Nothing Is Wrong. So Why Am I Drinking This Much?
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. Today I want to talk about a question that can feel strangely difficult to answer. What if your life is good, but you're still drinking more than you want? Let's say you love your family, you're proud of what you've built, you have people that you care about, and you still have things to look forward to.
Speaker 1:Sure, of course, life can get stressful, your kids can wear you out, some weeks are harder than others, but overall, you like your life. If that's the case, why am I drinking this much? When somebody is going through divorce or grieving loss or dealing with a major crisis, there's an explanation that's available there. You can draw a fairly straight line between what's happening and why alcohol might be more useful during that time. But when your life is genuinely good, the drinking doesn't really seem to fit.
Speaker 1:And then you start wondering, maybe, maybe there's this larger problem that you haven't found locked up inside of you. Am I secretly unhappy? Am I maybe missing something? Why isn't everything that I have enough? Sometimes those questions, they're worth exploring.
Speaker 1:But drinking more than you want doesn't necessarily mean your life is hiding something terrible. Alcohol doesn't need your life to be bad or struggling. And in fact, sometimes it only needs to improve certain moments reliably enough for it to keep returning. And the usual suspects, maybe it ends the workday. Maybe it makes a dinner more relaxing and enjoyable.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's something for you to look forward to in that late afternoon. And sometimes it can make us adults feel like we don't have to be responsible all the time. And researchers who study drinking motives find that people don't drink only to cope with pain. We also drink to enhance positive experiences. We want to connect with other people, make enjoyable moments feel even better.
Speaker 1:And alcohol can find plenty of opportunities inside of a good life. And I know it certainly did in mine. If you've listened to this before, you've heard my drinking stories and I'm not going to go into that whole thing again, but for years I had a very effective way of dismissing whatever alcohol might have been costing me. I looked at everything that I could still accomplish. I could do work.
Speaker 1:I went to the gym. I showed up for my family. I was building companies and I could handle that pressure. Whenever I was questioning my drinking, I could always point to the rest of my life and say, look, I'm still doing all of this. And I treated my ability to function as evidence that alcohol really wasn't taking that much from me.
Speaker 1:But eventually I realized I was answering the wrong question. I was proving that I could carry this weight, but I wasn't asking whether that weight was worth carrying. And here's what's important. If your standard is whether alcohol has destroyed something important to you, you may continue passing that test for a very long time. And in some people's case, an entire lifetime.
Speaker 1:Your marriage could still be good. Your career could keep moving forward. You could hit the gym. You can get your bills paid. Maybe you go coach a soccer team and you're always there for the people that need you.
Speaker 1:But meanwhile, alcohol might be costing you something that is much harder to see. And I call this your margin. Your margin is what you have left after life takes what requires from you. It's the difference between getting through a Saturday morning and actually wanting to do something with it. It's that patience that you still have when your child really needs you.
Speaker 1:It's that energy to make plans, call a friend, maybe start something new or follow through on something that matters. But it isn't urgent. It doesn't need you right away. You can have a very good life and almost no margin inside of it. And in fact, your life may look good partly because you're using nearly everything that you have to keep it running that way.
Speaker 1:And then alcohol arrives at the end of the day and it seems to give you some of that margin back. And then you can finally relax. You can exhale for the day. Work feels more distant. And maybe for the next few hours, you don't feel like you have to be responsible for everything in your life.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing, that relief, it is real. It's one of the reasons that drinking becomes so easy to repeat. But some of the relief may be borrowed from tomorrow. We know that alcohol can make you feel sleepy, but it's also going to disrupt the quality of your sleep later that night. In research, we already know connection between drinking and poor mood and well-being is going to show up the next day.
Speaker 1:However, that doesn't mean that you're going to wake up unable to function. You still need to do what needs to get done. You may just simply need a lot more effort to get that done. You might have less patience because of that for interruptions. You might have less enthusiasm for going to do your workout and you might have less interest for anything beyond those responsibilities directly in front of you.
Speaker 1:And in this case, nothing collapses. I call these milestones. You have these major things in your life. Those all remain intact. But the space around them, those get smaller.
Speaker 1:And I think this is where a lot of people end up being stuck. We tend to evaluate drinking by asking whether it's made our lives bad. When that answer is no, we assume that, Hey, there's nothing more to really consider here. But that sets the bar remarkably low. You don't have to wait until alcohol really damages the good parts of your life before asking whether it's limiting one.
Speaker 1:If you're wondering why you drink as much as you do, instead begin with what the drink changes for you. What happens in that first twenty minutes? Does the day feel finished? Does the night suddenly feel more rewarding? Do you feel less responsible, maybe more connected with your partner?
Speaker 1:Or maybe simply that you feel relieved that you have some time that you actually own. And those are the moments and the reasons that alcohol has probably earned its place. But then I want you to look past whether you can still perform and consider how much of yourself remains available afterwards. Not just when you made it through the next day, maybe how much patience did you have? How much energy?
Speaker 1:Did you have room for anything beyond what absolutely had to get done? And that's where the trade can become more clear. And then there's one final question I want you to ask. If nothing became dramatically worse, would you still want this exact relationship with alcohol, let's say in five years from now? And I really like that question because it removes the requirement that something has to go wrong before you're allowed to want something different.
Speaker 1:Your life can be good and alcohol, it can be useful in certain moments. And at the same time you can be highly capable and continue accomplishing pretty much everything that people expect of you. And the trade can still be holding you back. For a long time I wanted to prove how much I could accomplish while continuing to drink the way I was drinking. But eventually I became more interested in a different question.
Speaker 1:How much more in my life might be available to me if I just stopped using so much of my energy just to carry it. But eventually I became more interested in a different question. How much more of my life might be available to me if I stopped using so much of my energy just to carry it through the day? Not just how much more I could accomplish, but how much I could notice and enjoy and give to the people and experiences that I cared about. And maybe that's a question worth asking.
Speaker 1:Not whether your life is good enough to justify changing, but how much more fully you might be able to live it if you weren't spending so much energy holding alcohol in place. Okay. Thanks for hanging out with me this week. I hope you had a great holiday weekend. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.
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