People Who Pour A Drink Almost Every Night Usually Have These 5 Reasons
dekazigzag | ShutterstockYou don’t have to get wasted every night for this to be an issue. Many people struggle with feelings of shame about how much they drink, even at levels that are not commonly considered to be “a problem.” To reassure themselves, these people note that they experience no physiological dependence on alcohol, and "only" have one or two drinks a night to “take the edge off.”
However, at some point, especially if these people generally try to be healthy in other ways, e.g., nutrition, exercise, therapy, they start to feel uneasy about what they increasingly recognize as a need to drink almost every evening (or almost every weekend). Here are six reasons that you may drink more frequently than you would ideally want to, and how your drinking relates to your relationships, mental health, and overall wellbeing.
People who drink almost every night usually have these reasons:
1. They're self-medicating anxiety or depression
Many people who pour a drink almost every night do not recognize that it isn’t normal to feel extremely stressed, negative, or upset all the time, because this is what they observed in their family of origin. They think everyone feels overwhelmed and requires a substance to feel positive. This is not the case, and is not healthy, but if you have never seen anything else, it feels normative to you.
Incidentally, some people are also self-medicating social anxiety, the type of anxiety where you are fearful of others judging you and feel very inhibited and anxious in social situations. If you can’t socialize without alcohol, your use usually ramps up on the weekends, and your spouse may have mentioned you are embarrassing at social events when you drink too much.
2. People who pour a drink nightly don’t allow themselves to clock off
With the advent of smartphones and email, work is often 24/7. When people are very perfectionistic and anxious about doing well at work, they feel they have to respond to all emails in real time …unless, of course, they are not going to respond well.
The only way they can take themselves off the clock is to get inebriated enough (usually 1–2 drinks suffice) that they cannot be sure that they will respond intelligently to a work email. This is a subconscious motivator for those who struggle with scrupulosity and perfectionism.
3. They drink because their partner drinks
Many women will only be intimate when drinking, so the man drinks to drink alongside her and start the couple down the path of physical intimacy. Another reason is that many women find their rigid, angry husbands to be more laidback and easygoing (or sleepy) when inebriated.
Drinking together is the only way that either of these people feels good in their relationship. Usually in this situation, both partners grew up with drinking in their families and do not recognize how dysfunctional this is.
People with trauma histories often feel fear or disgust around being intimate after the dopamine of the honeymoon stage wears off. In these cases, drinking allows these women to keep the peace in their marriages. This is not a healthy path, and eventually many of these women start to feel angry about feeling they need to participate in intimacy at all, and consider this retrospectively as coercive.
4. People like this dislike their life and feel they need to escape
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Many people are trapped in lives that they do not find fulfilling or meaningful, often because they are not spending their time and energy in ways that make sense to them, or because they are unhappy in their primary relationship. I discuss both of these in my podcast episode “I Have A Perfect Life, So Why Aren’t I Happy?” It feels risky and fraught to deeply examine whether you want to make significant life changes, like a career change or divorce, so you are using alcohol to anesthetize yourself regularly and avoid thinking about anything upsetting.
This is like how people used soma in the book, Brave New World: “Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”
5. People who pour a nightly drink may have physiological dependence and a drinking problem
You no longer know how to feel relaxed without alcohol, but you think that because it is “just one or two” (and usually a lot more on weekends), then you can keep telling yourself it’s not an issue. This is often seen in adult children of alcoholics, who have a genetic predisposition toward addiction, but believe that things are sustainable because they don’t drink as much or with as bad consequences as their parent.
If this post resonated with you and you find yourself a person who pours a drink almost every night, therapy is a great first step toward finally reckoning with your relationship with alcohol. A skilled therapist will help you figure out which of these issues is most at play, or other factors unique to your situation, and what next steps to take.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice, Best Life Behavioral Health.
