Proof the stress-drinking cycle is real

A lot of pro-drinking memes poke fun at how various low-level stresses lead people to drink (or at least provide convenient excuses to drink).

Drinking can also feel like the way to formally take the load off at the end of the workday. It signals a release of stress, so we start to associate drinking with stress relief. Also, we tend to drink only when we know we can afford to let loose - when we’re not on call at work, when we have no early morning obligations. Over time, that link starts to form in our minds, and before long, we think drinking is a solution when we experience stress.

Studies have shown that drinking actually increases anxiety over time, as your brain fights back against the calming effects of alcohol. But we hadn’t had much proof that anxiety itself leads to drinking, until now.

A new two-part study has shown that stress increases cravings, and cravings increase drinking, in people with alcohol use disorders. The studies tracked journal entries for over 900 days for over 100 people with AUD. The higher the stress level they felt on a given day, the more cravings they had that day, and the more drinks they had… the next day.

One of the most important things you can do, then, to cut back or quit drinking successfully, is to break the mental link between drinking and relaxation. It’s why we have an entire course of exercises on Getting Calmer in Drinker’s Helper. We hope to help you prove to yourself that drinking isn’t relaxing. Prove to yourself that other methods of relaxation can work for you.

If you’re cutting back or quitting drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an app that provides motivational exercises, drink tracking and insights into why you drink, and a support group of your peers to help you make needed changes. Try it free for a week before joining!

Why we embrace the sober curious

We know there’s a bit of… hype right now about short-term sobriety. The “sober curious” movement has made headlines; there’s a burgeoning variety of non-alcoholic craft beverages; there are bars and dance clubs explicitly designed to be drink-free.

It’s a trend, and it’s unfortunately probably not going to last.

But while it lasts, we think it’s a wonderful thing, in contrast to some, who have expressed concern that characterizing sobriety as a wellness movement might mislead some people with more serious drinking problems (or, more accurately, alcohol use disorders) into thinking changing isn’t necessary for them, or might minimize their struggle in the eyes of others.

It’s a fair concern, but we still think the likely outcome is more good than harm. Here’s why we support sober curiosity and all that comes with it:

1. We think a lot of people have mild or moderate alcohol use disorders and will be helped by this movement. Addiction is a spectrum, not a binary. In other words, you’re not “an alcoholic” or “not an alcoholic.” If that were the case, you might think some people will have an awful struggle to quit drinking, and others won’t struggle at all. But the reality is somewhere in the middle for most. They’re somewhere on the spectrum. So it’s an anti-addiction move for everyone to quit or cut back to a low risk drinking level. It’s easier to stop drinking before more serious problems develop (you’ll have fewer or less frequent cravings and a life that isn’t as centered around drinking as advantages). So the more people who take on this problem early, the better!

2. This movement might make it safer (socially) to make changes. More people probably have drinking problems than believe they do. Because the commonly acknowledged treatment options are so stark (expensive rehabs or religious Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with strangers), many people are hesitant to acknowledge problems in their earlier stages. If the movement makes it easier to tell your friends not to offer you drinks, we think that’s a win, as that can be one of the hardest parts of cutting back or quitting normally.

3. This movement might actually help some people discover they have problems. If you had told us we’d have cravings for alcohol when we quit, we’d have laughed you off. But we did, and we only found out by quitting. So we think it’s far more likely that this movement helps someone who doesn’t know they have a problem than that it derails some who do. If people find that quitting drinking, even temporarily, is harder than they’d imagined, they might decide to do it permanently or seek further help.

If you’re cutting back or quitting drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an app that provides motivational exercises, drink tracking and insights into why you drink, and a support group of your peers to help you make needed changes. Try it free for a week before joining!

Why we're not big fans of alcoholic seltzer

We’re not big fans of any alcoholic beverage, of course, but we really worry about the implications of this one.

According to this article, sales of White Claw, one of the top alcoholic seltzer brands, were up 265% year over year.

Here’s why we think this could be a bad thing:

1. It gives drinking a veneer of “health" by promoting itself as low calorie (like light beers that promote themselves to athletes), gluten-free, and low-carb. It’s kind of like those old commercials that used to promote chocolate frosted sugar bombs-esque breakfast cereal as part of a complete breakfast… along with 10 oranges. Alcohol isn’t healthy; this just means you’re choosing a healthier mixer.

2. A higher calorie beer might have the advantage of making you feel full, and therefore drink less. A light seltzer, probably not so much.

3. It’s a lot more convenient to grab a mango seltzer than to make yourself a cocktail. That means people who love sweet cocktails might be likely to drink more often, or drink more, than they would otherwise. It’s just lower effort, less time between drinks, less planning required.

We’re not saying it’s less healthy, just saying if your goal is a reduction in the amount of alcohol you consume, this might not be a good idea for you.

If you’re cutting back or quitting drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an app that provides motivational exercises, drink tracking and insights into why you drink, and a support group of your peers to help you make needed changes. Try it free for a week before joining!

