Read · 7 minutes
Drinking a bit more
than you'd like
No lectures, no units-per-week table, no suggestion that you have a problem. Just some honest questions about where the line sits for you.
Most men who raise this in coaching are nowhere near the picture the word "alcoholic" conjures up. They're holding down a job, a family and a mortgage. They've simply noticed that the two after work has become three, that it's every night now rather than most, and that they'd rather not look at it too closely.
This is not a page about stopping. It's a page about noticing.
The question that matters isn't how much
It's what is it doing for you? Because a drink that's genuinely a pleasure and a drink that's doing a job are two different things, even when it's the same beer in the same glass.
Worth being honest about which of these fits:
- Taking the edge off a day you couldn't otherwise put down
- Getting to sleep
- Being able to talk, or feel something, or stop feeling something
- Filling an evening that would otherwise be very quiet
- Or genuinely — you like the taste and the company
If it's one of the first four, alcohol isn't really the issue. It's the solution you've found to a different issue. Which is worth knowing, because it tells you what actually needs attention.
The sleep trap
This one catches nearly everybody, so it's worth spelling out. Alcohol does genuinely help you fall asleep — and then it wrecks the second half of the night, suppressing the deep restorative stages and waking you at three or four with your heart going.
So you wake up shattered. And a shattered day is much harder to get through, which makes the drink at the end of it more necessary. That's not weakness; it's a loop with its own logic. Recognising it as a loop is what lets you step out of it.
A fortnight's experiment
Not a ban — an experiment, which is a very different thing. Pick two weeks and drop it right down. Notice your sleep, your mood by Wednesday, your temper, your mornings.
What you learn is useful either way. If it's easy and things improve, you've found a lever. If it's much harder than you expected, that's the genuinely important information — and worth talking to your GP about rather than pushing through alone.
Signs worth taking seriously
Not to alarm you, but because these are the ones men habitually explain away:
- You've tried to cut down and haven't managed it
- You're being careful about how much anyone else sees
- It's moved earlier in the day
- Someone who loves you has mentioned it more than once
- You get shaky, sweaty or badly anxious the morning after
If you're not ready to change anything
That's allowed, and pretending otherwise is how these conversations get shut down. Noticing is a real step on its own. Plenty of men sit with the noticing for months before they do anything, and the noticing is what eventually makes the doing possible.
Somewhere to think about it out loud.
Coaching isn't treatment for addiction — but it is a confidential place to work out what the drink is doing for you, and what else might do that job.