Let me guess who you are.
Good at your job. Functional. You pay your bills, manage your life, show up. You drink. More than you should, probably. More than you tell your doctor, definitely.
But you tell yourself it’s not that bad. You’ve never lost a job over it. Never wrecked a car. Never hit whatever imaginary line would make it official.
So it doesn’t count. That’s the story.
The trap nobody labels
There’s a version of yourself you’re comparing against. Someone who’s lost everything, who drinks in the morning, who can’t function. And as long as you’re not that person, you get to file your own drinking under “not a real problem.”
“I drink a lot, sure. But it’s not that bad.”
That sentence lets you off the hook. Over and over.
Meanwhile the drinking keeps going. The evenings keep blurring. The mornings stay foggy. The weight stays on. The energy stays low. Nothing gets bad enough to qualify as a real problem. And nothing gets better.
That’s the trap. Not some clinical threshold you’re dodging. Just a way of life that slowly eats your potential, and never quite crosses whatever line you’d need it to cross before you’d take it seriously.
What it was actually costing me
I was 106kg. Blood tests that worried my doctor. Palpitations. Sexual problems I blamed on stress. Every morning starting with a cold shower just to be able to function.
I told myself it was stress. Work. Just the way things were.
It wasn’t. It was the drinking. All of it.
But I didn’t see it that way because I never lost my job, never wrecked a car, never ended up anywhere embarrassing. By whatever standard I was quietly using to grade myself, I was fine.
I wasn’t fine.
The question that actually matters
Forget where you rank on some imaginary scale.
Ask: is this making my life better or worse?
Look at the mornings. Look at your energy. Look at what you’ve quietly stopped doing because drinking makes it too hard. Look at who you are at 10am versus who you are at 10pm.
That’s the honest question. Not a label. Not a comparison to someone worse off than you.
What I found on the other side
I stopped drinking and found out I’d been living at about 60% capacity.
The clarity I have now for work, for thinking, for being present in conversations. The confidence. The absence of that background anxiety I’d had for years that I assumed was just my personality.
It wasn’t my personality. It was the drinking.
18kg gone without trying. 2,232 euros saved without budgeting, and still climbing. I manage more now and feel less overwhelmed.
None of this required hitting some threshold first. It just required asking honestly whether my drinking was helping or hurting.
What’s actually at stake
This isn’t about where you fall on somebody else’s scale. It’s not about whether you’d qualify for anything.
It’s about: what does your life look like in 5 years if nothing changes?
Same mornings. Same evenings. Same slow drain on your energy, weight, confidence, money.
Or something different.
The good news is the method isn’t hard. Once you understand what alcohol actually is and does, once you change how you see yourself, once you start building real evidence of who you’re becoming, the whole thing gets easier than you think.
You don’t have to be “that bad.”
But that doesn’t mean things are fine.