What it Means to Use Alcohol to Escape (a replay)

0:00Many of us use alcohol to turn off our brain, escape our problems, or check out. But escapism is actually associated with more intense drinking and lower life satisfaction. In this episode, you'll learn about the different theories behind escapism, why we're doing this, and how it makes our problems worse. I hope that this episode can help you make some connections so you can realize that your drinking is not helping you. I'll also share a personal story of when I drank to escape and how that went for me. And before we dig in, I'd like to take a moment to thank my sponsors who made this episode possible.

1:04Welcome back to the Sober Powered Podcast. I'm your host, Jill, and today we are talking about drinking to escape. Escapism is the tendency to seek escape and distraction from reality or real life problems. And there are three different theories on the cause of escapism. The first is escape from self, which involves decreasing self-awareness and forgetting the meaningful aspects of the self. When we have a high level of self-awareness, we compare ourselves to standards, which can lead us to feel inadequate. So instead, we let go of high-level conscious thinking and turn to bodily sensations and impressions.

1:51In this theory, escape is meant to free us from constant self-evaluation, analysis, comparison, and judgment. This is really interesting to me. If you've been listening to my podcast for a while, then you know I talk about lack of self-awareness a lot, and it seems like a chicken or the egg kind of thing. Heavy drinking decreases self-awareness and increases denial, but did we subconsciously choose to have less self-awareness in the first place and disconnect? Or did we just never learn the skills to have self-awareness in the first place? Both are probably true depending on the person. Another theory is the escape from everyday life theory, which explains escaping as a disengagement-based coping mechanism.

2:44And the cause is that there's an identity mismatch with how society says we should be, or there's pressure to conform to a uniform way of life. When our identity and sense of separateness do not develop in a healthy way, we escape to protect ourselves. The sense of separateness is an important part of identity. It begins at birth when we're unaware of being separate from our environment and slowly develops as we interact with the world and our caretakers. And eventually we become a unique individual with a sense of self, self-awareness, and a purpose. When individuation doesn't develop correctly, it can lead to anxiety, depression, lack of boundaries, and it can make it difficult for us to have our own goals that are different from other people's.

3:39This theory is also interesting because many of us go through a self-discovery process in sobriety where we learn who we are, what we like, what we care about, and how to set boundaries. Many of us get stuck people pleasing and having resentments. And I know in my experience, I linked my sense of self-worth with career success and achievement. So I'm wondering if this sense of separateness didn't really develop fully for me and I had to link my identity to career success. The last theory on this is the escape from freedom approach. And this one was originally developed in World War II. So this involves our inability to handle our expanding freedom of choice in modern life and the freedom from former authorities like the church, families, or traditions.

4:36This extra freedom can cause anxiety and feeling alone because we realize that we are completely responsible for our own thoughts and behaviors. so to find relief, we escape. Research suggests that addictive behaviors are closely related to the desire to distance ourselves from reality. Coping with unpleasant or intense emotions commonly leads to escapism in alcohol addiction. People that have a lower capacity to regulate their emotions will typically escape into binge drinking after experiencing a personal failure or something that's really upsetting. And some researchers have argued that severe drinking and gambling problems are more likely about escapist coping than reward seeking.

5:30And remember, our drinking stops being fun at the end, yet we continue to do it. Then we trick ourselves, saying that we drink to have fun and we drink to socialize when really we're not having any fun at all and how are we socializing when we're blacked out and slurring and not remembering the night and just embarrassing ourselves. Alcohol is really good at facilitating the process of escaping because it turns down or turns off higher order evaluations of ourselves and our past. So it gives us an immediate escape from self-awareness. A similar theory is the self-medication hypothesis, which states that we drink to relieve painful emotions.

6:20So check out episode 214 if you haven't listened to that. It's all about self-medication. Something interesting I learned too is that gambling with chance-based machines like slots over skill-based games is associated with escapism rather than entertainment. And smoking has been too. Smoking is a moment of escape from your routine or from a stressful situation. And smoking research suggests that as nicotine dependence increases, escaping from negative emotions becomes the main motivation of smoking over pleasure seeking. This is all negative reinforcement, where we drink to avoid negative things like anxiety, feeling alone, depression, boredom, unpleasant memories, and things like that.

