Your drinking life seems normal. If these 5 things are true, it’s not.

If you’re questioning your relationship with alcohol, see if you experience any of these five things. If so, you might benefit from quitting.

1. When you start, your off switch disappears (what off switch?), and you experience an insane desire for more.

I felt like I was under a spell. My drinking was outside of my control once I started. All I wanted was more. I was drawn to more as inexorably as Sleeping Beauty was drawn to touch the spindle on the end of the spinning wheel.

But it didn’t happen every time I drank. That’s where it got super confusing to me.

I have since been taught that normal people NEVER have that craving. Never? Really? Seems highly unlikely.

It’s worth at least asking some of the people you know who don’t drink very much if they ever get that desire for more, more, more.

And it’s worth asking yourself if you do have this experience. At least some of the time.

2. No matter how sincerely you promise yourself you aren’t going to do it again, “never again” inevitably turns into yet again.

I always thought it was the 5th glass of wine (or second bottle) that got me in trouble: hungover, anxious, and remorseful.

Because of what I wrote about above (the absence of an off switch and a craving for more), it’s the first drink that got me in trouble.

As my friend Paul says, “It’s not the caboose that kills you.”

How many times have you told yourself you aren’t going to do that again, only to start the cycle all over?

3. You have rules about when, where, what, and how much you’ll drink. That you break. No matter what they are.

My rules included:

Never having wine in the house, unless I was going to drink it right then. (Because if I had wine in the house, I was going to drink it. Right then.)

I didn’t drink brown liquor (whiskey, scotch, etc.). Strangely to me, I got just as wasted on vodka and gin as I did on the brown alcohol.

I never drank beer. (Too fattening. As if drinking 1.5 bottles of wine a few times a week wasn’t.)

I alternated glasses of water with glasses of wine. Which worked great. Until the second glass of wine, at which point I was like, “Why drink water?”

I drank wine instead of hard liquor. Surprisingly (not), I simply drank more glasses and got just as wasted.

What have you tried to manage your drinking?

In retrospect, I really didn’t want to not drink as much, I wanted to get drunk and not have any negative consequences.

I mean, why bother with one glass of wine? What’s the point of that?

4. The things you do for fun, the kind of work you do, and your social life revolve around drinking.

I’d go to street fairs in Chicago (drinking). I hung out with one girlfriend (drinking). I worked in advertising (drinking). And I dated guys who drank. At least as much as I did, if not more. In comparison, my drinking looked not so bad.

My absurd drinking was normalized because of the people and places I chose to be in.

Research shows that if you’re friends with people who are overweight, or who smoke, or who drink too much, you’re far more likely to do those things yourself.

So, do an inventory of your activities, your career, and your social life. Can you imagine any of that absent the alcohol?

5. I thought people who didn’t drink were weird. Too earnest. Too square. Too religious. Not fun.

And the first couple of recovery meetings I went to were terrifying.

Very strange people. Guys from the Salvation Army. Old men smoking cigarettes. (This was 22.5 years ago, and yes, they smoked in meetings.)

Since then I’ve become friends with a sober socialite who dripped $100 bills from her purse, a sober homeless guy named Fred who hung out in the park on my corner, and sober wildly successful entrepreneurs. Sober painters. Sober real estate brokers. Sober musicians.

Funny. Interesting. Complicated people.

Of course, there are also overly earnest, serious, and religious sober people, too.

And since getting sober in August of 1999, I’ve done these things:

• Traveled the world (Africa, Korea, China, India, Bhutan, Caribbean islands, Mexico, Costa Rica, Europe, Argentina, Peru, and more)
• Started 4 companies
• Written a book
• Adopted a child
• Married the love of my life who makes me laugh every day
• Moved to my dream town
• Gotten fit
• Healed my relationships with my family, including my ex-husband
• Made money

It’s amazing how redirecting the energy I spent trying to control my drinking or recovering from drinking into what I’m passionate about has transformed my life.

It’s available for you, too. You are on the threshold of living your juiciest, joyous, most interesting life.

If you identify with my story, congratulations! You probably have a drinking problem. Experiment with being AF for a week. Sign up for my FREE 7-Day Stop the Spiral Challenge.