Why some heavy drinkers escape drinking problems

You may be surprised to hear that the diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder (the official name for alcoholism), or AUD, do not actually include a person’s drinking level.

Of course, the other criteria are likely to correlate with drinking heavily (developing symptoms of tolerance and withdrawal; thinking about alcohol all the time; letting drinking interfere with responsibilities). But that means in theory, there could be people who drink heavily without having an alcohol use disorder.

So are they really out there, and if so, what makes those lucky people able to drink heavily without developing more serious problems?

A new study of this so-called “Addiction Resistance” has shed some light on why some people who do drink heavily don’t develop the disorder, which at a high level is characterized by drinking in a way that substantially interferes with living a happy, healthy life.

A couple of caveats:

1. The study was only conducted on young, healthy people, so its results may not apply to older heavy drinkers.

2. It was survey-based, so there could have been lies or inadvertent misreporting of drinking levels

Now, onto the findings!

You might guess that addiction resistance is down to genetic factors, and that’s likely true. Those in the study with no family members who had a substance use disorders had a higher degree of addiction resistance (ability to drink heavily without developing a disorder). That suggests that there are genetic components that may make some people more susceptible to AUD than others at the same drinking level.

But there’s more to it! Here are a few of the things that help someone resist AUD despite drinking heavily:

1. Greater emotional stability

2. Norm adherence (e.g., you like to follow the social/societal rules)

3. Risk avoidance

Since many of the criteria for AUD revolve around continuing to drink despite obvious problems it’s causing, these attributes make sense. If you tend to avoid risks, you’ll avoid doing risky things like driving to an event where you know you’re going to drink. If you tend to adhere to social norms, you’ll avoid going to work drunk or hungover, which avoids allowing drinking to interfere with your career. If you’re more emotionally stable, you’re less likely to drink in risky ways when something bad happens.

At the same time, these may indicate things to work on if you’re on the other side of the equation. Even for a heavy drinker, there may ways to make your drinking less risky. You may be able to work on ensuring your drinking doesn’t interfere as much with your life.

But we believe most important of all is working on emotional stability. A lack of it can make it very difficult to cut back or quit, because drinking is a common way to escape negative emotions. There are a variety of ways to build greater emotional stability, and a variety of ways to deal with negative emotions more productively.

That’s why we have two whole courses in our Library dedicated to Staying Calm and Getting Happier. We know how important it is to successfully cutting back or quitting drinking, both from research and personal experience.

If you’re cutting back or quitting drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an app that provides motivational exercises, drink tracking and insights into why you drink, and a support group of your peers to help you make needed changes. Try it free for a week before joining!

The rise and rise of non-alcoholic beer

Apparently, non-alcoholic beer is set to become a $25B market by 2024. We’re inclined to celebrate, because we know how having tasty substitutes can make the first month or so without drinks much, much easier.

The driving factors behind the growing demand include:

1. Growing awareness of health consequences of drinking (woo!)

2. General health consciousness (NA beers tend to have fewer calories - also woo!)

3. Liquor bans in some places

4. Religious beliefs among young people

5. More plentiful and easily accessible products (sweet!)

We didn’t know much about the market, not being huge beer fans ourselves, so we did some research.

Turns out there are a lot of options, and some are easily available nationwide, including:

1. Some NA beers are available on alcohol home delivery app Drizly: Athletic Brewing Company Run Wild Non-Alcoholic IPA, Beck’s (a very well-known German brand), Kaliber (an Irish brand), and Buckler (a pale Netherlands beer).

2. Several NA beers are available on Amazon.com in the US, including Heineken Zero, Erdinger, Clausthaler, and Kaliber.

3. Several brands have created their own online shops:

   1. Gruvi, which offers both non-alcoholic beer and wine, is now available for purchase online around the US (check out getgruvi.com). It uses a different process than most other NA beers, which may make the flavor different.

   2. Wellbeing Brewing Company is solely dedicated to craft non-alcoholic beer, and is so wildly popular several of its selections are currently sold out on its online shop.

   3. Athletic Brewing was founded by someone who quit drinking and felt annoyed by the lack of options for NA beer in his new sober social life.

   4. If you’re more into craft beer, Bravus is a non-alcoholic craft brewery with an amber ale, IPA, and oatmeal stout.

4. Two Roots Brewing, known for its cannabis-infused non-alcoholic beer, is introducing a lager, a wheat beer, and an IPA in California BevMos this month.

We’re glad there are tons of tasty, non-alcoholic beer options for people who are cutting back or quitting drinking.

Beyond just finding substitutes, you can get empathy, encouragement, motivation, and insight by using Drinker’s Helper, our app designed to help people cut back or quit drinking. It’s like a self-help manual and a support group rolled together into one. Try it free for a week!

September is FASD awareness month

September is a lot of things in the sobriety community - some celebrate Sober September (where people don’t drink for a month to re-set, like Dry January), it’s Recovery Month (acknowledging mental health and substance abuse issues), and we just learned it’s also Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) awareness month.

