When Does Social Drinking Become ‘Problem Drinking’?

As a provider of alcohol and drug intervention services, North Jersey Recovery Center believes that education on these matters is vital. Everyone should be able to discern the signs, so that they can avoid the risk of developing an alcohol use disorder. People who have an addiction to alcohol are usually in denial about their problematic drinking. An addiction to alcohol ruins relationships, causes harmful effects on the body, and can be fatal. Alcoholism affects the brain and causes brain damage and memory loss.

” It’s hard to define the lines that separate social drinking, problem drinking, and alcoholism. Some try to put a number to it, such as don’t consumer over this amount of alcoholic drinks and you’ll be fine. Heavy drinking can turn deadly, especially when it involves binge drinking. Binge drinkers aren’t always physically dependent on alcohol, but their pattern of drinking can be just as dangerous.

Social Drinking vs. an Alcoholic

Alcoholics are incapable of predicting or controlling their consumption amount, once they start. In fact, a good amount of addicts will be in denial that they even have a problem and will find ways to rationalize the behavior, even if the state of the addiction worsens. Alcohol https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/social-drinking-and-drinking-problem/ abuse includes dangerous drinking patterns such as binge drinking, heavy drinking, moderate to extreme intoxication, and higher tolerance. Engaging in alcohol abuse places an individual at high risk for developing alcohol use disorder; it’s important to seek help sooner.

It can be difficult to discern the difference between social drinking vs problem drinking, so we’re providing a few guidelines here. American drinkers continue to normalize alcohol consumption and it is acceptable in our culture. This would never be tolerated with other drugs and addictive substances. Social drinkers, or moderate drinkers, typically consume one standard drink or up to a couple of alcoholic drinks in any given drinking situation or episode, often using the alcohol to relax, fit in, and celebrate.

Problems Drinking Can Cause

The desire to drink is so strong that the mind finds many ways to rationalize drinking, even when the consequences are obvious. By keeping you from looking honestly at your behavior and its negative effects, denial also exacerbates alcohol-related problems with work, finances, and relationships. Binge drinking can have many of the same long-term effects on your health, relationships, and finances as other types of problem drinking.

Alcohol abuse and AUD are quite similar and are often used interchangeably. However, there are some key differences between the two that may help to address social drinking vs problem drinking. Note that, not everyone who has a drinking problem suffers from AUD, or what others consider ‘alcoholism.’ While drinking in a social setting is acceptable there are other issues at hand that should be addressed.

Do you have a drinking problem?

Medication such as naltrexone can help people limit or stop drinking. After more than a year in relative isolation, we may be closer than we’d like to the wary, socially clumsy strangers who first gathered at Göbekli Tepe. Last August, the beer manufacturer Busch launched a new product well timed to the problem of pandemic-era solitary drinking. “You’ll never drink alone again,” said news articles reporting its debut. Americans may not have invented binge drinking, but we have a solid claim to bingeing alone, which was almost unheard-of in the Old World. During the early 19th century, solitary binges became common enough to need a name, so Americans started calling them “sprees” or “frolics”—words that sound a lot happier than the lonely one-to-three-day benders they described.

In the years since, they have argued that religion helped humans cooperate on a much larger scale than they had as hunter-gatherers. Belief in moralistic, punitive gods, for example, might have discouraged behaviors (stealing, say, or murder) that make it hard to peacefully coexist. In turn, groups with such beliefs would have had greater solidarity, allowing them to outcompete or absorb other groups. This mutation occurred around the time that a major climate disruption transformed the landscape of eastern Africa, eventually leading to widespread extinction. In the intervening scramble for food, the leading theory goes, our predecessors resorted to eating fermented fruit off the rain-forest floor. Those animals that liked the smell and taste of alcohol, and were good at metabolizing it, were rewarded with calories.