I realized at some point it was out of control and I couldn't stop. The details are as ugly as anybodys addiction story but to most everybody else I managed to externally look "fine".

I am the biggest contrarian and skeptic in the world, eventually sought out medical help and was referred to AA which I was very leery of.

But I did it and recently celebrated year 2 of sobriety along with a way to address the stress, fear, loneliness of startup life.

Not trying to hijack a data-thread into self-help but when I was out drinking I loved consuming these articles to feel like I wasn't the only one.

Having spent some time in AA there are are a LOT of developers, entrepreneurs, hackers that are working the program too, if you're struggling with the alcohol monkey like I was it's a safe thing to at least check out.

I was in the same position for most of my twenties. I did well at work, was in (mostly) good physical shape, and didn’t have any trouble rehearsing/gigging with my band. I really thought I just “liked to go out;” I’d drink when I had band practice or a gig (2-3 nights a week), then would go out on Friday and Saturday nights with my friends. That only left two nights a week to hang out with my girlfriend, so of course we’d go out to dinner or make something to eat at home and end up at a bar.

I honestly didn’t understand what denial was until I woke up one morning and realized I was an alcoholic. I quit drinking 6 years ago and could not be happier with my decision.

Isn't being a functioning alcoholic the same as, um, say, a foodie? or anyone with a dedicated hobby?

Alcoholism tends to have a far more damaging long-term effect on a person's health than most other hobbies.

I guess it depends how you define "alcoholic".

First off, congratulations on turning your situation around and maintaining your sobriety for 2 years. I can't imagine how much work that must have been.

I've never really understood the whole "alcoholic vs. sobriety" thing. Is it not possible to "learn" to drink less? I see time and again the idea of being "out of control, unable to stop". Why is complete sobriety the only answer? Can varying levels of control truly not be learned? Or is the prevailing mindset that it's "easier" (while I'm sure still very difficult) to just go down to zero and maintain that, rather than learn moderation? I wonder if there are any studies or evidence to back that up, if that's the case.

Also a question about AA itself, if you're ok answering it. My understanding is that AA is very faith-based (many steps of the 12-step process invoking a deity), and that a big part of it involves opening yourself to God and Jesus to help. Is that universal, or are there non-religious versions of AA? I know if I (an atheist) ever got into a situation where I needed something like AA, I would be very uncomfortable with the religious aspects.

When I went vegetarian, I went cold turkey. The first two weeks, I wanted meat all the time, and it was hard to resist the temptation to eat it. The next month or so, I still wasn't sure I'd be able to keep it up, but it was easier.

Since then (years), I sometimes want meat, but it's gotten far easier.

I sometimes think about loosening up--I've considered rules like eating it once in awhile if I know it was humanely and environmentally raised (as much as possible), or bringing seafood back, or even eating meat that I know will otherwise go bad (which basically ends all my ethical objections).

The biggest reason I haven't is that it would be way harder and probably make my life worse overall. At this point, being vegetarian is super easy. I only sort of remember what most meat tastes like, I'm very used to not eating it, and I know I can do it.

Critically, it's never a decision I have to make; it's a given. If I made the line blurrier, then every time I saw meat that looked good, I would have to make a decision. The cognitive load of being a vegetarian would skyrocket, and I would probably have more of a feeling of missing out because I would think more about the possibility of not missing out.

First as others echo if you don't understand the addiction consider yourself lucky. If I drank one drink at the end I was physically compelled to have another. Imagine a terrible itch. You have to scratch it. Heavy drinking alcoholics have such strong physical addictions that detox without medical supervision can be life threatening. Your reaction wondering why millions of people choose AA and abstinence vs trying to "cut back" is misinformed but not uncommon.

Second and more importantly IMO the misconception that AA requires a traditional faith or GOD experience is what kept me out for years. Part of working the steps is finding "a higher power" and I know many atheists in the program that consider that to be Good Orderrly Direction (GOD) vs a spiritual or dogmatic experience.

But the true "work" of the program is centered around confronting your wreckage of the past and confronting life on life's terms vs utilizing alcohol as a mechanism to check out of life.

I believe that it is both addictive and alters one's state of mine are what makes it difficult to simply "learn to drink less". I suspect that it is technically possible, but going sober (avoiding the addition) is likely to be a much easier choice than trying to control the addiction. When it is something that can impact one's long-term health as significantly as alcholism can, it makes sense to go for the comparatively easier solution of avoiding alcohol altogether.

The only way this dumb monkey could quit was to quit altogether. Hey, if you can control your own drinking, that's great. But I know that I cannot.

Also, I'm an atheist in AA. It works for me.

