MelindaFlowers

Hey Everybody,

I’m wondering how long your “red zone” drinking phase lasted until you simply couldn’t stand it anymore? The daily hangovers, daily withdrawals, headaches, acid reflux, etc. simply became too much and you finally stopped? How long did you keep going when it truly became hell? I’m not talking the “I think I drink a bit too much” phase. I’m talking about the “I can’t go on like this…” phase. I’ve been sober for 17 months but I’m just curious. I wrote this from my experience which evolved into drinking every day. I know these may not apply to everyone but this was my progression. I'm wondering who can relate.

I think most of us could probably sum up our drinking years into three zones:

Green Zone:

This would be the start of our drinking. We went out, had fun, drank. Sure, we probably drank more than most people but we would drink at night, get up the next morning with no real problems. Drinking still worked during this phase. We did not black out and when we got tipsy we laughed and had fun.

There are probably more days in the month that we don’t drink than we drink. You stop before you go to bed and drink water. If you follow this plan you may not even have a headache in the morning. You buy a bottle of vodka or a 12 pack of beer and it lasts as long as you think it will. You are never surprised in the morning about how much you drank. Your recycle bin is not a cause for an alarm and you have never hidden alcohol from anyone at any time. You openly joke about drinking and may put drinking memes on Facebook. Nobody is actually concerned about you except your uptight teetotaler aunt.

Yellow Zone:

This is where you start to question how much you’re drinking. Hangovers have started to become common and we wake up with headaches on more mornings than we would like to admit, but hey, we’re still having fun and drinking still seems to enhance every experience after 5 pm. People have started subtly asking “How much do you drink…?” or turning down our invitations to drink on work nights. You drink alone. You start to think about how much you’re spending on alcohol and you also maybe have even googled about alcoholism.

You’re probably taken an “Are you an alcoholic” test online but brushed off the results, telling yourself that you’ll stop soon. The shift has happened where a lot of our drinking is alone.
You may try to stop during this phase without that much of a problem. You might make it a week or even a month but you think that shows that you maybe were not as bad as you thought. So you drink again because there’s a party or a vacation. You are probably drinking most, if not all nights.

Your hangovers/headaches are apparent in the morning but they are mostly gone after a few strong cups of coffee and a large bottle of water. Your physical appearance has not changed yet, except for those extra 20-30 lbs you’ve gained and you know why: alcohol. There are minor health problems at this point but you attribute them to stress.

You honestly feel that you could cut back if you REALLY tried. You’re just not ready to really try but you’re thinking you will sooner than later.

You’ve blacked out and embarrassed yourself on several occasions but your friends laugh it off. You’re having a harder time laughing it off though.

You’re tried to do minor changes to your drinking, or to moderate but very unofficially, like you know, it’s not that bad, is it?

You’ve had your first week of drinking every night of the week. Your headaches now last all day but go away with that first drink of the night. You have started rotating liquor stores so the cashiers don’t become too familiar with you. It’s 2015 and you don’t carry cash so your debit purchases on your banks statement? Every other purchase is from the liquor store. You are hiding your consumption and lie on the doctor’s form where it asks how much you are drinking. You put two drinks a day and are confident that the doctor will never know the difference. You look fine and your health feels fine.

You hide alcohol when people come over, even if it just as subtle as sticking it behind the ketchup bottle when people come over.

But none of this is really a problem because you’re going to stop soon.
You have probably googled “Sober Recovery,” read with rapt attention, but you’re not ready to join or post.

Red Zone:

You are drinking every day. You are hungover every day. You may be going to work every day, but you feel like crap every day and you are sure that people can notice if you make eye contact. Your eyes are visibly red and you’ve made excuses for this: allergies, contacts, insomnia. Your face is red and people have asked you about it. You have a huge water bottle that you drink in its entirety on the way to work. You still don’t pee until lunch time. Someone could probably look at your face and say "Oh yeah, that's an alcoholic."

You hide alcohol now, it many creative and various ways. You have probably: stuck a bottle in a coat pocket when you come in the door. Stuck a bottle up in the closet or under a mattress. A bush in the yard? Why not? You hide them so well YOU forget where you put them. You have also done the "reverse commute" for the bottle where you take the empty bottle out with you in the morning in your work bag to dump it at the park trash can.

