Moderate Drinking: Beyond the Numbers

What does reasonably healthy, moderate drinking look like? Some of the best answers to that question have little to do with numbers of drinks and plenty to do with quality of life. On this page, we’ll look at some of the subjective descriptions of what it means to sustain reasonable balance in our drinking.

We’ve also looked at moderate drinking by the numbers.

Dr. Ruth Engs also has a pageful of hints taken from her 1987 book, Alcohol and Other Drugs: Self Responsibility, titled Hints for Sensible, Moderate, and Responsible Alcohol Consumption and Party Hosting.

Below: (a) Dictionary; (b) Moderation Management; (c) Rules-free; (d) Personal Responsibility; and, (e) A Way of life.

Moderate: From the dictionary

M-W.com offers this as its first definition for the adjective moderate:

1 a : avoiding extremes of behavior or expression : observing reasonable limits <a moderate drinker> b : CALM, TEMPERATE

WordNet 2.0 expands on that:

verb: 3. control, hold in, hold, contain, check, curb, moderate — (lessen the intensity of; temper; hold in restraint; hold or keep within limits; “moderate your alcohol intake”; “hold your tongue”; “hold your temper”; “control your anger”)

adjective: 1. moderate (vs. immoderate) — (being within reasonable or average limits; not excessive or extreme; “moderate prices”; “a moderate income”; “a moderate fine”; “moderate demands”; “a moderate estimate”; “a moderate eater”; “moderate success”; “a kitchen of moderate size”; “the X-ray showed moderate enlargement of the heart”)

MM’s Concept of Moderation

Moderation Management characterizes moderate drinking this way

A Moderate Drinker:

• considers an occasional drink to be a small, though enjoyable, part of life.
• has hobbies, interests, and other ways to relax and enjoy life that do not involve alcohol.
• usually has friends who are moderate drinkers or nondrinkers.
• generally has something to eat before, during, or soon after drinking.
• usually does not drink for longer than an hour or two on any particular occasion.
• usually does not drink faster than one drink per half-hour.
• usually does not exceed the .055% BAC moderate drinking limit. (see Note 1 below)
• feels comfortable with his or her use of alcohol (never drinks secretly and does not spend a lot of time thinking about drinking or planning to drink).

Moderate Drinking: Rules-free, Permanent

Addiction specialist Debra Jay offered a description of moderate drinking on an episode of the Oprah show titled Moms Who Drink Too Much:

If you don’t have a problem, you never even think about making up a rule [about when and how to drink]… [W]ith somebody who doesn’t have a problem, they don’t even have to think about it. They just really can use [alcohol] responsibly… They’re not going to be thinking at 2 o’clock about what they’re going to be drinking at 5 o’clock if they don’t have a problem.

In expanding on the rules-free concept of moderate drinking, Jay suggested that rule-making itself may not be a problem as much as rules that are repeatedly broken and take on an air of emotional unmanageability. She also identified a set of rules that could shift a person from problematic to moderate drinking:

[If] alcohol [is] creating repeated problems in any area of [your] life, … and you think, “Well, maybe I don’t have a problem,” you know what? Change your drinking behavior, cut way back … [committing that:]

• I’m going to drink when I’m not around my kids,
• I’m going to only drink with other people,
• I’m going to drink once or twice a week,
• I’m going to have one or two glasses of wine,
• And, [that] it’s a permanent change in my life.

If you can do it, you don’t have a problem.

Asserting Personal Responsibility to Drink Moderately

Dr. Stanton Peele offers an alternative to Ms. Jay’s never-make-a-rule guideline in his response to a drinker who says “there have been some occasions where I have drank more than I intended,” and wonders if they are a red flag:

Evaluating feedback about how your drinking is going is critical as you decide on your plans and goals…

A lot of drinkers occasionally drink more than they intend or than they wish they had. The issues are:

1. Is this a regular occurrence,
2. Can they stop, resist, and reverse this overdrinking,
3. Are they showing problems in their life as a result of overdrinking,
4. Do those close to them feel their overdrinking is harmful to the drinker and themselves?

Your answers seem to be “no” to these things…

Moderation as a Way of Life

In an important sense, quantifying moderate drinking is critical. The numbers help us to determine where the drinking risks lie and make well-informed choices.

But instead of being a numbers game, I find the essence of moderate drinking to be more about living than drinking or abstaining. After an extended phase when I wasn’t being very sensible about my drinking, getting healthy took time. There was no magic switch to flip, no mystical word of salvation to take me from being “lost” to being “found.”

What worked for me were Abstinence, Balance, and Consciousness.

I found abstinence helpful in grounding myself. It’s not as useful for everyone as it’s been for me, but once I started making peace with being DAFT — Delightfully Alcohol-Free Today — on a regular basis, I had more clear-headed energy to invest in the rest of the work. Some periods of abstinence have been weeks or months long; many have been embedded in weeks that also included a day or two of drinking.

Balance involved developing a number of skills, and freshening up existing ones. Goal-setting, self-examination, testing out rules, adjusting targets, and focusing on things that I value most were all a part of that. Gathering good information and getting support from my peers made a big difference.

It turns out that healthy balance isn’t always about setting iron-clad rules, at least for me. My life is often a pendulum which can swing into very positive space, or be blown into difficult or crisis-laden space. I can’t always prevent a wild swing from occuring, but I can use harm reduction to keep problems from compounding, and I recover more readily when I accept that the pendulum exists.

Learning to be more conscious is the glue that brings the abstinence and the balance together for me. I’ve grown to appreciate and resolve some of my ambivalence and demystify my relationship with alcohol. Awareness of the stages of change has allowed me to see where I’m at in the process, and keep taking small steps forward.

Bottom line, skill-building is empowering. Becoming a moderate drinker hasn’t been a personal purity campaign for me, trying to conform to a fixed numeric standard. It’s been about taking a lot of simple, pragmatic steps, being alert to various risks and agile about reducing and eliminating harm — all in the name of sustaining balance.

(Companion page: Moderate Drinking: By the Numbers.)