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.

Sunset is good

  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

Victoria Vanstone

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

Beautiful sun flare though the cloud

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

Hourglass time passing

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 […]

The Magic Pebble

multicolor pebble in hand

Someone messaged me recently to ask the following question: If it takes 20 minutes for alcohol to get into our system why do I get a buzz straight after the first sip? I thought it was worth delving into a bit further in the form of a blog post because this feeds into the psychology […]

Why Life Isn’t Boring Without Alcohol

Multiracial group of young people smiling at camera

This particular topic opens up a whole realm of interesting sub-topics, not least of which is where we draw the line between the so-called ‘normal drinker’ and the ‘problem drinker’. If you are drinking all day every day without being able to stop, then you clearly have a problem with alcohol, but what if you […]

Falling Off The Wagon

Stressed young man

There is a common dynamic when we fall off the wagon after a period of sobriety that is worth bearing in mind. With regular drinkers, because alcohol is a sedative, and because your brain reacts to it by becoming hypersensitive so that it can work under the sedating effects of the alcohol, we have an […]

Online Course Free Taster

  I’m very pleased to say that the first 7 modules of the online course are now available to try for free. You can find this on the ‘Online Course’ page of the website, link below: https://www.alcoholexplained.com/course/ Please do let me have any feedback, good or bad. Many thanks,

Alcohol Explained Online Course

I’m very pleased to say that the Alcohol Explained online course is now up and running. You can find it on this site under the main menu. The idea was to get everything in Alcohol Explained and Alcohol Explained 2 (and even one or two things that aren’t in either book), update and refine them, […]