Clearing away the empties after a big night, I’ve sometimes considered scribbling out the ABV % and instead pencilling in the measure of my shame, on a scale of 1 to 10. 

Let’s just say, a ‘1’ was never in the running. 

A whole bottle of wine + five gins = one deeply private overshare, gallons of tears and at least 24 hours of deepest depression. 

Little mental calculations flying everywhere. Like ‘yes it was bad, but next time I’ll drink more water’, or ‘if I’d stopped at the wine everything would have been fine…’ 

Fundamentally though, those sums are all underpinned by the belief that giving up alcohol would be a socially or personally unsurvivable loss. 

Remarkable, isn’t it?

Alcohol is actually thought to affect around 50 different neural mechanisms, most significantly:

• by increasing the uptake of a neurotransmitter called GABA, it reduces stress … by acting basically like a...