Here are the key points we’ve learned from perusing the coverage of FASD awareness month:

1. It’s more common than you might think. FASD, which refers to a set of symptoms adults can have due to their mothers’ drinking during pregnancy, affects 2-5% of kids in the US. That’s about as common as autism, but the condition is not as well-known.

2. FASD can be hard to detect. A lot of people don’t even know they have it), because it can be confused with so many other things, especially behavior problems. One article painted the picture of the symptoms like this: the child struggled with “sitting still, loud noises, making friends and math.” Sounds like a lot of kids, doesn’t it? Most of the symptoms are mental in nature, and sound a lot like the effects of alcohol: people with FASD have problems with memory, problem-solving, learning, and self-control.

3. Moms aren’t always informed about the risks. A lot of people think that some amount of drinking while pregnant is safe. But it turns out alcohol is even more dangerous to babies’ developing brains than other drugs including pot, opioids, cocaine, or meth.

4. There is no cure. Right now, there isn’t a cure for FASD, but there is ongoing research aimed at reducing the effects. And soon, there will be an app designed for parents to learn how to cope with the behavioral problems FASD causes.

If you know you’re pregnant, the message from the public awareness campaign is clear: don’t drink until your baby is born. The symptoms are lasting and can cause real developmental challenges for your kids.

If you’re looking to take a break from drinking, whatever the reason, we’d love to help you do it. Drinker’s Helper is an app that offers over 100 motivational exercises and a peer support group to help you cut back or quit drinking. Try it free for a week!

The costs of drinking outweigh the benefits (for society)

A new study found that alcohol is a net drain on society, costing $2 for every $0.21 it brings in in taxes.

What kinds of harms are those? According to the CDC, they include:

1. Medical costs (due to disease, like liver disease, heart disease, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders in babies, several forms of cancer, due to deliberate acts of violence under the influence, or due to injuries caused by accidents sustained while operating cars or other machinery drunk)

2. Lost productivity (people not showing up to work, or not being as productive as they could be, due to drinking; un-employment or under-employment)

3. Criminal justice system costs due to prosecutions of drunk drivers and people who drunkenly assault others

The study’s authors advocate for raising alcohol taxes as a way to discourage the heavy drinking that causes most of the problems, and as a way to ensure that producers and heavy drinkers bear the brunt of the cost.

Higher taxes are a proven way to reduce alcohol-related harms.

But we of course think it’s even better to convince people not to drink. The US history with Prohibition tells us that simply stopping people from getting alcohol legally won’t stop them from drinking; if the desire is there, they’ll make their own moonshine. Likewise, cheaper and likely less safe alternatives will spring up, if all we do is raise taxes.

If you want to change the way you think about drinking, we invite you to try our simple app, Drinker’s Helper. We provide motivational exercises, a way to track your drinking so you understand why you drink, and a support group for accountability and encouragement. Try it free for a week!

Book Review: The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober

Although nothing will surpass This Naked Mind for us, this might be our new next favorite “quit lit.”

We knew we were going to have to read this book when we saw the title.

“The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober” perfectly captures the difference between the expectation and the reality of quitting drinking. Sobriety sounds boring, stodgy, and lifeless to most of us, thanks to years of social conditioning (“sober as a judge,” anyone?). The reality is quite the opposite. Drink-free living restores people to who they are, and allows us to better ourselves.

So we love the core idea. The book also makes quick reading, packing powerful ideas into punchy anecdotes. Specifically, we loved:

1. The section on tips to get through the first 30 days without drinking is excellent. It has wonderful ideas that worked for the author, and a lot of her experience in terms of the challenges of early sobriety (e.g., the misplaced fear of refusing a drink, the need to avoid challenging situations at first, etc.) resonated with us.

2. It illustrated more clearly than any book we’ve read the gradual nature of the decline into addiction. You don’t wake up one morning in the gutter; you start by waking up somewhere other than your own bed. Or as she puts it, you don’t have the shakes until you do. What’s helpful is that someone who doesn’t have as severe an addiction can still read this book and discover parts that resonate with them at the beginning of the journey. The author also doesn’t flinch from describing the truly terrifying physical addiction symptoms she experienced toward the end; it’d be powerful reading for anyone who’s anywhere along the self-destructive path.

3. Without proposing any one system, she has a clear understanding of the process of quitting drinking, covering a lot of the consistent elements we’ve seen in other memoirs: attacking the pro-addiction mental voice (the “Wine Witch” in another book; she calls it “Voldemort” - ha!), adopting greater mindfulness, practicing gratitude, and asking for social support. She also has fantastic tips on books, podcasts, Instagram accounts and more that were helpful to her.

4. We especially liked the social side of her personal revelations in the book. The author goes into how she discovered after going sober that she was actually an introvert who didn’t like clubs and dancing, but instead loved reading and 1:1 conversations. We introverts do tend to use alcohol to loosen up in social settings, and it can be a relief to be ourselves again when we stop drinking. It was nice to see someone articulate that so well.