You are seriously worried about your health and you have mysterious pains in your back, sides, or throat. Every day.

You buy a certain amount of alcohol for the evening and drink far more than you planned. You wake up every morning and say to yourself: “I will not drink today” and you mean it. You drink that night. There are months where you drank 30 nights.

You tell yourself you’re bad but not that bad because you’re not like that guy who drank eye-openers before work. Could you imagine if you were that bad?

You drink as much on any random work night as you do on New Year’s eve. You stop when you pass out.

Your hands start to shake and you know why. No more excuses. You know it isn't from stress.

You are TERRIFIED of going to the doctor. Terrified. Not only because you know that he can tell now from your damaged appearance but your blood work must be awful and you just know he’s going to ask you to get it done because you haven’t been there for a few years.

You are drinking more than you ever have because it takes that much to get you drunk.

Your recycle bin would be a cause for alarm to any stranger on the street, even if five adults lived in your house. You have tried to hide your empties. You find your empties when and where you least expect it, hoping they still have alcohol in them.

You are wondering if anyone, anywhere in the world drinks as much and as often as you do.

98% of your drinking is alone because it would look bizarre to drink as quickly and as much quantity as you do. When people are visiting you go to the kitchen to pour extra drinks so people don’t notice. You blackout anyways. You drink at home because to drink as much as you do at a bar would cost a ton of money and you can’t drink like you want at a bar. The service is too slow you’d look weird anyways.

Friends no longer laugh off your drunken blackout behavior. They are scared for you.

Sometimes you feel stone sober after 10 drinks. Sometimes you black out. You try to stop but you honestly can’t for more than a few days. You make it three or four days but that three to four day hangover gave you an easy start. You don’t know how long hangovers last because you never wait them out to see and drink away the headache every night. But when you do stop, you find out they are lasting four to five days.

Well, that ended up being a lot longer than I thought.

I’m curious how long people could maintain the “red zone” lifestyle.
I only lasted in the daily withdrawal, daily feeling horrible phase about four years. I always say that I actually couldn't drink any longer. I felt too horrible. It became so bad I stopped. I’ve been sober for 17 months.

badger257

Probably 3 years of everyday all day drinking. Except when in jail a few times.

MelindaFlowers

That's interesting. Mine was 3-4 years too. I've always wondered when people say they drank for 15, 20 years how much of that was the serious, debilitating stuff. I'm thinking it isn't possible to go on much longer than a few years of "red zone."

I've also found that the middle zone, or "yellow" zone is often the longest.

Dee74

I'm not sure I was maintaining much of any thing, but I managed to continue red zone drinking all day everyday for 5 years or so.

I can scarcely believe it now.

D

Soberpotamus

I never made it to everyday or all day drinking. I was a binge drinker, I drank quickly and blacked out, and then passed out. I'm not so sure that all day, everyday is worse in every way than what I did though. I've read that drinking a lot, very quickly can be more damaging, especially to females.

There were periods of time, months, and later on, years, where I drank several times in a week though. And it was during those times I think I simply couldn't process the alcohol in order to be able to drink daily. It was too much alcohol for my body.

When I stopped, I seemed to have no problems. I just stopped. No tremors, no hallucinations, nothing. My symptoms were more subtle, they were emotional ... anger, rage, grief, sadness, anxiety, and depression. And they lasted for quite a while, the first year at least, and into the second, becoming more intermittent and less frequent. I had meltdowns the first year, yelling, crying, depression for a couple months at a time (lying in bed), and isolation due to the anxiety. Now, it's rare I have a meltdown or rage spell. It typically involves the dogs now, when I feel out of control walking them, or afraid they are in danger. The grief is much less too. I worked through a lot of it. My mom's been dead five years now. I did become depressed this fall again, but it's mild in comparison to the first and second year depressions I experienced. My anxiety is manageable, and I actually enjoy being around people now as long as I get my down time to decompress.

Verte

1.5-2.5 years in the red zone. Interestingly, I never had a green zone during my drinking life. Drinking went from nothing to blotto on the town, to red zone then back around to nothing, nada, zilch.

Andante

Hmm, the "Zone System" as applied to alcoholic progression. I like it!

Of course, the progression doesn't quite neatly sort itself into discrete zones like that, but it's a useful tool, and very colorfully described, I might add.

