How Much Alcohol is Too Much?
When does a drinking habit cross the line into addiction?
When I was in my early twenties, I went through a year in which I drank an insane amount of beer. My drink of choice was Bud Light, and I went through a case of 24 cans every single day.
I opened a beer as soon as I woke up each morning and kept drinking until I fell asleep. Even during the middle of the night, I’d often wake up to use the bathroom and chug a beer to help me fall back asleep.
I’m lucky to have survived. My wake-up call was a psychiatrist telling me that if I kept drinking like that, I’d die within weeks or months. After that conversation, I quit drinking and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Unfortunately, this first attempt at sobriety didn’t last long. I managed to stay dry for a few months, but then I relapsed and went back to drinking for another seven years.
What’s interesting, however, is that during that entire seven-year relapse, my drinking never reached the same extremes that it had in my early twenties. I never came close to drinking 24 beers in a single day again, let alone drinking that many every day.
Instead, I normally drank a six-pack of beer each night. Sometimes, I’d drink about twice that, but never much more than a dozen.
Of course, twelve beers in a day is still quite a lot of beer. But, after establishing such a massive baseline as a young adult, twelve no longer felt like a lot to me, and six felt like barely anything.
During those years, I thought a lot about getting sober. Part of me knew that I was still an alcoholic, but another part of me constantly downplayed my addiction.
I remember regularly asking myself (and Google), “How many beers can you drink in a day before it becomes a problem?”
There are plenty of guidelines on this, and no matter which you choose, the answer is always well below six.
For example, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, run by the US government, gives these limits:
Drinking In Moderation
2 drinks or less per day (for men)
1 drink or less per day (for women)
Heavy Alcohol Use
5 or more drinks on any day or 15 or more per week (for men)
4 or more drinks on any day or 8 or more per week (for women)
Whenever I looked these guidelines up, though, they never served as the wake-up call that they should have.
Instead, I’d roll my eyes at them. I told myself that the people who came up with these numbers were just as out of touch as the terrible drug education classes we used to take in school.
How could drinking in moderation be two or less drinks per day? Was someone who had three beers after work really exceeding moderation?
Or, what about people who got drunk on Friday and Saturday each week? Was that really heavy alcohol use if a bit of partying on the weekend pushed them over the edge?
I often convinced myself that these numbers were so low that they were meaningless.
Other times, I’d try to use these numbers as goalposts. I did my best to cut down to 15 drinks a week, believing that if I could do it, I’d no longer be a problem drinker.
Of course, everyone reading this probably already knows how that strategy works out. I’d cut down for a couple of days, but then I’d find an excuse to ramp back up. I might make it through the work week, but when the weekend came around, I’d be back to my old self.
In summary: I spent a ton of time looking up these stats and guidelines as a drinker, but it never actually helped me. It didn’t help me determine whether I had a drinking problem, and it didn’t help me to fight my drinking problem either.
Now that I’m sober and reading these numbers, they look completely reasonable to me. If someone was drinking much more than two beers a day, or fifteen beers a week, I think that would be fair cause for concern.
I don’t mean to say that they’re necessarily an alcoholic—just that they seem to be drinking a bit too much and too regularly.
However, I also think that focusing on just the numbers can be quite misleading. When it comes to alcoholism and problem drinking, there’s a lot more to consider than just the quantity that you’re consuming.
Even though I drank way more in my early twenties than in my late twenties, I still think that my addiction was actually far worse as I approached thirty.
I was drinking less beer, but I had a harder time taking even a single day off. The drinking habit was also having worse effects on my health and my social life.
I’ve met plenty of people who drank even less than I did, but who were also clearly addicted to alcohol.
Instead of asking ourselves “Are we drinking too many drinks?,” a better question might be, “Is our drinking habit having a negative impact on our lives?”
The quantity of alcohol is an important indicator of addiction, but it’s not the most important one. We also have to pay attention to how our drinking habits are disrupting our routines, affecting our sleep, destroying our relationships, and more.
For me, the number of drinks that I was having became a distraction. I used it as a way to talk myself out of sobriety rather than as motivation to quit.
I found far more success when I focused on how sobriety could help me escape the harms of my drinking habit.