6/14/18 (Thurs) Excellent article

I was reading an excellent article this article morning.  So much of it resonates with me.  The fact that I could live in the thought processes of most self declared alcoholics does not escape me.  The following quotes are directly from the article that I wanted to remember.  Pretty powerful considering just yesterday I was trying to convince myself that the only thing I screwed up on this weekend was drinking wine. If I just stay away from the wine, I will be fine. I was doing really well with only drinking very low alcohol beer.

How I Let Drinking Take Over My Life by William Leith

I wanted to drink for precisely the same reason that I didn’t want to drink – because I had a drinking problem. 

When I try to explain my drinking problem, it goes like this: in my head, I was a moderate drinker, but after I’d had a drink, I wasn’t. The more I drank, the more I wanted to drink. Drinking increased my thirst.

Drink added something, but it always seemed to subtract more than it added, and the only way I could get things back to normal was to drink more, and all this drinking began to wreck my mind.

I had a persistent fantasy that, the next time I started to drink, things would be better.

 I have the same feelings (after 5 years sober) about alcohol that I had when I was 10. It’s dangerous; it’s disgusting; it causes cancer; it rots your liver and makes you look, and smell, like a much older and sicker person. 

Drink had woven itself into the fabric of my life. 

There were three bouts of heavy drinking, each more serious than the last. In the first two bouts, in my teens and then in my mid-20s, I responded to stress – the stress of school, the stress of work – by drinking alcohol. In the third bout, when my drinking escalated dramatically, it was as if the alcohol itself had become a stressor.

Some people drink, and then they drink more, and at a certain point, they become obsessed with drink.

But drinking always increased my desire to drink

“It creeps up,” said Drummond. “It’s insidious. I don’t like to think it’s ever too late, but it becomes harder and harder to do something about it once it’s got a grip on people.”

When you drink, it can be impossible to think clearly about your drinking.

Glutamate promotes brain activity; Gaba inhibits it. Booze acts as a red light for glutamate and a green light for Gaba. Think about that for a moment. Gaba hinders communication and glutamate helps it. Booze helps the hinderer and hinders the helper. In Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, Lewis describes what happened when he got drunk for the first time: “The sites of glutamate transmission become numbed and ineffective, so information flow is now sluggish, with big signals still getting through while small signals fade into static.” Furthermore: “It’s Gaba’s job to fine-tune thought and perception, to clarify things, but now things are clear to the point of caricature … In other words, I am thinking about very little, but I am thinking about it with magnificent clarity.

Alcohol, then, stops you thinking too much. It slows down the hamster wheel of anxiety. It simplifies.

When you drink, another neurotransmitter, dopamine, is sent all over the brain. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of anticipation, of excitement, of wanting more. Dopamine floods your brain with a sort of excited hunger, the sensation of being in thrall to something. 

**Kingsley Amis once said, it’s not about being drunk, it’s about getting drunk. It’s about that magic moment of rapture on the way to somewhere else. The sweet spot – the exact moment when anticipation and reward are in perfect balance. 

**This sentence gave me anxiety bc I not only know this but understand it on a guttural level - I feel it.

When you flood it with chemicals to make it feel rewarded, it will find ways to feel that reward a bit less intensely. So you need to drink a bit more to get the same buzz

Desire grows as fulfillment shrinks; anticipation nags as reward becomes less rewarding.

Something happens to the prefrontal cortex, the centre of decision-making in the brain. Imagine every thought you might have as a narrow pathway. Now imagine an obsessive, dopamine-fuelled thought happening over and over. It becomes a trunk road, and eventually a motorway. There are no other routes. You find yourself in a difficult situation. You want to drink, but drinking is making you ill. You feel ill, but you want a drink. You are full of wanting. So you drink. And it doesn’t work like it used to.

You cross the line when you start lying to yourself. But you never know where the line is.

At a certain point, the sweet spot begins to disappear. You search for it. You search for it by drinking more. The hangovers get worse. You spend at least half of each day fighting a hangover. 

Why did I drink? I drank because I was anxious, because it helped me talk to people, because worrying about my drinking helped me to stop worrying about other things, things that really stressed me out, such as writing. Drinking relieves stress, and then causes it, but the stress caused by drinking, at least for a while, helps to screen out your real worries. And then drinking becomes a real worry. You cross the line, but you don’t see it, so you keep on going.

It’s been five years now. Sobriety is awesome. My brain really does believe that. Being sober is much better than I thought it would be five years ago.