Reviving You Recovery
Menifee, CA | Addiction Treatment Center
Why Do I Always Want to Drink After Work?
For millions of Americans, drinking is a normal part of life. While the number of us who do drink regularly is falling, almost 70% of Americans drink. For those of us that do, drinking is normalized as part of social and private life. It’s might even seem weird to you to go out on the weekend without having alcohol. Packing a case of beer or a bottle of wine is almost more common than taking food with you. That also holds true with getting home from work. We’ve all seen Mad Men, where the titular heroes get home to enjoy a glass of strong drink after work “to unwind”.
The thing is, while that’s romanticized in media, it’s not usually good for you. And, if you find yourself always wanting a drink after work, it might point to deeper issues like problems with stress, difficulty coping with pressure at work or from traffic, mental health problems, and potentially even problems with alcohol. Each of these can hit hard, with many of us starting with relatively inconsequential habits that eventually get out of our control.
Do you have to worry? Let’s take a look at some of what you need to know!
Why Do I Want to Drink Every Day?
For many of us, drinking is a habit. If you accustom yourself to doing something for long enough, you’ll fall into a habit of doing it on autopilot. For many of us, that means it’s very easy to brush our teeth every night because we have a habit of doing so. That can apply to drinking as well. For example, if you get home after a stressful day and pour yourself a drink or get yourself a beer, and then get to relax, you’ll start to build a habit that’s also reinforced by the extra comfort and reward of being home and getting to relax. You associate alcohol with getting to unwind and getting to have time for yourself. The reasons you want alcohol might be more than that alcohol helps you relax.
Some other reasons can include:
- You’re experiencing a high level of stress and are relying on alcohol to help you unwind. You could try looking into ways to reduce stress, like going to the gym or meditating after work to nip this habit in the bud before it gets out of hand.
- You’re dependent on alcohol or have a substance use disorder/addiction meaning that you actually crave alcohol. If you’re drinking more than a drink after work, it’s a good idea to start by talking to your doctor about your alcohol use patterns and then working with them to cut back, cut down, or stop altogether while you figure out how you want to use.
- You don’t have other, healthy, ways to relax so you look forward to something that allows you to engage with it and that offers reward. Looking for healthy and positive hobbies like crafts, sports, games with friends, cooking, etc., is a good idea because it gives you a positive outlet that’s also entertaining.
- You want to reward yourself for getting through a hard day or completing a job you didn’t like. Here, you might want to look for different work or into healthier reward options.
Essentially, you might be drinking for a lot of reasons. Understanding those can take some time and introspection of your current lifestyle and habits, which only you can answer.
How Often Is It Healthy to Drink?
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism recommends that individuals drink no more than two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women, or respectively no more than 7 drinks per week for women and no more than 14 drinks per week for men.
That also works out to:
- No more than 4 drinks per occasion for women or adults aged 65+ and no more than 5 drinks per occasion for men
Here, a drink counts as about 0.6 ounces of alcohol. That works out to a single 12 oz. Regular beer, which is normally about 5% alcohol, about 8-9 ounces of a 7% alcohol beverage, 5 ounces of a 12% alcohol beverage (most wine), and 1.5 ounces of a 40% alcohol beverage (e.g., whiskey or gin).
If you’re drinking more than that, either in a single sitting, per day, or per week, you’re engaging in unhealthy behavior. Of course, for most of us, drinking every day is also a bad sign. It’s not necessarily unhealthy to have a maximum of 0.6 ounces of alcohol per day. At the same time, it’s not exactly healthy either.
Get Your Questions Answered Now
What is Self-Medication?
Self-medication is the phenomenon by which many of us look to outside sources to self-soothe or to feel better after experiencing stress, negative emotions, or physical pain. At any given time, up to 92% of all people will engage in some form of self-medication. For many of us, that means using alcohol to reduce feelings of stress, to reduce feelings of anxiety, to soothe upset emotions, to reduce feeling pain, to fall asleep.
While it can be healthy to self-medicate with things that build up your health over time (e.g., using sports to increase your ability to sleep is healthy self-medication), substances like alcohol almost always result in problems. For example, they reduce effectiveness over time. As you increase tolerance, you’ll need more and more alcohol to get the same results. In addition, alcohol causes more problems.
If you drink, you’ll be more tired, more emotional, less able to concentrate, more physically in pain, and less able to sleep than before you drank and the things you were self-medicating will probably get worse. This means that self-medicating can eventually make problems a lot worse than they were, while you have fewer and fewer outlets to cope with them. As a result, you’re forced into drinking more and more, creating dependency and eventually substance use disorder.
Getting Help
If you feel like you need a drink every night after work, chances are, you should think about getting some help. That’s important even if you can quit using alcohol on your own. Why? Wanting a drink every night normally means you’re struggling with stress, mental health problems, or coping with parts of your life. It’s not a sign that things are going well. Talking to your doctor about stress, about building emotional coping mechanisms, and about improving your mental health can give you the tools to improve life before things get worse.
Most importantly, your doctor can help you to gauge your alcohol usage and patterns and can give you answers on whether your drinking is unhealthy. Chances are, if you are drinking every day and you think about drinking a lot, you might need help not just reducing alcohol usage, but treating the underlying causes behind drinking too much. For example, you don’t start relying on alcohol after work because everything is great. Instead, things are bad and alcohol is the thing you look forward to the most, which turns into a problem. In 2023, 28.9 million Americans qualified for a substance use disorder diagnosis or “addiction” to alcohol. Often, that starts with simple steps like having a drink to unwind after work. If you’re noticing you’re relying on alcohol a bit too much, that you spend too much time thinking about it, or that it’s the thing you look forward to most, stopping to get help now can help you get back on track before things go badly wrong. Good luck getting help!
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