You have a plan. Two drinks on Friday, two on Saturday, and nothing during the week. Then Tuesday night comes and the thought shows up anyway. A glass of wine sounds good. By Wednesday you’re doing it again, and by Thursday you’re asking yourself the same question you’ve asked a hundred times. Why can’t I just “drink less”? You are not someone who lacks discipline. You run a team, a household, and a calendar that would flatten most people. When somebody needs something, you are not indecisive or hesitant. You just go make it happen. So why is the glass at the end of the day the one thing you can’t seem to handle? There’s a reason, and it has very little to do with how much you love to drink.
Your drinking isn’t self-indulgence. It’s a symptom of self-denial. When you spend your days adjusting, minimizing, or ignoring your own needs so everyone around you stays comfortable, you end every day depleted. The evening drink makes sense because it turns the volume down on that depletion. The fix isn’t drinking less. It’s how seriously you take your own needs.
Why drinking every night isn’t self-indulgence
Most people look at a nightly glass of wine and see self-indulgence. Too much wanting. Not enough discipline. That’s probably the story you’ve been telling yourself, too.
Before going any further, here’s what this is not. It is not going to tell you that you’re drinking too much. It is not going to tell you that you’re using alcohol to avoid your feelings. It’s going to tell you that if you zoom out and look at the big picture, your drinking does make sense. That’s not making excuses. It’s describing the mechanism.
There is a reason pouring a drink in the evening not only feels like relief, it makes reasonable sense. You are putting up with a lot. But here’s the bad news slash awesome news. You’re the one putting yourself through it.
That’s the shift. The drinking isn’t you giving yourself too much. It’s what happens after a long stretch of giving yourself too little.
How ignoring your own needs made me drink more
I relearned this the hard way, with a bed.
When my house was on the market, I hired an estate sale organizer to sell almost everything in it, because after two marriages and a lot of years of motherhood, I was done holding the bag for everybody else. One day she told me someone had put in an offer on my bedroom set. It was less than she thought it was worth, but the furniture was heavy and the buyers would have to hire their own movers. She thought we should take it because we might not get another one.
My house had not sold yet. I still needed somewhere to sleep. But I didn’t want to tell her to hold off, because that’s not fair to her, and I pride myself on being really easy to work with. So I said, fine, let’s do it. I figured I’d just tough it out until the house sold.
The movers took my bed in the middle of my workday, and I didn’t think about it until bedtime. That’s when I walked into my empty bedroom and realized, oh shit, I actually need a place to sleep. I ended up pulling a lumpy ass mattress out of the attic and making a bed on the floor of a hot upstairs bedroom, away from my bathroom and all my stuff. I packed a go bag and a phone charger every night to go sleep slash not sleep in another part of the house.
I did that for seven full days. And in seemingly unrelated news, I drank more that week than I had in months. Which in hindsight makes perfect sense, because it’s not like I was looking forward to going to bed.
Here’s the part that matters. If it had been anybody else’s bedroom set, one of my kids, a friend, anyone staying in my house, I would have said no without batting an eye. The timing isn’t going to work out. It’s too soon. And if the offer had been too good to pass up, I would have immediately ordered them a brand new bed, or at least a basic frame with a nice mattress.
It’s not like I couldn’t afford a new mattress or that I don’t care about my sleep. It just literally did not occur to me that I had any other option than to tough it out and stick to the plan.
That whole week, I had less bandwidth. I felt more overwhelmed. I had less creativity, less momentum, less presence for my clients and my team, and less patience for my puppy. That’s not because I’m a negative person. It’s because I was operating on a deficit. It is real hard to thrive when you are grumpy and tired and sore because your basic needs aren’t being met.
The extra wine I drank that week was not self-indulgence. It was a symptom of the fact that I wasn’t taking good care of my bestie, Colleen. I was forcing her to go through every day with less than what she needed.
And I’m not embarrassed that I drank every night for a week. What I’m embarrassed about is that it took me seven days to stop pretending there was any reason other than my own lack of consideration for myself that I didn’t have a bed to sleep in.
Why you say yes to everyone else and no to yourself
That bed situation was me following a rule. The rule was that if something is just for me, it’s really not important. Don’t make a big deal about it.
Every rule like that has two versions. There’s the go rule and the no-go rule. The go version leads to an automatic yes when someone else needs something. The no-go version leads to an automatic no, or at least a hesitation or a delay, when it comes to something you need.
The go rule fired the second the offer came in. Her job would be easier, so yes, without even thinking about it. The no-go rule is the one I lived with for seven days. My sleep and my quality of life were not worth the extra time and money and energy it would take to order a new bed now and move it later. I never even questioned it.
