How to tell if your drinking has become a problem

Alcohol is the hardest thing on this list to notice getting away from you, because it is the only one where the behaviour is not merely tolerated but actively encouraged. Nobody comments on a bottle of wine on a Tuesday. Somebody would certainly comment on a line of cocaine.

So the usual signals do not fire. Which means you have to check deliberately.

Why the units are not the test

UK guidance is no more than 14 units a week, spread over three or more days — roughly six pints of average-strength beer or six medium glasses of wine.

That number is useful for population health and not much use to you personally. Plenty of people drink more than 14 units with no loss of control at all, and some people drink less than that and cannot stop once they have started. Volume is a poor indicator of the thing that actually matters, which is control.

Better questions

Answer these honestly. Nobody is watching.

• Have you set yourself rules, and broken them? Not before six. Not on weeknights. Only wine. Only two. Rules are what people invent when part of them already knows.
• Do you drink faster than the people around you, and manage it so nobody notices? Extra ones in the kitchen, one before you go out, topping up your own glass?
• Have you hidden bottles, or hidden how much of one you drank? Concealment is one of the most reliable signals there is.
• Do you wake at three or four, anxious, for no reason you can name? That is often the rebound as alcohol leaves your system, not a message about your life.
• Have you tried to stop for a set period and found it much harder than expected? Not failed — found it disproportionately hard.
• Is your first thought on hearing bad news what you will drink about it?
• Are you drinking to sleep? Alcohol gets you to sleep and then wrecks the second half of the night, so this one compounds.
• Would you be uncomfortable if someone knew exactly how much you drank last week? This single question does more work than all the others.

None of these makes you an alcoholic — a word I find largely unhelpful anyway. But three or four of them is worth a conversation.

The anxiety loop, which almost nobody spots

This is worth understanding properly, because it explains why cutting down feels so much harder than it should.

Alcohol is a depressant. As it leaves your system your nervous system rebounds: you wake early, heart going, gripped by dread with no object. That dread is physiologically produced by the drink. But it does not feel like that at all. It feels like a true perception about your life.

And there is one substance that reliably relieves it, available from six o'clock.

So the drinking that causes the anxiety becomes the treatment for the anxiety. People run that loop for a decade, entirely convinced they drink because they are anxious, when the causation runs substantially the other way.

The uncomfortable implication is that cutting down will make your anxiety worse for the first ten days or so, before it gets significantly better. Knowing that in advance is often the difference between getting through it and concluding that you were right to drink.

If some of this landed

You do not have to have lost something before you are allowed to do anything about it. Waiting for a crisis is a very expensive way of deciding.

Alcohol counselling in Kent · Anxiety therapy