In the beginning, when starting with the Reframe App, it sounded so good, drinking controlled with a habit tracker to tell you when you overstepped.

I tried it out, but a couple of things stopped me from proceeding, and this is a general problem I see in temporary breaks from drinking as well:

1. Deceiving myself: After only two weeks of staying within my set boundaries, I started deceiving myself in the same way you deceive yourself when taking a quiz on “am I drinking too much?”. On a party, I told myself beforehand only to drink 3 drinks. In the end it was 5, and it weren’t small ones, it were big ones.
2. Craving: Each day I would omit drinking or staying Tre to my goals, I always suffered from cravings. The cues and the triggers remained.
3. Drinking stays a quick fix: I was so tempted to raise my limits the following week because I thought I wouldn’t make it. So, in small and gradual steps, I guess, I would have ended up with the same, if not more, amount of drinking afterwards.
4. Consistency: Apart from the self-deception, I felt I was inconsistent and this felt very uncomfortable, because I was always calculating how many I could drink on specific dates. I spent a lot of time to plan drinking and shoving goals: “If I drink only 2 today, I may drink one tomorrow, and one is none, so I can have two, and who says they need to be small? A big one can’t hurt”
5. Prolonging the pain: It’s like saying: After my break, I can drink as much as I want again. Finally back to normal. And then, out of a mixture of remorse and happiness, I drank even more than before.

That was in the very beginning, say, half a year ago. I didn’t see any sense in cutting back without quitting. I made it a make or break event. The first two events I went to without drinking, I told myself: Just try to keep sober just for the first third (During an ice hockey match). I endured the game. The second event was a party. I committed to driving and told my wife I didn’t know if I would get tired and wanted to drive home. But I stayed all night, without a single drop of beer.

That was the time I started with Podcasts and YT videos. And the contributors of the confirmed with their own experience that it wouldn’t work for them, and that gave me a lot of consolation. That was the time I quit drinking altogether.

Until next time, keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.