Beyond counting

We can be pretty pedantic about counting in MM.  After all, you can’t moderate your consumption of something without measuring it.   But very few newcomers to our meetings are already counting their drinks; it’s not something that comes naturally.  Initially, counting tells you what your baseline is: this is how much you drink now.  Over time it hopefully becomes a guide that keeps you on course.

But obviously counting in and of itself isn’t going to fix things for you.  You could count drinks without doing a thing to reduce their number.  You would go on being somebody who is drinking too much, but you would be very well-informed as to just how much you were drinking.

And what would be the point of that?

Clearly, that’s not why we go to the effort. Counting is really just a first step.  What comes next is the important work of changing the kind of math you do when you drink.

Let me explain.

A binge drinker has been doing addition.  When you’re talking about something you like, more is better than less, right?  So two is better than one, and three even better and on down the line.  Drinking is about adding one drink after another after another, in the hopes of….what?  The Big Night? The epic adventure? This is probably the way you learned to drink when you were young, and you default to the rote addition of one plus one plus one when you drink.

The challenge now is to switch to subtraction.  You have to decide how many drinks are appropriate for that occasion and then you start subtracting.  The idea is to stop when you get to zero.

The habitual drinker, on the other hand, may not have known this but she’s been doing multiplication.  Three drinks on Monday, four on Tuesday, two on Wednesday, three on Thursday.  Multiplication is like addition in batches: it can produce some big numbers quickly.  An average of four drinks a day gets you to 28 over the course of a week.  What sustains this level of consumption is the fact that the amount consumed on any one occasion isn’t debilitating.  You can get up the next day and take care of business.  You can survey your life and find–at least in your opinion–ample evidence that your drinking isn’t interfering with the important roles you have, as employee or boss, spouse or parent, sibling or friend.  It’s all fundamentally okay (sort of). The problem is that you have this daily average number of drinks that when multiplied by seven puts you well above what medical experts define as moderate drinking.

So the habitual drinker needs to start doing division.  She needs to set a total for the week and then divide that number by her number of drinking days.  This shifts drinking from something that just happens to something that is budgeted and planned.

And here’s the critical point.  As much as we emphasize counting and numbers, the most important thing isn’t the actual number you plug into your equation.  The point is to start doing the math.  Don’t get hung up on having numbers that are well above the MM guidelines.  If a night out with your friends typically means 10 beers, well then an evening that stops at four is going to seem not just difficult, but impossibly and distressingly so.  Plug in a number that is more attainable and work towards that goal.  The practice of “doing the math” will over time make it possible for you to move those numbers lower.