Ask HN: Drinking Alcohol While Working?

I quit drinking ~9 years ago. I tried to start several companies while drinking, built and exited a company after quitting. Now I work as an exec coach w/ a focus on recent applied research in behavioral psychology. All that to say, I’ve thought a lot about both healthy / unhealthy alcohol use and productivity. Here’s my $0.02.

I’m not of the mind that no one should drink, but if you’re noticing that it’s hard to work and be productive without alcohol, you might want to explore that more before going back to drinking.

It could be as simple as you’re using alcohol to get past the initial discomfort of starting a task / etc, or it could be that it’s a way of avoiding some deeper emotional issue (anxiety, depression, ptsd, etc).

Regardless, even if you continue drinking, it would be ideal if you could access vitality and excitement and productivity without needing alcohol, so you can freely choose when to drink and when not to. If you can’t be productive without drinking, on some level you’ve developed a dependence on it, and this is not typically a great place to be. Even if you never have major consequences, it just tends to make the joy of everything else a little duller.

The fact that you’ve quit for 6 months and still aren’t feeling more excited seems indicative that something else is going on, whether you’ve replaced alcohol with something else (caffeine, nicotine), you actually don’t enjoy your work, or you were drinking quite a bit and your brain is still recovering. It can take 6-24 months for people who were significantly alcohol dependent to get through “post acute withdrawal” and return to normal brain activity. If you drink during that period, it more or less resets.

Anyways, hope the above is helpful for some context. If you want to talk, drop me a note.

Good points, thank you. There are definitely anxiety, depression, ptsd types of issues at play.

After reading your and others' comments, I've decided to skip the alcohol for as long as I can and work on other modalities to try and increase my passion and motivation for work. Maybe I'm burned out and need a sabbatical or break.

I hear you — taking some time off can definitely help.

The one other idea I’d offer is that the way you’re talking about drinking is a sort of “dead person goal.” In behavioral psych we define this as a goal that a dead person can accomplish better than an alive person.

A dead person will be really good at not drinking.

To turn it into an “alive person goal,” all you need to do is make it positive — ask yourself, what am I moving towards that I care about by not drinking?

Maybe this is a better relationship with work, connection to family, health, or even something like making space for healing. Whatever it is, the more you can focus on what you do want to move towards rather than what you want to move away from, the greater chance you’ll have at tapping into vitality and engagement in your day to day.

All that being said, this can be easier said than done. Especially if you’re burnt out, taking time off and getting back in touch with doing things for the intrinsic rewards can go a long way towards rekindling the spirit.

I drink more than I should, but never during work. When i worked in a real office, there would occasionally be a lunch or something where I had a beer, and it just made me tired and unproductive for the rest of the day.

Same as you, I find myself drinking more with being mostly stuck at home. But I find it completely incompatible with work. I spend part of my time coding, part on project management, and part talking to clients (I have my own business). I would consider it very disrespectful to meet with other people for work while even remotely under the influence. And if I'm working by myself, alcohol makes me lazy and stupid, so I would find it not compatible with getting work done.

To be clear, I enjoy having a drink, almost certainly too much. But I don't see the overlap with work at all. The only real advice I can give (and i don't want to judge) is to make sure drinking doesn't just improve your perception of how well you're working, and actually makes you more productive. And maybe it's better to have a drink to let off some steam after work vs mixing the two. But it's a personal thing so ymmv obviously

> make sure drinking doesn't just improve your perception of how well you're working

Yep. Good point.

I'll have the occasional normal glass of wine or the occasional beer during hours in a "it's a nice drink" sort of way not a "I'd really like alcohol now" way. I think even more often than that like a regular drink at lunch or something isn't uncommon for people but IMHO if you're getting over the legal limit (during work) then you're taking things a bit far. Nothing wrong with calling it a day early or with having fun outside of doing work once in a while but if you're not fit to drive you're not fit to teach or invest - regardless whether you feel like you are or can get away with doing so most of the time.

Same with "And no, I don't crave alcohol.". If you feel you have low productivity, low drive, and low passion without alcohol so you're going to restart drinking with hopes all that comes back then... you crave alcohol you have just separated the thing from the effects in an effort to make it seem like it's somehow not the alcohol you crave it's something else.

Now I have no idea what "tripled my drinking" is in quantity or anything but the general attitude about how you view it all makes me just as uneasy about reading the question regardless.

Good points.

The legal limit in most places is actually quite low. I think a couple of drinks triggers it even an hour after (for most). I don't want to make you even more uneasy (smile) but honestly a couple of drinks don't even get me buzzed.

All your points are very good and important for me to absorb.

If being over the legal limit doesn't even get you buzzed, it seems like you have a very high tolerance due to heavy / frequent drinking.

This is correct. It's tolerance from long term regular drinking.

So find something else that gives you the same benefit without destroying your body. I vote running. Do couch to 5k. Keep it up for 6 months. And then if you still hate it do something else.

And no being cold isn’t a reason, you can easily run at 0F for hours.

This was how i quit smoking. It's great advice, with the caveat that (a) it's only suitable for some people - although as someone with an addictive personality I found it actually easier to get "addicted" to running than most other people I know, and (b) I think the best strategy is to pick up running first, without trying to quit other bad habits, and worry about quitting once the running habit is established. I started running while smoking (for 15 years), and about six months in to running realized smoking wasn't working for me and got motivated to quit. It was still unbelievably hard, but I had an established running habit that helped keep me on the wagon. As I say, it's not for everyone, but worth considering.

