What my GP said about alcohol and this together

I had one evening where I was much more affected than expected and it frightened me, and I have been careful and fine since.

The thing I would flag is that if drinking has become a way of managing something, that is a different conversation and worth having with somebody qualified.

Thank you for writing this down. It helped.

I found that eating less alongside drinking was the actual mechanism in my case, rather than anything more mysterious.

Mine hit much faster and lasted longer, and the following day was noticeably worse than it used to be.

The pub is still the pub and I still go. That took a bit of working out and the answer turned out to be that the pub was never about the drink.

It simply stopped appealing. I had not decided anything and one day I noticed I had not wanted a drink in three weeks.

My honest report is that I still drink, less, and I enjoy it more, which was not the outcome I predicted.

What helped was telling one friend, so that in a group there was somebody who knew and quietly covered for me.

My tolerance came back partially after about a year, which nobody had told me might happen and which I should have expected.

Something I got wrong was assuming an ordinary evening would go the way ordinary evenings used to. It did not and I had not planned for it.

The social pressure was harder than the physical change. Explaining why I was not drinking was the whole difficulty.