The Downside of Using Alcohol as a "Social Lubricant"
I told myself I needed to get drunk to have fun. But was I ever having fun in the first place?
Before getting sober, I used to treat alcohol as a “social lubricant.” Back in those days, I experienced anxiety in many social situations. It was especially bad when I found myself in medium-sized crowds, such as house parties or busy bars. To overcome this anxiety, I’d get drunk.
Generally speaking, the drunker I got, the easier it became to get out of my head and start enjoying an event. As I drank, I became more talkative, cheerier, and far less nervous. Yet, despite these apparent benefits, there were several massive problems with this approach as well.
To begin with, my attempts to use alcohol as a social lubricant never went nearly as smoothly as I hoped.
A typical night out in those days began with drinking at home. I didn’t like to show up to a party without already having a little alcohol in my system. If I arrived at the door completely sober, I’d have trouble even knocking because my social anxiety would be so bad.
If I wasn’t already drunk upon arrival, I’d at least normally be a little tipsy. Then, as soon as getting to the party, I’d open another beer and start drinking even more. I often got way too drunk way too fast.
As I drank, I never felt like just one or two beers was enough to loosen me up. Instead, I went through a seemingly endless amount of alcohol, basically trying to get as drunk as possible. For me, the drunker I got, the easier it was to get through a party, so I always had a drink in my hand.
Of course, by drinking all night long, I often reached the point where I would embarrass myself. Sometimes I’d end up crouched in front of my friends’ toilets, puking my brains out. Other times, I’d become a public spectacle, loudly and rudely shouting in the middle of the living room.
There were also many nights in which despite all of my drinking, I still felt overwhelmed by social anxiety. On those nights, I’d spend the entire party out on the balcony smoking, trying to avoid being around too many people. I’d even sometimes hide away in the bathroom for a few minutes just to get away from the crowd.
At the end of a party, I’d often overstay my welcome and be the last to leave. The trouble was that I needed to wait to sober up a little before I could get home. It wasn’t even that I was driving—I lived in Chicago during these drinking years and took the El (Chicago’s subway) everywhere. The real trouble was that I was so drunk I couldn’t make it home without needing to pee.
Even if I waited to sober up a bit, I often had to hop off the train halfway through the trip to use the bathroom. It reached the point where I had memorized which places I could most easily pee near each train stop. This sounds like a little thing, but it became a truly disruptive part of my life.
Too often, drinking at parties is portrayed as nothing but fun. The reality is that even if alcohol loosened me up a little, I still had plenty of anxiety, and the drinking brought a ton of bad side effects.
But all of this is still just the beginning of the problem. The more serious long-term effect of all this drinking is that it built into a serious alcohol addiction. My social anxiety gave me an excuse to drink. By drinking to get through it, I ended up training myself to believe that I couldn’t get through events without alcohol.
Later, as my addiction got worse, it killed my social life altogether. I stopped going out to parties because I was more interested in drinking for its own sake than in having fun. Instead of having beers with friends, I drank alone on my couch, night after night.
In the long run, the “social lubricant” ended up destroying my ability to socialize.
After getting sober, I had to relearn how to socialize without alcohol. I had to figure out how to go to events, talk to people, and have fun, without chugging beers the entire time.
Fortunately, this process wasn’t as impossible as it once felt. The first few times going to a party sober were hard, but as I got used to the feeling, it actually got easier pretty quickly. What surprised me the most was that after a few years sober, my social anxiety disappeared altogether.
In retrospect, I think that by getting drunk, I was crippling my chances of overcoming my anxiety. In my drinking days, I never gave myself a chance to work through the anxiety. I simply got drunk and did my best to ignore my feelings. In contrast, by regularly going to social events without alcohol, I’ve been able to teach myself that there really isn’t anything to be anxious about.
My experience with alcohol and social anxiety reflects a broader pattern in addiction: We often tell ourselves that we need the addictive substances for the various benefits they provide in our lives when in reality they are only making every aspect of our lives more difficult.
I often told myself that I couldn’t live without alcohol because of all the ways it helped me through life. The truth is that I was just causing more problems for myself.
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