Six signs you have a drinking problem: No1 you’re reading this article

Almost nine years ago this summer, at the end of a beautifully sunny bank holiday I had once again ruined by getting drunk, I sat on the edge of my bed and realised that if I didn’t stop drinking, I was going to die.

Either I was going to die by choosing to kill myself, the terrible lows of my endless hangovers frequently leaving me suicidal.

Or I was going to die by falling down some stairs, or any of the other ways I had read about people coming to sticky ‘accidental’ ends because of alcohol. The alternative was that I would continue to live this life-sapping Groundhog Day existence, with the daily horror of waking up and having to immediately check my phone to see what I had done the night before. Had I sent a colleague an unfiltered WhatsApp, posted something inappropriate on Instagram, been tagged in an embarrassingly drunken photograph on Facebook that the mums from nursery might see?

I didn’t want to stop drinking, but nor did I want to continue. I knew, somewhere deep down in my well-pickled soul, that I had a problem – so in August 2017, just before my then four-year-old daughter started reception, I packed myself off to rehab to get sober.

My story is extreme, but I have learned that I could have got off the runaway train of addiction a lot earlier. I think of all the years of pain I could have saved if I’d recognised the signs of problem drinking.

In a world soaked in mummy wine culture, I spent years struggling to accept that I could be an alcoholic. And for a time at least, I was very good at convincing myself – and everyone around me – that I was OK. But, in the end, it became much easier to accept that I was an alcoholic than keep on telling myself that I wasn’t.

Since that life-changing moment, and my decision to talk publicly about my alcoholism, there is one question I get asked again and again.

‘In a world soaked in mummy wine culture, I spent years struggling to accept that I could be an alcoholic,’ Bryony Gordon confesses

Not ‘do you find it hard to be around people when they are drinking?’ (No, not unless they are repeating themselves, in which case I excuse myself and happily go home).

Not ‘do you miss alcohol?’ (Nope! In fact, I couldn’t think of anything worse, which is wild to me as someone who just ten years ago couldn’t think of anything else).

No, the question I get asked most is: how did you know you had a problem?

And I get asked it most at this time of year, as the weather gets warmer and the May bank holidays bring an official launch to rosé season, the point at which drinking seems like the most normal thing in the world.

Positively healthy, even. What could be better for your wellbeing than an afternoon in the garden with friends and a few bottles of Whispering Angel?

Why look, there’s Dame Joan Collins, recommending a bottle of La Balconne Organic Provence Rosé as she stands in front of a dusky pink display of her favourite wine in Marks & Spencer.

Indeed, passing the Dame Joan-backed display of rosé in my local M&S last week, I almost fell for it myself.

Then I remembered all the women who message me on Instagram each week, asking me if I think they, too, need help.

These women are so like me, it’s sometimes frightening: middle-aged, well-dressed, with a seemingly happy family life.

They don’t look like they have alcohol problems – at least not by traditional stereotypes. They’re hardly sitting on a park bench swigging out of a paper bag. But then nor was I.

I’ve come to realise that, like me almost a decade ago, they are holding it together on the outside, while barely coping underneath.

And just as I used to quiz sober alcoholics I haplessly stumbled on, I know what it is they want.

They want me to tell them the precise number of drinks that proves someone has a problem, in the hope they will fall one glass of wine short of it.

They want me to give them permission to keep on drinking, to tell them that I was much worse than them and they can stop worrying about their alcohol intake.

The truth is, only you can decide if you have a problem with alcohol or not. No doctor or expert can diagnose you, no self-styled social media sobriety guru can reassure you by telling you that you’re a ‘grey area drinker’ rather than an alcoholic.

But looking back, these are the signs I wish I’d known about, the things that might have shepherded me to safety and sobriety a little sooner.

And I share them here with you today, as the weather gets warmer and the lure of the pink pinot gets louder…

1. You have lots of rules around alcohol

People often think that putting in a strict system around their drinking is a way of controlling it. In fact, it can be a sign that the drinking is controlling them.

Towards the end of my drinking, I had endless rules about alcohol. I told myself they were signs of sensible moderation.

Bryony had several rules surrounding alcohol, towards the end of her drinking. But, she warns, such rules can often give the illusion of moderation while disguising the real problem

Instead, they were an attempt at creating order in a world made increasingly chaotic by my alcohol abuse. I was proud of my rules, because they reassured me and everyone else that all was well in my world.

I wouldn’t drink until my daughter was in bed; I wouldn’t drink after 11pm; I wouldn’t drink two nights in a row; I wouldn’t drink spirits; I wouldn’t drink alone (unless everyone I’d been drinking with had gone to bed).

