AIBU to think drinking every day is normal?

[BitBehind]

Just that really.

I grew up in a household where both parents drank every night. Always wine with dinner and then sometimes gin or whisky afterwards.

They were never smashed. But they definitely drank every day without fail and often a little wobbly before bed. I didn't think much of it.

Now I always have wine in the evening. Soon as the kids (toddlers) are in bed it's my routine to come down and have a glass of white wine in the quiet at last. And then maybe one more with dinner. And maybe one more after dinner. Small glass. 3 max. I never go out drinking anymore so that's it. I'm never drunk but also would find it hard to not have that glass at the end of the day

Is this normal? My partner says it's definitely not.

Apart from being way above your recommended units, isn't this also very expensive? How much do you spend on wine each month?

It was my normal when I was in a very bad place.

Now I just have a glass or two at weekends.

There are a lot of pressures in the U.K. to normalise heavy drinking, to the point where it is no longer seen as ‘heavy drinking’.

Knock it on the head for a couple of weeks and you'll soon see if you have a problem: tbh a glass a day wouldn't do any harm but half a bottle is a little excessive. Has it crept up at all? I'd want to be keeping a close eye that it wasn't sneaking up.

Have you tried stopping for a while, like a month or a few weeks? I have never drunk as much as you but would have a bottle over a weekend. I stopped for a bit and felt like the constant low level anxiety and blue feeling went away. I love wine but feel I can't tolerate it any more - I just feel depressed the next day, so now keep it for special occasions and pay the price the next day.

Yeah. It is expensive. I guess as its the only indulgence I spend my money on. Oh and the occasional overpriced moisturiser!

If I'm honest when I'm struggling to persuade my 3 year old to get into bed or he's just taken all the clothes of our the laundry bin and made a fort out of them instead of going to sleep (last nights example ha ha)...I do crave the glass of wine as my reward. So I guess that's not good.

No it’s not normal. I worked in alcoholic rehab and more often then not this is how it started with them. If you’re using alcohol as a way to relax, then if something bad happens in your life it could escalate into full blown alcoholism.
you also don’t need to be a morning drinker to be considered an alcoholic. 3 glasses (nearly a whole bottle) isn’t healthy and although you don’t necessarily feel drunk you will be over the limit and not fully able to help your children should an emergency arrive. To do that everyday isn’t good.

@5zeds Thank you. I'm feeling quite determined this morning to change but guess that's easy to think at 9am.

I think everyone's "normal" is different, but I wouldn't expect it to be usual for most people to drink every night. My parents didn't, they always had wine with Sunday lunch, and possibly on Saturday evening I can't remember but I'm pretty sure not during the week.

My DH drinks every day, and I wish he didn't (for health reasons) but I don't.

Interestingly I looked up the maximun recommended units for alcohol recently and in the 1970s it was 56 units a week! the UK has one of the lowest recommendations, apparently Spain recommends no more than 35 units/week.

Haha OP you shouldn’t have posted on Mumsnet where a thimbleful of wine a month is the norm and people clutch their pearls at anything more!

Here we go again 🙄

There's always someone on these threads who trots this out.

There's a big gap between several glasses a night (unhealthy) and having a drink once a year at Christmas.

Just because it's common to drink daily, doesn't mean it's something that should be normalised or encouraged.

I also think it's only normalised on here because it's wine. If someone wrote that they drank the equivalent in cheap vodka or lager, I don't think quite as many people would be laughing and saying it was fine.

Not normal for me or anyone I know (at least publically).

The way you describe it as well, your reward, your indulgence, something you can't go without, something you need to relax, being "wobbly" around your children on a regular basis etc and the fact that you downplay how much you drink (first you said it's 3 glasses, then referred to it as that one glass), etc sounds to me like some kind of dependancy. All those things to me are far from normal.

I would suggest you try some alcohol free nights. I am pretty sure that if you cut back you would fine life more manageable too. I can't imagine what my energry levels would be like if I drank as much as you do on top of work and a toddler. I can't think of anything much worse.

