The Body Keeps Score, Part 4: Alcohol and the Older Dad

I am going to write about alcohol with the specific caveat that I am not writing about alcohol dependency or alcoholism. I am writing about the much more common and much less discussed territory of the person who drinks moderately, within socially normal parameters, and who gradually notices that the drinking is doing a different job than it used to.

This is a piece about function, not quantity.

The evening wine

For most of my thirties, a glass or two of wine in the evening was a pleasure. A reliable, low-cost pleasure that marked the end of the working day, accompanied dinner, and was part of the texture of an adult evening. I enjoyed it. I did not think about it.

After Ellie, the glass of wine started doing something different. It was still pleasant. But the pleasant was increasingly doing the work of decompression that had previously been done by a walk, or dinner that wasn't eaten standing up, or a conversation with Claire that lasted more than eight minutes.

The glass of wine was becoming a coping mechanism, and coping mechanisms and pleasures are different things with different implications.

What the body does with alcohol after 40

Several things change in your forties that affect the relationship with alcohol:

The liver processes alcohol less efficiently. This is not dramatic — you are not going to notice this in a single evening — but it means the metabolic cost of the same intake is higher than it was at 30, and the recovery is correspondingly longer. The two-glass evening that produced no effect the next morning in my mid-thirties produces a vague half-flatness at 44. Not a hangover. A reduction in morning quality.

Alcohol suppresses testosterone. Dose-dependently. Four units suppresses it measurably for the following 24 hours. The weekly two-glass-an-evening habit means you are spending a significant proportion of your week with testosterone running slightly below its already-declining baseline.

Alcohol disrupts sleep architecture. Specifically: it reduces REM sleep and produces a rebound of light sleep in the second half of the night. You fall asleep more easily. The sleep is worse. The Body Battery reading is lower. On a week when the children are also disrupting sleep, the compounding of alcohol-disrupted sleep with child-disrupted sleep produces a cumulative deficit that is genuinely uncomfortable.

What I changed, and how

I want to be straightforward: I did not stop drinking. I reduced, and I changed when and why.

The specific change was the evening glass of wine on weeknights. I moved it to weekends. Not as a rule — I am not constitutionally suited to hard rules about pleasures — but as a default. The default weeknight evening no longer included wine unless there was a specific reason to include it.

The effect was immediate and more significant than I expected. The Body Battery readings improved. The morning quality improved. The diffuse tiredness that had been my ambient condition for two years reduced noticeably. I felt more functional.

This was simultaneously good information and slightly irritating information, because it confirmed that something I had considered a reliable small pleasure had been, in practice, making things harder.

The coping mechanism question

The more important change was the reason for the change, which was the recognition that the wine had shifted function.

When a drink is a pleasure — when you are choosing it from a position of genuine want rather than from a position of needing something to reduce the day's residue — the relationship with it is a healthy one. When it is the primary decompression mechanism, when the thought "I just need a drink" is operating as a coping strategy, the relationship has shifted into something worth examining.

I have found other decompressions. The walking. The twelve minutes in the doorway between the office and the kitchen after the working day ends, before the parenting shift begins. The twenty minutes with Claire after bedtime. None of these are as immediate as a glass of wine. All of them leave me in better condition the next morning.

The honest position

I drink at weekends. I enjoy it. I do not experience it as deprivation to not drink on weeknights, which is itself information — if not drinking felt like deprivation, it would mean the function had shifted even further than I thought.

I am not writing this as a sobriety piece. I am writing it as a function piece. The question is not do you drink but what is the drinking doing, and the answer to that question, examined clearly, might produce a change that is worth making without it needing to be a big decision.

It was not a big decision for me. It was a quiet one. The Body Battery approved. That was enough.