Exhaustion is the thing that gets me every time... I will be mentally too tired to study or clean, yet I'm too stressed to just chill out, and so the path of the least resistance is to have a few drinks. I wasn't going to do anything other than stress anyway. It's not a good excuse, I know.
It was so important to me to get a few solid months of sobriety in before I started back to school, and it was easy to get it and maintain it because I wasn't under an enormous amount of stress. I had some drama in my life but it was work drama and predictable and controllable, and I was able to find new stress coping mechanisms, for the little kind of stressful things. I went back to school and I fell back in to my early programming because stress was SO increased...
I seem to have very black and white thinking. I should be studying, and there's nothing else that is important right now. I don't have a care plan to obsess over this week because it's my observation day tomorrow. So I'll have free time and I will force myself to study for Monday's test until I completely exhaust my brain and spending time doing anything else feels like cheating on the wife I'm supposed to be fully committed to. My mistress doesn't mind or judge when I run straight to her every time.
I need to get out more.