The whole "God thing" of AA stopped me for quite a while. But the whole deity thing is optional, you just need a power greater than yourself and (ideally) a sponsor who can call you on your bullshit. I've heard the name "Jesus" a handful of times, and never from someone running a meeting.

From what I gathered, AA wants you to trust your recovery to a Higher Power, because then you can depend on said higher power to pull you through times of personal weakness (because nobody's strong all the time, let alone a recovering alcoholic). The term Higher Power in the handbook often pretty explicitly refers to the Christian God, but I remember the same handbook saying that the connection to the Higher Power is a distinctly personal one, and that each AA member can choose to define their higher power as they wish.

It is true that a lot of AA members end up finding Jesus as part of their recovery, but many also get through it by trusting in a different god, or in humanity, or in the elegant universe, or in the transcendental power of the AA group itself.

From what I gathered that evening, AA's process is very much faith-based, but what you're putting your faith in is flexible, and doesn't really matter to most AA groups.

[1]http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/en_step2.pdf

    > I've never really understood the whole "alcoholic vs.
    > sobriety" thing.

I too do not suffer from these kinds of habits directly or even through close family or friends, so other readers forgive me if I'm falling short of level-headed understanding here.

The question you seem to be asking is "Why isn't moderation an option" and addiction is, in part, the inability to moderate. Maybe you can't relate to that, but for somebody that has that inability, participating in any amount of the activity they have difficulty moderating is flirting with ruin. They use all of their ability to form and practice moderation habits on just avoiding taking the first step.

Their reality is very much different from yours or mine, the risks and rewards are entirely changed. Like airgapping an unpatched OS that's gone out of support and which hosts business-critical data, only an absolute countermeasure will suffice.

Having never suffered addiction you physically and psychologically cannot understand the affliction. It controls your thoughts, your body, your actions and decisions. It has costs well beyond every night drinking- costs paid in broken marriages, lost friendships and worse.

Pointing out that you have never suffered from addiction is not flippant. It is in response to a lot of what you have already written. You don't know the pain of which you are so dismissive, far apart from the 'coldness' of text. You express yourself and your understanding very well, and your words are sharp.

I would absolutely agree that my frame of reference is different (I wouldn't say "skewed"; that's a bit of a weird and disrespectful way of putting it), but I'm asking questions with the intent to try to understand better what people who have struggled with addiction have to go through to get better.

You accuse me of being dismissive, but I am anything but: I am asking questions trying to understand the forces at work here. The parent was very dismissive of me and my effort to understand.

Let's teach by example here.

Dismissive: I think addiction isn't real because I've never experienced it.

Dismissive: I'm going to imply that your questions are stupid and invalid just because you haven't experienced what we're talking about.

Not dismissive: [pretty much everything I've said up till now]

Perhaps my uncalled-for overreaction is due to the loss I've experienced at the cost of addiction, from my own mistakes and mistakes made around me. For me there has been a significant loss of life both in my immediate family and friends.

HN is a pretty weird place to ask these questions, and I understand perfectly well what flippant means- thanks for not being dismissive or condescending.

I admit I may overreact, but only because I find your questions- especially the way you responded to be- to me disingenuous.

Though I should never discourage someone from learning, and judging by my reaction i see why anonymity and text are the right place.

(i can tell that i overreacted, and responded emotionally and strangely. I am bipolar on top of addiction issues and reading this post back to myself it's apparent. I'm being an ass. I'm leaving my post because maybe my broken train of thought can be a bit of a learning experience? i'm sorry i am so rude.)

I can only ask you to believe me when I say I'm not being disingenuous here: I am genuinely curious about all this stuff, especially since I have no first- or even second-hand experience with it. I am sorry if I come off as somewhat clinical or detached... as I mentioned and we all know, it's very hard to get tone across via a medium like this.

That's why it's hard for an alcoholic to control their drinking. Having only a drink or two is easy to say when you're sober, but easy to excuse after the alcohol has kicked in.

A person of the right frame of mind can reduce their intake to a point of normality. There is no difference between an alcoholic and a healthy person other than their temporary blood chemistry and a predisposition to drinking. Framing it as an on/off is a tactic used by those who don't believe in the ability of another to moderate volume.

I like - very occasionally - to put a few coins in to a fruit machine, or to wager on an event. But I don't get the addictive impulse from it, I don't have to fight the voice in my head, I don't get the rush followed by the shame, and I don't and I don't get the feeling of unstoppable momentum from it that marks an addiction. I'd be willing to bet if I did it more frequently that it'd get that way.