Oh and you question re liking wine etc. I like wine. I also like chocolate. And crisps and lots of lovely things. I don't have any of that every day. That doesn't require iron willpower because I don't have a depedancy to any of it. Sometimes I might really fancy a wine and have one. Or I might really fancy one and not have one because I have stuff to do (driving, early start the next day etc). And either is perfectly fine for me.

Not normal although a family member went through a period of drinking pretty much every night, maybe 1 or 2 beers, but has had to stop that because of health problems.

It’s breaking the habit. In the week replace with stuff that’s nearly as nice. So instead of wine or beer with crisps every day have fizzy water or grapefruit tonic and ryvita chilli thins. Not quite as nice but nearly there.

Also the calories from drinking every day must be insane!

Hi OP,

Yes it's 'normal' in that plenty of people do drink every night in the UK, especially since lockdown. If it's what your parents did every night when you were growing up, then it's been normalised for you over years and years. It's not healthy though, and it's understandable that your husband is concerned. You say you drink half a bottle of wine a night, if the wine is 11% then that's just over four units a day. Drinking more than four units of alcohol every day gives you a 90% chance of developing alcohol related fatty liver disease, which can be reversible if you cut down your drinking. If you don't, it can further develop into alcohol related hepatitis and cirrhosis:
www.drinkaware.co.uk/facts/health-effects-of-alcohol/alcohol-related-diseases/alcohol-related-liver-disease

I would go and see your GP and tell them that you've been drinking half a bottle of wine a night for the last 18 months and want a check up. They won't bat an eyelid and will probably order some blood tests for you to check your liver. I would be careful about stopping drinking completely this week; you have probably gone past it being a habit to alcohol dependency to some degree (it's a spectrum) if you've been drinking half a bottle of wine every day for 18 months and might get some nasty withdrawal symptoms.

www.drinkaware.co.uk/advice/how-to-reduce-your-drinking/what-to-expect-when-you-stop-drinking

Good luck OP.

@adlitem I used to be like this. I could happily drink as often / as much as I wanted, because I only wanted to drink (1) small amounts and (2) not very often

My half bottle a night crept up to 1 bottle a night to 1 bottle and an extra mini bottle to a bottle and half, then almost 2. I'm now a member of AA.

I was also raised in a family where drinking daily was the norm! Dad had a really high powered job so when he got home he would drink whisky, Mum would have wine and was a SAHM. Every single day. Neither of them ever seemed worse for wear and we were well raised and cared for.

I would love to have a drink daily - work and kids really do drive you bonkers don’t they!! But I do consider the health side effects and tend to have 3 nights minimum not drinking at all.

I did find some statistics that I thought might be interesting to you...

"In 2018, 69% of men drank and 85% of women drank within the government low risk drinking guideline (a maximum of 14 units for both women and for men)." alcoholeducationtrust.org/teacher-area/facts-figures/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwwJuVBhCAARIsAOPwGASBhcfsNGYXUauORNE26s9N5eaFBG3SOJExJ175Q0Vyq9Df4vjklDkaAhqnEALw_wcB

For what its worth whilst I've known plenty of people who drink like you do, I think it's fair to say that most women drink less than you do and more than I do. I now drink very little between pregnancies and breastfeeding and not really going out very much anymore somewhere along the years I got out of the habit of drinking. It isn't a virtue just a fact, and I have unhealthy habits of my own.

Between 15% and 20% of people in the UK report that they have had more than 6 units (for a woman) and 8 units (for a man) on at least one day in the last week.

This is what was referred to a 'heavy drinker'. So if by normal you mean 'the majority of the adult population drink this much' then the answer would appear to be no.

"Between 2006 and 2019, the proportion of adults who drank more than 8 units (men) or 6 units (women) on any day in the past week fell for all age groups between 16 and 54 years old. The largest decrease occurred in people aged 16-24, from 29% drinking heavily in 2006 to 15% in 2019...
Overall, the 25-34 age group reported drinking the most heavily in 2019, with 22% exceeding 8/6 units on any day in the last week. By comparison, only 3.2% of people aged 75 and over reported heavy drinking." https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/alcohol-related-harm-and-drinking-behaviour-1

Oh, and having wine with beans on toast is not to enjoy a glass of wine with a nice meal. That's just kidding yourself.