Thank you, I'm going to start running (again).

I've now had six months of complete sobriety. The result: my productivity, my drive, my passion for work have gone down. And no, I don't crave alcohol.

I generally don't drink. Most of my life, I could tell you when I had my last drink in terms of "Three years ago at so and so's wedding."

But I also drank daily for about a year while very sick and not getting adequate medical care. I hate alcohol. I hate the taste of it. As soon as I had better answers, I pursued those and stopped drinking.

I also talked to someone who was drinking extremely heavily and had surgery for some problem and during the surgery they discovered some other organ was beyond salvaging and they removed it.

This person felt enormous guilt over their drinking but it likely saved their life. The surgeon was astonished they were still alive given the state of the organ they removed.

So, maybe you have some unidentified health issue which would be better treated with something other than alcohol.

I'd never drink on the job, but I also don't actually drink alcohol in general. I haven't drank regularly since my clubbing days ~15 years ago and not at all for the last 10-ish years. Well, that isn't _technically_ true; sometimes I'll have a sip of champagne if the restaurant treats us as a surprise, but this is so rare that I don't even remember the last time it happened. It isn't that I have anything against drinking, I just never really liked the taste of alcohol and the health effects make drinking a totally pointless activity to me.

I know this is rehashing what others in the thread have already said, but if you feel the need to drink to enjoy your work it seems worthwhile to dig deeper into the root cause rather than self-medicating with alcohol.

I don't, but that's mostly just a reflection of the fact that I barely drink at all. Not that I'm a teetotaler or anything - I just don't drink much. I keep a collection of whiskeys and some mixing stuff on a shelf in the kitchen, but the urge to drink is rarely present. Most years (over the last 15 or so) I think if you averaged out my "drinks per month" for the year, the number would round down to zero.

That said, when we were working out of the office, if we went to a group lunch at a restaurant or something, was I opposed to the occasional drink over lunch? No. But would I drink enough to go back to work sloshed? Also no.

Wish I had some advice for you. All I can say is keep experimenting and see what works for you personally.

Drinks are either a treat or a staple. If you need treats to be productive, that probably points to some other issue. If you need to make alchohol a staple… well, there’s a large body of work on that.

Why isn’t there a Soylent Kumbacha CBD Microdose Kernighan productivity drink already?

'druk / another round' is a good movie that explores this question. the thing I took away from it is that drinking isn't an end in itself, and it's a mistake to treat it as inherently good or bad.

Never, it doesn't agree with me. It breaks my concentration and makes my thought patterns more erratic. With my technical work it doesn't fit.

I think it may not be so bad for brainstorming scenarios and I've definitely been drinking with colleagues in semi-business gatherings like meetings on business trips.

Also I rarely drink alone. It makes me depressed afterwards :) And I never really feel the need to drink in such a situation.

When I was a lawyer I had to develop a routine for sobering up enough to get stuff done (this was after lunch or social events with 2-3 drinks not getting plastered). I would drink a glass of water, take some dry snuff and watch something tranquil on netflix for like 30 minutes. Never failed to clear my head enough to focus. But if I was by myself I would never exceed a pint with lunch because I hate losing focus.

For me at least, the Ballmer Peak is real. And at this point I can calibrate it pretty well.

At the same time, I once worked with a guy who seemed to be permanently tipsy and topped himself off with a flask during the day. He was useless as a worker and therefore annoying as a coworker.

So obviously there's a counterproductive point. You have to watch it and be honest with yourself about it.

>Ballmer Peak is real

I was told the most sensitive test for alcohol impairment is Minesweeper performance.

I can handle a beer at lunch. That's about it.

Back in the day I would get a brightly colored can of alcopop at the gas station and drink it on the way to the office past the police station back in violation of the open container law assuming that (1) the cops would mistake it for an energy drink and if that failed I could (2) claim I thought it was an energy drink.

I find alcohol helps with motivation sometimes but even small amounts drastically affect my coding. Anything more than about half a drink is too much.

Non alcoholic beer can be perfect sometimes, like when it's 5pm and there's a couple of tedious tasks left to do.

To me a glass of wine is like a signal that the day is over. So during work? No. When I'm coding or working on something just for me, for fun, sure.

I don't think it necessarily affects quality, but I definitely do things slower when having a drink.

Yea. We have a "Beer light" that comes on part way through the day. Free beer + liquor + Claws in the bar. Only after the most important work is done though. Highly encouraged during mandatory meetings.

You might find this an interesting watch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Round_(film)

I have sometimes been able to replace alcohol with tea. Sometimes it's the need for something stimulating. Not your question, but 2 cents FWIW

I will occasionally drink while working on personal coding projects. I experience a kind of "Ballmer Peak" [1] at a certain point - I think what happens is my inhibition is lowered enough that I stop double-guessing myself too much. Eventually though I begin to lose track of what I am doing, but it can still be fun to look over my work and maybe make a few notes. I wouldn't drink and work if it was something professional or important, though, because it's too likely I'll make a mistake somewhere.

[1] https://xkcd.com/323/

Yeah, I find I stop thinking and start doing, which can be good or bad, depending on the circumstance.

I can have 3-4 drinks, still doesn't come close to YouTube's hit to productivity.

Nope. Gotta flex your head!