Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
Distant health warnings move almost nobody. The cost that lands is the one showing up this month: your memory, your marks, the work you know you could be doing.
So keep it specific and keep it near. Heavy drinking in the teens and early twenties shows up in memory and in school work, which is the exact ground a young person is being judged on right now. Said once, without alarm and without a lecture, it tends to get heard, because it concerns something they already care about.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
Qur’an and Sunnah
do not squander your wealth wastefully (Quran 17:26). Memory and years are wealth of the same kind, and easier to spend without noticing.
وَءَاتِ ذَا ٱلۡقُرۡبَىٰ حَقَّهُۥ وَٱلۡمِسۡكِينَ وَٱبۡنَ ٱلسَّبِيلِ وَلَا تُبَذِّرۡ تَبۡذِيرًا
Give relatives their due, and the needy, and travellers- do not squander your wealth wastefully
Qur’an 17:26read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review of brief alcohol interventions found that a single short structured conversation in primary care reduced drinking by a modest but real amount, roughly twenty grams of alcohol a week, among hazardous drinkers who had not asked for help. Modest is the honest word for it. It suggests one well aimed conversation is worth having, and that no single conversation carries the whole job.
Kaner EF, Beyer FR, Muirhead C, Campbell F, Pienaar ED, Bertholet N, Daeppen JB, Saunders JB, Burnand B. (2018). Effectiveness of brief alcohol interventions in primary care populations.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A consequence you can feel this week can compete with a craving; one twenty years out cannot.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Sometimes the drinking or the smoking is not the first problem at all. It is somebody's own treatment for an attention difficulty or an anxiety nobody has looked at yet.
Draw your own chart of the moment you usually give in, with the questions you actually ask yourself, and put it where you will see it.
If the language of a recovery group puts you off, that is a reason to look for a different group, not a reason to decide that help is not for you.