The problem is that alcohol has been over normalised. With people talking of wine o’clock and pubs having happy hour where alcohol is cheap etc a culture is being created where alcohol is something we should all crave and all want to drink as much as possible.

if anyone posted here that they did a line of coke every night, quite aside from the illegal aspect of it, people would rightly raise their eyebrows and for many that would even be a dealbreaker in a relationship.

But if someone posted here that they wouldn’t start a relationship with someone who drank a coupl of glasses of wine every night, people would tell them to unclench, whereas they would be supportive if it was someone who took any other kind of hard drugs.

Fact is that alcohol kills people. And it destroys lives. And we have normalised it purely because it’s legal.

When a 15 year old gets drunk people say that they should just let it go because they’re going to drink anyway. But we don’t say that about other drugs. Why not?

I think saying you aren’t going to drink this week is too much

Take it day by day.

I am not going to drink today

From other peoples experience of trying to cut down. It works for a while but then old habits come creeping in and they are back to where they started

Giving up all together becomes the only option. Which might sound almost frightening at the prospect of never again having alcohol but when faced with feeling awful after another night of drinking in front of the tv or overdoing it in the pub. Not drinking again becomes an easy choice

Haha OP you shouldn’t have posted on Mumsnet where a thimbleful of wine a month is the norm and people clutch their pearls at anything more!
Yes what you drink is more than the recommended amount and it’s more than average, but an average is just that - some people drink more, some drink less.

Yes, there's a long tail either end of the average. But why on these threads do people who drink daily feel the need to mock anyone suggesting an alternative as if they're a ridiculous extremist? I drink most weekends. I don't drink during the week. Sometimes I have a dry month, just to make sure, but I measure my alcohol intake in units per week, not thimbles per month. And I think daily alcohol consumption is too much.

For anyone getting defensive about this, I suggest you think about why. A friend who mocked me for having a dry month later told me that it was because she thinks she drinks too much and me stopping for a while made her uncomfortable, because she realised she would struggle to do so and didn't want to admit the problem at that point.

because who wants to live for years in a nursing home with not much life anyway? Cheers OP!

Living in a nursing home for years happens quite a lot to alcoholics. It's not like they keel over suddenly after a merry but slightly shorter life. Alcohol effects the bowels and the kidneys, so you can have merry fun wearing adult nappies whilst you're doubly incontinent. I mean I suppose the good news is you can get alcohol related dementia, so you might be unaware. Drink can also dramatically affect your mobility though, and not just when you're drunk, so the nappies are necessary because you might not make it to the toilet in time even if you're aware you need to go and retain some continence.

Oh, and then there's congestive heart failure. And strokes. Unfortunately these also do not kill you quickly. Having worked in the care system, I really wish people wouldn't trot out the line about living in a nursing home. It's more likely to happen, and to happen sooner, if you drink to excess.

@WisherWood

I agree with your second point. I don't get that notion of just do what you want to have a "more fun" life to avoid living a long one. It doesn't really work like that. What is more likely to happen is you will be less able to enjoy what's left of your life if you've not taken decent care of yourself. You might still live till mid 80s, but your quality of life is much more likely to be terrible towards the ends.
One of the reasons I try to be at least a little bit healthy is not so much a fear of dying earlier, but I HATE the thought of being incapacitated in my old age - whether mentally or physically.

It's not necessarily about old age either. Drinking more than the recommended amounts raises your risk of pretty much all cancers, and that can be in your 30s and 40s. You can also have serious liver damage by middle age if you drink excessively.

There's so much delusion on this thread.

Normalised, perhaps, but no- not normal.

It was normal for my grandparents and parents but I intend to break the generational trauma and alcoholism.