I quit smoking six years ago. It sucked. I became perpetually cranky (er), I got severe headaches for almost a month, I couldn't sleep, and I thought about cigarettes nearly every waking moment of the day. With severe addictions, it truly becomes a matter of dependence. I equate the impulse to have a cigarette with the urge to eat. When you've gone too long without eating, your body lets you know "Hey, maybe you should eat, idiot." If you ignore it, it insists more loudly. And it doesn't stop.
Quitting smoking was almost like that. I may as well have been denying myself water and trying to convince my body that I wasn't thirsty. Addiction operates on those same basic impulse levels: Eat, drink, sleep, have a cigarette, find something to hump (maybe that last one is just for sex addicts). Smoking was like breathing; the desire came from somewhere deeper than the conscious mind. It wasn't a craving, the way one might prefer to have a slice of pizza instead of a bowl of ice cream; it was simply something I had have to have to get through the day.
Six years later and it still isn't completely gone. When I smell someone smoking I can still remember how it tasted, and how it made me feel. And I find myself desperately wanting a cigarette. I don't often act on the impulse; it's been long enough that the feeling is just a dim memory, and once the rational mind kicks in the craving quickly passes (perhaps it helps that cigarettes are three times as expensive as they were when I quit). But in that brief moment, when you're first exposed to the stimulus, the impulse is as strong as ever.
For me, drinking alcohol feels the same. Only with an added wrinkle: it seems like everyone I know is drinking all the time. Fear of secondhand smoke and all the legislation that's passed in recent years has made it easier to stay away from cigarettes because you're rarely exposed to them. I'm pretty sure you have to be a ninja to smoke in public nowadays. But drinking isn't shunned; it's encouraged. If you're going out with co-workers, friends, your wife, your family; odds are some (or all) of you are going to have a drink. As someone who has had trouble controlling the quantity of alcohol I regularly consumed at certain points in my life, this makes fighting the habit infuriating. And it makes quitting cold turkey, as I did with smoking, a virtual impossibility.
So how do you walk the line between casual and heavy drinking? Between being sociable and being a full blown alcoholic? The following has worked for me:
1) Try not to keep alcohol in the house. If you're like me then if there's alcohol anywhere around you, you'll drink it. There's no such thing as buying a twelve pack but stopping at six and saving the rest for tomorrow. Not drinking when there's liquor around feels about as natural as sitting down to take a piss. So just don't keep it in the house, and don't buy so much of it to begin with.
2) Drink with other people. You're likely to drink more at their pace, and if you're a heavy drinker then odds are that pace will be slower than yours. You'll likely be drinking out in public, which is more expensive, and so you're not as likely to just keep going until you get tanked (unless you're wealthy, I suppose). Plus, in this setting it's more about being social and less about self-medicating.
3) Stay honest. If you catch yourself lying about how much you drink to other people, stop it. Don't buy a six pack and chug it down before your wife gets home and then take out the trash to hide the evidence. If you're hung over, don't tell everyone at work you've got the flu. This rule is probably the hardest, because these types of behaviors happen when you've reached that point when you know you've got a problem and you're trying to stop, you just can't yet. That's when you're at your most desperate (and pathetic). Just ride it out.
4)Find something else to fill the hours of the day you used to spend drinking. Go running. Write a stupid blog. Make it something fun, so that you look forward to it, like a reward.
There you go. That's my foolproof method. Practice it, and it'll still feel impossibly hard, and hopeless, and it won't work for a long, long time. But just keep doing it. Remember how long it took for you to become so tolerant of alcohol? To stop getting hangovers? Right.
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