Happy Hour is our celebrated transition from work to play. Daily drinking has become so normalized that alcohol was deemed essential during the Covid lockdown, and we replaced the workday’s end visit to the bar, with Virtual Happy Hour online. We drink alcohol to connect and to disconnect, to ease our transition from work to play, and to relieve the stress at the end of the day. We drink to enhance the joy of life and we drink to relieve the pain. Alcohol is there to boost us when we’re feeling bored and to help us let down a bit when we’re overly busy.
Alcohol would seem to be a wonder drug – a panacea. But….
If you think of alcohol as a drug prescribed by the doctor, a drug prescribed to treat complaints of depression and anxiety, or of feeling exhausted or overwhelmed, would that seem so natural and normal?
If the doctor told you that they could prescribe this wonder drug alcohol to give you relief for a few hours every evening but it came in the form of a capsule or was injected like insulin would it still have the appeal of wine in a bottle of whiskey in a crystal glass?
What if the doctor was straight with you and told you that the problem with this wonder drug alcohol is that it is difficult to control the dosage and the list of side-effects is quite long.
Side effects including weight gain, confusion, a decrease in motor skills, memory loss, dehydration, despair, poor judgment, bad body odour, diarrhea, vomiting, loss of balance, loss of interest in hobbies, poor social skills, poor sleep…just to name a few.
Sadly alcohol is also quite expensive and may damage your finances. And your liver. Oh, and once the positive effects wear off, the original symptoms will more than double in severity. You will experience an increase in depression, anxiety, and exhaustion. And one last thing – it’s highly addictive. But the doc says everyone’s doing it- it works great!
We’d rightly be outraged that a doctor would be so twisted to prescribe something so hideously shit for our health and well being. We would tell them to fuck off and would never see that doctor again. But it’s not the doctors who are prescribing alcohol the wonder drug.
Currently, society, the media, and the alcohol companies are desperately trying to prescribe us this ‘wonder drug’. Advertisements for this ‘wonder drug’ even show up in our brain as thoughts telling us that we need it. We tell ourselves that we cannot possibly survive the evening, stress, or social events without it.
Luckily for us, these are just thoughts. That’s all they are: It’s not a necessity. It’s not a medication we need and we just have to tell those thoughts to fuck off, same as we would that twisted doctor. Alcohol is a drug that worsens our symptoms. It opens up a door to a well of emptiness..
There really are cheaper and healthier alternatives that are much more effective and lasting than that so called ‘wonder drug’ called alcohol.
Next time you get an urge to pick up the bottle, why don’t you visualize the twisted doctor, give him a strongly-worded order to leave, and then find a real alternative to heal your symptoms.
more by this author :
How to Stop Drinking Away the Pain
Don’t let the shame of the stigma keep you from saying
“I think I have a problem with drinking”
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