In Britain the Macmillan Trust cancer charity has calculated that the average drinker spends an average of 315 days hung over; that’s almost a year, party people. And a little bit depressing.
Here, the Irish Heart Foundation (IHF) is running a new campaign this month, “Your Heart Can’t Drink Like You Can”. It is unusual in highlighting the damage that alcohol can do to your heart – damage that can include raised blood pressure, an enlarged heart, an increased risk of stroke and an irregular heart rate, even in young people.
The “Your Heart Can’t Drink Like You Can” campaign is concentrating on reducing people’s drinking rather than getting them to give up entirely even for a limited period of time. I would encourage people to try giving up for a little while; we are coming up to November, which is traditionally a month of abstinence for Catholics.
But there might be other motivations for this advice. When you give up drinking, you miss drinking: and when you go back to drinking, you miss giving up. I realise this is not the statement of an intelligent person, or even of a fully functioning adult, but it is about as honest an assessment as I can make of what little I’ve learned in the past four months.
To recap: I gave up drinking for four weeks in May. I gave up writing about it after a month, obviously, but didn’t drink again until a couple of weeks later. I don’t know why I started consuming alcohol again, to be honest. I had no craving or any real desire for it. I think maybe I felt a little isolated from drinking friends, family and colleagues – ie, almost everybody I know. But, what the hell, I had been living with that and it wasn’t an insuperable problem or even that unpleasant.
Source: Ann Marie Hourihane, Irish Times, 23/09/14
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