There are just a couple of pieces we didn’t like as much:

1. The author’s descriptions of partying during her early career in the magazines seemed, unfortunately, very glamorous. She cites celebrities she met, and despite the grimy details about warm wine or occasional unpleasant surroundings, the tales come off glittery, adventurous and sexy. We wished for some stories that felt equally glamorous from her sober days to balance out the feeling of jealousy we had reading about her early drinking experiences. To be clear, she completely dismantles the glamor later in the book; it just made us uncomfortable early on.

2. We would have liked to hear more about the author’s experience in AA, which she says she deliberately decided to leave out. It’s understandable that she might have been reluctant to criticize the largest nonprofit organization that helps people quit drinking. Still, we might have benefited from her insight into the process, knowing what else did or didn’t work for her.

All in all, it was a wonderful read and one we would highly recommend to anyone thinking about cutting back or quitting drinking.

We’d also love to help ourselves through our app, Drinker’s Helper. We designed it based on our own experience with quitting drinking, and we hope it will help you, too. It has over 100 motivational exercises based on cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy, a support group made up of peers with similar drinking histories, and a simple way to track your drinking and urges to drink so you can discover your triggers. Try it free for a week!

Four things that are NOT signs of a drinking problem

Google does a pretty good job of directing searchers to the right tests to determine if they might have alcohol use disorders. We recommend looking at the WHO Audit test or the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder to get an idea of what characterizes drinking as problematic (These are some of the first results you’ll find if you search for something like “drinking problem test”). 

However, for those of us who get our advice from grandmothers, magazines (physical or digital) or other less scientific sources, there are some common misconceptions out there. We want to clear up some of the things that are NOT signs of a drinking problem.

Why? Because if you think these are signs of a drinking problem, you may think you don’t have one when you do.  After all, you don’t drink alone, so you must be fine, right? Wrong!

Here are some habits that seem like they could be signs of a drinking problem, but in fact are not:

1. You’re not careful about what you drink. Some people think it’s a sign of a drinking problem if they consume a lot of hard alcohol, and conversely think they don’t have a problem if they stick to beer or wine. News flash: alcohol is alcohol, whether you consume it in 12% ABV glasses of wine or 40% ABV shots of pure liquor. Regular wine drinking in ‘social’ doses can easily add up to a drinking problem.

2. You drink to relax, or to feel happy. While it’s certainly not great to depend on a substance to experience an emotion, it’s not a sign of alcohol use disorder to drink when you’re stressed or upset any more than it is to drink when you’re being social or fun. As a society, we drink to celebrate; we drink to get through hard times. We drink to forget; we drink to commemorate. None of it makes any sense. If you drink enough, for any reason, you will end up with a drinking problem, and you’re especially likely to do so if the genetics aren’t in your favor.

3. You drink alone. Drinking alone might just mean you’re an introvert. Or it might mean you’re lazy. Or it might mean you just prefer your own couch to the local bar. Whatever the reason, drinking alone by itself does not mean you have a drinking problem, and you can just as easily develop a dependence on alcohol drinking with a crowd as you can drinking alone.

4. You drink every day. Guess what? As a woman, you could drink one glass of wine a day and be at the “low risk” drinking level given out by the NIAAA (for men, you could have two). You could also have 10 drinks in a night and be in a risky place regarding your drinking. It’s the total amount that matters.

As you can see, a drinking problem isn’t really about a certain pattern of drinking (other than the amount you drink). It’s not about what you drink, on what schedule, why, or the circumstances surrounding your drinking. 

The truth is that alcohol use disorder is characterized broadly by three things (you can find these broad strokes reflected in the DSM-5 criteria):

1. Failing to control your drinking

2. Experiencing the physical symptoms of addiction - craving, withdrawal and tolerance 

3. Continuing to drink despite experiencing obvious consequences for your health, your mental health, your career, or your relationships

In other words, it’s somewhat intuitive, actually. If you’re frightened by physical symptoms of addiction you see in yourself, if you know you’re unable to control your drinking, or if you continue to drink despite problems caused by your drinking in other areas of your life, you have some level of drinking problem.

And that last part - “some level” - is key.

You may have a mild problem or a severe one, or anything in between. If you asked people on the street, many would tell you alcohol use disorder (or they might use the term ‘alcoholism’) is a black and white issue: you either “are an alcoholic” or you’re not. This misconception can prevent people who should change from doing anything until their problem is serious.

If you’ve decided to change, our app, Drinker’s Helper, can be a helpful aid along the way (although let’s be super clear: it is in no way a substitute for medical treatment).

Drinker’s Helper provides helpful tracking and insights to help you understand why you drink (so you can change it), as well as motivational exercises drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy, two proven therapies for alcohol use disorder, to help you change the way you think about alcohol. Along the way, you’ll get advice and encouragement from your support group, made up of peers in similar circumstances. Try it free for a week!

Book review: Mindful Drinking

We found “Mindful Drinking” by Rosamund Dean a practical and clear guide to moderate drinking.

