This article is part of The Belief Bucket series, where we examine ten common beliefs about alcohol.
- Introduction: What is the Belief Bucket?
- Belief #1 – Relaxation (Alcohol helps me relax)
- Belief #2 – Happiness (Alcohol makes me happy)
- Belief #3 – Reward (Alcohol is my reward) ← you’re here
- Belief #4 – The Rosy Effect (Remembering only the good times)
- Belief #5 – Taste (Alcohol tastes amazing)
- Belief #6 – Social Ally (Alcohol helps me socially)
- Belief #7 – Sleep (Alcohol helps me sleep)
- Belief #8 – Moderate Drinking (Our obsession)
- Belief #9 – Boredom (Alcohol solves boredom)
- Belief #10 – The Buzz (Alcohol feels amazing)
We worked hard all week and felt completely sure we’d earned a drink.
We handled the pressure, got everything done and kept a lot of it to ourselves. Then Friday arrived, or maybe it was just the end of another long day.
“I deserve this.”
And in that moment, the drink felt like payment for everything we’d put in.
But the thing is, by then alcohol could be taking even more out of us than the day had. We called it something we’d earned, then woke up the next morning paying for it.
How alcohol became our usual reward
Most of us started connecting alcohol with rewards long before we ever questioned it.
Finish an exam, have a drink. Get the job, have a drink. Close the deal, open the bottle. Get through a rough week, we’ve earned one.
After doing this for years, having a drink became what we did whenever something was finished. We didn’t stop and think about what the reward would be. We just thought about having a drink.
And it didn’t even have to be a good day. A good day deserved a drink. So did a bad day. A stressful day, a boring one and an ordinary Tuesday could all end with the same reward.
So almost any kind of day could become a reason to drink.
Maybe we just needed a break
A lot of the time, we’d been pushing ourselves all day and wanted permission to stop.
We wanted the pressure to ease. We wanted to stop thinking about work and feel like the day was finally ours.
Having a drink told us that work was over.
This can get mixed up with the belief that alcohol helps us relax. Maybe what we wanted most was the break.
The need for a break was real. We had just tied that break to alcohol.
So if we stopped drinking but kept pushing ourselves until we were running on empty, it might feel like the reward had been taken away. We still needed a proper break.
We might still call it a reward
In the beginning, drinking may have felt like a treat.
Later, it might have become automatic. We drank because it was time, because the bottle was there or because not drinking felt strange.
The amount went up. The good part got shorter. Sometimes the drink didn’t feel special at all.
But we kept calling it a reward because that was what we’d called it for years. Even when it didn’t feel like much of a reward anymore, drinking could still be the first thing we thought about after a difficult day or something worth celebrating. And if our body had started expecting alcohol, not drinking might have felt uncomfortable or strange.
So were we choosing a reward, or drinking because we didn’t feel right without it?
A reward shouldn’t make tomorrow worse
If something is really a reward, we should feel glad we chose it. Alcohol often left us with poor sleep, low energy, anxiety, regret and another day that felt harder than it needed to be.
So were we really rewarding ourselves, or just making the next day harder?
When we look at the real trade, we may have felt better for a short time and then paid for it for hours or even days.
We were meant to be rewarding ourselves for getting through the week. Then we went into the next one short on sleep, patience, focus and energy.
That doesn’t sound like much of a reward.
We’d already done the hard part
We did the work. We handled the pressure. We solved the problem, reached the target or just made it through a difficult week.
Alcohol didn’t create any of that. We just used a drink to mark it afterwards.
So taking alcohol away doesn’t take away what we achieved. We still did it, and we get to keep the next morning as well.
We still need to reward ourselves
Stopping alcohol doesn’t mean every week ends with more work and nothing enjoyable. We still need rest, something enjoyable and something to look forward to. That could be a meal we enjoy, time with someone we want to see, buying something we’ve wanted, going somewhere, switching the phone off or doing absolutely nothing for a while.
It doesn’t have to be impressive. It just needs to feel good without making tomorrow worse.
And the end of the week can still feel like ours without alcohol being the main event.
We still get to reward ourselves. We’re just choosing something that doesn’t take from us afterwards.
Next, we’ll look at our good drinking memories and the parts we may be leaving out.
— Brent
Next in the series: Belief #4 – The Rosy Effect (Remembering the good times) →