Alcohol can give us 20 minutes of relief and take the rest of the night and much of the next day. And we can still remember it as something that helped.
That sounds strange when we say it plainly. But the relief came first, and the cost usually turned up later.
So we connected the drink with feeling better. Then when the poor sleep, anxiety, low energy or regret showed up later, we treated them as separate problems.
The Disparity Rule helps us put those two parts back together.
What the Disparity Rule means
Disparity just means there is a gap. With alcohol, it’s the gap between what the drink seemed to give us and what it actually took from us. Maybe we got a short buzz, some relief or a break from everything going on in our head.
Then we paid for it with more drinking, worse sleep, anxiety, lost time, less patience, poor decisions or another day when we didn’t feel like ourselves. We might feel better for a short time, then feel worse for hours or even days. And because the good part and the bad part didn’t happen at the same time, we didn’t always connect them.
Why the cost was easy to miss
The first drink did something quickly.
If we were tense, bored or restless, we could feel different within a short time. That made the drink look like the answer.
The bad part came later.
We slept badly later. We woke up anxious. We had less energy at work. We cancelled plans, ate badly, lost patience or spent the day trying to recover.
And because those things happened afterwards, we could blame them on stress, age, work or that we were having a rough day. Then evening came around and alcohol looked like relief again.
No wonder the drinking and withdrawal cycle was so hard to notice. The drink seems to fix a feeling that alcohol may have helped create.
What alcohol gave us kept getting smaller
In the early days, alcohol may have felt exciting or relaxing. But over time, many of us needed more alcohol to get less of the feeling we wanted.
The buzz became shorter. Relief didn’t last. We could spend most of the evening trying to feel as good as we did near the beginning.
And once tolerance starts leading towards dependence, we may be drinking more to stop feeling uncomfortable. It might have very little to do with enjoying ourselves by then.
So we were getting less from alcohol and dealing with more because of it. We might drink more, sleep worse, think about alcohol more often and feel less like ourselves when we weren’t drinking. That wasn’t the trade we thought we were making at the beginning.
What the trade could look like
Imagine we went to a party and enjoyed the first part of the night. We felt more relaxed, talked easily and got the buzz we had been expecting.
Then we drank more than we planned. We repeated ourselves, lost part of the night or said something we wouldn’t normally say.
We slept badly and woke up with anxiety. The next day disappeared because we had no energy and didn’t want to see anyone.
If we only remember the first hour, alcohol looks like it gave us a good night. But add in everything that followed the first drink, including the next day, and it doesn’t look nearly as good.
The same thing could happen with drinking at home. We got a brief feeling of relief after work, then lost the rest of the evening and woke up feeling worse.
We don’t need percentages to see the difference. We just need to include everything.
The cost builds over time
The Disparity Rule isn’t only about one hangover or one bad night. And some of the cost can build slowly.
We lose confidence in our own promises. We stop doing things in the evening because drinking has taken their place. Our health, relationships or work could start suffering.
We may spend more time planning our drinking, hiding the amount or recovering from it.
None of that has to happen all at once. It can happen slowly enough that we don’t really notice how much our normal life has changed.
And by then, alcohol may be doing little more than helping us feel okay for a while.
Work out our own disparity
It helps to start with the thing we believed alcohol gave us.
Was it relaxation, confidence, fun, sleep, relief or a break from our thoughts?
Then we can ask how much it really helped and how long that feeling lasted.
Then we include everything that came with it. That means the rest of the night, the next morning, the effect on our mood and energy, the broken promises and anything that had been building over the years.
We’re not trying to make alcohol look worse than it was. We’re just including the part that came later, because that was part of the drinking as well.
Was that brief change really worth everything that came with it?
— Brent