This week reminded me how easily the urge can return when life piles up
Days spent wrestling with the kind of behind-the-scenes tech that makes my head spin, stand-up rows with AI over lost work, and getting bullied by Grammarly left me close to tech tears.
By mid-week, piles of wet washing, a tumble dryer that had thrown a hissy fit and dramatically died, and grumbling tendonitis that is refusing to mend had all joined the list.
Ordinary problems, the kind most people face.
That’s often how tension builds, not from one big thing, but from everything stacking up.
I opened the fridge and looked at the rows of Kopparberg cider my son gets from his part-time job and never drinks.
The irony?
I was never a cider girl.
JD was my party drink. Wine was my sleep medication.
And I thought: This is the wrong reason to have a drink.
All those built-up feelings — frustration, stress, anxiety — were exactly why drinking right then would have been a bad idea.
It’s the question I get my clients to stop and ask themselves, and this time, I used it on myself.
What do I need?
That’s the moment that matters.
The pause. The choice.
The space where something else can happen.
Fortunately for Arnold, it meant I grabbed his lead and stomped around the woods in the rain and dark, and came home feeling much calmer.
I used to use alcohol to change my emotional state, to muffle or take the edge off uncomfortable feelings.
A walk doesn’t always hit the spot, but it’s about knowing yourself well enough to spot when you’re getting hijacked, and understanding how to soothe what’s really going on.
In the woods, I checked the stories I was telling myself and reframed them into something helpful.
We all live inside the stories we tell ourselves.
We might as well make them work for us, rather than against us.
It’s something I talked about on BBC Radio Gloucestershire with Nicky Price this week — how drinking more than we’d like is often less about habit and more about emotional build-up.
Stress, fatigue, loneliness, boredom.
The glass isn’t the problem; it’s what we’ve hired it to do.
🎙️ Listen here
Forward to 1 hour 20 minutes to listen to my segment.
👉 This week’s quick question
When you reach for something, what are you trying to ease?
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