I Quit Alcohol During University For The Sake Of My Mental Health

It takes nerve to walk up to a bar and confidently say the word ‘mocktail’ without feeling like an idiot, but I couldn’t recommend it enough
Witthaya Prasongsin via Getty Images

Yeah, so, university is pretty alcohol heavy, guys. Don’t know if you’re aware, but chances are: if you’re at uni, you’ve had a drink. If you’re going to uni, you’ll have a drink. If you’ve finished uni, drinking is all you have now.

University is tough, that realisation comes pretty early on. Now I don’t want to promote binge drinking, but in my first year I was a pretty good advert for binge drinking. It’s almost ingrained into university culture that to make friends you have to drink, to enjoy uni you must drink, if you don’t drink you’ll become a social outcast destined to spend three years being that guy who’s always messaging the group chat pointing out the time and asking people to keep the noise down.

For new students, fresher’s week is billed as the biggest event of the year, even bigger than exams, and clubs regularly try and entice more and more students in with cheap drinks, regular club nights, and former Love Island contestants stopping off on their extensive meet and greet tours. Students flock to various club nights week in, week out, and that’s fine - I was one of those people.

What I’m trying to say is, university and alcohol go hand in hand. But I quit. I started my third year at university and I stopped drinking.

Final year is obviously the hardest, most stressful year of any student’s life, what with exams, dissertations, the mid-youth crisis of not knowing what the we’re going to do with the rest of our lives – hangovers aren’t going to make it any easier either.

I wanted to give up drinking to focus on my third and final year, obviously, but outside factors also played a part. For one, I was suffering from PTSD. A traumatic event earlier in the year combined with the fact my girlfriend had just moved to France to study her Erasmus year hit me all at once. I broke down. For some, drinking would unfortunately be the answer. I didn’t want that to be the case.

At first, I just cut down my consumption, stopping myself from having a drink after shifts at my bar job, or not going too heavy when I went out with friends. But I was still finding myself struggling with the demands of uni and work, and drinking was only making those pressures worse, as well as allowing PTSD to rear its ugly head on a more regular basis. Looking back, I’d consider a lot of that first term a write off, although being three years into a literature degree at a polytechnic, you may feel that the whole three years are a write off.

New Year came around and, as we all know, once you’ve said you’re going to do something in a New Year’s resolution, you have to stick to it! Right?! So, with the return of my girlfriend for Christmas and the stresses of university numbed for a month, I was able to get my head straight. I intended on quitting alcohol for the foreseeable as part of my goal to get out of university alive, or at least with a 2:1.

Obviously, people tend to comment when we choose to do things that aren’t necessarily social norms, like not drinking on nights out or putting the milk in before the hot water when making tea. I work in a bar, so the irony was quickly pointed out by staff and customers. My friends tried to tempt me with a drink every now and again, even my seminar tutor at university asked me what I was playing at.

I managed to go two months before having one shot on my birthday that I felt obliged to have, before managing to go another three months until the end of university without a drink. One of the hardest things I found was not that I desperately wanted to drink, but the feeling of letting your friends down, feeling obliged to drink, as if it’s rude to turn down a drink when you’re offered one. But when your mental health is on the line, what are you supposed to do?

There’s a scene in Edgar Wright’s The World’s End where Nick Frost’s teetotal character Andy describes the courage it takes to order a tap water in a bar surrounded by rugby players, and I get that – it takes nerve to walk up to a bar and confidently say the word ‘mocktail’ without feeling like an idiot. At uni it’s even harder, when you’re surrounded by the culture of alcohol, when you’ve spent two years immersed in that culture – but mental health must come first. I embraced my new-found sobriety, I was empowered by it, and I couldn’t recommend it enough.

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