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.