What’s your poison? Beer, wine, or hard liquor? Almost everyone has a type (or two) of alcoholic beverage that they love. It’s their go to unwinder after a hard day at the office and must have to celebrate something great. Many of us indulge without a second thought because we’ve never had an addiction issue, nor has anyone close to us.
Did you know one of the telltale signs of alcohol addiction is the inability not to drink? While most of us picture alcoholics as the individuals who drink like fish and show up to work drunk, there’s another more subtle side of alcoholism that gets little to no PR – the inability not to drink for no reason greater than to simply stop.
Kicking Alcohol to the Curb
Could you do it? Could you not drink alcohol for one week? What about one month? How hard would it be if you decided today that you would not have any alcoholic beverage for one year?
Susan Rosson Spain is a writer who loves wine. She took on the challenge to take a year off of drinking for the second time her in life in 2012. Now, Susan loves wine from its visible sparkle to what she calls “the delicious tickle it creates in [her] brain.” You might relate to her as she always looks forward to “Wine-o’Clock.”
What prompted Susan to take a year off drinking for not the first but second time in her adult life? Here’s where you and Susan may differ. Her mother became an alcoholic. Despite being functional, devotion to the drink disrupted her mother’s relationships to the point where she lost interest in everyone and everything. Says Susan, “All of her creativity—and she had been so very creative—vanished, buried under layer upon layer of numbness.”
Susan didn’t want that to be her.
You don’t have to be the child, partner, sibling, or friend of an alcoholic so that you don’t want to lose your creativity. You never want to lose your passion for life because that’s human, and alcohol can subtly begin to erode it if you fail to remain vigilant. Alcoholics do not set out to be alcoholics; it happens over time, some great and some short.
Take the No Drink Challenge
One of the first steps toward alcoholism is regular consumption of alcohol. According to the NIAAA, 71 percent of Americans drank in the past year. 56.9 percent drank in the last month. If you stopped drinking today and took one week, one month, or one year off, what would happen? Here’s what wouldn’t:
- Your health wouldn’t suffer.
- Your body wouldn’t build a tolerance or a dependence, even a slight one.
- You wouldn’t miss out on fun.
And you know what would happen? You’d confirm and remain un-addicted to alcohol. Earlier this year we issued the Just Once Substance Free Challenge. If you participated, here’s a new challenge to kick off. Try taking at least one week off alcohol, one month if you’re dedicated, and one year if you’re an athlete. Let us know what you learn.