Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?

I don’t have any good advice on stopping drinking, but what I will say is that some people have a physiological addiction response to alcohol that others do not and those who do not usually don’t realize this, so they can blithely say things like, “just don’t drink” without realizing that this is a genuinely difficult thing for others.

I, fortunately, am not among those who have the addictive response and when, as an undergraduate, I realized that my drinking was getting very problematic, it was easy enough for me to cut out the worst aspects of my drinking (straight vodka in a 20oz tumbler—definitely not recommended) and restrict myself to beer and wine and these days I almost never drink that either.

But I know people for whom doing things like making it through a month without a drink is a serious challenge.

I think your best bet is to find some form of support, whether that’s AA¹ or just a trusted friend who can help you stick to your choices.

1. The literature on AA points to mixed efficacy, if I recall correctly, but I think the whole concept of having a network of trusted peers you can turn to for support whether you succeed or fail is probably the key aspect of what makes it work and since it’s so widespread, if you’re in any decently populated area, it’s likely you can find a meeting any day of the week and can drop into one whenever you need it.

The thing that I find holds me most accountable is exercise. If I'm preparing for something (a race or a bout) then drinking undoes all the hard training and it's evident in my performance.

The longest I went was about a year. I still enjoy the odd drink and very occasionally might have a bigger night but I feel fairly well moderated.

If you're really going for zero (or close to zero) then it's going to need a bigger habit change (which could be assisted by something like forming a new complementary habit).

As for social settings, it takes a lot of personal discipline but I find most people are quite respectful and encouraging if you assert that you have kicked a habit for good.

Everyone else here will hit you with the "ritual" and "learn to enjoy without" I am the same as you - and I will tell you what worked for me. I tend not to drink on weekdays, but when I do drink, I drink to get drunk. The holistic stuff didn't work for me, I love drinking, I enjoy the social aspect of it. I have terrible willpower and a very hedonistic attitude.

Naltrexone works for me

I take a tablet on Wednesday to Saturday before bed.

I don't get any side effects (YMMV) but what it DOES do is basically take away the majority of the buzz from drinking, I lose interest after 2 or 3 drinks

Those weekends I want to go out and get smashed with friends, I just don't take the tablets.

Talk to your doctor, its cheap, low level side effects if you do have them - but its the one thing that works for me, I now have a couple of social drinks on weekends and I never thought I would be that person

> I have a hard time saying no to a drink if everyone else is having a drink

Dig in deeper on this and then make yourself do it. It’s a good initial skill to hone.

The first thing is just saying no thanks when offered. This will be easier/harder depending on your friends. Ordering something nonalcoholic is a good. But next problem is being sober around your drunk friends isn’t usually such a fun thing. So you’ll ultimately need to just stay out of the bars, make friends that don’t drink that much, or alter your friend group nights.

Went from 1 beer to 2, then 3. Then hard liquor. Passing out on the couch for months on end. Waking up with hangover.

Eventually went to the doctor to discuss my issue that I can’t stop. Yet I have no problem not to drink.

So I stopped drinking. Naltrexone for the cravings the first couple of weeks. Now sober. Don’t even miss it.

I haven't had a drink in 27 days, which is the longest I've gone in a while. Left to my own devices, I tend to settle into a pattern of 2-4 drinks per night, 5-6 nights a week (I actually tracked this for a while with a spreadsheet).

It's not like, ruin my life, wake up in a gutter type situation, but it leads to just feeling somewhat crappy all the time, and I didn't like it, so I wanted to stop.

Some things that helped / are helping:

I have an app Habit Tracker. It's a pretty simple app with a list of habits you want do do, you can set on some schedule. When you do them, you tick them off and it keeps track of how many times, so you build up a streak. I made a "don't drink" habit, and check it off in the morning if I didn't drink the day before. It also shows a notification bubble on the app if you don't check it off and I hate that. It's like this little negative reinforcement that I have to live with that bubble all day if I drank the day before. It's silly, but it helped.

Reading the book This Naked Mind and listening to The Huberman Lab podcast episode about alcohol (#86) also helped. Alcohol messes up your body in a lot of ways, even at what's considered "moderate" or "normal" levels of drinking.

/r/stopdrinking on Reddit

Alcohol is an addictive drug and when you stop after using it regularly, you're going to feel cravings. It's not a moral failing, it's physiology. They do get less intense and less frequent after the first two weeks or so.

A couple things:

1.) I realized that drinking was a symptom of bigger issues in my life, and I was self medicating. Resolving those issues wound up with me giving up my excessive drinking with almost no effort.

