Anxiety! Hands down, alcohol is the best anti-anxiety drug anyone has ever come up with. Not only that, it’s cheap, fast-acting, readily available, no prescription required, socially promoted, and pervasive. What’s not to like about that? This is part of why it’s hard to give up.
And When You Called… Good morning. This is Dr. Wilson, how may I help you today?" I said. Then there's usually a long pause, and sometimes the line goes dead as someone hangs up. Or, "Oh, you're a real person. I was expecting a machine," a woman says.
Choosing Help When You Decide It’s Time Choosing the appropriate help can seem like an impossible task, especially if you are in a crisis. There are a welter of options and they soon seem to be indistinguishable. But if you can stay a bit focused you can winnow out the inappropriate, bogus, and just plain silly.
Putting On Your Oxygen Mask I’m sure you’ve all flown enough to have memorized the cabin attendants’ run through “In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will fall from the overhead compartments. Put your mask on first…” I’m also sure that over the past 6 months we have all experienced [...]
How the Pervasive Mythology is Keeping You Drinking The Steppers have so indoctrinated us over the past decades that most of us have come to believe a number of things that simply have no basis in reality.
Drinking and Your Self-Image It’s interesting that giving up alcohol isn’t particularly hard. Really, it isn’t. What’s difficult is changing your self-image, habits, and beliefs. Let’s start with self-image.
Managing All the Commotion! It is extremely easy, and tempting, to get distracted by all of the political turmoil which threatens to engulf us all for the foreseeable future. It’s also another excuse to drink our way through what looks like looming disaster. Guess what? As with many issues, events, conditions, and conundrums, there is a limit to how much any of us can do. As usual, the choices are, do what we can – and that requires some careful choosing – or ignore everything and retire from life, possibly with a numbing, and even more depressing, alcohol assist.
Support Groups? Everyone thinks that they need a “support group” and many of us have fallen into the trap of thinking that this means AA or some other similarly focused group. Wrong!
Be Wary of Your Personal Physician! Once again this week we received a call from an individual who found himself in trouble because he had confided to his doctor’s assistant that he thought he might be drinking a bit too much since his retirement. The assistant wrote a note saying that the man was obviously drunk (he wasn’t, hadn’t had anything to drink) and his doctor demanded that he immediately check himself into a residential rehab program.
Happy New Year’s! And in keeping with last week’s tradition, here is the original version of Auld Lang Syne: