Nobody sits down at twenty five and decides to become a man who needs four pints to feel normal. It does not work like that. It arrives one reasonable evening at a time. Hard day, have a drink. Cannot sleep, have a drink. Cannot say what is actually wrong, have a drink and it stops mattering for a couple of hours. By the time you notice, drink is not something you enjoy. It is the only tool you own for turning the noise down, and you have been using it for years.
That is what people mean by self medicating. It is not the lad in the doorway with a can at nine in the morning. It is a man with a job, a van, a mortgage and a routine he would never describe out loud.
A pint is a pint until it has a job to do
Forget how much you drink for a minute. That question gets you nowhere, because every man alive can find someone who drinks more than him and feel fine about it. Ask a better one. Ask what the drink is for.
If it is for the taste, for the company, for a Saturday afternoon with your mates and the football on, that is a pint. If it is for getting through, for taking the edge off, for shutting your own head up long enough to sleep, then it has a job. Anything with a job gets used more as the work gets harder. That is the whole trap. The worse things get, the better the drink does its job, and the less likely you are to say a word to anyone, because you have already got something that works.
It works for about three hours. Then it hands the problem back with interest.
The maths does not work and your body knows it
Alcohol is a depressant. Not an opinion, that is just what it is. It takes the edge off tonight and sharpens it tomorrow. It wrecks the back half of your sleep, the part that actually repairs you. You wake at four with your heart going and every worry you own queued up in order of size. So you get through the day on four hours and a short temper, and by seven you need something to switch off again.
Men do not usually drink because they are happy. We drink at the problem. Then the drinking becomes a second problem, which is how a man ends up with two things wrong and never says a word about either.
The scale of it is not small. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reported a 25 percent rise in alcohol related deaths in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the year a lot of men were sat at home on their own with a problem and a fridge. The CDC's own report on deaths from excessive alcohol use across 2016 to 2021 found the same direction of travel. Up.
Those are the men who died. The far bigger group are still here, getting up for work, quietly drinking to stay level.
What men told me about it on the road
I ran 2,300 miles across America, Los Angeles to Jacksonville, in 56 days, and I talked to men the whole way. Truck stops, petrol stations, roadsides, car parks. Men I had known for nine minutes told me things they had never told their wives.
Drink came up constantly. Never as a confession. Sideways, every time. I have cut right down since the divorce. I only have a few in the evening now. I was worse than this a couple of years back. Nobody said I am drinking because I cannot stand being in my own head. That sentence does not get said out loud. But it was underneath half of those conversations and you could hear it.
The run is finished. What I took off it has not changed. Men tell you the truth sideways, when nobody is looking at them, when they have got something else to do with their hands and their eyes. You get it on a walk, not across a table.
The documentary is here if you want to see what those conversations looked like: https://youtu.be/723hRr0vu2A
Four things that are worth doing
Count it for two weeks, honestly. Not an estimate. Write every drink down in your phone the moment you have it. Most men are shocked not by the total but by the pattern. Sunday night. Every night the kids are at their mum's. Every time you speak to your dad. The pattern is the information.
Tell one person the real reason. Not that you are cutting down. Why. Say it badly if that is the only way it comes out. I am drinking every night because I cannot stand sitting still. One person. That is the entire bar.
Put something in the gap at seven o'clock. This is the bit men skip. You cannot remove the drink and leave the hole, because the hole is the reason you were drinking. Walk the dog. Go to the gym. Go and sit with your brother. Something that fills the exact hour the drink used to fill, and gets you out of the house.
Tell the doctor the truth about the amount. Halving the number is a lie that only costs you. And if you have been drinking heavily for years, do not stop dead on your own. Coming off it hard can be genuinely dangerous. That is a five minute conversation with a doctor who has heard it a thousand times.
If it is your mate and not you
Do not open with the drinking. He has had that argument with himself a hundred times and he will win it.
Go at the other thing. You have seemed flat for months. What is going on. Then shut up and let it be awkward, and do not take the first answer, because the first answer is always fine, just tired. Ask once more, properly. That second ask is where men start talking.
If he tells you something heavy, you do not have to fix it. Stay there, do not flinch, and go back again on Thursday. Turning up twice is worth more than anything you could say the first time.
One last thing
The drink is not the enemy. It is a bad answer to a real question, and the question is the thing worth getting at. Men do not need a slogan about it. They need one other man who knows the truth about them and still rings on a Thursday.
If you are in the dark end of this, if the drinking has got to the point where you are thinking about not being here, do not sit on it tonight. Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, in the US. It is free, it is day or night, and you do not have to be in immediate danger to use it. You just have to be a man who has had enough of carrying it on your own.