2.) When I do recreationally drink, I limit myself to evenings only, I give myself extra time to sleep it off, and I force myself to consume single tall drinks only.

3.) I maintain awareness that I tend to self medicate, and reflect on the problems in my life that I can control.

Cutting drinking out completely is likely going to require a person to hold you accountable, and swapping in a different hobby to divert your focus. I find that when I'm idle, I tend to wander in the kitchen.

Good luck!

The technique that worked for me was replacement.

The idea with replacement is that it's hard to say no to something, but easier to say yes to something slightly different (a nonalcoholic alternative).

Don't have any booze around, but do have lots of seltzer and tea.

I decided not to drink for a year and stuck to that commitment. Simple as. If I can't attend an event without drinking I didn't go.

I'm hopeless for quitting my compulsive browsing habit though. I keep trying and relapsing.

The big change for me was to stop thinking of quitting as something you should succeed at on the first try and start treating attempts as trial runs for gathering data and improving your approach.

The other piece was combining many different levers: social support, replacement activities, rewards, motivation statements etc. You need as many tools as possible because addiction is tough.

For more on this type of approach check out the book Change Anything... Helped me more than any other source.

A key idea they discuss are "critical moments" - ie that time when you're buying the 12 pack. You need to figure out when and why that happens and design a plan to address it.

I just flat out quit - no drinking, period. I think 6-8 months for me was enough to normalize and remove it as a habit and now I'm able to drink without making it unhealthy. Luckily I wasn't anywhere near alcoholic - just casual habitual drinker, but a nasty hangover really pushed me over the edge to stop.

I took Ayahuasca, and it told me to stop taking drugs. Ayahuasca is an insane plant.

Have some kids. It'll be torture when you have a headache and they're up before the sun rises.

I hope this was a joke, but if not, this is not good advice for most people.

Having kids does not solve substance abuse issues, mental health issues, relationship issues or any similar problems. People may believe that having kids will fix whatever problem they're facing, but instead find that it just adds tremendous amounts of stress, burden and additional hardship on them.

Can second this, with a 7 week old even the slightest risk of a hangover isn't worth a few hours of fun. My partner not being able to drink definitely helps.

Some ideas: 1)Before you start drinking try to think about how you will feel after 2)Make a calendar and everyday you don't drink mark an X on the day - you won't want to break the streak 3)Drink way more seltzer water 4)Consider fasting - when I started fasting I had ZERO interest in eating or drinking garbage 5)Seek therapy

I'll vouch for the seltzer water. Turns out I'm just addicted to drinking carbonated beverages that aren't sweet... not necessarily the beer/alcohol. A lot of non-alcoholic beers are getting to be pretty decent too. If you want to stay cheap, even a bud zero is surprisingly tolerable and totally fills the cravings for both carbonation and that refreshing beer taste. Between seltzer water and non-alcoholic beers, I've massively decreased my alcohol consumption and feel pretty great. Would highly recommend for anyone looking to cut back

I kicked alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis. Not all at the same time, and not all on my first try. Everyone's usage is different so you have to figure out what works and doesn't work for you.

First thing is you have to really want to quit. If you don't want to do it, it will be a lot harder. Try to really think through the ways your substance use is harming you in the short term or long term, be it physically or mentally or whatever. People get really really strong cigarette cravings when they quit, but if you've started to feel lung pain in your daily life and actively realize the damage you are doing to your body, it's a lot easier to hold off on those cravings.

If your pattern is to go long periods without drinking and then binge a bunch in one weekend, maybe you just need a strategy to get you through the one weekend that you do feel like it. Anything that can delay it- eg say I won't drink until I clean the whole house and go to the gym. and maybe when you do finish cleaning and exercising a few hours later you won't feel like you want it as badly or can say no to your urge.

If going to bars is what tempts you into a drink, and you go to bars more to socialize than anything, try to find some socialization somewhere that people don't drink or where drinking is a detriment, like hiking or sports or Magic the Gathering or what ever floats your boat.

Rather than wallow in self pity, forgive yourself for your mistake and then try again. Don't excuse yourself like well I already had one so I guess I failed... you had one, but one is better than two or ten, so don't give up, start again and keep at it! If you were doing a programming project and your first prototype went a bit poorly you wouldn't give up (hopefully), if you knew you could do it, you'd take what you learned and try again with a new prototype.

