Why can't I stop drinking once I'm buzzed?

Lack of self control. Try to pace yourself. Have a couple of drinks then a glass of water. Drink the water like it was a drink. I even put a lime on the glass. It looks like a gin and tonic but I am hydrating myself and socially drinking at the same time. Works like a charm.

Your are a binge drinker and more than likely an alcoholic. If you blackout, passout, or puke and feel like shit everytime you drink it can’t be healthy or enjoyable. There ain’t no telling what you might do blacked out like drive a car, insult people, or have unsafe sex with a very ugly person. Waking up and having to hear about your blackout antics and having to apologize for the night before is humiliating. People will draw on you with magic markers and steal stuff out of your pockets if your passed out. Puking isn’t fun. Sleeping on the cold bathroom floor isn’t fun either. You need to quit drinking or make yourself limits and stick to them. I try to have limits. I still drink to much sometimes but haven’t blacked out in a while. Not since I was part of a drinking crew called “Team Blackout!”

Honestly, because the buzz is enough to make you feel good while simultaneously taking out your self control in one shot… no pun intended. You really need to try to just stop drinking, since you admit you have a problem stopping.

You are an alcoholic, or on your way to being one. You should stop drinking. You have no control. Drinking til you blackout is a big red flag.

On a side note, how old are you?

You don’t have to crave alcohol to be an alcoholic. Please consider the advice given by @JLeslie @poofandmook @missingbite and @buster. I concur with all of them.

This sounds exactly like someone I know!! (me) I tried every trick in the book to control it and ‘get it right’, to no avail. Please do not follow in my footsteps; there is nothing there for you, trust me on that one. Quit now, save your self some (ok, a lot) of grief…

It’s sort of like my addiction to cake. I know once I go buy cake, I’ll eat the whole stinkin thing, so I just try not to buy cake.

Before you start drinking, you have to set a schedule for yourself. Be mindful of what you’re drinking and how fast. Say you’ll have two drinks, then wait an hour, then drink another. The trick is maintaining the buzzed feeling without letting it get too far, and the way to do that is to simply stretch the drinking over a longer time. You can keep drinking, just not too fast.

Also, you should talk to a friend beforehand and ask him or her to watch you and keep count of your drinks together. Someone who can tell you when you’ve had enough or remind you to pace yourself.

@le_inferno I don’t think that would work for the OP. People like that tend to just work around it, like hiding from the person who is supposed to keep them in line. Or, taking just one more drink, even though themselves they wouldn’t. They are usually very good at finding the other alcoholic in the room so they don’t feel like they are drinking too much. Hopefully I am wrong, but that has been my experience.

I would still like to know the OP’s age. The is a big difference between a 21 year old doing this and a 35 year old doing this. Maturity goes a long way.

Honestly, I think the same part of the brain that controls addictions like smoking cigarettes is the problem. No alcohol actually tastes good the first time you have that drink (think about how old you were the first time you tasted an alcoholic beverage). Also, no one likes the taste of that cigarette the first time they take a puff. Do you understand what I’m saying? You become accustomed to that flavor… and each time you taste it, it tastes a little better than the last.

So that buzz you feel after having a couple drinks is addicting just like that buzz you can get from smoking a single cigarette. I think the only way to stop it is to not drink at all.

Actually, you can stop drinking after you’re buzzed. You don’t stop because you falsely believe that intoxication has destroyed your ability to stop. It’s the result of an “alcohol expectancy” – a self-fulfilling prophesy. For example, in some societies people do not believe that intoxication acts as a disinhibitor. In these societies people become highly intoxicated but never act in inappropriate ways. But when people in such a society come to believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor (typically as a result of contact with Western societies), they sometimes act in inappropriate ways when intoxicated: “The alcohol made me do it.”
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/20090506104523.html

Sounds to me like you are an alcoholic.

I’m the same way with hot sauce. It’s more of ..a challenge for me than fine food.

This sounds counter intuitive as all hell, but cultivate a taste for great beer or even fine Scotch. When you start to taste and appreciate great spirits, you shift the reasons why.

Frankly, I believe you are healthy, within your rights, and it’s entirely natural to drink as much as you possibly can every now and again in life (“Take her up to speed – Blow out the cobwebs”). Nothing is wrong with you. You are not an alcoholic (like so many kneejerk idiots’ comments above would have you believe). The measure is – and always will be – when it starts to affect your life. Only you can decide that. If that happens friend, you must have the courage to act.

Good luck!

Blackouts are a pretty serious medical occurrence. Creates lots of dead, irreplaceable brain cells. If I were having them and I knew what was causing them, I would try to stop doing whatever it was that precipitated them.