The thinking and approach were very familiar after reading The Mindfulness Workbook for Addiction and This Naked Mind; the core of the book is suggesting that becoming more aware of why you drink and monitoring your intake carefully are the keys to moderate drinking.

Here’s what we really loved:

1. To start, we agree with the premise that mindless drinking is extremely common in our alcohol-fueled society. It’s the drinking out of habit, out of ceremony, without any thought at all, that can be stopped just by training yourself to become more aware of each thought and action.

2. We also completely agree that mindful drinking requires constant awareness of your behavior and the drivers of it. The author outlines an excellent strategy based on understanding why you drink, tracking your drinking, and avoiding (or developing alternative strategies to deal with) problematic emotional triggers. We love the strategy and we hope to enable this kind of mindfulness with our app, Drinker’s Helper. The author also does an excellent job outlining the difficulty of moderating your drinking, acknowledging that sobriety requires one massive decision where moderation requires thousands of little day by day, hour by hour ones.

3. We also very much support the idea of taking a short break from drinking at the start (she recommends 28 days), regardless of whether the change you intend to make is moderation or sobriety. The re-set allows you to really know what not drinking is like. It also forces you to break the personal habits that might have led you into mindless drinking.

Here’s what we didn’t like as much:

1. It didn’t help us understand why the author (or anyone, for that matter) would want to drink at all anymore, given all of the downsides of drinking and benefits of sobriety outlined in the book. We don’t mean this in a judgmental way - we support people who decide to moderate their drinking and think it’s a fabulous path for many people. We just didn’t understand it given the rest of the book; this author goes through the whole journey of understanding how drinking doesn’t really do anything good for you and how annoying and complicated it is to monitor your drinking so carefully as is required for successful moderation, and then leaves it there. What is the reason to drink at all? That’s what we felt was missing, reading this.

2. It didn’t explore as much the idea of addressing other gaps in your life. It offered short-term strategies to deal with anxiety or depression (meditate! start gardening!), but what about actually changing whatever it is about your life that’s fundamentally making you unhappy? We found that the surface-level coping mechanisms were very important, but even more important was understanding what we didn’t like about our lives and changing that. That made lasting change easier. Are you spending time on the wrong things? Are you spending time with the wrong people? Are you working in a job you hate? Change that, and you won’t need as many coping strategies.

All in all, we loved the book and found it a clear and practical guide to changing your drinking. Our app, Drinker’s Helper, could actually help to implement some of the strategies from the book, in terms of tracking your drinking and how it really makes you feel. Give it a try today!

What are you really drinking?

Do you read the nutrition labels on your wine?

Now that you’re thinking about it, you can’t recall seeing very many, can you? I can’t recall seeing a single one.

Turns out that’s a bit of a trick question. Wine (and other high ABV liquor) isn’t required to have a nutrition label.

Leaving aside the sheer insanity of that failure of regulation, that means wine and liquor can have additives in it that you’re not aware of. There are a good number that are approved for use, but do not need to be disclosed to people, like magnesium sulfate, calcium pantothenate, folic acid, polyvinyl-pyrrolidone (PVP)/ polyvinylimadazole (PVI) polymer, and other terrifyingly complex-sounding compounds. It’s unlikely such a drink will have eggs or nuts in it, but if it did, you wouldn’t know unless they decided to tell you.

It also means that you can’t easily compare between options to identify the “healthiest” one. While of course it’s best to not drink at all, wouldn’t you rather know if one wine has low calories or low sugar, or another has high levels of anti-oxidants? Right now, it’s down to what each individual producer decides to disclose, so it’s very hard to make comparisons with one touting the benefits of its beverage and obscuring the downsides.

This strange circumstance is a result of Prohibition. That meant, with some exceptions (wines with less than 7 percent alcohol and beers that don't have malted barley actually fall under FDA rules, per this awesome Vox article), alcohol isn’t regulated by the FDA (which has required nutrition labels on all packaged foods as of 1990, but by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which sets different rules, mostly regarding disclosing a beverage’s alcohol percentage if it’s over 14%. Gee, how generous.

Multiple efforts over the years have failed to get these labels applied to alcohol due to vociferous lobbying on the part of alcoholic beverage companies, who for obvious reasons would rather not remind people how many calories are in a typical drink (it’s about 100-200 calories per drink. You do the math on a typical drinking night for you).

We can’t help you track the nutrition content of your drinks, but we can help you track your drinking. If you’re cutting back or quitting, it can really help to set a healthy drinking limit and keep track of how many drinks you have, as well as the circumstances of your drinking. Over time, it can lead you to realize why you drink and seek healthier, alternative ways to get that same feeling. And as one of our reviewers noted, Drinker’s Helper is so much more than a drink counter. We provide a support group of similar drinkers and motivational exercises based on cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy. Give it a try today!

Alcohol is not your friend when it comes to sleep

What should you never do before bed?

I’d imagine many people might say “drink coffee.” I would have - I’ve avoided caffeine after 7pm since reading up on the factors that affect sleep quality.

But a new long-term, broad study (over 700 participants over 14 years) has found that alcohol is EVEN WORSE than caffeine for disrupting sleep quality.

