re: How did you quit drinking?

God and AA

Set small goals like try 1 week of no alcohol. During this week, fill your schedule with something else to do. When the wife and kids go down, grab a bowl of ice cream and you go down too. Wake up earlier.

After a week, you start to think about it less. Go 2 weeks, you will think about it slightly less and you realize how much better you feel. The longer you abstain, the more you will start to think that you don't want to drink at all.

Seek help including from GOD.

I thought about how much I hated my dad for being drunk all the time and then realized my son sees me drunk all the time and figured if I didn’t break that habit it would just continue and I’d be an angry drunk my kid complained about one day.

What’s worse is I assume my dad had these same feelings but chose alcohol over me. Every time. Alchoholics and drug addicts often take about a moment of clarity. It’s a very real thing. And I never want my kids to experience those feelings.

I chose to sacrifice things I like for the good of my son. It wasn’t easy and I still miss it. I have to make a conscious decision not to drink every evening.

I still occasionally drink wine or beer, never hard liquor, and I’m never drunk around my kids.

Went to rehab. Started running 30+ miles a week. 5 years sober.

Almost everyone I know started drinking much more heavily and regularly during COVID, including myself.

When I decided I wanted to cut back, what really helped me was looking at a bottle of bourbon as nothing more than hundreds of empty calories that were going to give me a fat, puffy face in the morning, and would cancel out my day’s workout. That helped with my mindset of trying to stay with clean eating.

Also I started going to the library to always have a new book to read. When I’d normally want to unwind in front of the TV at the end of the day with a glass of Michter’s, I’ve devoted that time instead to reading and grinding through good stories, which has been great for my mind.

Nobody goes to the zoo and wonders why a caged animal might be depressed. We live in a dysfunctional society that separates families in the morning, promotes stress, consumerism, and coping to avoid emotions in the present moment. We use food, media, porn, drugs, alcohol, and the most widely excepted form Workaholism, to supplement boredom, stress, sadness, fear and even happiness.

I think it’s important that we realize why we are coping, and that no emotion warrants an action. That we are the observer of that emotion and not the emotion itself. We “feel bored”, and not “I am bored.”
This gives us the space to tolerate those emotions and not try to suppress them. Otherwise we just choose other coping mechanisms that may be deleterious in other parts of our lives. Basically what I’m describing is awareness training, in the form of education and meditation.

You can definitely try not drinking one day out of the week, for a month. Then the next month, two days out the week. third month, two or three days in a row. I liked drinking different days for different reasons, so alternate those days off throughout the week, so you can learn to adjust for those specific reasons.

Books:
Annie grace -how to control alcohol. She lays out a great argument about how we don’t really like drinking, and that it is our subconscious biases that tell us otherwise.

Eckhart Tolle - a new earth. Awareness training, demonstrates how we all operate from the same values.

Gabor Mates entire work, but his co-authored book “hold onto your kids” depicts behavior, and how we were raised and are raising our kids. Even though we operate from the same values, our behaviors and how we satisfy those values are very different.

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I’m tired of waking up with a hangover just to wake up again with another.

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This is it for me

Hate feeling bad in the am

If you're serious about quitting seek help. Tell your wife first so you have some accountabilty. Once the genie's out of the bottle you can't put it back in. Then start going to meetings, do an IOP treatment or look into inpatient treatment if you need it. I got help a year ago and it was the best decision I ever made. I'm coming up on my 1 year sober anniversary soon and I"m a million times happier and a much better person/husband/father.

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Swallowed my pride and went to an AA meeting. I got tired of the endless cycle of saying I was going to quit and only lasting about a week without booze. FWIW I was a binge drinker since college - I didn't know how to have a couple of beers and stop, I drank to get completely smashed every time. If I went to dinner with friends and had a couple, I'd stop somewhere along the way home to finish the job. I embarassed myself and my family multiple times with my drinking.

I'm 810 days sober now, I seriously don't know how much longer I'd have lived if I didn't stop. Going to AA and meeting my sponsor has legitimately saved my life.

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Stop telling my story...