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I quit drinking cold turkey 4 days ago.
I feel mild anhedonia, experiences I normally enjoy are muted or feel like they're happening to someone else and I'm only watching, if that makes sense. I have too much energy during the day and it's hard to relax fully in the evening. My appetite has dropped a lot, but I still want to eat because I've increased my lifting recently. It's kind of the way you feel hungry when you have a cold. You feel your body's need for sustenance, but no foods are particularly appealing. My libido has dropped considerably, though that may also be due to the extra fatigue from increased lifting. In the evening, light is too bright and noises are too loud, kind of like when you have a bad hangover. My baseline stress level feels higher; on a scale of 1-10, I was previously around a 3 or 4 most days, and now I feel like I'm stuck at 6 all the time. Sometimes I suddenly feel exhausted during the day and want to rest, but I'm too wired to actually relax before bedtime, sort of like when you've had too much caffeine to sleep.
On the bright side, my feels like it's working at 200% speed. While I was doing well at work before, now I'm absolutely crushing it. I don't have heartburn or any other gastric trouble anymore, I don't have much appetite for junk food, and I find temptations to my various vices almost trivially easy to resist. Getting up in the morning is getting a lot easier. I have the focus and the patience to listen to chat with my kids in the evening after dinner. I can handle more chores. I can take care of my wife better. I can control my temper much more easily. I spend probably 1 hour less per day lying on the couch. I picked up a physical dead tree book and started reading it for the first time in many months. I'm not thirsty all the time, and my body doesn't hurt as much when I wake up in the morning. My heart rate gets back down to the low 50s when I sleep at night. My sleep quality is much better. And maybe best of all, I don't feel the sense of guilt and self-loathing I've learned to live with every night when I go to bed and every morning when I wake up. That's probably what keeps me going each day more than anything, I don't feel like I suck anymore.
I was (am? well, hopefully was) a 5-8 drinks a night kind of guy which, while clearly not good, doesn't really seem like "real alcoholism" when you google alcoholism and read stories from people downing a fifth or two of vodka and blacking out every night. But that amount was apparently enough to slowly change my mind and body over months in ways I hadn't even realized, and I'm dealing with the aftermath now. It's very... sobering.
I wrote this as a personal reflection and thought I'd share it in case any other folks are on the same path.
I think here in Japan (where if I am not mistaken you also live) drinking is much more seen as normal--I almost never hear anyone talk about alcoholism (アルコール中毒者 or アル中) except as a joke. No doctor has ever verbally asked me about how much I drink (though it's on the forms that I fill in) and none have ever told me to stop drinking unless I expressly asked "Do I need to not drink with this drug?"(antibiotics.) Then it's a reluctant ”お酒はだめ" (no alcohol). Never for how long, never a recommendation on lifestyle choices. Booze seems just part of the culture here--which is bizarre in a way when you think of how many people just can't drink in Japan without going full ゆでだこ (an oldish term meaning boiled octopus, referring to the redness of face many get after consuming even a little booze).
At my tops I was at 4-5 a night, typically 2-3 beers and then a couple of vodkas or whatever I had on hand (bourbon usually). When I quit for a month at the end of summer I....didn't feel much different. The main difference was in my morning self; when I rose I felt more rested, more clear-headed, less dubious about whatever I had said or done the night before. My wife took a less-than-helpful stance in telling me to just have a beer as she insists I am much more personable and, probably, interesting, than when sober. "It's like you're at a funeral," she said one night as I sat listening to my family speak Japanese. I think this has more to do with my default self, which is fairly quiet and reflective and not willing to jump into conversations that aren't directly related to me (especially if they're in another language). I find I am typically also quite functional on this much, making dinner, putting away dishes, setting the dishwasher, sorting out the kitchen, all after 4 or 5 drinks. Then I would crash.
My worry was twofold: Was this affecting my health? But also was this an unbreakable habit? I think drinking like this does affect health in well-documented ways if consistent, if it's a habit, but in my case it was a habit I was able to break with a bit of willpower--the first few days (where you are now) tended to be the most difficult, simply because the whole act of drinking had become ritual. I would suggest (without having myself done this) to substitute a new ritual (maybe involving a non-alcoholic drink?) which you can adopt to replace the drinking, and in this way stave off that sense of something missing (if that's what you feel) in the early evenings when the news comes on.
I am no longer teetotaling, but like to think I am more aware now of when I drink and how much, and consciously limit myself. All this as commiseration and a wishing you luck in whatever your goal ends up being.
Edit: With doctors, on reflection, it may not be that booze is so much part of their culture as it maybe the Japanese tendency, even among professionals, to not want to introduce any sort of discord into a moment. Saying "Don't do xyz" could be met with resistance. So they assume, I suppose, you already know, or will read the papers they give you, without having to say it directly. But now I'm armchair theorizing.
