Emotional Drinking: What You Are Trying Not to Feel

Nobody drinks a bottle of wine for the taste. Emotional drinking means you're drinking about a feeling you'd rather not be having. The interesting part is that you can understand the entire pattern, name every trigger in it, and still do it tonight.

Alcohol works, and that's the problem

Alcohol works. The first drink does exactly what you asked of it, on time, every time. It lowers the volume, asks no questions, and doesn't require you to be in any way. Very little else is that reliable.

It doesn't remove the feeling; it just moves it later. An hour or two after the last drink, the feeling you were trying to avoid is still there, sometimes louder, because your body also needs to process toxins. The engines are overruning.

Why insight doesn't stop the drinking

You can be completely honest about your drinking. Call it what it is, map it by weekday and hour, name every trigger, install the app and count the days. It helps for a while.

Then a Tuesday arrives with a hard meeting at work, and the whole structure goes.

Understanding why you drink and being able to stay in the room with a feeling are two separate capacities. When you sit with your emotions, you build tolerance. Tolerance makes you stronger when you confront triggers.

The feelings that send us to a drink

Boredom. Unstructured time with nothing needed from you. Alcohol turns an empty evening into an event.

What helps: let it stay empty for twenty minutes. Breathe deeply. Grab a book. It will pass.

Loneliness. Alcohol simulates company. What helps: name it as loneliness, and sit with it. Knock on a neighbor's door. Go and volunteer somewhere. Join a community.

Grief. We're bad at this one, personally and culturally. Alcohol numbs for a little while, then the grief comes back with vengeance. What helps: give it time; it's unavoidable.

Shame. Drinking on shame produces more shame by morning. What helps: confess to one person. Shame doesn't survive being spoken.

Disappointment. Small, daily, unglamorous. Alcohol closes the gap between how you imagined things would go and reality. What helps: leave the gap open and note what and why you were hoping for. Was it that critical in the grand scheme of things?

Feelings aren't facts

Feelings behave like thoughts. They arrive, they're loud, they're certain they're right about your life, and then they thin out and go. They present themselves as verdicts.

At my first race a kid near the finish line held up a sign saying Pain is only temporary. A hundred metres on, another kid, another sign: Pain just means bread in French.

Both were right.

How to sit with a feeling instead of drinking it

Do these things; it takes five minutes, roughly.

Name it. Before the drink, something happened. Say what it was in one plain word. Bored. Angry. Lonely. Ashamed.

Pull your chair beside it. Don't sit across from it and don't try to win. Put your chair next to it, at whatever distance you can manage, and look from there. There's an exit right beside you. When it gets too hot you can pull back, and you can always leave the room.

Find it in the body. Throat, chest, stomach, jaw. What weight, what temperature, how much space it takes up. Attention on the sensation interrupts the thinking, and the thinking is what generates the craving.

Time it. Watch for the moment it weakens. Almost every acute wave lasts less time than you imagine. Once you've watched one dissolve without a drink, you have the evidence, and that's where strength starts.

What changes

Your decisions get better, you get to know yourself better, and you gain maturity, a certain kind of calm and wisdom.

Stay Sober // Stay Cool

Monica

Frequently asked questions

What is emotional drinking?

Emotional drinking is using alcohol to change how you feel rather than to enjoy a drink. It isn't defined by quantity but by function: the drink is doing a job that a feeling created, usually managing stress, boredom, loneliness, shame, or grief.

Why do I drink when I'm stressed?

Alcohol lowers the intensity of a feeling within minutes, reliably, and it's the most available exit in most homes. The relief is real but temporary, which is why the stress is still there when the drink wears off.

Is emotional drinking the same as alcoholism?

No. Emotional drinking describes why you drink, not how much or how physically dependent you are. Many people who drink emotionally are somewhere in what's often called grey area drinking, the space between fine and a diagnosable problem. If you're physically dependent, stopping without medical supervision can be dangerous, so speak to a doctor first.

How long does a feeling last if you don't drink on it?

An acute wave generally rises and thins out within minutes rather than hours. What lasts longer is the thinking about it, which is why locating the feeling in the body helps.

What can I do instead of drinking when I'm bored or lonely?

Name the feeling in one word, put your attention on where it sits in your body, and give it a set amount of time before you do anything about it.

Can you stop drinking without dealing with your emotions?

For a while, yes. Discipline, tracking and abstinence rules all work in the short term. They tend to run out when a large feeling arrives, because they manage the behaviour rather than build the capacity to tolerate what drives it.