#7 Reason for not drinking for 90 days: drinking fatigue

When you come to depend on drinking to relax you, to calm you, and to help you wind down every day but you also happen to have to drink it in large quantities in order to get that benefit, you can experience drinking fatigue.  You don’t actually feel like drinking but you know that if you don’t you’ll remain the tightly wound non-sleeping and anxious person you are when you don’t drink.  So you drink, even though part of you would really like to take a break and perhaps just drink some tea for an evening.  A person who has a good relationship with alcohol doesn’t ever experience this.  So one reason not to drink for 90 days is to recover from (and cease to experience) the peculiar ennui of being obligated by habit, rather than desire, to drink a lot of beer.

I’m glad that I have forcefully removed the obligation to drink tonight.  It annoys me that I feel so much less angsty about not drinking today than I did three days ago.  Like, accepting that I’m not drinking, not just for tonight but for 3 months, is giving in to something I was determined not to be okay with.  Except that I am okay with it.  But I sure as hell won’t admit yet that it might actually feel GOOD to not drink.  Don’t worry, soon I will experience irritation fatigue, in which I begin to get really tired of being irritated all the time and forcefully remove my obligation to be annoyed.