We know the drill. As soon as December hits, every occasion is an occasion to have a cheeky drink or three. Bottle of prosecco in the office? Yeah, go on then… it’s Christmas. Quick pit stop at the pub after work? Why not. It’s Christmas, ain’t it? Shall we grab a wine from the off licence on the way home? Yeah. Make it a mulled one.
Everyone lives in the happy assumption that Christmas is the time to drink all the drinks, which is fine to an extent. But what sort of relationship does peak period of alcohol consumption have with our mental health, and why are we so keen to join in with the hangover-heavy festivities anyway?
Well, I hate to break it to you but Christmas isn’t entirely to blame. It plays its part of course, it’s the time of year when more people are more inclined to have various social obligations at which booze will often be the glue that holds everything together. But there are elements of our own behaviour that makes us even more susceptible to those week long December hangovers.
Consulting Clinical Psychologist Stuart Linke explains that these sorts of drinking habits (i.e. drinking more) tend to be occasion based as opposed to just the time of year. ‘Christmas is obviously a time where lots of people collectively think it’s party time, particularly in the working environment’, he tells* The Debrief*.
It’s an aspect that we all look forward to on some sort of level. I’m sure I speak for many of us when I say it’s as much about signifying a work wind down and a huge release from the pressures of professional environments as much as it is about having a load of parties to go to. ‘There is also a bit of social pressure to drink’, Stuart says. ‘If you can see that everybody else is drinking more at that time [you might feel the need] to keep up but don’t necessarily want to’.
That niggling feeling in the back of your mind? That might be FOMO rearing its ugly head again. And with so much going on at this time of year, we can only imagine that the pressure to ‘keep up’ with the pace and regularity of drinks to be even more present.
It’s a pressure that women seem to feel obliged to give into more than men. Even though drinking rates in the UK has taken a fall over all – at their lowest since 2005, in fact – women seem to be drinking more than they used to. In a series of interviews with young professional women who were drinking excessively, Stuart found that one of the reasons they drank was because they found it empowering.
‘We spoke to some women at who have professionally successful lives and what they told us was that they’re very busy and work very hard, and working hard to be like everybody else but in particular to be like men’, he says. ‘Then, when they finish work and there’s a holiday or a weekend they say “Right, that’s it. I’m no longer a responsible person anymore so I can have a good time” and once they start drinking the alcohol, its disinhibiting and then so they carry on drinking’.
Drinking more than you intend to is an easy habit to slip into. Since the beginning of the month I’ve found myself trudging home much later than usual thanks to a few too many ‘accidental’ after work drinks, just because it’s Christmas. It feels like it’s an excuse that I’m not entirely conscious of making, but I just end up fall into.
Stuart agrees that it’s a pattern that lots of people find themselves in. He describes this as what some professionals refer to as ‘seemingly irrelevant decisions’. ‘People end up finding they’re dinking a lot and they don’t plan to go out drinking but they’ve made lots of small decisions along the way that have lead them into their drinking’, he explains.
‘For example, choosing to stay late at work to finish a project, means that someone else is in the office with you finishing. And then you say let’s get a quick one on the way home because you haven’t got time to do much else this evening. You won’t bother now because it’s too late. You just go to that bar around the corner for one but by the time you’ve finished you’ve spent the whole evening drinking’, but what you haven’t realised is that earlier on the decision to stay late at work, Stuart adds, you probably already had in the back of your head that you might go for a drink. It’s never with the intention to stay for the whole night. Perhaps you’d stop off for one. ‘But there’s actually an accumulative effect on all of these small decisions so that in the end you wind up drinking far more than you planned’.
Rings a little bit too true, doesn’t it? And the thing is, it’s so easy to do around Christmas because there are more reasons to stay late to finish up a piece of work before this end of year meeting or that final proposal, right? ‘It’s doing what everyone else is doing’, Stuart says. Here goes that’s social pressure thing again.
‘I think one of the issues is also that people surround themselves by people who do the same as them’, Stuart continues. ‘But it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is doing the same. Quite a lot of people are not drinking that much but they can just quietly go home. You don’t see them. So, you imagine that everyone around you is the same as you [and drinking just as much] but if you actually compared it really wouldn’t be the case’.
But instead of taking stock of whether or not we actually want to be drinking as much as we do at this time of year, if at all, we concede to the seemingly inherent obligations of Christmas – going out more often than usual with people we’re assuming also want to go for drinks and staying out way longer than we intend to just to keep up with the big guns. It does't sound so fun and festive when we put it like that, does it?
Like this? You might also be interested in…
Cheesy Christmas Drinks That Are Only Okay To Drink At This Time Of Year
There’s A Terrifying Amount Of Sugar In Your Christmas Drinks
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.