I wouldn’t drink with people who were a bad influence on me, and I wouldn’t drink at work events, because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of my boss.

I didn’t always stick to these rules. But their existence somehow gave me the illusion that I was OK, and allowed me to pretend to everyone else that this was the case.

After all, ‘Oh, I don’t drink spirits, the grain has a funny effect on me’ sounds so much better than, ‘I don’t drink spirits because quite often they make me black out’.

2. You change your usual tipple

When I was 21, I stopped drinking vodka and Cokes and started drinking vodka and tonics – it was obviously the mixture of alcohol and sugar that was the problem, not the mixture of alcohol and me.

Later, I swapped vodka for wine. Spirits were the problem! Except grape seemed to have the same effect on me as grain, and so I tried watering it down with ice.

Then eventually I swapped wine for beer, and then beer for the lower-alcohol ale, before finally, almost 25 years after I’d first picked up a drink, I accepted that the problem was alcohol generally, and the solution was that I couldn’t drink it.

‘When I was 21, I stopped drinking vodka and cokes and started drinking vodka and tonics’, our columnist says. Bryony struggled to accept she was the problem, and instead blamed sugar

Does a person with an allergy to shellfish hope that it might go away if they try mussels instead of prawns? No, they do not, and so it

is that I’ve come to realise I am allergic to booze.

3. You fill in drinking questionnaires

It is often said that alcoholism is a disease of denial, the only illness to tell you that you don’t have it.

It will survey your recycling bin overflowing with empties and

say: ‘But you don’t drink on Wednesdays and never in the mornings, unless you are still up from the night before, which doesn’t really count.’ I used to do online ‘quizzes’ to try to reassure myself I didn’t have a problem.

It didn’t matter if I answered ‘yes’ to 19 out of the 20 questions – I would focus on the one I answered ‘no’ to as proof that I couldn’t possibly have a proper issue.

I would pour myself a glass of wine, put on my matching rose-tinted glasses, and focus on the wonder of that first sip.

If you are obsessed with proving you’re not an alcoholic – You do Pilates! You have a job! You have a house! Your partner hasn’t left you! – might I respectfully suggest that, ultimately, it’s going to be a whole lot easier to just accept the fact you are one?

4. You plan your life around booze

I made a big song and dance of the fact that I never drank during the day, as I felt it was irrefutable proof that I didn’t have a problem. I didn’t wake up and want a drink – in fact, I often woke up vowing never to drink again.

But did it matter that I wasn’t drinking during the day when I was thinking about drinking all the time? My whole life and work schedule was arranged around when I could have an ice-cold glass of rosé (or five).

If I had a big work meeting on a Tuesday morning, this meant I couldn’t drink on a Monday evening, which meant I had to get some wine in on Sunday night.

The planning and plotting was endless and, when I got sober, I was amazed by how much space in my brain was freed up.

5. One glass always leads to oblivion

There’s a huge misconception that an alcohol problem is defined by how much someone drinks, and that the only people who are truly alcoholics are imbibing booze around the clock, unable to stop.

Alcohol problems are not defined by how much you drink, but rather by how you drink, our columnist explains. (Picture posed by model)

In actual fact, an alcohol problem is not about how much you drink, but how you drink.

I could often go weeks without having a drink. But the moment I decided to have ‘just one’ glass of wine, I would end up drinking to oblivion. However hard I tried, I could not moderate. It is genuinely easier for me to have no drinks whatsoever than one or two.

6. You get existential crises, not hangovers

When I got sober, it came as a surprise to me that not everyone drank to get drunk, and not everyone felt consumed with shame the day after a night out with friends.

My husband can go for a nice night out, drink four pints of beer, and while the next day he has a headache and feels rough, he doesn’t feel consumed by paranoia. He simply has a fry-up, drinks lots of water, and laughs at some of the stories his friends told the night before.

But I could not accept how I felt the next day. It was horrific.

I was always trying to outrun the consequences of my drinking – I was obsessed with the milk thistle supplement or the precise amount of water I needed to drink before I went to bed so that I could wake up the next day feeling tickety-boo.

I was consumed with finding the hack that would allow me to drink like a normal person.

And this is the truth – that if you’re asking yourself the question, ‘Do I have a drinking problem?’, well, you probably already know the answer. There’s absolutely no shame in that, only in the exhausting obsession that is trying to deny it.

Contact Alcoholics Anonymous anytime on 0800 9177 650 or go to alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk to get support.