Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
Not feeling sleepy is not the same as not being affected. Younger drinkers often stay awake through a great deal more than their body is actually handling.
The tiredness that ends an older person's night arrives much later, so the evening runs on and the amount climbs with it. Which is why a limit has to be set before you start, as a number, rather than judged from inside the evening. The same goes for whether you are fit to drive: how alert you feel is the least reliable instrument you own.
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 be extravagant: God does not like extravagant people (Quran 7:31). The limit sits alongside the eating and drinking from the start, not halfway through.
۞يَٰبَنِيٓ ءَادَمَ خُذُواْ زِينَتَكُمۡ عِندَ كُلِّ مَسۡجِدࣲ وَكُلُواْ وَٱشۡرَبُواْ وَلَا تُسۡرِفُوٓاْۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُسۡرِفِينَ
Children of Adam, dress well whenever you are at worship, and eat and drink [as We have permitted] but do not be extravagant: God does not like extravagant people
Qur’an 7:31read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a laboratory study of 516 social drinkers, alcohol raised aggression mainly among those who dwelt on a provocation, which suggests that dwelling on it is the bridge between drinking and lashing out. Notice what that shows: alcohol was doing something the drinkers were not registering as a feeling. Lab settings are artificial, so hold it lightly, though as evidence about self-assessment it is worth having.
Borders A, Giancola PR. (2011). Trait and state hostile rumination facilitate alcohol-related aggression.. Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Your sense of how affected you are is itself one of the things being affected.
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
Drink can make talking easy and still leave you with friendships that feel like nothing. Worth noticing which of those two you actually came for.
If stopping has been harder for you than it seems to be for other people, that is worth taking seriously rather than reading as a flaw in your character.
If a young person is using regularly, waiting to see whether they grow out of it is a gamble. Help early is nearly always cheaper than help later.