7:13positive reinforcement would be about pleasure seeking and drinking to have a good time socially. But remember, we trick ourselves into thinking that we drink for positive reasons. But often it's about negative reasons because remember, we stop having fun at the end, but then we keep doing it. If you're listening to this podcast and you're trying to quit drinking, it's pretty likely that you're not drinking for positive reasons anymore, those have likely faded away or become very, very brief as the negatives from your drinking pile up. Escape from self-awareness and from the negative aspects of real life are strong predictors of lower life satisfaction.

8:02A 2022 study published in Substance Use and Misuse looked at escaping with drinking, smoking, drug use, and gambling to see the relationships between escapism, problematic use, and life satisfaction. The strongest relationship was found between problematic alcohol use and life satisfaction. Problematic alcohol use with escapist motives predicted lower life satisfaction. So basically, if you drink to escape, your life is going to suck more than if you just drink a lot. So in this case, drinking isn't about letting loose, blowing off steam, or having fun. It's about turning off your brain, getting out of your life, and forgetting your problems.

8:56Escapism was found to be an amplifier of the misery caused from problematic drinking. This study found that problem drinkers who drink to escape have lower life satisfaction than problem drinkers who do not drink to escape. We drink to escape our problems, but then escaping problems doesn't actually solve or improve them. So then our problems keep getting worse, and then we need to escape more and more. and then the more that we realize that we've lost control over our drinking, the more we hate ourselves and have lower self-esteem and then we try to exert control in all other areas of life and it just creates a lot of stress and a cycle of drinking to escape.

9:42We can drink to escape something very specific like the examples that I was talking about in my episode about impulsivity. When something really bad happens that we can't handle, we immediately run to alcohol to turn it off. Or we can drink to escape with our life overall, which would be more regular drinking. So this could look like drinking to cope with a bad marriage, not being able to set boundaries or speak up for yourself, working a job that you hate, financial stress or trauma. Drinking doesn't fix any of these problems, and the more that we drink to deal with everything, the less resilient we become because we're not learning or practicing any healthy skills.

10:31And eventually, our drinking begins to cause problems in our lives, and then we have to drink to escape from those problems too. Escaping from our life and our problems tricks us because it provides instant relief, even if it makes everything worse. Then we continue to chase this feeling of relief because things are just too much for us. This could be relief from boredom too. It doesn't have to be intense emotions or stress. However, when I sent out a listener survey a couple months ago to people who get emails from me, the number one problem that people reported was stress. We have to let ourselves be exposed to the discomfort and confront our problems so that we can learn to tolerate them and use problem-focused coping skills.

11:24Drinking is not going to teach you how to tolerate problems, stress, emotions, boredom, or setbacks. Emotion dysregulation is known to play a role in the development and maintenance of alcohol use disorder too. This comes from both never developing the skills to deal with emotions and from alcohol changing the brain to make our emotions more intense and make us more reactive to them. A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction was looking to understand risk factors for binge drinking in people with alcohol use disorder. They evaluated nearly 400 people receiving outpatient treatment who were diagnosed with severe AUD, and they separated them into two groups, binge drinkers and non-binge drinkers.

12:18Then they looked at sociodemographic info and assessed impulsivity and emotion regulation abilities. So they found that positive urgency and limited emotion regulation skills were significant risk factors for binge drinking. Positive urgency increased the likelihood of having a pattern of binge drinking by 2.2 times, and limited emotion regulation skills increase the likelihood by 1.5 times. And remember from my recent episode on impulsivity, positive urgency is acting rashly and without thought in response to positive emotions. It's thought that urgency in our teenage years is linked to the emergence of addictive and self-destructive behaviors like binge drinking, and that urgency in adulthood intensifies into a full-blown addiction.

13:15So if you started drinking as a teen and you drank heavily and often, then it may have changed the way that your brain developed. Alcohol can change the way that the prefrontal cortex develops, making us more impulsive when we experience emotions. But you don't have to start drinking as a teen to develop a problem. I didn't start drinking until I was 22, but I was busy using other self-destructive coping mechanisms before I discovered alcohol. Emotion dysregulation comes from not having skills to impact the duration and the intensity of a feeling. If a feeling is very intense and it lasts a long time, then we're going to search for quick relief.

