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, 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. In farm country, at the end of the harvest, there is usually a big celebration. Men who do not drink during the rest of the year can be seen staggering from one picnic table to the next making fools of themselves. It's a glorious site. These men are not alcoholics and you can be sure they woke up the next day wishing they would hurry up and die. 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 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. Then there is plain old Harmful
Drinking, you’ll know when this happens.
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