The bottle of wine on a Tuesday evening. The beers after work that have become routine. The weekend drinking that starts earlier each week. Maybe someone’s mentioned it—a friend’s casual comment, a partner’s concern, a remark from family that landed with more weight than you’d like to admit. And your immediate response was defensive: “I’m fine. It’s not a problem. Everyone drinks.” But somewhere underneath that denial, there’s a quieter voice that wonders if they might have a point, even as you push that thought away.
I’m not here to tell you whether you drink too much. That’s not my job, and honestly, focusing on quantity often misses the point entirely. What I’m more interested in is this: what’s the alcohol actually doing for you?
The truth is, alcohol is almost never just about the alcohol. It’s about what happens when you drink. What softens. What quiets. What becomes bearable that wasn’t before.
The Honest Function of Alcohol
Alcohol works. That’s why people use it. It genuinely does what it promises in the short term: it takes the edge off anxiety, muffles the internal critic, makes social situations feel less threatening, numbs difficult emotions, creates distance from stress, and helps you sleep when your mind won’t stop.
These aren’t imaginary benefits. Alcohol is a depressant that slows your central nervous system, reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex (where worry and self-judgment live), and increases GABA, a neurotransmitter that has a calming effect. Physiologically, it delivers on its implicit promise: things will feel easier.
And for many people, that’s exactly what they need after a day of holding everything together—at work, with the kids, in a relationship that’s quietly difficult, with the constant low-level anxiety that’s become background noise. A drink or three lets you finally exhale.
The problem isn’t that alcohol doesn’t work. The problem is what it costs, and what it prevents you from addressing.
What We’re Actually Trying to Cope With
When I ask people what they’re reaching for the drink to manage, the answers vary but certain themes appear again and again:
Anxiety and overwhelm: The nervous system that won’t settle. The worry about work, money, health, relationships. The constant feeling of being one step away from things falling apart. Alcohol temporarily interrupts that circuit.
Emotional avoidance: Sadness you don’t have time for. Anger you’re not allowed to feel. Grief that’s too big to face. Loneliness even when you’re not alone. Alcohol lets you skip past the feelings rather than sitting with them.
Social discomfort: The anxiety about how you’re being perceived. The exhausting work of monitoring yourself in company. The fear of being boring or awkward or too much. A few drinks and that hypervigilance eases.
The inner critic: That harsh voice cataloguing everything you did wrong today, everything you should have done differently, all the ways you’re not enough. Alcohol turns down the volume on that relentless commentary.
Disconnection and emptiness: The sense that you’re going through the motions of a life that doesn’t quite feel like yours. The gap between who you are and who you’re expected to be. Alcohol fills that gap, temporarily.
Sleep avoidance: Not wanting to lie awake with your thoughts, so you drink enough that you’ll pass out instead. It’s not quality sleep, but it’s unconsciousness, which feels close enough.
None of these are moral failings. They’re signs that something in your life or inside you needs attention. The drinking is just the visible symptom of the deeper struggle.
When Coping Becomes the Problem
Here’s the bind: alcohol works well enough, quickly enough, that it becomes the default response. Had a hard day? Pour a drink. Feeling anxious? Open a bottle. Can’t sleep? One more glass.
Over time, the pattern strengthens. You stop developing other ways of managing difficult emotions because you don’t need to—you have alcohol. Your capacity to sit with discomfort, to self-soothe, to process feelings, these muscles atrophy from lack of use.
Meanwhile, tolerance builds. What used to take one drink now takes three. What used to be weekend drinking creeps into weeknights. The line between “relaxing” and “needing” gets blurrier.
And then there are the costs that accumulate quietly: sleep quality deteriorates (alcohol might help you fall asleep but wrecks the restorative stages), anxiety actually worsens (alcohol disrupts your nervous system, creating the rebound anxiety you then drink to manage), relationships strain under either the drinking itself or the person you become when drinking, physical health suffers, and self-respect erodes as the gap grows between who you want to be and what you’re doing.
The cruelest part is that the very things you’re drinking to cope with often get worse because of the drinking. But by then you’re caught in a loop that’s hard to escape without support.
The Question Worth Asking
I don’t think the useful question is “Am I drinking too much?” because that invites defensiveness and comparison with people who drink more than you do.
The more honest question is: “What would I have to feel if I didn’t drink?”
Sit with that. What emotions, thoughts, or situations are you using alcohol to manage? What becomes difficult when you’re sober that the drinking makes bearable?
And then, even harder: “What needs addressing in my life that I’m using alcohol to avoid confronting?”
These aren’t comfortable questions. They point toward things that might require change, difficult conversations, grief work, trauma processing, or simply acknowledging that you’re not as okay as you’re pretending to be.
But they’re the questions that lead somewhere other than the loop you’re currently in.
What Actually Helps
If you’re recognising yourself in this and feeling that familiar defensiveness rising, that’s normal. Nobody likes looking at their coping mechanisms too closely. They’re serving a purpose, and removing them without addressing what they’re managing feels terrifying.
This is where support becomes important. Whether that’s therapy, mutual aid groups, trusted friends who can hold space for honesty, or all of the above—you need people who won’t judge you for struggling but also won’t collude with the drinking.
In therapy, we don’t focus on the drinking first. We focus on what you’re coping with. What the alcohol is protecting you from feeling or facing. What needs aren’t being met. What’s driving the anxiety, the overwhelm, the disconnection.
As those underlying issues get addressed, as you develop other ways of managing difficult emotions, as your life starts to feel more aligned with who you actually are, the pull toward alcohol often naturally decreases. Not because you’re white-knuckling sobriety, but because you need it less.
Sometimes people stop drinking entirely. Sometimes they develop a genuinely moderate relationship with it. What matters more than the outcome is the honesty about what’s driving the behaviour and the willingness to address those roots.
The Work of Understanding Through Counselling
If alcohol has become more central to your life than you’d like, it means you’ve been carrying something difficult and found a tool that works, at least partially.
The drinking makes sense given what you’re managing. The question is whether it’s the tool you want to keep using, knowing what it costs and what it prevents you from facing.
You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to be ready to stop. But noticing the pattern, questioning what it’s doing for you, and being honest about what you’re avoiding—that’s already meaningful work.
If you’d like support exploring this, get in touch and we can explore how counselling in Cornwall or online therapy might be able to help. Not to judge your drinking, but to help you understand what’s beneath it and find better ways of coping with what’s actually hard. You can reach out by calling me on 07969 547876 or contact me here.