You should be very thankful that you don't suffer from it, nor have had close enough contact to addiction so that a question like you're asking seems reasonable. I urge you to spend a couple hours reading up on it and how it works (at least the parts we know and understand), how it's defined, and how it's treated. If you can find some intervention videos on youtube, it might be worth sitting through.

For my relatives who suffer(ed) from this kind of addiction, it simply becomes all they think about all the time. If they're at work, they're trying to figure out how to get home earlier to start drinking, or they'll try to figure out how to hide the smell of the alcohol behind powerful aftershave. If they're not drinking they're trying to figure out how to drink, and if they are drinking, they're trying to figure out how to stay conscious long enough to get to the next bottle. In my family at least, the addictions are usually co-present with various psychological ailments. The literature on drug/alcohol addiction is jammed full of information on this co-presence.

To an addict, the thing they're addicted to become everything to them. They'll use everybody around them and manipulate them to feed the addiction. If you can't help that purpose, then they'll throw you away and move on to the next supportive person. It becomes more important to them than sex, food, shelter, etc. If you're down to your last $15 and need to decide between food and booze/drugs, to an addict the choice is obvious, you don't have to eat every day.

The best analogy I can give is that addiction of this nature feels a little like slow motion drowning. If you don't get to the surface to get another breath, it's over. A drowning person will climb on top of their own mother to get to that air, and thus it's the same with substance addiction. Everything else becomes secondary.

Bizarrely, it's not always the substances that are addictive by themselves (like morphine), but a powerful psychological predisposition drives many addictions. For an addict who's been able to go clean/sober, giving them a drink or their drug of choice is a little like putting them back in that drowning situation and asking them if they really need that breath or if they can just hold it a little longer. To them it feels like functionally the same situation.

I've watched several friends and relatives die either directly from their addiction, or from some secondary issue caused by their addiction. It's maddening watching it happen. You can even have full-rational conversations with an addict about why it's bad and terrible and they'll agree and provide thoughtful responses about it. But right after that conversation they'll go and pour a drink. The closest example I can think of right now is to watch a few episodes of "Hoarders", ignore the hoarding itself, and watch the conversations with the hoarders. They're completely lucid, but there's something broken in their psyche that causes them to do what they're doing. An uncontrollable compulsion. If you can get through a half dozen episodes of "Hoarders" without going a little crazy, congratulations. I can barely make it through an episode without wanting to reach into the television and grab the people and shake some sense into them so they can see what they're doing.

To your central question, there are programs that attempt to wean addicts off of their addiction. But usually the goal is to get them down to zero. In many cases it's simply because they are so addicted to their substance that going cold turkey would likely kill them. Getting clean, even off of a serious alcohol addiction, can be medically difficult. It can be unbelievably unpleasant, from seizures to hallucinations.

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/alcohol-withdra...

Tolerances of people with very severe addictions can also be mind blowing. Blood alcohol levels that would kill most people might be the baseline an addict walks around with all day.

I know from some of my friends and relatives that AA has literally saved their lives. It's put them into a support structure full of people who also have gone through the same thing. It means they both have understanding, but also BS checkers...people who know when they're being manipulated because they were themselves manipulators. If you're struggling with a serious addiction, concern about deism is the absolute bottom of the list of things you have to worry about, but it is often used as an excuse not to join the program. I would also urge you to read up on the AA program, it's a powerful system full of some very deep wisdom. You can attend an "open" AA meeting if you're curious. It might be boring to a non-addict, but it can be the life-changing foundation for an addict. My relatives who are in AA never miss a meeting, and always find where the local AA meetings are whenever they travel. It's "religious" in the sense that following the program religiously has turned their entire lives around.

I also urge you to read up on the criticisms of AA and compare to other programs. Also, learning about AA and AA-like programs (like Narcotics Anonymous) as well as sound-alike but different programs (like Narcanon) can be useful as well. It's likely somebody you know does suffer from addiction, and understanding some of the things about it and how it works might enable you to save somebody's life.

i've heard mention of a group? system? called rational recovery.

heavy drinkers find drinking intensely enjoyable - and (subtle difference here...) not displeasurable in any way whatsoever until hangover/puke. if you aren't the kind of person who's ever drank 15+ drinks in a single night, you just have no ability to comprehend this. it's not within your realm of understanding - your personality is just completely different. or your brain chemistry is such that after 3-4 drinks, you feel terrible.

if so, be thankful.

There's another reason which you didn't mention. It's not personality, and it's not that I feel terrible after a few drinks. I drink very little because the following [1] is incomprehensible to me:

   Alcohol – Euphoria has been reported during the
   first 10–15 minutes of alcohol consumption.