Sometimes alcohol overuse is indicative of metabolic problems. Their brain say 'starving, please feed me', but because of insulin resistance sugar can't get into the brain cells. Ethanol has 7 calories/gram. It gets converted into acetate, which is easily used by the brain as fuel. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14085230

There was a link I found interesting, on student athletes and the '4 day hangover'... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21255738

Naloxone and naltrexone can be really helpful at reducing the amount of alcohol that you can consume. Naltrexone is FDA-approved for alcohol abuse. My friend's alcohol use was under control for about 2 weeks after her treatment with naloxone. Low dose naltrexone is probably more beneficial than full-dose...

Another friend told me of how, while on naltrexone, she could have a beer, then half of a second beer, but couldn't finish the second beer. She drank to make her emotional problems go away - it was easier to stop the naltrexone than the alcohol.

The only reason you continue to do it despite the inevitable price you have to pay is because it alters your mood positively in the short term.

You have two problems: 1. Desire for instant gratification 2. Lack of other things that alter your mood positively

You can work on both in parallel. Exercise solves both at the same time.

The last meta thing to keep you focused on longer term healthy routes of solving this problem is to realize that:

1. You’re weak minded if you keep giving into instant gratification and should strive to be a stronger person 2. You have a deficit of things that give you positive emotion which is decreasing your quality of life

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread on what could replace drinking for you but you need to seek what works for you.

I slept poorly one night and decided that nothing was worth that effect on my wellbeing. I also read that there alcohol is neurotoxic at any dose, and I value my lucidity: https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk/news/new-study-finds-even-moderate...

So I ended up on a combo of meds that had a “No alcohol” provision. One was your standard mental health medication; but the other was terbinafine for a toenail fungus that wouldn’t die. The latter pretty much got me to stop drinking. Whenever I would have a drink anyway (thinking, how bad could it be anyway) the hangover the next morning was brutal - and way out of proportion to the amount drunk.

A single 12oz beer with moderate (6%) ABV would leave me with a hangover that felt like I’d tried to keep up with a bunch of 26 year olds with a death wish.

Anything more would make me actually wake up with a death wish.

This amount of negative reinforcement made it pretty unbearable to drink for the year plus I was taking the medication, and it just sort of stuck after.

To make this useful advice - maybe try doing something terrible the morning after; perhaps posting a bad programming opinion on the forum of your choice.

One thing that can help is to understand that no one is going to save you. You have to decide not to drink on your own. Once you see that, you can work on setting your life up in a way that makes it easier to make healthier decisions. Also don’t feel guilty when you drink. Just decide you want to be healthy, and that drinking leads you away from that goal. It’s not about quitting drinking. It’s about deciding that health is your priority, and drinking simply isn’t helpful is supporting your priority.

Develop an exercise routine.

I hated the feeling of running or working out hung over and used that as motivation to not drink. Would rather feel good working out and feel good after the work out.

For me, it took internal alignment. A break through for me was understanding how vegans manage their diets. For vegans, their identity is they are vegan. They don't eat meat because that is who they are as a person.

When I decided to stop drinking, I decided my new identity was someone that does not drink. It took about 6mo to fully get ok with not drinking, but I am happy I did it :)

> Any tips on cutting out something completely and how to get out of just hating yourself when you fail?

Honestly, cutting something cold turkey is the hardest thing and requires hard willpower.

It might work better if you wean yourself off, don't turn down the drink but just zip a bit and leave it. If the foggy head feeling still happens with a zip your body will eventually just reject that idea.

Long abstinence is the key. I have been able to re-frame my relationship with alcohol successfully---but this is often not the case for long time habitual users. I cut out alcohol, but substituted in non-alcoholic beer (they are VERY good now) and high CBD / low THC cannabis. I felt nearly no "high", but found that it hit the spot that the first beer would. Eventually once the habit was broken I kept drinking the near-beer and stopped the cannabis except for occasionally, and it worked! This may not be an option for you, but it worked for me.

I too love drinking. I used to close bars every day of the week. I had changes of clothes at work so that I could go straight from the bar to work the next day.

Eventually I had to want something else more than I wanted to drink. I started adding up the financial toll of my drinking and looked at how much that set me back from other goals. Then later it was my health.

But finances was the biggest thing. Social drinking was like buying a brand new car every year. It kept me from going anywhere in life.

Making that connection is what worked for me.

If there are other people in your family with drinking problems, or you have a mental illness, you should probably get professional help with quitting, because the chance of alcohol eventually ruining your life is significantly higher.

I love beer and always drink fairly responsibly. The hangover from >2 beers is enough to keep me from having more than that. I used to average 2 on Friday, 2 on Saturday, maybe 1 on Sunday, and a couple of weekdays I might have 1 or 2. I always told myself that was perfectly fine because it's not excessive on a given night, but recent review of the literature convinced me otherwise.