I'd say I met most of the criteria of a "Red Zone" drinker for the last 6 or 7 years of my adventures. There finally came a point where the game wasn't worth the candle anymore.

Frank14

Wow, those red zone situations are spot on. The red zone really crept up on me and I'd say about 2 years. This sort of mirrors my switch from beer to hard liquor. Beer just takes so much longer to process and you eliminate a lot of it along the way. 2 years of hell was enough.

JeffreyAK

I was late yellow and into the red, drinking daily and going down the spiral, for about 4 years. The phase you refer to as yellow was actually short for me, I went pretty quickly from having a small problem to having a big problem and denying it to myself. There were some reasons I see in hindsight, but once I was there I somehow muddled through for 4 years until the negative consequences piled up so high that I was forced by my employer to go get help - long after my friends and family were well aware of what was going on, and had tried in less-direct ways to get me out of the spiral. And even then I drank for 5 more months, and accumulated the worst of my negative consequences, before I finally gave up the battle. I was a tough nut to crack.

happybeingme

3 years as well. I went from a few days a week drinker to full time alcoholic to sober in about 7 years.

Cascabel

I don't think I was actually ever in the red zone although I certainly was flirting with it. I quit drinking twice; once for over thirty years and for about two years, so far, this time. I quit drinking both times because I was drinking more than is healthy, drinking every day, developing a tolerance for alcohol and was finding it hard to skip a day of drinking. I concluded that the alcohol was in charge, not me, and I decided it was time for a change. I seldom drank much more than a bottle of wine a day but for me, a single glass was/is too much.

BBQBOY

Very accurate post...I would also say my "red zone" drinking went on for between 3-4 yrs. before I had to surrender!!

tursiops999

I was in the green zone in my 20's and 30's. In my 40's I got into the yellow zone -- at least 5 years for sure, probably more like 10. I got sober at 52, and before I got sober I think I had just started to dip my toes in the red zone. I was lucky enough to get really scared by that and somehow find recovery.

advbike

Meh, I dont think these categories fit everybody. Not everyone progresses that way.. Personally, I drank less and less as the decades went by. It was mainly self medicating.. but still a problem.

Many have other patterns or just quit on their own.. they just don't need an online forum to stop behavior that's damaging their health. I just don't think these patterns fit all those who drink to excess. Probably many though..

Gottalife

Nearly all my drinking was red zone, from 16 to 22. Never any control. The only regulating factor was money and a period of sickness after each binge where I couldn't drink. 4 days drinking, 3 days dry and sick and broke was the pattern. I was very badly damaged at the end, brain damage, hallucinations, malnutrition, barely functioning, and frightened of my own shadow. Drinking straight spirits because beer didn't work anymore, never eating. Death was not far away.

Like others I don't see how anyone could maintain that level of drinking much longer, maybe 3 years of bad and three years of ultra bad.

Sudz No More

My red zone lasted about 10 years but quite a bit of it was functional. I wouldn't call it the yellow zone either though because I was at the every day 6 or more like 12 a day level for that long. Still, those 10 years were very hard drinking years and many nights were spent drinking upwards to 20 drinks by myself in my apartment. It wasn't until the last few months that I began to experience physical ailments from the years of abuse. It was those few months right at the end that convinced me to stop but I really do believe I was in the red zone for those entire 10 years.

Delfin

I've been thinking quite a bit about all of this myself, Melinda. Just trying to look back and figure out where my switch broke, if I was ever really a normal drinker, how long my stages were, etc.
I was about to move into the red zone permanently and already had some of the Red zone behaviors when I realized I'd gone off the rails and found SR. I spent most of my alcoholic drinking in the yellow zone too. Probably about 10 years with a break while I was pregnant and nursing.
I sometimes look back and feel like it all happened to someone else. It's like a bad dream, but I actually lived it. Amazing.

Delfin

TheRepairman

Being a binge drinker, I floated between zones. Spent 15+ years in Green, with periods of Yellow. Last 5-6 years it's been periods of red but still float between green & Yellow.

juppe

I realize your zone theory won't apply to everyone but I can relate to it very much. Green zone for me was 22-28 years old. Yellow zone was 28-30 years old and red zone 30-32 years old.

ScottFromWI

I honestly don't remember exactly but there was a period of multiple years in the red zone for sure.