For me it’s not so much that I want alcohol as it is I want to not be stressed out. Alcohol facilitates that. I can de-stress without it but I rarely have the time I would need to do after a workday. Having a beer/drink when I get home gets the ball rolling so I can enjoy things again rather than just sit around with fried nerves.
I’m an alcoholic and reading your replies you are definitely one too. “I can take it or leave it” is such an addict thing to say. Also drinking doesn’t help with stress, it just kicks the can down the road making it harder to deal with in the future
Don’t project your problems onto me. Its one drink when I’m on edge after work and it does help with stress, it takes the edge off enough that I can do things that I enjoy which reduces my stress.
If my reddit account still existed I could point you to posts written by me 10 years ago identical to the things you are saying
Um, no. Problematic use of alcohol, perhaps - “alcoholism” implies addiction, impact on relationships and rest of life etc, which is not implied in the previous comment. A lot of people use a beer or two to deflate after work or stress without it necessarily being a problem. You have to look at the whole picture.
Um, yes.
At least with a pretty high certainty, the “I can do without” is a lie. If you need alcohol that much to “de-stress”, then you are functionally unable to live without alcohol. And that is extremely problematic.
I disagree. I don’t need that drink, it’s just helpful because I don’t have unlimited free time to do breathing exercises or run or whatever other stress management would otherwise work. I have maybe 1-1.5 hours after I get done with everything else I need to do to try and watch a show or play a game or something else that’s fun and if I’m still stressed from work I can’t enjoy those things. If I have to use other methods to calm myself first I won’t have enough time to actually do the fun thing.
I rarely drink on weekends unless it’s socially. It doesn’t even occur to me to do so.