It was pretty hard to change my habit at first. What made the biggest difference was working out. I have a long history of fitness, and could recall that in my most fit era, I rarely drank. Like maybe once a month I'd have a beer.

It's really hard to be in great shape and average 10 beers a week, even if it's limited to 2 per event. Knowing that it's a limitation to my goals is very powerful in reducing my intake. I really just love beer and all its variety, so I miss it, but it also makes it much nicer to enjoy when I have it.

What helped me eliminate almost entirely was understanding the impact it has on the body and the brain. More than "it's bad for your health", it helped me understand why it's bad. Even the allegedly harmless "a glass of red wine a day is good for your health" (spoiler: no).

There are many sources, but I recently saw this one from Dr. Andrew Huberman, which seemed more comprehensive than a lot of what I've read before.

[1] What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS1pkKpILY

What kicked off my now nearly four years without drinking was an initial four months of intensive breathing mindfulness exercises from thich nhat hanh's book and at least one hour a day on an encompassing project, in my case really learning some 555 timer circuits.

You don't sound like you are addicted, based on which you might get something from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUck-umj2WI. Basically other things will have to move out the way for you to do this, and you may burn a bridge or too, which is fine.

I found pretty quickly in was enjoying the ritual of drinking, not the alcohol itself. Once I figured that out I would have a cold seltzer water after a day of work, or when hanging out with friends, and get the exact same ‘unwinding’ feeling.

Pretty soon after that I could have water with ice - turns out my body just wanted something cold at a certain time as a cue to relax.

Still going strong 6 years later!

It's all about self control. My dad was an alcoholic and my sister is an alcoholic. I'm about to uncork a fresh bottle of cabernet, but I'm only going to have half a glass with my dinner. I never touch anything stronger than wine, and I rarely have more than one glass. I probably drink on average one glass every two days and sometimes less.

This is terrible advice.

I’m sorry to be so harsh, especially here, where I know etiquette is important but this comment needs to be shut down.

I will edit this comment to add more in a moment but anyone reading this now, do not think is advice is effective.

BRB with more.

Have you thought about substituting “mocktails”, cocktails with alcohol substitutes that taste sort of like alcohol but without any real alcohol?

Personally I think they taste even better, they look interesting just like a cocktail, and can be part of the same social ritual.

Go to AA, do the steps, read Allen carrs easy way

I've seen enough of my friends die to know that recreational drug abuse doesn't end well. That normally does a great job of keeping me from drinking. I do it once a year to recalibrate myself.

Don't think about it as quitting anything. The default is to not partake. Do some introspection to figure out what it's providing for you, and look elsewhere for whatever that is.

I recently took a month or so off drinking for health reasons, and found that the latest generation of alcohol free beers really helped.

Most of the time I reach for a drink, I realized it was more about habit than any need to be drunk, so simply replacing real beer with Heineken 0.0 helped me “scratch the itch” without the alcohol.

It’s a good question, and I’m glad that you posted it. I am in a similar situation.

For me, I am becoming wearier and wearier of drinking - but having the access to an external and accessible release is appealing. I don’t have advice but I do have a personal target: I smoked cigarettes starting 20+ years ago. And over the years I got distance from it little by little. Now I have, what I like to think of as, a good relationships with tobacco. I enjoy a cigarette once every 6-8 weeks. Sometimes it’s good and tasty and I enjoy the experience, other times it tastes like crap and I know I’ll feel even worse later so I cut it 1/4 in.

That’s where I want to get with alcohol (and I’m certainly getting closer).

There's no magic, don't buy alcohol. When you give in and buy some, forgive yourself, think about how you made the decision and how you can make a better decision next time. Don't allow alcohol to be kept where you live .

Failing is human--please never hate yourself for that.

You don't seem to be in a bad place, but you should talk to your doctor about some mental health counseling.

Specifically, you should try to get down to the bottom of what causes you to feel a need to binge on a 12 pack in a weekend when you can live without alcohol for weeks otherwise.

Good luck.

absolutely. Failing is the fastest way to learn.. I encourage mindful failure.

literally... I just decided and stopped. Mind over matter. The Last drink I had was about 8 months ago.

Same with coffee. I waiting till i got the flu then quit coffee. The idea is if I'm going to feel like shit and need to rest lots i might as well take advantage of it.

I still drink a cup or two of black tea a day but no coffee anymore.

If I'm not in control of my mind then who is? If I cant control what i consume then I'm not in control of my mind...