Alcohol and Blackouts
I’ve been reading Matthew Walker’s excellent book ‘Why We Sleep’ (about 5 years too late and I’m sure many people reading this will already have read it, but if you haven’t I would very much recommend it). I suspect I may be doing more than one blog post off the back off this but I […]
The Life Raft
When you are drinking regularly, you can’t quite imagine not doing it. Even thinking about quitting for a day can feel intimidating, let alone a week, a month, a year, or the rest of your life. But as the reality of life as a regular drinker forces itself upon us, we desperately want to change. […]
Envying Normal Drinkers.
I hear this quite a bit; people saying how they envy ‘normal’ drinkers. These envyers of normal drinkers can often be very set in their sobriety and have no intention of ever drinking again. They know from personal experience that if they drank it would end in a horror show, so they themselves would never […]
Life is Like a Table
The other day, when it was getting a bit much for me, a very close friend of mine told me the concept of your life being like a table with lots of legs. Each one of the legs is one of the stabilising factors in your life; your job, your relationship, your finances, your parents, […]
Staying Safe Around Alcohol Free Drinks
After I gave up drinking, I didn’t really go to pubs. I met a few friends on occasion and went to the pub, but I didn’t really enjoy it. Sitting there while someone is getting slowly intoxicated isn’t really fun. It’s like (I imagine) sitting with someone who has taken methamphetamine or heroin. Socialising is […]
9 Years
The 15th February marked 9 years sober for me. Someone asked me recently if quitting was a great epiphany for me. It wasn’t at all. It was a mess. I’d been drinking for 5 days straight, literally all the time. I’d missed work and just sat at home and drunk myself unconscious, and when I […]
The Shorter, Sweeter Life.
It’s often the simple questions from children that really stump us. For example, the other day my eleven-year-old son asked me ‘If smoking is bad for you why don’t people just stop?’ It’s those kinds of questions that can leave you utterly at a loss. My stock answer to date has been to say […]
Cuppa
I was speaking to someone the other day who was struggling with their drinking and was trying to quit. Not an unusual sequence of events you’d think, but in fact, it was unusual because they didn’t know me through Alcohol Explained, they are a parent of a child who is in my son’s class at […]
The Benefits of Sobriety
This topic could almost be a rewriting of the whole of Alcohol Explained, things like reduced heart rate which leads to higher energy levels, greater mental resilience, far better sleep (and the whole world of increased quality of life that flows from that), weight loss (if you go about things in the right way), and […]
The Longterm Effects of Drinking
I thought it would be useful to set out a timeline of the physiological changes that take place when you consume alcohol regularly. 1. Experimental When you first consume alcohol, your brain has never encountered it before and it is ill-prepared to deal with it. First-time drinkers find that their tolerance is low and they […]