14:02And alcohol is an excellent way of getting relief. I genuinely believed that alcohol was helping me for a very long time. If you're seeking out relief from your emotions, then this is a sign that you're drinking problematically and you need to learn some coping skills. Because alcohol doesn't actually give us real relief. It just lets us check out for a little bit before the emotion comes back even stronger later. My biggest motivator for drinking to escape was working in biotech. Early on in my career, I was working at this place where everybody ganged up on me and then I just disengaged in response.

14:44They used to criticize my lunches to the point where I'd have to hide in a meeting room to eat alone. They would try to force me to try their food. And then they accused me of having an eating disorder at a company party because I didn't want cake. I actually just don't like cake. Get over it. And they said that in front of everybody. It was brutal. And to this day, I really don't understand the obsession that they had with my lunches. Like get a life people. But anyway, it was most of my coworkers that were doing this. And one of them decided to say something to my boss. I think it was something like I wasn't working as hard as they thought I should be.

15:30I don't really remember what happened after that, and I don't want to. But I just remember being very upset, like instantly very upset. I'm not trying to argue here that I was the best employee, because I definitely was not. but this place was filled with people who like to get into everybody else's business and make themselves look better. Probably another way to escape from their own life by worrying about everybody else. So on the day this happened, it was a work night and I went home and I got so drunk. I remember being on my back porch blasting music and singing at like 9 or 10 p.m., probably disrupting my entire neighborhood and embarrassing myself.

16:16And I was thinking, I am having so much fun. But then in the middle of the night and the whole next day came the crippling self-hatred and shame before I got drunk again the next night. I got drunk every day for two weeks to deal with this situation. Drinking was somewhat fun for me in the beginning and I could kind of convince myself that I was having fun even when I wasn't. But when the alcohol wore off, everything that I hated about myself and my life was still there. We create a life where we enjoy a few hours of each day, and then the remaining 20 to 22 hours are filled with pain, self-loathing, and suffering.

17:02Of course we're going to want to drink to escape again. But your life doesn't have to suck. I actually really love my life right now. The idea that drinking to escape leads to lower life satisfaction is important, and that's what I need you to take away from this episode. I never had another job with co-workers like those people, but I did continue to have work-related problems, even in sobriety. The next time that I had a problem was a few years later when I was 18 months sober. I was passed over for a promotion that I had been promised I was getting for a year and my boss basically said it was because I was stupid.

17:43So I had an intense urge to get drunk and blow up my life just like all the times that I did in the past. This time however I didn't and you know what happened? I woke up the next day feeling a little bit better and then I woke up the day after that, feeling a little bit better, and so on. I started problem solving and working through the emotions instead of checking out of my life. Drinking to escape made the intense emotions and stress stick with me for two weeks straight. Dealing with it sober made the intense emotions and stress stick with me for one or two days. We turn off our self-awareness because we can't handle our lives and then drinking turns off the rest of our self-awareness.

18:31I need you to work on recognizing what you're drinking is doing. You may not be able to identify why you're drinking right now because I believed that I drank for fun and socializing even for a few months into my sobriety, but you can recognize that drinking isn't helping you. It prolongs our suffering and makes us less happy with our lives overall. We can continue escaping in sobriety by turning to food or sugar, edibles, gummies, or weed, sex, bad relationships, gambling, and more. Or we can learn the skills that we need to actually problem solve and improve our situation. You can learn these skills through working with a therapist, working with a coach, taking a course, enrolling in a program, doing a lot of reading or listening to podcasts or joining a sober community or going to in-person meetings and learning from the wisdom of the group.

19:29I think that's one of the best parts of a sober community is you learn from other people's perspectives because we only understand our own experiences. I even learn new tools and ways to change my perspective from talking to the Living a sober-powered life community. When I'm really stressed now, I like to turn on my PS5 and play some video games for a bit to let the intense emotion pass, but I'm focused on problem solving at the same time. Sobriety doesn't mean that we have to suffer 24-7 and just sit with it all the time. There is such a thing as healthy distraction. So your takeaway from today's episode is that escape from self-awareness and from the negative aspects of real life are strong predictors of lower life satisfaction and that escapism is actually an amplifier of the suffering caused by our drinking.

20:27It doesn't have to be this way if you just trust me and stop drinking and work on learning the skills to actually cope. If you listen to Sober Powered Skills, then your skills episode today is about one cause of escapism and how to cope. If you don't listen, then you can grab the link in the show notes. And if that's not for you, then I will talk to you in the next one.

21:11You