Problem Drinking

Problem drinking is when drinking becomes a problem in your life. Its not about a hangover or a binge drinking weekend. It’s not even about drinking everyday on your vacation. Problem drinking is persistent. It’s when the way you conduct your life is being affected by too much alcohol. Its when every Monday you go to work hung over. It’s when you feel like crap too often and you know its because you drank too much the day before. It’s when you do things you normally wouldn’t do because your drunk. Not just once but, you do this all too frequently. It’s because alcohol is affecting your life in ways you wish it wasn’t. If you’re here it is probably because alcohol is starting to affect your performance in life. Maybe it’s because alcohol is affecting someone else’s life in ways that concern you, possibly they just plain bug you. Most people are not alcoholic. Waking up with a hangover doesn't mean you are an alcoholic. A lot of very normal people drink to excess for a lot of different reasons. They celebrate weddings, they mourn after funerals, etc. There are a number of perfectly acceptable reasons for perfectly normal people to drink. Going away to college can be one. Joining the military.  So if a hangover and heavy drinking don't tell you if you have a problem. What does?  One way to tell is that you don't know what will happen when you drink. The other is that bad things will probably happen when you drink, maybe not always but, much of the time they will. And you do it anyway.  Here are a few tests to see if you qualify as a problem drinker. 

The Michigan Alcoholism test or MAST test was developed as a preliminary test to see how bad your drinking is.

Alcoholic Behaviour is just a self assessment. If you can’t remember your behaviour that’s not a good sign. 

The CAGE test is another self assessment to help you judge where you are at.

The TWEAK test is another variation of the CAGE test.

Then there is plain old Harmful Drinking, you’ll know when this happens.

Raging Alcoholic