The Lies We Tell Ourselves When We’re Drinking Too Much Hattie Garlick - The Telegraph
go to original August 14, 2022

5 Things to Expect When Quitting Alcohol for 90 Days (Sober Leon)

Apologies if you are reading this with a glass of something restorative in one hand, but recently, two new studies suggested that the drinking patterns we fell into during the pandemic are now having a grave effect on the nation’s health.

Helping You Find Addiction Rehab, Your Recovery Begins Today at Rehab 4 Addiction

They make sobering reading. Research from the University of Sheffield presented a worst-case scenario involving nearly a million additional hospital admissions over the next 20 years. Meanwhile, the Institute of Alcohol Studies predicted 147,892 additional cases of alcohol-related diseases, ranging from liver cirrhosis to breast cancer, by 2035.

Lighter drinkers decreased their consumption during the pandemic. But on average, heavy drinkers (those regularly drinking over the recommended 14 units a week) hit the bottle still harder and deaths from alcohol have now reached record levels.

And those alarming figures aren’t all down to untamed teens, swigging from bottles and staggering in the street. In recent decades, there’s been a dramatic shift away from drinking in pubs, towards doing it at home, and while young adults cut back on drinking, older groups have uncorked more bottles.

Whereas in the past “the typical drinker at risk would have been an 18-year-old male, down at the pub. Now, it’s much more like a couple in their sixties, sharing a bottle of wine every night in front of the TV,” says Colin Angus, the senior research fellow who led the University of Sheffield study. “There was a big moral panic when it was the former, because it was so visible in town centers on a Friday night. But you don’t see the older people drinking quietly at home, until they turn up in hospital with some chronic health consequences.”

Sadie Boniface, head of research at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, which published the second of last week’s studies, said: “The evidence that alcohol is harmful to health is crystal clear, but it still has a prominent place in British culture, media and society in general, and the majority of us drink. Myths, old wives’ tales and junk science about alcohol feed a confirmation bias: we want to believe that things we already do – or enjoy – are not bad for us, or even that they might be good for us, when really they are not.”

So, if that evening “stress-relieving” glass of wine (or three) is now a daily fixture, it might be time for some sober truths.

Read the rest at The Telegraph

Related: Global Study Finds Surprising Results for Alcohol Consumption (CNN)

Related: 10 Unexpected Benefits of Quitting Drinking (The Sober School)

Related: Try Dry: The App to Track Your Time off Drinking (Alcohol Change)