Ever since my early twenties, I found myself turning to alcohol as a way to treat a kind of social anxiety. Initially, it was the kind that I just didn’t want to talk to people I don’t have anything in common with, so I’d chug down a glass of wine before they arrived for the party or whatever, and I was set for the rest of the night. But as the years passed, and I kept up with this habit, it started to self-prophesy into a considerably larger problem. I was finding it difficult to speak to anyone, even my friends and family. Unless, of course, I kept drinking.

By all accounts, my drinking never reached dangerous levels to myself–certainly not to others. Though after over ten years of binge-drinking to fuel a desperate want to connect with others, I shouldn’t have been too surprised to find some liver damage in a recent checkup.

I do pretty well when I abstain from alcohol completely, as a rule mostly by avoiding more social outings than I should. I have been seeing a psychologist for the last year, working to improve my social anxiety. For the record, my liver is fine now, I abstained for over three months after they detected signs of fatty liver, and I have been much healthier since.

But I don’t want to quit drinking forever. It makes me happy, calm, socially fulfilled. And honestly the hangovers aren’t even something that bothers me.

But there’s one thing that helps manage the drinking. For the better half of three years, I’ve been an avid runner. I initially started running in combination with diet to lose weight, but it just kind of stuck. To the point where I do multiple races every year, and even finished my first marathon just three weeks ago. I’ve already been at my target weight, give or take, for a year and a half, but I just keep running anyway. The reason, I think, is that running makes me happy and calm in a similar way that alcohol does. That, and it obviously helps keep me at my happy weight.

Usually it goes like this:

  1. I buy a ticket for a race as soon as I’m able to after the previous race is finished; so I always have something to train toward.
  2. I train as a means to feel that I’m not throwing away money.
  3. I benefit from the training in my mental health and my physical health.
  4. I abstain from drinking on and off while training, depending on how serious the race is. But I do go through cycles of heavy binging followed by lower consumption.
  5. Drinking impacts my performance significantly, most likely due to poor sleep. It also wastes a lot of my money.

I’ve summarised it in this graph.

It’s somewhat satisfying to see it laid out like this. In maths terms, I suppose this is a directed graph on six nodes. A couple of quick observations:

  • The node with the highest in-degree is my brain; my mental health is affected most by the system (for better or for worse).
  • The node with the highest out-degree is the booze; it is affecting the most.
  • Physical and mental health nodes have null out-degree; they aren’t depicted as externally affecting anything, but that’s not to say in reality they don’t internally affect everything.

Something else that’s interesting is the associativity of the relationships the arrows represent. Observe for instance that the race tickets are not actually needed. You can easily cut them out and direct the arrow directly from money to running, expressing the relationship “money buys motivation”.

I’m sure there are lots of graph theory tricks you could apply to this thing, but what happens if you try removing alcohol?

Well, immediately it’s clear that our running and health are no longer impacted negatively. We are also not wasting as much money.

So this should be a clear win for me, right? I’m not so convinced.

The effect alcohol has on my mental health, I know, is surely bad on paper. It’s the reason I’m in this mess, and it’s the reason it got worse. But it’s also the most surefire, comfortable way to unwind after a busy week, or loosen up and laugh with friends. I’d much rather manage the booze than eliminate it entirely.

So if I can find ways to only drink strategically, on days when it will have minimal impact to my running, that’s a good start. Binging less on nights that I do drink will naturally help me spend less money and my health will be better off for it, even if slightly. The truth is, I find that limiting my alcohol throughout the month and saving it all for a few tactical nights just makes me drink way too much on those nights and go way overboard with it. I don’t really think there is one big, important change I can make that will solve everything, without quitting entirely forever.

Do I have any key takeaways from this? No. I just thought by typing this, I could gain some insight, which I’d say I have. Even if only a bit. I can come back to this post in a year’s time and see if these thoughts and ideas still hold up. Who knows, maybe I will have more to add later.

For now, I’m just going to continue making small improvements.

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