Since I’ve been in therapy and on medication, I rarely drink more than two drinks in an evening. I’ll drink glasses of water in between drinks. More than that and I often regret it, not just for the hangovers, but for the severe depression the next day, which can get really bad. My fiance helps me with this, gently reminding me how many drinks I’ve had and encouraging me to drink water. At parties, I bump it up to three drinks depending on how long I plan to hang out. I have had some serious drug/drink abuse in my life, and I don’t want to go back to that.
But Saturday, I achieved the rank of Bulletproof. I was just having a wonderful time, and was with people I trusted, and got absolutely plastered, to the point where the majority of the last two hours of the evening are lost to me. And for some reason, the next day I didn’t have that bad of a hangover, and I didn’t feel depressed at all.
I think it might be because I control my drinking now. I can enjoy letting go and going over the limit every now and then and not feel bad because it’s not a daily, weekly, or even monthly habit anymore.
I started drinking for real the summer of my junior year of college. I became a bartender at a tight-knit, fancy place. We could drink during work but, more importantly, we drank after work - a lot. On the nights I wasn’t working, I had another group of rowdy friends that I went out with. I was covered every night and I drank 12 drinks minimum and 20 drinks maximum every single during that period. I went out and did that over 100 nights in a row.
Lo and behold, alcoholism kicked in. I drank very day over the next 4000 (12 years or so) days or so with the minimum being 12 and closer to 30 drinks a day at the end. It isn’t very funny knowing that, if you choose not to drink that day, you could die or at least be in excruciating pain and very uncomforatable in general.
I rarely got a hangover and I had a nice professional job with a beautiful wife, a perfect house, and everything else. Still, the pressures of alcoholism are horrible especially when you have to hide most of it as the biggest secret of your life. You just want to feel normal but normal is gone and requires vast amounts to alcohol to simulate it every single day for years at a time.
It really depends on the situation. If I have nothing to do the next day I won’t stop drinking until everyone is ready to go home, but I’ll pace myself. There’s a fine line between being happily drunk and being sick on the floor, and I can usually tell when the next drink will make me cross it. If I have to get up the next day I’ll have at the most two drinks. I’m a ridiculous lightweight so usually two drinks is more than enough to give me a buzz.
I just keep going, which is why I tend not to drink. When I stop drinking, I start to feel really depressed and sickly within about an hour. If that happens, I go home early.
For better or for worse, I am a typically a functioning drunk, which gets me into all kinds of crazy situations. So, as for stopping, the sad but true answer is that I usually dont. I usually stop before I get sick, and the biggest factor in that is because I’m also poor (and a high tolerance).
When I do want to stop, the best way for me is to strictly limit myself to five drinks. Like I said, I have a high tolerance, but every drink after five makes it almost impossible for me to stop until I’m stonkered. Anything before five is pretty easy for me to stop, assuming I dont have any reason to drink besides wanting to drink. Hope that makes sense.
Why do I stop? Because I dont want to get so drunk I black out. I black out pretty often when I get super-drunk. Other reasons for stopping are because I run out of money, or because I dont want to embarrass my friends.
I cannot drink casually. If I am drinking I am drinking until either I’m good and royally hammered, or the beer has run out. In years previous, the general rule was the beer ran out or the bartender told me to go home. Currently, I stop drinking when I begin to feel ill or just to damn tired - mostly the later.
When I go go a Hurricanes game, I limit myself to two beers. I do this because 1. I am driving 2. I have to be at work at 0600 the next morning and 3. Beer is $5.25 a pop at the RBC Center.
I quit drinking altogether, but I’d definitely say that most of the time when I drank, which was pretty rare, it was to excess. Not barf-all-over excess, but to the point of being drunk/tipsy. For me, because I’m short, I was pretty much highly buzzed by my 2nd glass of wine and drunk by the 3rd.
I feel a lot better now that I’ve cut alcohol out of my life. Even on the rare occasion where it was just a glass of wine, I still felt sluggish and unmotivated the next day. Again, this might have to do with my tolerance being so low. And I found that initially there might be a feeling of euphoria, but by the end of the evening I’d be sort of sad.
I might still have a glass of champagne at my wedding or something, but I’m pretty much done.
I quit drinking on April 4, 1987, around about 10:00 that evening, shortly after I ran into that carload of people leaving the beach. Don’t worry, no one died, no one got hurt really badly. I had begun drinking sometime about 9:00 that morning. The officer that arrived on the scene did not even do a roadside sobriety test, he just said, “Get in the car and wait until I talk to some of the witnesses.” Around midnight I blew a 0.19 in the breathalyzer.