Here are the details:

1. People self-reported their consumption of alcohol, caffeine and nicotine before sleeping, and wore wrist bands that gave an objective measure of sleep quality

2. The study controlled for other factors like age, gender, weight, and mental health

3. In terms of negative impact on sleep, it goes: nicotine, alcohol, then caffeine.

We’ve actually done some more research on this, and it turns out alcohol has a serious detrimental impact on quality of sleep. There’s an exercise we’re putting out soon in the Drinker’s Helper app about “Alcohol & Sleep,” and another exercise, “Better Sleep,” that will go into the things you can do to improve the quality of your sleep (other than not drinking before bed).

If you’re interested in cutting back or quitting drinking, we’d love to help. Join the Drinker’s Helper community by downloading the iOS app and getting support, empathy, advice, and motivation to stick with your goals.

Binge drinking, then bingo?

I still remember the horrifying time I accidentally took a sip of “Grandpa’s juice.” It’s still a good reminder that your first taste of alcohol (I think it was probably whiskey?), before the conditioning that makes you more pliable and open to it, is downright disgusting.

My grandfather didn’t binge drink, though, and he eventually quit drinking entirely.

But apparently, this isn’t the case for a lot of older adults in the US. A new study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society recently found that 10% of adults over 65 in the US binge drink regularly (in the last month).

We think of college as peak binge drinking time, but later in life, we imagine things calm down as our responsibilities increase.

In fact, however, older people may be more likely to feel bored, feel a lack of purpose, or feel socially isolated, all of which can encourage the same drinking behavior.

Binge drinking isn’t smart for anyone (just because very drunk people make very poor decision-makers). But binge drinking is a lot more dangerous as an older adult than a college-age partier. Here’s why:

1. An older person may be more likely to be injured in a fail, and drunkenness makes us all more likely to trip and fall

2. It’s more likely an older person will be on medication that interacts with alcohol

3. An older adult may be more likely to have a chronic health condition that’s made worse by drinking, like a heart problem

We can imagine other reasons binge drinking may be rougher on a senior citizen. Maybe you have fewer friends to call or are alone if something goes wrong. Maybe you have a harder time recovering from the hangover the following day. But binge drinking poses a lot of risks, regardless of the drinker’s age.

If you’re looking to cut back or quit drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an iOS app that provides motivational exercises, drink tracking so you can see progress and understand why you drink, and a support group so you can chat with peers who have similar drinking histories. We welcome anyone who wants to change their drinking, whether your goal is to cut back, stop binge drinking, or quit drinking entirely. Try it out today!

The true cost of drinking and driving

Everyone knows drinking and driving is not safe and isn’t worth the risk.

But do you know how much a DUI will really cost you in monetary terms?

Even if you are a first time offender, if you get a DUI it can cost you thousands of dollars when all the fees are said and done.  

Law enforcement works hard to stop drunk driving, and steep prices to pay for everything that comes with a DUI is part of that.

While prices will vary depending on the state and circumstances of the offense, we are going to give you an estimate on just how much a DUI will cost you. These numbers are an average, coming from numbers gathered from law officers and people who received DUIs. 

Court-Ordered Fines:  About $1,500

While technically the fine for a first time DUI offender is only about $400- $1,000, extra penalty fines are usually added on, which hikes up the total fine price.

Attorney Fees: About $2,000

Investing in a good attorney will help ease the sentence and legal ramifications, but that comes at a high cost. This average even includes people who used a private defender. And if you have those extra penalties, the price will increase.

Towing and Storage Fees: About $200

When you are arrested for a DUI, it is protocol for the officer to call a tow truck and have your car impounded at your expense. Unless you have a sober passenger in your car capable of driving, you’ll be paying this fee as well.

Car Insurance Increase: About $1,000 annually

Your monthly insurance payment is going to skyrocket if you are a DUI offender. This increase could last for years after the offense.

Traffic School and Educational Courses: About $450

If you are arrested for a DUI, you will have to attend traffic school in order to re-obtain your license. Many states also require you to complete a treatment program or educational course on substance abuse depending on your blood alcohol content at the time of arrest.

DMV Reissue Fee: About $200

When your license is suspended for your DUI, you will have to pay a reinstatement fee to the DMV to get your license back. 

Additional Court Costs: About $800

Along with the fines you will pay, you will also have to file paperwork with the court and you will have mandatory court appearances. All of which will cost you money.

Ignition Interlock Devices (IIDs): About $170

Some states will require you to install an IID on your vehicle after being arrested for a DUI. And the money to install and maintain the device comes out of your pocket. 

Bail: About $200

If you are arrested and put into jail for your DUI offense, you will probably want to get out ASAP. All you have to do is pay more money to get out. 

Total Average DUI Cost: $6,520

And that doesn’t even include health risks or the potential to lose your job or alienate friends and family — the list can go on and on. Definitely not worth it!

If you are aware you have a problem and want an easy, manageable way to get help, there are options out there. 

