“How do you know if you have a problem with alcohol?”,
I asked a friend who was working as a Drugs and Alcohol keyworker many years
ago. “If it’s costing you more than money”, he replied. He did not remember
where he read or heard this from, but it’s a simple explanation that he often
resorted to, when explaining what made alcohol use problematic to his clients
or other people who asked.
So what is the real cost of consuming alcohol? Does
the cost solely affect the person who is drinking or is there a web around them
where the people who are close to them get stuck and end up paying their own
cost as a result of the person who drinks too much? And how can we dissect what
the cost really consists of, what it looks like in real life and what the
extent of it is? Here is my attempt to unfold one of the ways to do this.
Running the risk of being unpopular or a killjoy, I
would dare to say that there is always a cost in drinking alcohol because, like
alcohol consumption, the cost lies on a
spectrum, and it is proportionate to the amount of alcohol consumed so, when
one increases, the other one follows suit.
As we have learnt from research, the limit of the 14 weekly recommended
units does not constitute a safe amount, but rather it should act as a kind of
damage limitation. In a statement published on the research journal The Lancet,
WHO (World Health Organisation) confirmed that “when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health”.
Being a Sober Coach, having conversations with clients
to identify the costs that alcohol have on their lives is an early and fundamental
part of the process. There are different ways to do this and, among those, one
that I find useful and quite thorough (albeit more time consuming for the exact
reason of being so thorough) is using a very well-known life coaching tool
called the Wheel of Life.
The Wheel of Life
The Wheel of Life simply consists of a circle, a
wheel, divided in a certain number of slices, and each of them represents an
area in someone’s life. In Personal Development Coaching, it is usually used to
work out how satisfied someone is in each area of their life, such as family, social
life, work, etc., to then help them identify what needs to improve. I decided to
adapt it to the work I do now and stared using it with my clients to explore in
a honest and open way how their alcohol use affects each area.
We all might have an inkling of the overall impact
that our habit has on our life, but what this practice allows us to do is
zooming in on particular aspects of our life and shine light on the full extent
of the effect that abusing or misusing alcohol has both on us and everyone else
we interact with.
The slices of the pie chart have to encompass all the
aspects of your life, even if they are aspects that is not present at the
moment of completing it because the alcohol has taken over in a way that does
not make space for them, i.e. if your physical exercise slice is practically non-existent
due to your lack of energy or time, it’s still worthy of inclusion because being
active is a very crucial element when you look holistically at your life and
improving the quality of it.
Here is a list of the usual ones: Family, Partner,
Friends, Social Life, Finances, Work/Career, Physical Health, Mental Health,
Spirituality, Self-Development, Contribution/Giving Back.
Once you have your wheel, it’s time for your self-assessment
and reflection work to begin. What I strongly and warmheartedly recommend is to
be super honest with yourself. Nobody needs to have access to this information
apart from you, and nobody is there to judge you or criticise you for it, not
even you. This is only for your own eyes, unless of course you are working with
a Sober Coach, Therapist or Keyworker and you choose to have their input or
support to make changes and/or make yourself accountable.
What are really the costs?
People’s usual tendency is to veer towards thinking
about the extreme costs of drinking alcohol, such as being fired from a job,
losing your house, a relationship break-up, not seeing your children anymore, develop pancreatitis or
liver cancer. These are extreme consequences which can and certainly do indeed
happen to people who are positioned towards the higher end of the alcohol use
spectrum, the ones who usually sit on the border of when emotional dependency
enters the realm of physical dependency.
Much overlooked, I find, is the impact of more than moderate drinking –
and by this I mean consuming over 14 units a week, the areas that have come to
be known as “grey drinking area” and “binge drinking”. These are the effects
that most people have learnt to live with as the necessary collateral damage of
normal life and these are the ones I’d like to shed light on here. So, here we
go!
Family, Partner & Friends
How does your drinking affect your family life? People
get used to the status quo of wanting, psychologically craving a drink and feeling
tired and hangover the next day, so it can be tricky to realise how much of
that could actually be avoided if you decided to either not drink at all or stick
to the 14 units a week. Can you think of a time when your children were
demanding, maybe they were just being the most lively expression of themselves,
but the reservoir of your patience was running low and you ended up being short
with them and regretted it right away? Or a time when you could not be
completely present with them because you had a tiring day at work and you could
not wait to get them to bed as soon as possible so that you could finally have
that glass of wine that you had been aching for? Has a little misunderstanding
with your partner turned into a full-blown argument or fight because you had a
bit of a drink and your capacity to pause and think was dramatically reduced?
Have you ever made plans with a friend to meet them on the next day but had to
rain-check on them because the night out had extended longer than you had planned
to? I remember having to do that a few times, and when I really could not get
out in any way of my commitment, I had to really make an herculean effort to
push down my grumpy little monster and tap on my very limited acting talents.
