YOLO. Carpe Diem. You’re a long time dead.
These were all excuses I used at one time or another to drink. Often to have a lot of drinks.
After all, none of us really know when we are going to die, or if there is anything to come for us afterwards. And even if we believe in reincarnation, heaven or some other species of afterlife, we might as well make the most of our time on Earth right?
So seize the day, fill our cups and tomorrow be damned.
The only problem was that often I would feel as if I was damned the following day. Often I would feel so ill I would miss the whole day and spend it in misery. And even if I escaped a soul-sucking hangover, I would often feel quite below par for the day. Until the next drink came around again, of course.
Now that I have five years of being alcohol-free, I can see that hangovers were not the only downside to my drinking habits. Living for the day misses the big picture. So let’s think about what it means to be happy.
We all want to be happy, why wouldn’t we? But what does it mean to be happy?
There are shelves of books about this in the bookshop, philosophers have philosophised about it for centuries, there’s a ‘Journal of Happiness Studies’ and universities have courses in it, so we are not short of material to draw on. You will, no doubt, be relieved to hear that I will not try to summarise it all here.
What I will do is discuss a few key concepts and say how they have resonated with me in my journey to being alcohol-free.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has published a body of work on positive emotions and lists the following as her ‘big 10’.
Love
Gratitude
Interest
Pride
Inspiration
Joy
Serenity
Hope
Amusement
Awe
So the question we have to ask ourselves is, “Does alcohol make us experience more of these emotions or less?”.
Now you might argue that in the short term, alcohol can provide us with some of these, particularly amusement. I am sure we have all experienced having a good laugh with friends after a few drinks. But let me tell you a story that I think is illuminating.
A few years ago I attended a week-long course in the Netherlands as part of my Master’s degree course. I had become good friends with the others on the course and we had some pretty riotous nights of drinking. Towards the end of the week, my body couldn’t take any more and I decided to have an early night. Still wired from all the alcohol, I found I couldn’t sleep, so lay in bed restless. At about midnight, a large group returned from a bar and, thoughtfully, stood outside my window having an extended chat. At one stage the group exploded with laughter. I have never in my life heard such an uproar. I was intensely curious as to the incredible witticism that had led to this explosion of mirth, so I asked someone the next day what had been so funny. She struggled to recall and then said, rather lamely, “Oh, the door shut on someone as they were trying to open it”.
You might argue that “experience is experience”, and the people in that group obviously enjoyed the moment, but it left no lasting impression, at least on the person I spoke to and probably none of the others in the group. I am sure we have all been in that position of thinking, “I must have had a good time last night but I don’t really remember it”.
Even when we have not become blackout drunk, does alcohol really make us happy? We feel the euphoria of the first 20 minutes, but then all the negative effects of alcohol start to kick in as our blood alcohol level falls. We can (and usually do) take more drinks to counteract the dysphoria we start to feel, but as the night wears on our senses become increasingly dulled and our cognitive functions impaired.
Then there is the other side of the balance sheet when we look at our drinking from a distance. It is different for everyone, but for me, it was hangovers, arguments, feelings of self-loathing at not being able to control my drinking and missing out on days feeling rough. Then there is the hardest impact to see at the time, not living life to its fullest potential.
When I stopped drinking there was a subtle shift in my outlook. It didn’t happen overnight but rather came in the weeks and months after I became alcohol-free. It greatly accelerated when I started to work on myself, with the help of others.
That subtle shift was an increase in positive outlook, gratitude and optimism.
There is now a great deal of research that shows that optimism improves the immune system, prevents chronic disease, and helps people cope with bad news. Gratitude is associated with optimism and has been shown that gratitude helps people to be happier, receive more social support, become less stressed, and be less depressed.[i]
You might think that people are either born optimists or born pessimists, but this is not necessarily so. Several studies have shown that optimism can be learned, like anything else.
Something else I have found is that I am much more able now to get into the ‘flow state’, particularly when I am making music. This is partly because I just have more time, as I don’t waste any mornings feeling hungover, but also because I feel I have much better mental clarity. Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified six factors of flow:
Intense and focused concentration on the present moment.
Merging of action and awareness.
A loss of reflective self-consciousness.
A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity.
A distortion of temporal experience.
Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as an autotelic experience.[ii]
I am sure one of the reasons I feel I have more clarity is that I am not wasting time thinking about drinking. It would start in the morning with regrets and then as the day wore on it would turn to whether I was going to drink that night. If I was going out somewhere, I would be thinking about whether it would turn into one of those nights. I would think about what it was doing to my health. I would think about if I was going to try to moderate or not drink at the weekend. It was truly exhausting.
Something else which has shifted is that my friendships are now built on genuine connection, rather than a shared love of drinking. The irony is that we think alcohol helps us to be sociable and to connect with people, but if you are ever around drunk people when you are sober, you will soon see the reality of what those social interactions are like—people repeat themselves, tell stories with no point, start stories and then forget why they started. It’s not pretty.
If a Roman general won a great victory (or had a great deal of political clout and won a small victory), they would be granted a Triumph. This was a huge deal. The whole population of Rome would turn out to watch the victorious general parade through the city with his soldiers, and perhaps some captured booty and slaves.
Behind the general, a functionary would occasionally whisper in his ear, “Remember, thou art mortal!”
Now this was partly to keep the general humble (good luck with that!) but also because the practice of making a conscious effort to remember that we all die was part of their culture. This practice, called Memento Mori, goes back to Socrates and is an important part of the Stoic philosophy.
There is nothing morbid about this. It is actually a beautiful, life-affirming practice that reminds us how precious our lives are. The Roman politician Seneca said,
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
I find that reminding myself of this is very helpful to keep as mindful as possible. Let’s say I need to walk our dogs but it’s raining and miserable and I don’t really fancy it. I think that if it was my last day on Earth, and I was on my deathbed, what would I give to have one more walk with our beautiful dogs? I then try to keep mindful on the walk and appreciate the beauty of where I live. Of course, my mind wonders—nobody can exist in a complete state of mindfulness—but it is a beautiful, grounding practice.
YOLO. Carpe Diem. You’re a long time dead.
These are, absolutely, words to live by. But not as an excuse for mental obliteration, but as a reminder that we have one precious life and not to waste any of it.
[ii] Ibid
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