Is Your Relationship With Alcohol Really Making You Happy?

Let’s be real, red wine isn’t good for your heart. In fact, alcohol is carcinogenic. But does it make you happy?

Photo by Joshua Abner from Pexels

If we feel bad, and we want to be healthier and happier — why do we try everything from diet and exercise to meditation and acupuncture before we consider, with a pit in our stomach, that we might also need to renegotiate our relationship with alcohol?

And really, is alcohol even that bad for us anyway?

Turns out, despite our cultural devotion to the lie that red wine is good for our heart — there is no amount of alcohol (in any form) that is healthy for a human. So why do we do it? Why has a substance that causes anxiety, insomnia, and cancer become so embedded in the milieu of our existence for millions of years? There must be a good reason, right?

The theory goes that our ancestors found rotten fruit under a tree and the extra calories helped them survive, so we evolved with enzymes to digest alcohol, and a dopamine response to signal that ingesting it is a good choice. Our relationship with alcohol continued because it also helped us bond. A slightly weakened prefrontal cortex helps us laugh, play, dance, and like each other. And who doesn’t want that?

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Unfortunately, our evolutionary impulse to belong is so powerful that we have conflated the bonding that can happen when we are drinking with the alcohol itself. And alcohol has a different physiologic impact when we drink it alone. The joyful bonding of drinking with friends that leads to increased happiness goes the other way when we are alone. Drinking alone exacerbates our depression and anxiety. Alarmingly, Americans not only love to binge drink, but we also have a long-standing habit of drinking alone.

The evolutionary function of drinking alcohol is to bond, and that is a terrifying thing to give up. Here’s a picture of me from high school practically waterboarding myself with liquid belonging.

Me at 18

Can you just imagine a magical world where we truly only used alcohol for bonding? That we only drank small amounts, occasionally, and always together — that we recognized alcohol as a harmful substance, and actively protected each other from it? Is this really what it’s like to be an Italian living in Italy?

Unfortunately, Americans don’t drink that way, and it’s absurdly unrealistic to think that we could — because we do have a lot of unresolved intergenerational trauma in our relationships with alcohol. In true American fashion, we are extreme in our relationship with alcohol. As Kate Julian describes in her recent article in the Atlantic, we “tend to drink in more dysfunctional ways than people in other societies, only to become judgmental about any drinking at all.”

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Meanwhile, the alcohol industry continues making money encouraging us to enjoy it responsibly when they know the majority of their sales are to people doing keg stands and drinking in dangerous excess. The industry calls them “Super consumers.” In our heavy drinking circles, we think it’s kinda funny to watch someone try to puke and rally. And that over-consuming white wine and Netflix is just something to do on a Tuesday.

We have a drinking problem that’s not about me, or you. This isn’t personal, it’s cultural. The problem is we think that we should be able to control our drinking without any help from anybody. And that there’s something wrong with us if we can’t. And while we are busy trying to take responsibility for our choices, the alcohol industry is getting away with murder.

Young Americans are dying. The sharp increase in liver disease and alcohol-related deaths is staggering.

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If you’re struggling to drink less or quit, I just really want you to hear: There is nothing wrong with you, and you are far from alone. It’s normal to be addicted to an addictive substance, especially when we (and everyone around us) are consuming it in excess. It’s normal to struggle when we are trying to find freedom from alcohol.

And if we do somehow miraculously manage that, all of a sudden everyone else starts to think there’s something wrong with us — because as a culture, we aren’t taking the harmful side effect of alcohol seriously enough. We think the only reason to not drink is if you are pregnant, driving, or you have a problem. Most of us think alcohol isn’t really that bad, so we fear the label of alcoholic more than the harms of alcohol.

A friend once casually claimed (between sips of her third IPA), “I can drink as much as I want and never have a problem because I’m not an alcoholic.” We don’t think there’s something dangerous about alcohol, we think there’s something wrong with you for losing control. We stigmatize problem drinkers and miss that we are all playing with fire.

Anyone who becomes too much of a problem gets cordoned off in the alcoholic camp so that no one else has to feel uncomfortable drinking in front of them. When I stopped drinking a family friend admitted (in a rare moment of clarity and while refilling his glass of wine), “I don’t like it when other people stop drinking, because then I feel like I have a problem.”

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In my relationship with alcohol, I find it important to underscore that I identify as a normal person and a normal drinker. That alcohol is a dangerous substance, and I’m still renegotiating our relationship. I’m unwinding dysfunctional patterns that are much bigger and older than me and I’m choosing abstinence because it supports me to reset my nervous system. It’s been almost two years, and might be for the rest of my life — I don’t know yet. For now, I can’t believe how happy I am not drinking.

The connections and euphoria that can come from a relaxed prefrontal cortex are awesome, and frankly, I miss the shit out of those times, but I don’t think Americans can truly, or safely, enjoy the benefits of bonding over beers until we acknowledge our cultural baggage with alcohol. And until then I think we will stay stuck in the divergent camps that poison ourselves in excess, and those that get our belonging with the other sober folks drinking coffee in a church basement.

If you are an American unicorn with an actual healthy relationship with alcohol, please tell us your secrets. If you really do have only a few drinks, a few times a month, and always with friends — if your drinking truly does have a positive net benefit on your creativity, joy, and connections with your fellow humans — I celebrate you, and will you tell us, what was it that shaped your relationship with alcohol? Parenting? Religion? Sports? Italian cousins?

For the rest of us, my wish is that you can see your relationship with alcohol more clearly, and with less shame and that you make more informed choices based on what matters most to you.

There are no simple answers, and what is right and healthy will look different on each of us, but I’m hopeful we can at least start to look out for each other better — and begin to change the conversation.

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Related reading from other writers: Sober Curious, America Has a Drinking Problem