You’re probably not short on self-esteem. You’re just running rules so old and so automatic that you don’t see them as choices. (internal link: post on people pleasing and drinking)
The childhood rules that are still driving your drinking
A lot of the rules we’re following, we’ve been following for decades, and somebody handed them to us as a child. It doesn’t matter if you had the best parents in the world or the worst. You were taught to follow rules. You were taught what it means to be reasonable and responsible, what qualifies as a need, and what only qualifies as a selfish want.
See if any of these sound familiar. Don’t rely too much on other people. Suck it up and don’t bother anybody. You can rest once your work is done, young lady. Don’t be lazy. What will other people think? If you make a commitment, you’re not allowed to quit. Don’t make a scene. Be the bigger person. And for God’s sake, don’t get too big for your britches and stop making this all about you.
We probably heard those as kids. We’ve probably said them to our own. Those perfectly normal rules follow us into adulthood, until we become grown women who automatically shortchange ourselves without even thinking about it.
It becomes a lifelong pattern. Always adjusting, minimizing, or ignoring your own needs and feelings and desires for the sake of following the plan, staying on schedule, not rocking the boat, and making sure everybody around you is comfortable and happy. Even when it’s at your own expense.
Why trying to drink less doesn’t work when you’re running on empty
This is why it feels so hard to change your drinking when you finally decide it’s time and make a plan. It’s not your drinking that needs to change.
If you were in the habit of taking your own needs more seriously, you would drink like somebody who takes her own needs more seriously. It is really that simple. Which means this isn’t about one habit. It’s the hundreds of little habits. The seemingly inconsequential sacrifices and delays and self-denials that seem so logical and practical in the moment, and then add up to you not having the time or the energy or the give a fucks you need at the end of the day to properly take care of yourself.
It’s like trying to drive through your high-speed life without ever stopping for gas.
The big mistake high-achieving, goal-oriented women make is that when we realize we’re drinking too much, we try to reduce our drinking instead of seeing our drinking as a direct response to unmet needs in other areas. The drink doesn’t fill the tank. It just dims the warning light for a few hours. Cutting back on the drink while the tank stays empty is why willpower keeps running out. (internal link: post on why willpower doesn’t work for drinking)
Why you know what’s good for you and still don’t do it
Most of us understand that we should be doing more for ourselves. And yet there’s that damn know-do gap, where knowing what you should do does not mean you’re actually doing it.
Think about the things you keep promising yourself. Take that walk. Call the friend you keep meaning to call. Book the appointment you’ve been putting off. Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Get showered and dressed and out the door on Saturday morning for the thing you signed up for.
You already know these things would be good for you. The issue is that every single one of them feels like one more hard thing added to the end of a day or a week that has already been full of hard things.
And when the hard thing is just for you, your brain has a different set of rules.
What your cravings are actually trying to tell you
That week without a bed, I noticed my drinking was up. I don’t normally think on a Tuesday night that a glass of wine sounds good and then do it again on Wednesday. But I know better than to think the drinking is the problem. I know better than to assume I’m running short on discipline or willpower or motivation.
When your brain starts playing the alcohol commercials, there’s a reason for that. Your brain is trying to help you solve a problem.
My problem that week was that my pants were on fire. I was in too big of a hurry, I had too much on my plate, and I wasn’t taking any time to process or think. Because the other rule I like to follow is I’ll relax when I’m dead. Or at least I’ll relax when everything is done, and done well, and perfectly, and right.
The craving isn’t the enemy. It’s information. The work is learning to read your own body language. She speaks energy, not English. And you’ve got to stop believing everything you think. (internal link: post on nervous system regulation and cravings)
How to change your drinking by taking your own needs seriously
Changing your relationship with alcohol this way is not behavior change. It isn’t about two drinks on Friday and two drinks on Saturday and never during the week.
It’s about becoming the version of yourself who feels relaxed and complete and satisfied all by yourself, in your body, from the time you wake up in the morning until the time you go to bed.
You won’t fix hundreds of habits at once, and you don’t need to. Start with one area of your life and measure the gap between what you’re willing to do for other people and what you’re willing to do for yourself. Then look for the go rule and the no-go rule underneath that gap.
A simple place to begin: the next time you’re about to tough something out, ask what you would do if this were a friend’s bed. Most of the time you already know the answer. You just haven’t been allowed to give it to yourself. Every time you do, you build a little more capacity, and the drink has a lot less to turn down at the end of the day.
This isn’t about your relationship with alcohol. It’s about your relationship with yourself. The woman who gets told no by her own rules all day, every day, is going to reach for something that turns the volume down at night. The woman who takes her own needs as seriously as everyone else’s doesn’t need to.
After coaching hundreds of women through this process, I can tell you the drinking is almost never where the real problem lives.
If you want to know what’s actually driving yours, take the 3-minute quiz. You’ll find out which of the four drinker types is running your nervous system and where to put your focus first.
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