Track your Drinking
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Originally Posted On: https://alcanon.org/improve/track-your-drinking/
Establish a baseline
You’re probably reading this because you’re questioning your relationship with alcohol and thinking about whether to cut back.
Though it can be easy to recall a reasonable number of drinks consumed in a given evening, people tend to underestimate their alcohol consumption over time. It is nearly impossible to keep track of long term trends without some sort of tool.
As you learn more about alcohol and how it affects you, it’s a good idea to start keeping track of your drinking habits over time. Do you drink more over the holidays? If you’re a daily drinker, when’s the last time you abstained for a few days in a row? How often do you binge?
This can be as simple as counting your drinks each day, and keeping a record.
Avoid judgment
It’s important to keep an accurate and non-judgmental record of how much you’re actually consuming. Take pride in just counting your drinks and knowing how much you’re drinking over time. This alone is more than many drinkers can say.
Alcanon makes a free drink counting app called Drink Agenda that’s private, secure, non-judgmental, ad-free, and easy to use. It lets you freely import and export your data so that you can switch apps over time if you like. This is important if you want to understand long term trends and plan to still be drinking a few years from now.
Observe your behavior
After you’ve tracked your drinking long enough to start seeing patterns, take a few minutes to objectively reflect on the data.
Think about what motivated increases or decreases in your consumption. How were you feeling during those periods?
Were you drinking the amounts that you intended, or was the alcohol in charge?