through the other side. we all have one ot two of these things we carry until we deal with them, that's life.
3. it's not all bad news. i did a kidney detox this week as i just felt shit. from stress and not enough exercise and a few beers a day for a year, and my doctor recommended it. after 3 or 4 days of eating rabbit food, and drinking water like it was going out of style I felt much better. but get this – for the last 4 days I didn't feel like a beer after work. I shit you not! and the another added bonus is I was at a party last night, had seven or eight beers, you know, the usual saturday night out, and always, as long as i can remember, i have always felt like a beer or two the next afternoon or evening to take the edge of any hangover. not today. you know why? cause my kidneys are working properly and I didn't need alcohol to kick start them. simple as that.
good luck! Mark