Raise your hand if you’ve taken an online drinking assessment.

Raise your other hand if you took the same assessment more than once, trying different variations of answers in order to get a better result.  (Jazz hands if you switched to a different country’s website to see if they had looser guidelines.)

Nod your head if you then took those results and tried to work them backwards, in order to figure out how much you should cut back in order to drop into a lower risk category.

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Rub your belly and pat your head if you then tried to moderate to those levels, failed, took the test again, and got an even higher score.

Yah, me too. You are not alone.

The one phrase that really stuck in my mind was, “No more than 10 drinks per week, no more than 2 drinks most days, and no more than 3 drinks on any single occasion.” (Canada’s Low Risk Drinking Guidelines) The gears in my head began to whir as I read those numbers, trying to comprehend what living within those guidelines might entail. My mental computations resulted in one-word: IMPOSSIBLE.

Impossible is exactly what moderating proved to be for me – I was well past the point of drinking within the guidelines. Living alcohol-free has not always been easy but it is certainly simpler than that hellish cycle of calculations, bargains, failure and regret.

What’s worse, the guidelines are based on a 5 oz serving of wine, something I considered to be a half-glass. I expect my average was an 8 oz pour, meaning what I called 3 drinks was closer to 5.

When I take that assessment now with complete honesty, my end habits were in the “Severe Risk” category – and no one even knew I had a problem!

I am grateful for these guidelines and assessments because they were an important wake-up call for me. There is a lot of rhetoric and nonsense out there that implies no one can tell if someone else needs to quit drinking. I feel that’s a misinterpretation of that fact that the will to change must come from within. But the numbers don’t lie and high-risk drinking is self-evident based on patterns and numbers alone.

So if you’re struggling with alcohol, pay attention to those assessments and guidelines. Share them. Talk about them.

Remember that many of us seemed to be functioning just fine but still fell into the “High Risk” and “Severe Risk” zones. Forget the stereotype of what we all think addiction looks like and trust the evidence.