This is caused by the accumulation of acetaldehyde, a toxic intermediate product of alcohol metabolism, in the blood. They're literally poisoning themselves.
Due to reduced efficacy of the ALDH2 enzyme, yes. But only about a quarter of Asians have this issue.
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The ritual aspect is a huge part of it. Since I'm WFH, my routine is: finish last meeting and clock out (lol Japan) -> pour drink -> family time. I think I use it to help me transition between my work and home life since the shift can be pretty jarring. I've started going on a "pseudo-commute" where I go for a 20-30 minute walk directly after work before coming back home and going full dad mode. That seems to have helped.
I'm hoping you're right about the first few days. This morning (Day 5) I've felt the best yet, so perhaps the worst is already behind me. Though when quitting addictions and habits, I find that it will feel like smooth sailing for a bit until some unexpected stressor pops up, and then the temptations will come back stronger than ever in that moment. So I'm trying to be mindful of that.
When I've gone for my company-mandated health checkups here, I usually get a mild, friendly chiding from the doctor about my liver and my drinking habits (and also my weight... BMI 26.0 is pretty fat in Japan). It might have to do with my clinics being in hip, modern areas of Tokyo where the doctors are all younger. My experience with older docs here has been that they mostly just want me to GTFO ASAP.
Also chuckled at your wife's reaction. My wife also thinks I'm fun and outgoing when I drink, and she says that she thinks it's cool that I can hold my liquor far better than any of our family friends. I think you're right that drinking is seen as just part of (male) life here, although I've also spent a lot of time wondering how that's so considering the high rate of alcohol intolerance among Japanese.
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Congratulations on the victory! I don't struggle with drinking myself, but I have a similar struggle with eating sweets so I get how hard it can be.
Just a word of caution here: minimizing one's behavior is itself a red flag for alcoholism. My brother in law was an alcoholic, to the point where he just died in December at only 38 years old. But the entire time he insisted that he didn't have a problem, and that he didn't drink as much as (insert example here of people who drank even more excessively than he did). So I would just encourage you to avoid the temptation to say "well my drinking is ok because X".
Regardless, well done on the progress! Keep going strong, brother!
+1. That sounds quite excessive to me.
See e.g. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-drinking-patterns which defines "heavy drinking" as >=5 drinks on ANY day, or >=15/week. You're at 35-56/week. If you drink it very slowly, it's a little less concerning, but I think you're way past the gray area. A doctor friend told me they start asking questions (but there may not be a problem) at 14 drinks/week.
Or, in calories, that's 100/shot = 3500-5600 calories/week = 1-1.6lb/week. If you're drinking beer or fruity cocktails, multiply by 1.5-3. I'd even be concerned about someone having that many calories of icecream per week. At the same weight, you could replace with healthier foods and your body would be running on much better fuel.
Or, in dollars, even if you're drinking fairly cheap booze at $1/shot, that's $35-56/week = $1820-$2912/year. Might or might not be a lot of money depending on your job, but that feels nontrivial even from a FAANG salary. Especially since, if you're anything like me, a dollar spent on booze often means several more spent on munchies.
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Thank you. And you make a good point. I have also had early deaths in my family due to alcoholism, so I try to be very critical of my own rationalizations. Still an uphill battle though. I'll try to post about it again in a few weeks.
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I assume you're talking about Wild Turkey on the rocks.
Yes, but I actually like it neat. I have a bottle of Wild Turkey 8 in my cupboard that I'm trying not to think about right now, ha.
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Seriously, great work. Not just in quitting alcohol, but in writing this up so that you can remind yourself of all the benefits of quitting and all the reasons you quit in the first place.
5-8 drinks every 24 hours is alcoholic level. Most men I know who like alcohol seem to drink at least 2 or 3 every night, probably more on weekends. Even that amount seems excessive to me. An expensive habit, isn't it? I don't drink much, but the price is one reason why I want to cut down even more on beer drinking in 2025.
And to co-opt your thread: what does The Motte think about moderate drinking? One glass of red wine a night for heart health and cholesterol and whatnot. I must say, I am skeptical and have been skeptical for a while now. Those were longitudinal studies, and it could have been that the type of person to moderate their drinking to just one drink a night is also doing other healthy stuff.
Thanks, I appreciate it. And yeah, it gets really expensive. Never start drinking scotch or cognac, boys...
Re your question, I mentioned it in another post, but listening to the Huberman Lab episode on alcohol helped me quit. He actually talks about the glass of red wine a day idea here. tl;dl the effect of the good compounds in red wine is so small that you'd have to drink a ton of wine to get any benefits, and the physical effects of alcohol are so negative that there's really no "healthy" amount. But he does acknowledge that you should weigh the social and QoL benefits of an occasional glass or two against the effects and use your judgement (e.g. a glass or two of wine at wedding is probably okay of you're not an alcoholic).