Or you may have a friend who always has to come to the rescue to make sure you
are okay and they say they don’t mind. I have been on both sides and it had
become an exhausting routine on one hand, and on the other, I can see how it
was not fair to lay on others the burden of being saved you from unbecoming or dangerous
situations.
Finance, Self-Development, Work
The impact on your finances is not only caused by the money you spend on the booze, but on the taxi home that you have to take because you have drunk over the driving limit, and the food stop later on the night due to the alcohol fuelled binge. Dinners have become much cheaper since I stopped drinking and I can afford to eat out more even if my income has not shifted that much. I overheard a conversation years ago where someone was talking about wanting to go to a music festival but decided not to go because despite being able to afford the ticket for the event, they would not have the money to buy drinks so they made the decision not to go. Such decisions are an indication of your scale of values. This one, for instance, says that your decision on whether to attend an event are based on the availability of alcohol. You might say that there is no cost there, but the cost is that alcohol has become the main currency in your ability to have a good time and you cannot fathom enjoying something you supposedly love without it. And I want to stress that we are talking about a joyful and exciting experience, not a work-do with people you don’t want to spend time with.
Every little helps to make a big hole in your
bank account. A hole that, if wasn’t there, could be used to pay for exercise
classes, weekends away, learning a new craft or instrument, further training (or
just clothes), all things that would make some positive indents in other
spheres of your life, such as self-development, mental and physical health and
even your work career. If you don’t like your job, having more financial
availability and a clearer mind are ways to optimise the resources (time and
money) you already have. I know there are a lot of people who are able to do a
lot whilst drinking, but the analogy that comes to mind is like having to live
with depression. A lot of people go about their lives whilst being depressed,
but doing that is the equivalent of carrying a concrete cloak over your
shoulders and having to do all the usual stuff whilst dragging it around with
you. If you didn’t have to, you could fly and achieve so much more. And please
note that by achievement I don’t mean money, status or career, but your
subjective idea of reward and looking after yourself, which can be just
choosing to stroke your cat for longer.
Physical and Mental Health
So much already has been written on how alcohol badly
affects every aspect of our physical and mental health. Just ask google. Blood
pressure, cancer and even aging. Even simply having to go to the toilet to pee more
than usual is not just a drag but it depletes your body from the water that it
needs to function properly by tricking your body to think it needs to release
more water that it needs to! And please be cautious about those articles that
tell you that drinking wine every evening is good for your heart. A British
Heart Foundation study from 2018 concluded that “the risks outweigh the benefits, and drinking more than the recommended limits will have a negative effect on your health.” We really don’t need more encouragement to overload the already
stretched and underfunded yearly NHS alcohol-admittance
to hospitals.
And as per your mental health, alcohol only adds fuel
to the fire, even if your condition is quite mild, contributing to the onset of
stress, anxiety and depression. So, dig deep on what alcohol is taking out of
you. I have recently come across the concept of “Recovery Time”, which is the
time that people need to factor in when they go to a celebration – be it a
birthday, wedding, or somewhere they expect to basically go on a binge – because
they won’t be able to physically and mentally function the next day, which
means that the next day will be completely obliterated from their life. That is
a cost.
Giving Back & Spiritual Life
Giving back is one of those selfless acts that
replenishes our soul with lifeblood. People think of it as volunteering but for
me, making time to ring a friend who has just had a child and is struggling is
a form of giving back, or one who is going through a divorce and has nobody to
talk to. Giving a bit of yourself to someone, whoever that persons is, IS
giving back. I have met people who have used volunteering to occupy their time
in order to help them with their new-found sobriety because they had so much more
time on their hands. And others who have allowed themselves to find a different
purpose in life and started to nurture their spirit, the one without the ethanol.
A new wheel of life
Not being able to be the best version of yourself is
indeed a cost and, at the same time, always being the best version of yourself
is an unattainable task. Shit happens, we have to deal with it and a lot of the
time we have no control over what goes on, so yes, sometimes, we will screw up,
apologise, learn, and, most certainly, screw up again, but maybe differently or
less, if we have put our lesson to good use. By pouring the alcohol in the
cocktail though (pun intended), we just add an extra layer of difficulty for
us, because we add long-brewing stress covered in short-term relief.
If we get to distance ourselves from our life and look at all those snippets that are not working or that we would like to improve and change, I find it bizarre that our alcohol use is almost never one of the things we are ready to look at to change, so much so that it doesn’t even come into the conversation unless it becomes a real problem and, by then, it’s even harder to act on it. We don’t realise how much of our life will improve if we only looked at that and change it.
What would that wheel look like if every single
slice of it was not tainted by your alcohol use? Most of us don’t even realise
that we don’t have to drink and certainly we don’t have to do it all the
time! You can still go to a pub, go to a gig, a party, have fun and dance,
without a drop of alcohol in you. I now see being sober as an act of rebellion because
society keeps hammering it on us that it’s a necessary element (or evil) and
it’s actually not. But most of us won’t even question the presence of it. But
you can, and I invite you to do just that.
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