This thread has inspired me. Or i hope it will inspire me.
i don't know if i am an alcoholic. i don't want to admit that because it would be very sad for me to never be able to enjoy a beer again. i really, really enjoy a nice beer. and i sense that if one admits to the "alcoholic" tag, they are admitting that they should never drink alcohol again.
in all honesty i have at least 2 or 3 beers when i get home from work, plus a glass or 2 or 3 of wine. every day.
despite my habit i still manage to wake up early and train fairly intensely for athletics. i have run multiple sub 3 hour marathons in the past couple years despite carrying on this type of drinking habit. and i hold down i very high paying job.
i definitely have an addictive streak, but i have been able to quit things surprisingly easy. case in point, i drank a lot of coffee (8-10 cups/day) for the last 20 years and coincidentally i just quit cold turkey a month ago, with no withdrawal symptoms.
my biggest concern as previously noted is that i'll never be able to enjoy one beer again, or a nice glass of Cabernet, because i can't stop at one.
from a mustachian perspective, i have probably $5,000 worth of high end wine in my house that my wife and i reserve for special occasions. it would be sad to think that i cannot enjoy them any more.
this is partially a plea for help and partially a plea to let me know that i can dial back drinking without giving it up completely.
Well, 'alcoholic' is sort of a made up term, like a pop culture term. It's not used by the medical or psychiatric profession when they are treating substance abuse, or at least it shouldn't be except as a sort of slang. I dislike the term as well b/c it allows society to support and encourage regular ingestion of an objectively addictive substance, while somehow cordoning off a group of drinkers as 'different' based on extremely nebulous, unscientifically defined criteria.
You sound like a lot of people, somewhere in the middle on the sliding scale of alcohol use between 'never drinks' and 'drinks until it's fatal', and feeling uneasy about the long term trajectory. Which makes sense...booze is addictive to pretty much anyone who drinks regularly.
Setting aside the physical effects, I'd guess some personality types seem more susceptible to psychological dependence or forming a problematic habit of it. Both my husband and I were near-daily drinkers for most of the past 20 years, but he doesn't have quite the psychological dependence I do/did, so he's always found moderation easier. The difference seems to be that he never formed any strong mental link between booze and stress relief. Whereas, I had gone for 15 years of my young adulthood drinking very occasionally and not caring about booze, but then began drinking regularly during a period of un-diagnosed illness that was causing severe anxiety and insomnia. The 'link' quickly formed in my brain that a drink would help me calm down and sleep when nothing else was working (note: Had I had access to an Rx for sedatives during those months, I'd very likely have formed a habit around those, but whiskey was handy and sedatives were not).
Even though I got out of that insomnia/health crisis, and went back to drinking more 'normally', that association in my brain remained ("alcohol can chill you out and relax you when nothing else can"), and ever after, the end of a shitty day or a bad bout of insomnia would trigger the desire to have a drink. And gradually I just developed the habit of a couple of drinks at cocktail hour. Lots of my social circle drank the same way, and I experienced no negative consequences to my life. Literally none, not even hangovers. I had nothing but pleasurable associations with it.
But there was always a nagging worry about 1) my health; and 2) the inevitable creep of tolerance and increased intake. A recent health issue that is worsened by alcohol is what finally spurred me to tackle it.
My advice is, quit worrying about labeling yourself. If you are feeling concern, then that's all you need to legitimize taking steps. No need to wait and see if serious consequences might one day arise! As to moderation, you might be one who can. Or you might be someone more like me, where you CAN moderate, but just find that it's SO MUCH mental effort to do so, that it seems surprisingly easier to just not drink (though I haven't absolutely 'forbidden' myself from ever having another drink). Or you might be someone whose brain reacts really strongly to the first couple of drinks, and removes the 'off' switch; in that case, maybe moderation wouldn't work for you. I've never been a binge drinker, so others here might offer more insight on that pattern than I have.
But it seems like anyone who likes to drink with any regularity just inevitably ends up dealing with 'amount creep'. That's not a character flaw in you or anyone, it's just a human body's response to booze.
I know the feeling of not wanting to think about potentially giving up something you enjoy. Try framing it a different way in your head...see if you can just start thinking of it as something you get to try (at least for a while) to give your health a boost, and what a relief it will be to remove the nagging worry when you pour a glass. In other words, just give it a try. It wasn't nearly as scary as I thought back before I tried it!