The Loop - thinking about my drinking

I spent a long time asking myself whether I had a problem with alcohol. Not out loud but in my head. It usually started in that window between waking up and getting out of bed, then in the shower, at my desk over coffee, on the drive home.

I was good at thinking things through, solving problems. I’d built a career on it. So I thought this through, thoroughly and continuously. I solved precisely: nothing.

That was the loop. I’ve since heard versions of it from almost every man I’ve worked with.

It sounds like this. You drink too much but plenty of people drink too much. You use it to relax and unwind but next day you feel more wound up than ever. You’ve cut back before when you needed to, so you could do it again. But you haven’t, not in any way that looked like success. So you go back to the question.

Is it a problem, or isn’t it?

Six months later, same question. A year later, same question. The loop doesn’t resolve.

It just runs. The loop, thinking about my drinking.

The Loop runs whenever you're idling.

The loop feels like the work

This is the part that kept me in it longer than I should have been. The thinking felt like engagement. I wasn’t ignoring the issue, I was actively working on it. Except I wasn’t, not really. I was staying inside it. Working on something and staying inside something both look the same from where you’re standing. Which is how you can be genuinely exhausted by a problem you’ve never actually moved on from.

Men who end up in this loop are usually good thinkers. That may not be a compliment in this context. Being good at analysis means you can find a counter-argument for anything, including your own concern about your drinking. You can make a case for both sides indefinitely, as you do.

Then the loop gets company

The central question is draining enough, but it doesn’t stay alone for long. Other loops attach themselves to it, like tributaries feeding back into the main one. Suddenly you're not managing one circling thought, you're managing several.

You open a browser and start reading. That feels productive too. What you actually find is fourteen different answers to the same question, a quiz that puts you in a grey area and an article that makes you feel either better or worse depending on which paragraph you stop at. You close the laptop more stuck than when you opened it. The search handed you more material to loop with, not less.

Then there’s the social questions. What do you do at the Christmas party? What do you say when someone hands you a beer? How do you explain not drinking without making it a thing? This presents as a logistics problem, which is comfortable because logistics have solutions. Underneath though, it is a different question, one most men won’t name directly: will they still want to know me? Drinking is social architecture for a lot of men. It’s how they relax with people, how they feel like they fit. The looping around not drinking with family and friends is not really about Christmas parties.

It’s about belonging.

And then the enjoyment question. If I’m not drinking, how do I actually have a good time? How do I wind down from a hard week? What does a Friday night look like? These are fair questions. But the loop doesn’t treat them as things to find out. It treats them as things that need answering before anything can move. Since they can’t be answered from inside the loop, nothing moves.

What the loop is actually doing

Each of these questions feels prerequisite. Like you can’t take a step until you’ve resolved the social situation, figured out the enjoyment piece, found the article that finally gives you a clear answer.

The loop generates them for a reason. As long as there's one more question to sit with, the move can wait. I know that feeling. I've said it to myself more than once: it's just too hard, give up, crack another one. That's not apathy arriving from nowhere. That's the drink sneakily keeping you in the loop.

Underneath all of it is something simpler. Trying something and having it not work feels worse than not trying. If you never take a step, you’re never wrong. You’re just still thinking. For men who hold themselves to a high standard in other areas, a failed attempt isn’t neutral. It feels like it says something. So the loop continues, because the loop is safe. Nothing lands in the loop, which means nothing fails in the loop either. Genius!

Here’s the thing, though. At some point, the thinking has already arrived somewhere. You’re not still in the loop because you need more information. The fact that the question keeps coming back is itself an answer. You’re still in the loop because leaving it requires something the loop will never ask of you.

The Prerequisites That Aren't

These questions feel like they need answering before anything can move. They don't. They get answered by moving. The social question gets answered the first time you go somewhere and don’t drink. Not beforehand, in your head, in the loop.

They’re answered by what happens. Some people don’t notice. Some ask questions, and the conversation is shorter and less significant than you built it up to be. Some people are quietly curious in a way that surprises you. You find out by finding out.

The enjoyment question works the same way. The answer to what a Friday night feels like without a drink is what a Friday night actually feels like without a drink. That’s not available inside the loop.

The belonging question, the real one underneath the social logistics, tends to answer itself in a direction the loop never predicted.

But you don’t get there by staying safe inside it.

What a step looks like when you Are Tired of just thinking

It doesn’t have to be large. One meaningful conversation. One resource you actually sit with rather than bookmark and leave. One evening where you do something different before the habit kicks in. Something real, however small, that makes contact with the actual situation rather than the imagined mental version of it.

When a step doesn’t produce what you hoped, that’s not the loop being right. That’s information, that’s data. The loop deals in thoughts about your situation. A step that didn’t work tells you something true about it. Ask what happened, what got in the way, what you’d do differently. That’s it. Then the next step.

That’s how I eventually moved. Not with a big decision or a clear plan, but by doing something that broke the circling. The loop was still there, inviting me back in.

I just stopped going.

If you want to understand what is actually driving your drinking rather than just pushing through on willpower, that is the work I do with men. Understanding comes first. Then action becomes possible.

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