The Afternoon That Got Away From Me
Earlier this year, I decided to put myself out there. New-ish city, new chapter, new commitment to actually making friends like a functioning adult instead of waiting for community to materialise on my doorstep. I downloaded one of those friend-making apps, matched with someone who seemed lovely, and we arranged to meet for a mid-afternoon drink. Casual. Low pressure. The kind of catch-up you tell yourself will be one glass and home by dinner.
Normally, I’m a one or two good glasses of wine kind of woman. I savour. I sip. I make a single glass last because I actually like being present in a conversation. But this particular afternoon, somewhere between the first glass and the easy rhythm of new company, the wheels came off. I caved to peer pressure. In my forties. Which is something I would have told you was no longer possible, right up until it happened.
By the time I got home, I’d had several drinks past my actual limit. I ended the night with a pizza I didn’t even want, eating it slowly in my kitchen with the kind of quiet shame that only comes from doing something genuinely out of character. The next morning, I didn’t just feel hungover. I felt disappointed in myself. And that’s the feeling I want to talk about, because mindless drinking isn’t a young person’s problem, and for those of us with neurodivergent brains, it’s rarely about willpower. It’s about systems, and the absence of them is what gets you every single time.
Decide Your Limit Before You Sit Down
The thing I’d been getting wrong, for years, is that I was making decisions about how much to drink while I was already drinking. Which, when you stop and think about it, is the worst possible time to be making that decision. A brain that’s two glasses in is not the same brain that left the house. It’s softer, looser, more agreeable, and significantly worse at maths. You cannot ask it to enforce limits it never set in the first place.
So now, the decision gets made before I leave. Two glasses. That’s the number. I say it to myself plainly, the way you’d set any other boundary, and then I commit to it as a fact rather than a goal. The reason this matters more for neurodivergent brains is that impulse control is genuinely harder for us in the moment. We’re brilliant at hyperfocus and terrible at applying rules in real time when dopamine is on the table. The fix isn’t to white-knuckle through the evening. The fix is to remove the decision from the evening entirely.
Telling someone else helps. Before you arrive, mention it casually. “I’m having two and then switching to soda water.” Once it’s been said out loud to another person, it stops being a private intention and becomes a small social contract. Your brain treats it differently. The third drink isn’t a debate anymore. It’s just not happening. This isn’t about being rigid or joyless. It’s about giving your future self a fighting chance, because future you, three drinks in, is not the person you want negotiating on your behalf.
Build a Pause Into the Pace
The second thing that gets us is the pace. You sit down, drinks arrive quickly, you sip while you chat, and before you’ve registered what’s happening, the glass is empty and someone is asking if you want another. The whole ritual is designed to keep you moving forward without checking in. There’s no built-in stop. There’s no natural moment where you ask yourself whether you actually want this, or whether you’re just on autopilot because the glass in front of you is empty.
So you build the pause yourself. The simplest version is ordering water alongside every drink, not after. Two glasses on the table at all times, and you alternate. It slows your pace without announcing itself. Nobody notices, nobody comments, but your body has time to actually process what you’re putting into it. By the time you’ve finished the wine, you’ve also had a full glass of water, and the urge to immediately order another drink quietens significantly. Half the time, what feels like wanting another drink is actually thirst dressed up in fancier clothes.
The other tool is what I’d call the between-drinks check-in. Before you order the next one, you stop for a moment and ask yourself a couple of honest questions. Am I drinking this because I want it, or because the glass is empty and the momentum is pulling me along. Will I be glad I had this tomorrow morning. If the answers feel wobbly, you order something non-alcoholic and you don’t make a thing of it. Soda with lime. A pot of tea. Whatever lets you stay in the conversation without staying on the same trajectory. The pause is the whole point. It’s the difference between drinking with intention and drinking because the evening is doing it to you.
Have an Exit Before You Need One
This is the lesson I learned from the pizza afternoon, and it’s the one I think matters most. The reason I drank too much that day wasn’t really about the wine. It was about the fact that I had no plan for leaving. No time I’d told myself I was going home. No “after this, I’m doing X.” When there’s no exit point, the afternoon just keeps unfolding, and unfolding is how a two-drink catch-up becomes a five-drink evening you didn’t sign up for.
Now, before I go anywhere that involves alcohol, I decide what comes next. Sometimes it’s something concrete, like an early start the next day, or a podcast recording, or plans I’ve made with myself that I’m choosing to honour. Sometimes it’s just a time. I’m leaving at six. The exit doesn’t have to be impressive. It doesn’t have to be true, exactly. It just has to exist, and it has to be decided in advance, when your sober brain can actually weigh up what you want the rest of the day to look like.
This matters because peer pressure in your forties doesn’t look like peer pressure in your twenties. Nobody is chanting at you to skull a drink. It’s softer than that, and harder to refuse. It’s “just one more.” It’s “the night is young.” It’s the warm, genuine pull of a good conversation you don’t want to end. The only thing that holds against that pull is having somewhere else to be. Not a hard rule, not a dramatic exit, just a reason to gather your things and say, “this was lovely, let’s do it again soon.” The exit protects the friendship, too. You leave while it’s still good, which means there’s a next time.
Be Kind to Yourself When You Get It Wrong
What I wish someone had told me earlier is that you will mess this up sometimes. You’ll have evenings where you intended to stop at two and ended up somewhere else entirely. You’ll wake up with the shame spiral pre-installed, replaying the night and cataloguing every misstep. That’s not failure, and it’s not evidence that you’re broken or destined to keep getting this wrong. It’s information you didn’t have yesterday, and now you do.
The mistake most of us make isn’t the drinking itself. It’s what we do with the slip afterwards. We treat one bad night as proof of a character flaw, and we let the shame spiral become its own form of self-punishment that often, ironically, leads to more drinking. All-or-nothing thinking is particularly seductive for neurodivergent brains. We’re either doing it perfectly or we’ve ruined it completely, with very little middle ground. But the middle ground is actually where the work happens. It’s where you live.
So when it happens, you do the unglamorous things. You drink water. You eat something that resembles a meal. You move your body gently, even if it’s just a slow walk. You forgive yourself properly, which means saying it out loud rather than just thinking it, because the brain treats spoken words differently from internal ones. And then you go back to the system. The pre-decided limit. The pause. The exit. You don’t need to overhaul your entire personality or swear off drinking forever. You just need to return to the small, unglamorous structures that protect you from your own brain. That’s the whole practice. Not perfection. Just returning, with a bit more self-respect each time.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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