If you choose to do this and have trouble, then you might consider going to a couple of AA meetings just to see what you think.

For me it was basic greed- trying to get as high as possible. I feel great now- one more drink will get me to an even higher level. Unfortunatley this usually results in spinning rooms and worship of plumming devices.

I now alot myself what I will drink and put away the rest or determine in advance how many drinks I will consume. I then take my time consuming. Rushed drinking can lead to over drinking as well.

If you cannot control your consumption even after becoming ill regularly or blacking out you need to stop drinking. Ultimately it is a poison. Consider AA.

@JLeslie I hardly think a person loosing controll once a week could be called an alcoholic, nor that it is helpfull to call him that so out & forward. That’s quite harsh.

@me2010 Firstly don’t be so hard on yourself, you only do this once a week. Some of us don’t know when to stop with the “good time” it’s natural. I’m not saying you should keep it, just that you don’t need to beat yourself up over it.

About what you can do, try and ask yourself these two questions:
1. what do I get out of it?
2. what, in your assumtion, is driving you to do it?
(pay attention, your first answer to both questions would be “Idon’t know”, that’s why I am asking you to try and assume, you will come up with something)
3. Act on those fronts, according to what you find. feel welcome to come back to us with the results and re-consult.

GoodLuck!

@Marva Well, my experience is my two friends who drink to excess like that, they started in high school, and were only drinking on weekends, wound up being full blown alcoholics. One of them caught it in her early 20’s, and has been dry for a very long time. My other girlfriend didn’t get help until her early 40’s after she had lost custody of her children. Actually she had tried to quit a few times before that, and even after losing her kids it took quitting a couple of more times until she finally has been dry for over 2 years now. I don’t think the OP should risk it. If it is just drunken binges in high school and college, it still should not happen EVERY time he/she drinks. Of course I had friends who once or twice drank so much they blacked out or puked all night, but typically they drank just enough to be buzzed or drunk, but not to that extreme. They had some control over themselves even while intoxicated.

@Marva the frequency of the event doesn’t constitute the problem. The blacking out part does and that the OP freely admits to not knowing when to stop. Those are signs of a problem. If he can’t get it under control with self control steps it will lead to more problems. Again, how old is the OP. Age has a lot to do with this. A straight A college kid that does this at frat parties may grow out of it. A 35 year old that is missing work, is another story.

Your brain has decided it likes alcohol whether you enjoy it or not, whether you drink everyday or not. It waits and then does you in. What everyone writes is pretty true, you’ll have more things to feel crappy about than the short time of enjoying that buzz if you keep experimenting with amounts instead of stopping all together.

I have an alcoholic partner and can no longer count the number of times when a good time turned into a real bummer. We makes jokes about those times now but there is underlying anger too we surely didn’t need in our relationship. Stop yourself now before you mess really important stuff up like your health, your job, your standing with loved ones.

Blackouts don’t cause death of brain cells. There are two forms of alcohol blackout. In one (en bloc) blackout, the person experiences amnesia covering the entire period of intoxication whereas in fragmentary blackout the person experiences partial amnesia of that period. The latter are more common than the former.
It is important that blackouts not be confused with being passed out or being unconscious. When people are passed out, they are not conscious of what is going on during that period of time. On the other hand, people who suffer a blackout are experiencing amnesia; they were conscious and aware of what was going on while intoxicated but now they can’t remember what happened. http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/20090702105504.html

If your buzzed, sometimes, your body doesnt know what it is doing, thats why when you wake up and theres a car outside and you dont know where it came from it is because you were buzzed, you could keep drinking because your body doesnt know that its doing that, you could also just be drinking when buzzed because you are an alchoholic.Try to cut down on drinking, that may help.

I do the same thing. Ill be wasted, and try to find ways to compensate just to drink more. (Have an energy drink or similar ). You…and I…have an alcohol problem. But we cant even call it that, atleast in my own case. Ill smoke weed, or drink beer, but once i finish it, especially late at night, i keep doing more trying to achieve some type of buzz that will satisfy my crave. Sometimes i will finish that last beer, begin heating up some food, and go out for that last cigarette. By the time im done prwparing my drunken plate, I find myself wanting just one more beer, or smoke, before i sit to eat. Sorry to elaborate so far, but its obviously a form of depression, anxiety, and an addictive personality rolled into one. Its a tough monster to defeat, but im actively doing all i can now to better myself, as ive been this way far too long. And lastly, to the cunt who called us all basically losers and talked about how she was ‘just addicted to cake’.....well you wouldnt be on an alcohol and drug addiction blog if you were hooked on sugar, so go away, and let us support each other.