Rearranging the Deck-chairs
Tom Furman had a good post recently which hit a nerve with me. He spoke about how too often we major on the minors. We ignore the really important stuff and fiddle with minutiae. We might have everything right, all the right things in place.....but then we sabotage it with something else we are doing.
You might be eating well and training well.....but are you also smoking? Are you watching your diet, counting calories and macros....but drinking a bottle of wine a night? Are you training hard, eating well but not getting more than 5 hours sleep a night?
You get the picture. By avoiding the real problem, you can pretend to be courageous. You perhaps act as if you are uninformed, but you are mimicking a child who closes his eyes and believes he is invisible. You really aren’t fooling anyone. Not even yourself. - See more at: http://www.tomfurman.com/rearrange-the-deck-chairs/
Then there was this post on Suppversity.
Alcohol is a killer: According to WHO, morbidity attributable to alcohol in countries with an established market economy (10.3% of disability adjusted life years) comes second only to that of tobacco (11.7%; Murray. 1997). According to a very recent study by published in the scientific journal Addiction by the Pan American Health Organization, a branch of the World Health Organization alcohol was a 'necessary' cause of death (i.e., death would not have occurred in the absence of alcohol consumption) in an average of 79,456 cases per year in 16 North and Latin American countries (Gawryszewski. 2014).Alcohol is not good for you. And there are a lot more statistics out there if you want to look for them.
Dry January
These posts both came at a time when I've decided to give up alcohol for a while. I'm going along with Dry January I realised that I was drinking too much. I'll not get into details but there was far too much wine going down my neck most nights.....to relax. Much of it was a habit, but I was finding myself looking forward to the drink and the habit was getting too ingrained, so I wanted to cut right back.
Obsessing over diet, exercise, sleep and attitude are all fine.....but I was sabotaging things by drinking.
7 comments:
There is a difference between a glass (proper glass, not my uncles 16oz tumbler) of wine and a bottle.
There's a difference between a cocktail and a snoot full.
Just as there are documented deleterious effects from Alcohol, there are also fairly well studied positive effects.
I think that some "habits" have the tendency to evolve over time both in their frequency and amount. The problem is recognizing this, as they tend to creep along and escape our notice. No one sets out to overindulge on substance X, but this often enough ends up as a result. Good for you, Chris, in identifying this for yourself.
I'm with you here Chris. I can relate.
Me too!
Winter leaves us inside more often than not. We make excuses, it's cold, I'm bored, wine is 'good for the heart'. Bravo to you for acknowledging a potential problem and doing something about it. Let us know how you feel at the end of the month, will you?
I don't drink,and haven't all my adult life. But I can see how a habit can insidiously turn into an addiction. I notice it in the way people look at me as though I'm weird, if I mention that I don't drink. Many are compelled to ask me why, as though it is something totally out of the ordinary.Some will shake their heads and congratulate me on being so "disciplined" ( I don't see it that way ). Worse still are the ones who just cannot get their heads around the fact that someone would choose not to drink alcohol, and who keep asking, " Why?". It's those that I look at as future alcohol related statistics.
Great!
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