Generally speaking, I don’t find 2-3 beers per hour to be excessive, if you keep it up long enough you’ll get plowed but you can keep it up for a while. One year on spring break I drank a pint every 15 min for eight hours or so when I was no longer sober enough to walk to the keg. Then I got up and did it for the next two days until I cashed the keg by myself.
I can see drinking 35 beers a night if you’re up until 7 am. Even if you start drinking at 9 PM that only 3 beers an hour and if you’re starting when you wake up about 3 PM then you’re in the 2-3 beers per hour range. When I’m on vacation I typically do that. Of course, if you’re staying loaded every waking hour for months on end you have a problem.
I’d suggest cutting down on Friday night and Saturday for that kind of drinking so 5 PM to 7 AM friday-Saturday and 3PM-7AM Saturday-Sunday and then no more than a 6 pack the other 5 nights a week. That’s still partying pretty hard but it should at least be sustainable with a career. It works out to about 100 beers per week. Seriously lay off the Coke nothing good will come there
Really. 180 beers a week is 15 twelve-packs. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion, they’re all drinking Budweiser, which is about $11 a twelve-pack. That’s $165 a week, or $660 a month for beer. That’s some serious consumption there. You could probably finance a nice car for about ⅔ of that.
A thirty pack of beer is about $20. Hamms 30 packs are only $13. But the Coke is also running him $600 a month. So he is easily looking at a grand a month In beer and coke.
As to op, yeah drinking 180 drinks a week and only getting 28-35 hours of sleep a week is excessive. It’s your life but you should consider slowing down.
Even at my heaviest I drank about 30 drinks a week. And I considered that heavy.
If he is doing an eight ball a week, that’s $1200/month. This is on top of every other expense he has. I’d be surprised if he was employed with this level of partying, so I assume he has someone helping him out.
Honestly, I am dubious of anyone having a weekly habit of nearly 200 beers and an 8 ball of coke being even semi-functional as an employee or college student. But maybe I’m just being old.
This is the only quote we need for this discussion.
If you think the matter is important enough to create a new user account and open a thread about it, it’s problematic.
Even if you think you’re stealth bragging with the rest of the details, the fact that you state it’s unhealthy means you need to make adjustments either in your friendships or your consumption of mind/mood manipulating materials.
The details aren’t the issue, really. You could have said “We share 16 whole ounces of beer throughout the weekend!” or “I think me and my friends eat too much beef.” and many would have responded with tales of their own excesses in comparison. But if YOU think your group’s consumption is unhealthy then it probably is and if it ‘probably is unhealthy’ then it sounds like you’re ready to make some lifestyle changes, with or without the rest of your group following your lead. Kudos to you for having such insight!
Me, I quit the alcohol and drugs because I felt that being out-of-my-mind interfered with my real enjoyment (and memory) of events. That meant I didn’t partake during college, but it also means I can still vividly remember my High School graduation (and, before I made that decision, being able to remember anything about those years wasn’t a foregone conclusion).
To put this into perspective, the usual standard for a healthy, moderate amount of drinking is about seven per week (whether one a day, or more concentrated on the weekends). Now, this will vary from person to person: There are some people for whom any consumption of alcohol at all is unhealthy, and there are others for whom two a day is no big deal. But we’re talking about 26 times that rate, plus the 8balls. That’s absolutely not normal.
Which I’m pretty sure you already knew, especially since the first adjective you used to describe your own drinking is “unhealthy”. The question you really wanted to ask, I think, is what you should do about it.
Admitting you have a problem, like you have here, is a good first step. But it’s only a start. And there’s a limit to how much help we random people on the Internet can give. Your school probably has one or more programs for helping students deal with drug and alcohol problems. Find those programs. Ask them for their advice. And then, and this is the important part, actually take that advice.
I drink probably on the high end of normal for Americans (6-7 on one night a week, maybe 2-3 on one or two other nights throughout the week, so about 11-14 units total per week), and I think a lot of people exaggerate the dangers of alcohol (which exist, but should be put into perspective). That being said, you are way above any safe, reasonable or healthy level of alcohol consumption.
I don’t believe that you really consume 140-180 units per week per person (and if you don’t have an accurate sense of your consumption, that’s a problem in itself). More importantly though if you “need 8-10 drinks to feel something”, then that’s a big problem right there, because it suggests that your consumption is so high that your tolerance is way out of whack for a normal person.
You should probably consider cutting back to around 20 units per person per week for right now, and if you can’t do that, get some medical help.
Obviously the circumstance described would be abnormal and we can actually easily provide some real contextof how abnormal such circumstance would be.
Heavy alcohol use is defined as binge drinking on 5 or more days in the past month. Binge drinking is defined “as 5 or more alcoholic drinks for males or 4 or more alcoholic drinks for females on the same occasion (i.e., at the same time or within a couple of hours of each other) on at least 1 day in the past month.” Obviously by that definition what is described is much more than simple “heavy alcohol use.”
Using those definitions:
So 87.5% of college students are not heavy drinkers. In fact 62.1% of them do not report a single bout of “binge drinking” in the past month. This in no way implies that the numbers who do is not of concern, but binge drinking regularly is not “normal” in college; it is more the exception. Heavy drinking, as defined above, a much lower bar than the circumstance described as the op’s reality, is something the vast majority do not do. More of the same age group do in college than otherwise but it is still the exception.
Hector_St_Clare’s level is indeed quite on the high side for Americans. Average for Americans is 3.3 shots/week. Russians get to the 6.3 and South Koreans … dang … 13.3 shots/week on average. So he’d find no shortage good drinking buddies there … the op’s described circumstance? Not common anywhere on the world and not normal for American college campuses. Maybe for a subset of rock stars or old time Wall Street wolves and few Hollywood types before we post threads mourning their losses.
Yes such a circumstance would be insane. And that is just considering the alcohol use.
This rum fruit cake recipe sounds delish but the ones I’ve used call for continuing to baste daily with rum for weeks.
