If you could drink half the drinks you normally would (halves the calories and $ too), have as much or more fun, and wake up feeling exponentially better & ready to conquer your day, wouldn’t you? In this series of articles I’ll discuss zero-cost behavioral tools you can use to adjust your drinking habits so you can have more fun with less damage to your health, wallet, and productivity.
The core concept we’ll be discussing is “Intentional Drinking” which focuses on three key pillars: How much you drink, when you drink, and how you drink. By putting intentionality behind how much you drink, when you drink, and how you drink you can enjoy alcohol and a vibrant social life with confidence that you won’t be compromising your health and productivity. Intentional drinking has allowed me to balance partying in my early 20s with training for multiple marathon & Ironman finishes, starting a business, and working a software engineering day job. I know it can help you too! If you missed part 1 check it out here.
Part 2 - Party Planning
Why control when you drink:
“I’ve found success & effective achievement is less about being smart, and more about having the will to not be stupid.” - Me
Alcohol can cripple your competency if you don’t understand and manage it. Competence is defined as the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. We all can understand how alcohol cripples competency acutely via a hangover. Imagine trying to take an exam in school deathly hungover. I think it’s well understood (maybe even through personal experience 😉) that you will be much less successful and efficient. However, few people consider the insidious ways repeated alcohol use can reduce competency at a larger time scale. When I say “repeated alcohol use”, I’m not talking a fifth a night either. There is peer reviewed science showing that at a very reasonable 7-14 drinks per week on average, alcohol can reduce your resilience and ability to handle stress, increase baseline anxiety, and reduce overall mood. There are also long term effects on weight gain, gut health, and more but I’ll spare you and just summarize with: Repeated alcohol consumption at an average of 7-14 drinks per week is highly likely to cause a reduction in overall competence & effectiveness both acutely right after drinking and chronically in your everyday life.
Ok, now is my time to redeem alcohol and its place in our lives by repeating a paragraph from Part 1 of this series so you don’t click away thinking I’m just here to demonize it:
“So does this mean alcohol is always bad and needs to be avoided at all costs? No, it just means it’s a tradeoff between fun/social-connection and health/fitness in the same way staying up past your bedtime to catch up with a friend is a tradeoff (stakes are higher with alcohol though). Thus, our strategy for changing our drinking habits to better serve us is to frame alcohol as a tradeoff between fun/social-connection and health/fitness and effectively manage this tradeoff. I believe alcohol can be a net beneficial part of life as long as it is effectively framed and managed as a tradeoff. Hint - this doesn’t need to equate to less fun either! (see part 1 for details on having more fun with less alcohol)”
So, while it was (hopefully) obvious to most of you that drinking the night before a big exam, athletic event, or presentation is not typically favorable for a successful outcome, it's important to understand that this principle applies beyond just a 24-48 hour time scale. The negative effects of repeated alcohol use can extend further, meaning we must be smart about when we decide to use alcohol, both in the short and long term.
How to control when you drink:
Similar to controlling how you drink, controlling when you drink comes down to frontloading the thought and having a plan, i.e. “Drink Planning”. The main difference is we’re going to take it one step beyond the micro timescale of a single day/event and do this planning at a macro timescale of weeks, months, and/or quarters. This is called multiscale planning and you can get pretty fancy with it. Today though, I’m going to try and keep it as simple and tractable as possible because overcomplication tends to kill efforts toward personal change in my experience.
We’ll start with an example. Below is my personal drink plan for August that I wrote at the end of July with some of the specific details removed (names of friends, etc.) for privacy purposes. It took me about 5 minutes of distraction-free thought to write out:
August Drink Plan
Now it’s your turn! The following exercise will take a distraction-free 5-10 minutes and will be your playbook for the next month to drink with the confidence that you’re not compromising another area of your life.
The prompt is simple:
- Take out a google doc or the notes app on your phone
- Make two sections:
- “Big Weeks”
- “Possible Drinking Events”
- Look at your calendar and take 5 minutes or so to think about and fill in each section. Don't shoot for perfection. Done is better than perfect.
- Add one summarizing sentence at the bottom if you’d like.
- Adapt as needed as commitments change
- Review weekly to make sure you’re actually following your own directions
This 5 minute investment pays greatly in terms of long term health, happiness, and competency so go on do not disturb for 5 minutes and give it a try or your money back (That’s a joke. This is free 🤩). If you want to take things up one more level: For each of the events in your “Possible Drinking Events” list, build an event specific drink plan as described in part 1. As I mentioned earlier, this is just an introduction to the tactic of multiscale drink planning and I’m keeping it purposefully simple. I’ll expand on this practice soon in another article but for now if you have any specific questions feel free to email me at sean@drinkalcolyte.com.
Now we’re talking! Armed with the information of your big weeks alongside your drinking events, you can wax and wane between dialing in and letting loose much more effectively and do both with the confidence that you will not be compromising your competency. Lfg.