How to Tell if You are a High-Functioning Alcoholic
#5 You jokily refer to yourself as an alcoholic.
Sarah Allen Benton’s book, Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic explodes old stereotypes of alcoholism. She explains that these ideas are not only wrong but dangerous.
It’s something I’ve written about before, the lesser understood fact that there are many different types of alcoholics or people with Alcohol Use Disorders (AUDs)and a great many of them are functional.
Many people with an AUD hold positions of power, raise families and do excellent work.
These sorts of drinkers are ‘high-functioning alcoholics’ (HFAs). An oxymoron if ever there was one, but we live in a society with a very high tolerance for booze.
HFAs drink hard and function at a high level. They drink much more than the government guidelines for alcohol consumption, which places a lot of stress on their bodies and psyches, and they do whatever it takes not to let anyone notice.
HFAs’ ability to function in spite of their out-of-control habit saves them from the consequences that normally signal that a person’s drinking is out of control.
They don’t lose a job. They don’t lose their partner. They don’t lose their driving license.
In other words, they keep getting away with it.
So how can you tell if you’re a high-functioning alcoholic?
Here are six signs to look for.
1. You tell yourself the amount you drink is fine because of how well you perform in family/life/work.
The busy, competent mum who has everyone’s schedule down to a tee. She cooks amazing dinners, smashes it at work, and shows up on time for every activity. And she cannot wait to get home to drink wine.
The talented musician who drinks before playing, but the performance is so good nobody minds.
These drinkers know that they consume more than is healthy, but they are so productive that they don’t worry about it.
We usually drink too much to cope with the fact that the pace of our life doesn’t suit us. Or because we are doing too much. Capitalism isn’t designed to suit humans. We need a little something extra to get us through. Maybe we have been given more than a fair share to carry (women, especially mums, I’m looking at you, and not in a judgy way.)
Women, especially, are drinking more than ever.
And alcohol works. If the aim is to turn us into numbed out fast-paced doing robots.
But drinking too much can stop you from changing your life to suit you better.
It takes the edge off painful feelings, which if you sat with long enough, might just push you to make a change.
2. The friends you see most regularly are heavy drinkers too.
All my life, I tended to gravitate towards the drinkers. I liked the looseness and camaraderie, the off-key jokes and feeling of rebellion. The drinkers were just more fun.
In my teens and early twenties, I was unnerved by people who didn’t drink. They made me feel uncomfortable, with their habit of actually remembering what everyone did. Weirdos. I hated the way they left early, how they always stayed the same. Where was their sense of adventure? Didn’t they want to just cut back and not give a flip what happened?
Around this time, I made a friend who didn’t drink much, and we started to have sweet wholesome evenings together occasionally, eating elaborate salads and watching romcoms.
Her gentle, sober, considerate ways provided respite from my increasingly unmanagable lifestyle, but I didn’t see her as often as I saw the friends who loved to drink. Nor as often as I drank alone. Because although I liked her best, I couldn’t resist the pull of booze.
3. You drink fast compared to your non-drinker friends.
I’m not talking about your heavy drinking friends, those lovely maniacs shouldn’t be used as measuring sticks. I’m talking about the friends you see less often. The friends you do non-drinking based things with. (If you have any. Double points, if not.)
It was during a writing residency in a Scottish Castle that I finally realized I drank more and faster than ‘normal people’. Until then, I was still operating under the illusion that everyone drank the way I did. Because everyone I knew did. Or was much worse. (Fun fact: most people in my circle struggled to see I had any issue with booze at all.)
This residency opened my eyes. First because nobody showed up for the early evening sherry that was advertised in the residency documentation. I used it as a marker of time. 5:30 I stopped work and headed to the sherry bottle. Drank a glass of drink that I didn’t particularly like, alone, and waited until dinner.
Dinner meant one bottle of wine eked out between five of us, so I bought another extra to have in my room. The night we had cocktails and read poetry, I carried the glasses down to the kitchen and necked the leftovers. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there were leftovers. Of cocktails.)
4. You are angry when people have had enough.
During our first trip to the pub on Friday night, everyone besides me had half a lager. After they had finished, they put their empty glasses down and looked at each other expectantly.
They were ready to head home.
5. You jokily refer to yourself as an alcoholic.
On a wilder night at the pub — two drinks a pop — I was the only one still thirsty at last orders.
“I’ll have one more,” I said, self-consciously, trying not to sprint as I made my way to the bar. “Because I’m an alcoholic.”
My new lovely writer pals sat politely, while I downed an extra pint, which suddenly seemed very large. Which brings me to my crucial point.
6. You are more than happy to drink alone.
For years, opening a bottle of cold white, and pouring a glass to cook dinner, was my idea of heaven. Luxurious. Civilized. Grown-up.
Writing that sentence, I feel the old longing. What sweet pleasure drinking alone was!
But it kept me isolated too. It helped me to believe that I didn’t need anyone.
For years, I mourned the total absence of community in my life, at the same time as I adored drinking wine by myself.
It didn’t occur to me until after I quit drinking that my love of solo drinking and my growing feeling of isolation were connected. This is the scary thing about drinking. It hampers your ability to think.
As I became self-sustaining as a writer, I rarely had to work in a team or go to a meeting. Gradually, I became more isolated. I wished to be a part of something, but it just seemed harder and harder to connect. I had friends and usually boyfriends, but I still struggled to feel connected.
I’d switch from sad and lonely in the day, hating modern life for making islands of us, to happily drinking wine by myself at night.
The scariest thing is that I suspect I could have continued doing it forever.
7. In the early hours of the morning, you worry about your drinking.
Dawn is a strange, haunted time for the heavy drinker. You wake up, desperately dehydrated, with no understanding of why you drank enough to make yourself ill again.
Buying and pouring the wine, it’s easy to convince yourself that this is a treat. Because you want to relax. And you deserve something nice.
But lying in bed, feeling nauseous and headachey or just incredibly flat the morning after it’s hard to understand why you drank the way you did.
Why didn’t you stop after one glass or two, the way you’d promised that you would? Tonight it will be different, you promise yourself. But there’s a hollowness to the thought because you have had it so much recently, and yet here you are again...
And there’s no shame in getting addicted to something deeply addictive. The fact is, it’s likely not going to get any easier to stop than it is this very moment. Many people learn how to live without booze, and many others learn how to moderate through things like mindful drinking. The trick seems to be, to stop trying to quit on your own.
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If you need help to cope with life, you’re not alone.
If you’re ready to try something different from drinking, read beautiful hangover and discover what I did to get freedom from alcohol. Do whatever it takes to stay sober for 30 days: go to your doctor, try Smart or AA or Hip Sobriety or Soberistas.
Listen to Recovery Elevator and SHAIR podcasts. Read This Naked Mind. Try Moderation Management.
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Chelsey Flood is the author of Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE University. She writes about freedom, addiction, nature and love at Beautiful Hangover, autism and self-compassion at Polite Robot, and is also working on a non-fiction book about getting sober, and a new YA novel.