Apps like Drinker’s Helper can help you cut back, or quit drinking altogether. If you’re looking a step further, there are plenty of places, like Amazon, where you can purchase your own breathalyzer to ensure you don’t put yourself in risky situations.

How people deal with urges and slip-ups

There are two tough situations you have to confront when you’re cutting back or quitting drinking.

The first, and perhaps the most intuitive, is confronting an urge to drink.

The second, less common but more difficult, is actually having a slip-up into problematic drinking (which of course happens when you have an urge and give into it).

For dealing with urges, there appear to be three strategies that work almost equally well:

1. Finding an alternative drink

2. Distracting yourself

3. Thinking about the potential consequences

They’re completely different strategies, but each can work for the same person depending on the circumstance. When we were first quitting, we leaned heavily on tonic water. We also thought about the near-term consequences when we were considering drinking. Just remembering that awful nauseous, foggy-headed feeling was enough to get us to stay away.

When it comes to slip-ups, there are two diametrically opposed approaches to handling them, and we got an even split as to how often people used each! They were:

1. Beat yourself up about it

2. Shake it off

We imagine that some people respond well to negative reinforcement, but we’re personally more in the “shake it off” camp. After all, it’s impossible to change the past. So unless you can learn something from it that will prevent future relapses, it seems best to allow yourself to start the next day fresh, with a clear head and a clear conscience.

If you’re hitting the re-set button, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an app that offers exercises, tracking, and a support group to help you cut back or quit drinking. Try it out free for the first week!

Quick Profiles: SMART Recovery

SMART Recovery stands for Self Management and Recovery Training, and it’s one of the most popular sobriety programs outside of Alcoholics Anonymous.

We’re inclined to like this program because it’s based heavily on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one of two therapies (the other is Motivational Enhancement Therapy) we draw from in the exercises in Drinker’s Helper.

Here is the short story on what SMART Recovery is, and here’s their website if you’d like more information:

1. It focuses on teaching you to challenge the thoughts that lead you to drink with arguments of your own. It also teaches you to recognize when you are feeling an urge to drink, such that you can either avoid your trigger or learn how to deal with it another way. Overall, the goal is to ensure you don’t just act on your urges to drink.

2. It also encourages members to build up and sustain their motivation to quit drinking. The program recognizes that people sometimes forget why they’ve changed, and the desire to drink creeps back up. They believe it’s helpful to really remember all the good that’s come your way from quitting.

3. It teaches you ways to cope with life’s stresses in other ways beside drinking. Overall, the program posits that drinking problems often stem from a failure to cope with life’s inevitable stresses (or rather from a desire to cope and a belief that drinking is a reasonable way to cope). You need new ways to deal with those same stresses, or you’ll just end up drinking again.

4. It encourages you to build up a meaningful, active, engaged life you want to be present for.

We of course like that, like Women for Sobriety, there is no reliance on a higher power to change. There is instead an encouragement of self-confidence to build up self-control. We also like the combination of coping skills and developing a meaningful life - two important facets of any such program.

The key element we think is missing is actually changing the way you think about alcohol itself. That’s why we have two whole courses in Drinker’s Helper about Rethinking Alcohol. At the core of our thinking is the idea that if you still deep down believe that alcohol does something good for you, you have to struggle to stick with sobriety. If you instead convince yourself that alcohol is not your friend, you can have a much easier time making changes.

If you’ve decided to cut back or quit drinking, we’d love to help. Try the Drinker’s Helper app free for a week, and if you like it, join our community of thousands cutting back or quitting drinking.

Benefits of changing your drinking - from people who've done it

There are obvious benefits to cutting back or quitting drinking. You avoid a dangerous addiction and you feel more in control of yourself, which is a great self-esteem boost.

But those are just the most direct benefits. What about the indirect ones?

In our deeply unscientific survey of people who successfully cut back or quit drinking, we asked people about the benefits that mattered most to them.

Here is what we learned:

1. Everyone was happy they did it (100% of respondents). It was a minor sacrifice compared to what they gained. We thought it was awesome to see that no one regretted making such a difficult and sometimes unpopular lifestyle change.

2. The shocker #1 benefit is clear-headedness. That’s not something you often think about as a benefit of changing your drinking, but the benefit is real. Fully 80% of people said clear-headedness was one of the top benefits of changing, and a further 68% and 60% loved their more productive weekends and mornings, respectively. There were even 32% who noticed improved work performance. It’s all from having a clearer head instead of being hungover.

3. For many people, it’s all about the health. In their written comments, many people reference feeling better broadly, having their energy back, and clearing up old health issues. Specifically, 72% cited improved physical fitness as a top benefit of changing their drinking, and half that many cited their better skin.

There are countless benefits to cutting back or quitting drinking. If you’ve decided to do it, we’d love to help. Try the Drinker’s Helper app free for a week before joining. We provide a support group, motivational exercises, and a drink tracker to help you get through the hard part.

