[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by flylock shox

Four bits of advice for people who want to reduce - but not eliminate - their drinking.


First, only drink socially: never alone.

Of course you can get into trouble drinking socially. But the trend in North America in recent decades towards drinking alone is not a good one. What benefits alcohol provides are pretty much only evident is social situations.

The social context of drinking turns out to matter quite a lot to how alcohol affects us psychologically. Although we tend to think of alcohol as reducing anxiety, it doesn’t do so uniformly. As Michael Sayette, a leading alcohol researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, recently told me, if you packaged alcohol as an anti-anxiety serum and submitted it to the FDA, it would never be approved. He and his onetime graduate student Kasey Creswell, a Carnegie Mellon professor who studies solitary drinking, have come to believe that one key to understanding drinking’s uneven effects may be the presence of other people. Having combed through decades’ worth of literature, Creswell reports that in the rare experiments that have compared social and solitary alcohol use, drinking with others tends to spark joy and even euphoria, while drinking alone elicits neither—if anything, solo drinkers get more depressed as they drink...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...roblem/619017/