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As with almost every single thing, I think it's likely to be a marginal effect. Seed oils, a bit of booze, grassfed beef, some vitamin or other, high fructose corn syrup, caffeine... whatever. I think properly measured these things all pretty much blend into the background and have no meaningful impact on general health, wellness, physical ability, or longevity barring an actual significant deficiency or severe overuse. Stay reasonably lean, move around a bunch, pick up heavy things from time to time, and that'll get almost every bit of predictable benefit that you can get from health choices.
Every time I dig into studies that say otherwise, they appear to be complete garbage.
(For the record, I think drink at least somewhat too much and expect that it comes with at least some adverse risk down the road - I'm not trying to come up with some cope for why I'm actually totally fine.)
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My vaguely remembered understanding is that, not only are their observation studies in people, there are also experiments with animals and a proposed mechanism. I think that makes the recommendation stronger than the typical associations drawn in nutrition science.
That said, I'm not going to drink less, or indeed more, because I think it'll reduce my risk of heart disease. Alcohol has enough negative effects for me that I can't see myself ever drinking more than I do now, which isn't much.
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See for me, I like drinking occasionally well enough, but when I read the recent headlines about alcohol and cancer, the studies were about women who had two drinks every night. Which is a level I literally can't imagine, not so much because I don't drink that much, as because I can't manage to do anything that consistently. I can't remember to wear a wedding ring every day, or take vitamins, let alone have two drinks every single night.
@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola , if you could quit with no problems I wouldn't worry about alcoholism, but I would put 5 drinks a night at a problematic level if you weren't able to quit it.
My final push to quit for a while was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast about alcohol. It's not just "not good" for you, it's not just "bad" for you, it's really, really damaging to your body (gut, liver, and brain) in ways that AIUI scientists didn't even fully appreciate until relatively recently, even at what are commonly considered "safe" levels like a 1-2 drinks a night.
I realized that while I used to be able to accommodate a bit of light drinking in my life because my life had more "slack," I was now older and had significant responsibilities at work and home, so I really didn't have excess time and energy to spend on alcohol anymore.
ETA: I read that Huberman is known for playing fast and loose with the facts, so it might be wise to take the podcast with a teaspoon of salt.
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That level is almost certainly associated with real risks for liver and cardiovascular diseases, but my bigger worry would just be trajectory. It seems to me that if someone can't go down from five drinks per night, there is a pretty significant chance that they will eventually go up instead, and that this is a ratchet.
I was just thinking during my recent holiday illness how much it would suck to have a nicotine addiction and need to figure out how to manage that on top of being unable to eat or sleep.
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Speaking as someone who drinks occasionally, that really looks like alcoholism to me. Good to hear that you've been able to go cold turkey.
Have you considered naltrexone? It might be worth getting some on hand if you feel like going back on the bottle.
Yeah, definitely alcoholism, though unfortunately there are people who will gatekeep the term and claim that you need to get blackout on 20 beers a night or something. IMO it's more about the effect that it has on you mentally and physically than the volume of alcohol, and the effects on me were becoming increasingly negative.
I hadn't heard of naltrexone, but I'll look into it. That said, quitting booze is part of a bigger "detox" I'm trying to do. I'm also planning on cutting down my caffeine intake (2 cups of coffee a day) and my sugar intake to find out what my body's baseline is like.
I'll pile on for naltrexone as a happy user. I use it per the Sinclair protocol, detailed at https://www.sinclairmethod.org/what-is-the-sinclair-method-2/. Modern psych training is to prescribe it daily in the morning, which makes my meds shrink worry about me when I say I'm doing something different, but she's happy enough to see me keeping a log with numbers going down, and "once daily as I leave work because that gives me an hour before drinking" is close enough to her "once daily in the morning" for her to shrug.
I will endorse it more as a method to get back to a healthy relationship with alcohol, and enable abstinence if you want it, without slips causing a relapse, rather than a cold cure for addictive tendencies that lead to alcoholism. Probably if you do get abstinent with alcohol this way, it'll be by going California sober and substituting with other psychoactives, which could include psych meds. The Caliph has a good writeup at https://lorienpsych.com/2021/02/23/alcoholism/, as you'd expect.
I will say that it's to AA what scalpels and antibiotics were to leeches, in my opinion. It's a shame that the euros are ahead in this regard.
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Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported fame (who TracingWoodgrains was formerly working for) came out as a big proponent of naltrexone, apparently she has a book coming out about it as well. Seems like pretty promising stuff.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sea-change/id1743666262?i=1000653826427
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