Quick profiles: Women for Sobriety

We recently reviewed “Goodbye Hangovers, Hello Life,” by Jean Kirkpatrick, the founder of Women for Sobriety, so it seemed only fitting we should do a quick profile on the organization she built as well.

The goal of these Quick Profiles, as always, is to give you an idea about programs that are out there to help people cut back or quit drinking, since everyone seems to default to Alcoholics Anonymous or rehab.

So, to give you a quick idea of Women for Sobriety, here are the main tenets we’ve discovered. For more info, check out their website.

1. It is purely abstinence-based; it does not condone moderation, and as the name implies, it is for women only.

2. It provides an in person support group that’s not religious in nature, although members do discuss their spirituality in the broadest sense.

3. It tries to help women build up their self-worth in the face of possible feelings of guilt or humiliation. One of the core ideas is that this kind of program benefits women more than programs like AA that are more focused on making sure the drinker sees the harm they’ve done.

4. They also emphasize emotional and spiritual growth and a healthy lifestyle. It’s not just what you don’t do - it‘s what you do. They believe (and we support this idea) that alcohol addiction is often a result of trying to apply a chemical bandaid to an underlying emotional problem. Fixing the problem, then, is not just about stopping drinking, but about starting to live a more meaningful life.

5. They think knowledge of yourself is a key part of getting better. A lot of their program, seen in their 13 Acceptance Statements, is about seeing yourself as a confident, capable woman, who can control her life and her actions through her thoughts. Often, the group supposes, women are beaten down by pressure to be perfect wives, mothers, and career women all at once, and see themselves as failures when they shouldn’t. Building yourself back up is a key part of being able to take control.

Overall, there are some elements we really like, like the understanding that emotional problems often underlie drinking problems and the idea of making changes to support emotional and physical health at the same time. But we believe moderation is a viable option for some people, and it’s sometimes important to think about the past in order to figure out what went wrong along the way.

If you’ve decided to cut back or quit drinking, we’d love to help. Try the Drinker’s Helper app on the iOS app store today!

Lifestyle changes that helped people quit or cut back

We asked people in our small and therefore deeply unscientific survey about how they cut back or quit drinking, and they gave us some interesting answers.

Here’s what we learned from the results:

1. You need to go beyond just changing your drinking. 44% of those who successfully quit or cut back started a new fitness routine, and 44% found new hobbies to keep themselves from getting bored. Some also talked about waking up earlier, just as a way of making it harder to drink. But the point is that it’s rarely enough to simply stop drinking. You need to address the reasons you wanted to drink in the first place, which may require some life changes. And you need to find new ways to cope with life’s inevitable stresses.

2. A lot of people found it helped to simply avoid their triggers. 44% didn’t go to places they thought might tempt them to drink, and 36% got rid of all the alcohol in their houses. It doesn’t help to change your mind about drinking, but it helps introduce some friction between you and the booze. You have to go out of your way to drink.

3. Many people (about 24%) joined some kind of support group. These ranged from AA to church groups to making new friends to joining Reddit communities. You don’t necessarily need support specific to sobriety, but you do need a strong support network that’s ok with you not drinking.

4. Different strategies worked for different people. The diversity helps to convince us that there’s not just one way to quit or cut back, that the path to success depends on what help you need. That’s why we ask so many questions at the beginning of the Drinker’s Helper app, to personalize your experience so you get the right exercises in your Program and the right Matches in your Group.

We hope you are successful in your desire to cut back or quit drinking, and we’d love to help. We provide a support group, a program of motivational exercises, a drink tracker and insights into your drinking to help you along the way. Try it out free for a week in the Drinker’s Helper app.

Benefits of betting on yourself

There have been a rash of apps that allow you to bet on yourself making progress at losing weight, staying fit or being healthy. Some examples are DietBet, HealthyWage, and Gym Pact.

The idea behind all of them is that you will do better if you can get meaningful incentives for making healthy changes. In Gym Pact, you make specific bets that you can, for example, get all your necessary vegetable servings in a week. In Healthy Wage and Diet Bet, you bet that you’ll achieve a certain weight by a certain time. In most cases, the money for the winners comes from the losers.

So could something like this work in the context of cutting back or quitting drinking? We think so!

It’s a little hard to imagine people taking their BACs with breathalyzers every day to verify their progress, but you could set incentives for yourself (like we suggest in the exercise “Setting Incentives” in the Drinker’s Helper app) to achieve certain drink reduction goals.

It’s proven to work; contingency management is a therapy that works for people with alcohol use disorder to quit drinking. You get real rewards for achieving certain sobriety or drink reduction goals, and it makes it that much easier to make the calculation in the moment that not drinking is the better call.

So get creative with it! Maybe you could go on vacation at the end of the month if you make it through drink-free. Maybe you could buy a dress or a piece of jewelry you’ve been eyeing, or simply reward yourself with baked goods. Just think of what will help you rethink your priorities in that moment before you have a drink.

And if you want an extra push, we’d love to help you cut back or quit drinking. The Drinker’s Helper app has exercises, a support group, and tracking and insights to help you make changes. Join today!