I'd much rather have chocolate or sugar than alcohol. E.g. I like Grand Marnier, but that's because it has a pleasant sweet taste, not because it has alcohol. I'll drink a few beers a year, but that's because I'm doing something social, like watching a football game with friends.

so just like you said, this is why it's so hard for problem drinkers to cut down. it's just a whole different experience than a person who has a couple and then feels dizzy and wants to sit down.

I'm not saying there isn't a slippery slope, but I personally cannot imagine my life without at least some alcohol. I assume for the case of someone where their (excessive) alcohol intake has a huge negative impact on their life, zero alcohol sounds like a much better deal than drinking a lot.

But I still question the accepted "fact" that this is really a fixed "personality" thing. We humans have extraordinary brains and have the power to -- possibly with help -- change a lot of things about our personality and emotional state. It seems hard to believe that "once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic" is actually absolutely true.

but look at you - 2-3 occasions in your life - the people who have problems cutting down are doing that 2-3 times a week and are completely functional. it's a completely different personality type.

the bottom line is, for a lot of people, it's a LOT easier to stop than to 'cut down'. this isn't a magical premise. in fact i think it makes a lot of sense. similarly, for a lot of people, stopping is impossible. and that's how you get numbers like 74 drinks a week which sounds fucking ludicrous at first blush, but is in fact quite doable.

That's what addiction is. It's like asking why someone with OCD can't simply not wash their hands. It's mind bending to even imagine for someone who hasn't had that experience. I've dealt with obsession and compulsion at times in my life (not as a disorder), and I know how hard it is for me to modify habits and fixations. True addiction is some next level shit.

These are, however, all things that have been extensively studied and documented and affect millions of people. It's not necessary for you to be able to really get inside the head of an alcoholic, but that shouldn't keep you from accepting that this is simply how things are for some people.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC28294/

  > How  alcohol  or  wine  affects  cardiovascular  risk  merits
  > further research but right now the American Heart Association
  > does not recommend drinking wine or any other form of alcohol
  > to gain these potential benefits

If the science clearly indicated that "NOT drinking is actually considered a risk factor for heart diseasee" do you think AHA would:

  (A) Refrain from mentioning the risk factor.
  (B) Present the risk factor with a stipulation that individuals
      "consult your doctor on the benefits and risks of consuming
      alcohol in moderation"

I would also like to point out that the very AHA page you linked to states "The incidence of heart disease in those who drink moderate amounts of alcohol (no more than two drinks per day for men or one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers." So there may be a potential benefit there that AHA acknowledges.

Maybe, but this works in reverse too. There is a bias towards assuming that behavior perceived as sinful must also be harmful. This manifests in bad science in any number of examples: meat consumption, fat consumption, and yes, alcohol consumption. The USDA food pyramid (1992 one) came out against sinful fats and guess what happened? A low-fat/high-carb craze that was completely ruinous to public health.

Please do not mix the serving sizes people use with "one drink". You have no idea how much wine goes into the glass, not the strength of that wine.

A standard drink of wine is 125 ml at an ABV (alcohol by volume) of 8%.

Most people pour more than that, and most wine is stronger than that. 175 ml at 12% would be 2 units; 2 glasses of that is 4 units. See how easy it is to drink double the recommended limit?

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/824237

"The beneficial effects of alcohol are not only evident in cardiovascular disease, but also in reducing mortality from all causes."

http://www.medhelp.org/heart-disease/articles/Alcohol-Consum...

> In recent years we have seen that the results of similar “observational” studies were disproved when subjected to a “randomized controlled trial”—the standard bearer of scientific proof. A good example of this is female hormone replacement. For decades it was believed that female hormone replacement was beneficial. But a randomized controlled trial, called the Women’s Health Initiative, demonstrated that the exact opposite was true. The study was stopped in 2002 because women taking the study pills of estrogen plus progestin were developing heart disease and breast cancer at increased rates compared to those taking the placebo or inactive pills."

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/01/red-wine-good-heart-brai...

http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/AlcoholAndHealth.html

That page cites 188 articles, almost all of them finding health benefits to drinking alcohol. Without having gone into all of them to look for methodological flaws, that hints at a very consistent pattern of correlation.

That page alleges that it is maintained by a professor emeritus, who at least at this time, does not have nor need any funding from e.g. the alcohol industry. That's far from an exhaustive proof that he's free of bias, but it clears the most obvious source.

No one is saying that alcohol doesn't have negative effects on health. It's just that the positive effects of moderate consumption are stronger, enough so that overall mortality is reduced (at least according to the available scientific evidence, which I admit may not tell the whole story).

If you can't drink, then don't, but if you can then moderate drinking is far better for you than not drinking at all.

Source?