Used on ships too… such as The Mayflower where every passenger, kids included, had a one gallon a day ration.
Had a very nice NA beer - Surreal Kolsch out of California.
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The total wine suggestion was a good one, they have a pretty wide variety of NA beers.
The Hop Water is good too and lighter alternative to NA beers.
Tried 0% wine, too not a fan at all, just expensive grape juice.
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Here is the long version:
Short version:
I used to drink a lot.
Now I don’t drink a lot.
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Another good NA drink - Sierra Nevada Hop Splash.
interesting millennial view of drinking lifestyle. I feel like he was dancing around the semantics of the issue a lot. ‘sober curious’? lol. I guess you could call it that.
sounds like this person had a drinking problem for 10 years, but it was OK since it was socially acceptable in his circles. This is similar to my own story where I started drinking about 16 but I was just considered a cool party guy until I was like 30. I started to realize I had been an alcoholic for 15 years already, but never classified it as such. I had been hiding my crippling depression the whole time and now I was pretty much alone in life with no social cop out. The next few years were, not so great… I came very close to losing everything, including my wife and kids.
almost 3 years sober now. best thing I ever did.
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If the idea of still drinking a little makes it easier to drink less it’s helpful.
The idea of still drinking a little can easily lead to sliding back into old habits of drinking too much.
Alcohol is a drug, a socially acceptable one, but a drug none the less.
I know for me it’s better to stay away completely than to try to have a little every now and then as the author claims he’s fine with now.
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I think the he was a she (she said, “hey, babe…”).
Good that you were (are) honest about yourself. That chick is still denying.
part of youth is denying your own inevitable downfall.
serves an evolutionary advantage to chase the dream of immortality
“But I won’t drink for the sake of it.”
mmm sake…
Over the past few weeks I’ve gone from way too many drinks per day (>10), to 1 the past few days, and maybe 0 today and for quite a while.
Gotta say I sleep better and wake up feeling better. More alert too.
On the way I had 3 cases of severe hallucination, the last resulting in complete detachment from reality and landing me in the ER. (They never treated me though. After 5 hours we just left.)
I’m having trouble getting to that complete sobriety but I plan to make the jump. I’m replacing it with seltzer waters. Cracking a cold one and chugging half of it gives the “feel” of chugging some beer. Probably like how smokers chew on toothpicks.
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I found talking to someone helpful.
Committing to 90 days to start was helpful to me. It made the voice to use softer since there was an initial end point.
Everyone is on thier own path, so what worked for some won’t work for others.
I had two main aha moments on my journey.
I laughed, like really deep belly, knee slapping, uncontrolled laugh a few months in. I hadn’t laughed like that sober in years. This showed me alcohol wasn’t just making me feel good sometimes, it was keeping me from feeling good other times.
I had a non alcoholic beer. I found it horrible. I hadn’t appreciated before that that the only thing I liked about beer was the alcohol.
Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss anything more privately.
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Thank you, I have my partner for support. They also drank an unhealthy amount, but I was probably triple them. They recognized both in support of me and for themselves, they should stick to 1 drink per day. Of course going out with friends or something may be an exception.
Last night they had a glass of wine and asked if I could grab them another… I raised an eye and they remembered and had a glass of water instead.
It’s nice I can eat like 500 calories more and still be way under my previous intake! I’m eating maybe 200 calories of candy per day now and not feeling too guilty.
Talk more about this!
Real quick. I had visual and auditory hallucinations. One day I thought neighbors had music playing loudly because I could faintly hear it, the beginning of an auditory hallucination I wasn’t aware of. Then my phone kept playing music anytime I turned it on, regardless of changing any settings, reinstalling the Music and Spotify apps, etc. Frustrated why I couldn’t fix it, I just turned it off which stopped that part of the hallucination.
That night, think the worst nightmare you’ve had multiplied by 10. Specters appearing to attack, I could hear my partner (who’d fallen asleep on the couch) begging for me to help them but I couldn’t figure out where they were. Intensely vivid dreams that I couldn’t tell if they were real or not. I was giving people in the dreams my cell phone # to call me, and when I woke up would check my phone waiting for a text. My cat could fly. I was playing video games on the ceiling with no controller in vivid detail. The world split in two. It’s hard to explain. For the following two days I had visual and auditory remnants. I could hear my housemates having full conversations even though both were out of the house. They were actual memories dredged up and replaying in my mind. There were 3 different playlists in my house focused in specific areas that changed channels. Even songs I barely remembered, the songs were complete and spot-on. At one point a 6th-grade choir song I’d completely forgotten played in its entirety. I kept seeing things that I knew were normal, like a roommate walking past the hallway, but when I went to go say something to them they weren’t there. Or, I know my keys are always here, I grab them, and they don’t actually exist
The last one landed me in the ER. I was completely in a different world. VERY long story, I was convinced my partner had set up a scavenger hunt in the house for me like an escape room. I was tearing into storage boxes, going through drawers, etc. to find clues. At one point I disassembled our living room ceiling fan because there was supposed to be a key in it. I was convinced that ~20 of my closest friends and family were there with me. I was home alone. Eventually a neighbor was worried for me (it was nice of her, truly) and called 911, the cops took me to the ER where I sat in the waiting room for 6 hours and eventually sobered up enough and we went home.
It took a while for my partner to convince me I was home alone. I had no idea. I took videos of it for later. Watched about 10 seconds of one after… it was painful, I deleted them. Looking at most things for too long in the ER got weird. A tile pattern became a tiny battlefield of dots attacking each other. The words on the water fountain changed every time I blinked. I realized by thinking about it, every object I could see would make a sound. The 9 lights in the ceiling were each capable of playing an entire song or a snippet on repeat, or a number of other sounds. So I was spending my 6 hours making remixes of things. I could tell them to change or stop, go faster/slower to match the rest of the music, etc., holding 9 tracks in my mind at once.
When we got home a cat that looked vaguely like one of ours darted in front of our house. My partner thought in my hallucination I’d left a door open so we went out with flashlights at 2 AM to try to get the cat back. (Both our cats were safely inside.) I could swear that several of our best friends, our neighbors, and my parents were there helping. At least 20 people were in a search team. I didn’t realize until later when I asked if they all left right away, and my partner was confused.
Those effects lasted to some degree for a couple of days, but I think it’s all gone now.
Goddamn, that’s some crazy experience. Didn’t know alcohol withdrawal could do that!
I’ve had delirium and feeling like people are watching me in the house from other kinds of withdrawal.
It was mixed with beginning anti-anxiety/anti-depressant meds for the first time. Looking things up afterward, alcohol withdrawal and those meds interact poorly. Today I feel 100% stable - in fact, the best I’ve felt in months, maybe years.
Just be careful that what you grab isn’t a hard seltzer.
I know it’s minor compared to alcohol, but I’ve been tapering off caffeine in preparation for fasting tomorrow. I realized yesterday I’d been craving chocolate for the caffeine. Today is a no-caffeine day, and I’m not really looking forward to it.