Well I am just approaching it being 5 years since I gave up drinking alcohol. Has anyone else here done the same? And do you miss it?
I drank less and less as I aged. I always had a really uncomfortable night with an irregular and pounding heart rhythm when I drank, even if I didn’t drink enough to get sick or be hungover. I also quit drinking altogether about five years ago. I’d love a beer or two with Mexican food, but the aftermath is not worth it. I intensely dislike being aware of my heartbeat.
I still drink alcohol occasionally but my consumption has hugely dropped. I don’t miss it either. More than anything else it was the disruption to my sleep combined with a moderately severe ulcer that made me mostly stop. These days, I use far more alcohol in my cooking that I drink. I’ve had the same six-pack of beer in my fridge for two months.
I quit drinking 28 years ago. I smoke some pot but not daily or even very much when I do use. I quit mainly because it was too easy to put off responsibilities when I drank. My procrastination came to an end when I quit drinking. I can’t stand unfinished business.
Once I got through college, I was never a big drinker. My doctor put me on some medication for life, told me it didn’t mix well with alcohol, so I stopped drinking.
There was one New Year’s Eve where I had a glass of wine at dinner and a little champagne at midnight. Sure enough, it didn’t sit well with me.
The only thing I miss about alcohol is at a party or dinner when someone goes on and on about what a great wine or beer or single-malt scotch or whatever they’re drinking. But that’s just curiosity.
I stopped drinking about 25 years ago. I still have the occasional sip or two of my husband’s beer, but not much more than that. I stopped drinking because of ridiculous hangovers - getting a miserable hangover after three beers just wasn’t worth it. I don’t miss drinking at all
I always loved getting shit-faced, but in my late 40s it seems I had used up my god-given quota of alcohol ingestion–the hangovers (even from two beers) became a price to high to pay. I do get a nice charge out of O’Doul’s Amber(tastes more like beer than regular O’Douls).
I quit over 20 years ago because it was killing me. I still think about it every day though. Cunning, baffling, powerful stuff. My brain works differently.
Most times I drink I behave in ways I find shameful, even if nobody notices or cares. I feel it brings out a person I don’t like at all, so why do it.
I stopped two years ago.
I stopped for decades. Not for any particular moral reason but it just wasn’t something I was interested in.
I went off to college after being valedictorian, national merit scholar and so forth. My freshman year I behaved like a freshman with the beer and whiskey and such and came out with a 2.03 GPA. Stopped drinking and my GPA sophomore year was in the high 3s. Lesson learned.
I’ll still take a glass of good wine and - on vacation without my kids - indulge in rum-based drinks if it’s good rum (I have some brought in from a distillery in Nassau). And I have a 75-year-old bottle of scotch here at the house that I’m cracking open with some friends on Election Day if things go well.
Or, to translate, I don’t drink unless the occasion is good and the alcohol is absolutely excellent.
Your experience with a pounding heart after drinking is exactly mine, and it was about ten years ago that I stopped. I’d like a topnotch German beer with German food, but it’s not worth it anymore.
I used to drink all the time, for some periods very heavily. A few years ago I began to notice that it took me a couple of days to completely get over a big session and feel normal. So I concluded that my drinking career had come to end.
“It’s a young man’s game and I have lots of happy memories, but that’s it for me,” I told my drinking buddies and quit entirely. I figured that it would be simpler to treat it like smoking and just stop completely. People tried to cajole me by asking why I “couldn’t have just one or two,” but I explained that I would feel pretty useless if I couldn’t just stop completely because I felt like it.
Last night I was out with a friend who is a bit of a beer snob and had a mouthful of 3 different beers that he thought I would find interesting. They were unique flavors but that isn’t what I used to drink for.
I had my last beer a day before my 50th birthday. Actually, I had officially quit a month before, but I was hanging out with Denny Laine that night, so I felt a pint or two was warranted. I digress.
My reasons for quitting were manifold. First, I was just getting sick of it. Earlier in the year, I kind of made an ass of myself at a friends party followed by having my keys taken away from me, being driven home and then falling in my garage and almost breaking my arm. But that kind of thing was a rare occasion for me. I don’t think I’m an alcoholic (though it runs in my family). I was pretty much an everyday drinker, but not an every day drunk. A couple of beers after work was de riguer. Putting away a twelve pack or two over the weekend was no big deal.
In the end, the big reasons for quitting were based on vanity. I felt I could be saving a lot of cash if I cut out the beer. Also, my head was developing that layer of fat that old drunk guys get. And there was a girl I was interested in who I knew was sober, and I was hoping that might work out (it didn’t; she’s off the wagon, I’m still not).
I do miss a good IPA and being a little buzzed was always fun, but I really got sick of being drunk. Every time I was at a party or a bar and would get good and drunk, the noise around me would overwhelm me. Sounds just became mud in my ears. I turned into one of those guys who just smiled and nodded like he knew what you were talking about. It’s a little ridiculous.
All in all, I go with this. Things like consuming alcohol and shitty food is a game for the young. I wasn’t worried too much about shit when I could bounce back easily but being over fifty, I’m out. I had a good run. Let the millennials fuck up their lives now. Baton handed.
A bit over 6 years ago for me, but the rest is the same. It gets a bit easier to deal with the desire to drink, but it’s showing no sign of going away.
I was a drunk, and it landed me in the hospital 13 years ago. I’ve been sober since. I never have any desire to drink, though. I’m trying to remember how I felt the first few months after I sobered up, and I think any desire for alcohol went away rather quickly.
I’ve been sober for 18 years and 3 months. Quitting saved my marriage.
My last drink of alcohol is somewhere back in 1987. Sadly, I was unable to give up drugs of abuse until mid 1990. But quitting those primary mood-altering substances did save my sanity and my life many times over.
And I thank my worldwide community of other recovering individuals, in and out of every different recovery fellowship, for my current state of sobriety.
Chronic pancreatitis. Never had much tolerance before I got sick anyway, but I used to like a good local brew occasionally. Now I’m afraid if I drink I’ll end up in the hospital again.
I stopped drinking about 30 year ago now. Alcohol was more expensive than weed back then, and I always liked getting high more than getting drunk, so I quit drinking. I don’t miss it.
When you are treating dependencies on mood-altering substances, do mild stimulants like caffeine and nicotine play a role in whether or not someone is able to maintain abstinence?
In other words, do coffee and cigarettes help people quit or do they keep people from quitting?