Resisting a Drink When Everything Sucks
How I reframed my thinking around sobriety.
It's generally easier to stay sober when things are going well than when everything is going wrong.
Forgive me if that's an obvious point, but I think that it's an important one.
When we struggle in life—whether it's relationship trouble, depression, financial problems, or any other stressor—our sobriety tends to be at greater risk.
We start to get overwhelmed and anxious, and it's all too easy to let those feelings turn into an excuse for a drink.
Sometimes, even a small problem, like a bad day at work or an awkward interaction with a friend, can snowball into a relapse.
Why is it that we do this? How can we be so quick to throw away sobriety when life goes wrong? And what can we do instead?
I spent about a decade as a daily drinker. I didn't fully understand my drinking at the time (perhaps I still don't), and I didn't realize how often I used alcohol as a way to escape my problems.
When I was upset, anxious, or sad, I just drank until I forgot the emotion.
I wouldn't say that this is the only reason I drank. My alcoholism was the result of a complex combination of factors. However, my use of alcohol as a coping mechanism undoubtedly increased the amount I drank.
After getting sober, I continued to associate alcohol with coping. When I had any kind of problems, I'd think “I wish I could have a drink.”
Even if getting drunk wouldn't solve my problems, I knew it would help me forget them. Sometimes, when we're upset enough, forgetting is enough.
It can be brutally hard to resist the cravings that we get when life gets hard, precisely because we know that alcohol can let us forget our problems for a few hours.
However, we also have to remind ourselves that not only will alcohol not solve any problem, but that it will actually make most of them worse.
Drinking let me forget what was bothering me, but when I sobered up, I'd pay for the delay with interest. If I drank to forget my loneliness, I'd only end up lonelier each year. If I drank to forget financial woes, I'd end up even worse off after all the money I spent on booze.
It can be hard to remember this. Even after seven and a half years sober, I still sometimes have the thought, “What if I had a drink and forgot about my problems for a bit?”
It's no longer a strong urge to drink, but the thought still pops up.
Most recently, I thought about it when my grandfather died in March. I knew a drink wouldn't bring him back, but I wondered if it could ease my sadness for a night.
The main way that I avoid these thoughts is by reframing the way I think about sobriety and alcohol. Instead of thinking about sobriety as depriving myself of something, I remind myself of all the benefits it has brought to my life.
Getting sober helped me to save money, get healthy, switch into a better career, rebuild my social life, and move to a new country. By quitting drinking, I managed to turn my entire life around.
When I'm having an awful day, instead of thinking of alcohol as a way through it, I think of sobriety as a way through.
By not drinking—by staying sober—I can process my emotions, I can (sometimes) fix the problems, and I can redirect my energy to more positive aspects of my life.
Instead of thinking, “Everything is wrong and I need a drink,” I think, “A lot of things are wrong, but at least I'm sober. At least this one thing is going right.”
On one hand, sobriety doesn't let me immediately forget my problems the way that alcohol did. On the other hand, since getting sober, I have a lot less problems in the first place.
I've come to love the fact that no matter what else goes wrong, I can at least stay sober. The feeling that something is going well in life has gotten me through a lot of rough days when it feels like everything sucks.