The next morning I made an assessment, it could have been much worse. Five years earlier my Dad had died drinking and driving. Two years before that, his mother died of cirrhosis of the liver. I was not one to do anything in moderation, either. On the morning of April 5, 1897, I chose to stop drinking or it would likely kill me. Please forgive me this hijack.
I’m prone to unpredictable blackouts, so I try pretty hard not to get actually drunk anymore. By unpredictable I mean that the last time it happened, about 3 years ago, I’d only had about 4 or 5 drinks before things started to get hazy, but a good night out at that time would be 10+ drinks without barfing, getting the spins, or doing anything particularly crazy. Sometimes my body seems to just want to be completely shitfaced regardless of how much I’ve actually had to drink. Because of a couple of those experiences, I’ve been a lot more careful than I used to be.
Socially, it’s really hard in Japan to just stop drinking. Other people pour for you and your glass never gets close to empty most of the time, so you can’t just count drinks to know when to stop. I usually monitor my state and try to slow down or unobtrusively drink more tea or water when I think I’ve reached the point where I’m going to get really drunk if I continue. I also try to get ahold of the bottle so that I pour more than I receive. I drink water in between rounds when I think I’ve had more than 3–4 beers or the equivalent. When I get home or wherever, I make sure to drink more water, which means that I’ll usually wake up to pee during the night, and I drink more water then. Drinking lots of water really helps to not get hung over.
The last time I was hung over was when I went out with a buddy and got trapped at the bar with an obnoxious yet startlingly unattractive woman who would not let either of us politely extricate ourselves from the situation. (Believe me, we tried. We had to walk out when she was in the bathroom to get away without being actually rude to her face). She bought us a couple of drinks at the beginning of that fiasco, which I drank too fast, and I had already been drinking a bit immoderately. For some reason, I didn’t do my water thing and I paid for it in the morning. I hate evenings like that. I didn’t go out drinking again for a couple of months.
I, too, follow the three drink maximum plan, much to the consternation of younger coworkers who feel the need to get sloshed well past the point that it appears enjoyable to anyone involved. It seems to be pretty self-limiting, at least if I’m out and about; after three drinks, I just don’t feel like having another. At home, on the other hand, I’ve been known to kill a bottle of wine/Belgian ale, or down a hand of whiskey over the course of an evening of reading by the fire or watching a couple of films, but that’s more often the exception rather than the rule. And never having done the college-drink-cheap-beer-until-barfing-and-spend-the-rest-of-the-weekend-recovering, I think that was probably one part of the growing up experience I really didn’t miss.
That sounds like a good choice, and a soberingly justified (metaphorically and otherwise) hijack. Good on you.
I want to add that I think just plum getting tired is mostly the limiter for me too.
If we’re out at the tavern and we’re shooting pool, throwing money in the jukebox, dancing, and shooting darts then the energy level is too high and bar time seems too early those nights.
If it’s just a casual night out then sometimes I can’t wait for the bar to close so we can all leave and just hit the hay.
I also drink water between drinks later on in the night and I down a couple aspirin and a big glass of juice or water right before bed. That really helps with any hangover and problems getting up in the morning. I’m not a late sleeper after a night of drinking, I’ll probably get to bed around 2:30 good and sauced and then wake up around 7 am anyway. Find something to eat, drink more water and then carry on with the rest of the day. Might go to bed a little early that night but usually if I stick to Old #7, or beer only, I don’t get much of a hangover. I think the critical issue is dehydration. If you can control that, pace your drinking and have a good time, then it makes your excesses more tolerable.
If I’m out on a schoolnight, then it’s no more than three beers for me. The weekends of course, are totally different. Then it depends on where I am, who I’m with, where I’m going and what (if anything) I have to do the next day.
Quite often we’ll go out drinking in town and then finish up at a friend’s house where we’ll carry on until we get so trollied we just fall asleep. That’ll be after Hazel and I have put the world to rights and generally been through every single failing of any bloke we’ve ever dated.
She passes out on the sofa, I make it upstairs to the spare bed. I wake her up around midday with coffee after I’ve been up for several hours cleaning her kitchen (late night munchies…), tidying the house and doing the washing up. For some reason, she never complains!
I read this thread earlier and didn’t really have anything to contribute. Sometimes I drink a little, sometimes a lot. As many people have said the older I get the less I feel like drinking and also the less I feel like going out.
But then I though about this weekend. We went out on Sunday. My friend is on antibiotics and he can’t drink. My girlfriend is pregnant and can’t drink. So we joked that I had to drink for 3 people. I started with a cider, then (one glass less than) a bottle of champagne (my girlfriend wanted a glass). Quickly followed by - 6 tequilas, 4 Jaeger bombs and 6 double vodka and Red Bulls. This was between 3 pm and 7 pm. Needless to say I was pretty wasted. But I woke up with absolutely no hangover - go figure.
(and a high tolerance).