Drinking Score
I have finally come out with the thing that’s going to change the way that people think about alcohol issues. My Drinking Score is an objective, science-based and useful metric that actually measures and tracks how you’re doing with alcohol struggles and your improvement. For the first time ever, you are going to be able to get a nuanced measure of what you’re drinking, your drinking habits, and what the severity and problems of your drinking look like. This is a new approach to addiction that destroys the concept of “alcoholic” and moves away from the toxic all or nothing mindset.
Why did I want to create the Drinking Score?
You most likely know my story - I used to be a meth addict. I ended up going to rehab for meth and other drug use, but I drank A LOT before finding the harder drugs. While I was in rehab they dropped me in AA meetings. Even though my struggle at the moment wasn’t with alcohol they didn’t have narcotics anonymous or meth anonymous. I remember going to meeting after meeting having to introduce myself as something I didn’t even identify with, “My name is Adi and I’m an alcoholic.” I wasn’t allowed to talk or question my new label. Eventually I got sober for a while, relapsed, ended up going to jail, and had to come back out into the world facing myself as an “alcoholic”. I always hated the term “alcoholic”. It felt like someone was putting me in a box for people that aren’t supposed to be able to function like normal human beings. I was an alcoholic and the label was expected to be stamped on my forehead for the rest of my life. I hated the term so much I ended up doing my own research on addiction and came to find out that I don’t actually think I am the thing that they have been making me call myself for forever. I learned how to heal my relationship with alcohol and now I am able to drink socially and enjoy my life without having this label carried with me. I knew we had to get away from this black and white thinking. People needed a new language to speak that wasn’t this “all or nothing” mentality. This drinking score is the language. People finally have a way of measuring their progress and their problem severity. Instead of clumping everyone together and calling them alcoholics, we actually have a way to measure exactly where you are. And a way to measure your progress that’s not just counting the days in a row abstinent.
How does the drinking score work?
I took all of the evidence based around the factors that are the most important and some of the assessment tools that have been proven to be most effective in assessing someone’s addiction problem. The assessment is super quick and easy - all you have to do is answer about 15-20 questions depending on how severe your problem is with alcohol now. At the end you will get a score of 0-100 that moves around 6 different levels of drinking. There are four factors that the assessment is based on; level of control, life consequences, physical health impact, and mental health struggles and early life trauma.
First off, we look at the level of control. How much and when you drink matters a little bit less than your ability to control your drinking. There are functional drinkers who drink a lot periodically, but the thing that matters most is that when they drink they’re in control of how many drinks they consume. Another person could only drink once a month, but as soon as they have their first sip of alcohol they can’t stop. Are you able to tell yourself to stop when you need to? This is where level of control comes into play.
Then we take into account life consequences. I’m sure that we have all seen examples of how addiction creates negative consequences. With addiction, many of us suffer and quality of life can seriously worsen. If life is starting to suffer because of use that becomes a big risk factor. Another factor that is important is the impact on physical health. This is where quantity of use does matter. We all know that alcohol isn’t good for our bodies, it’s not a medicine. Even if you’re drinking at a very low level you’re still increasing the risk of some health issues. If you binge drink (4-5 drinks a day), drink daily, or have excessive drinking episodes multiple times a week that can cause massive health consequences.
It’s important that we are able to measure your health consequences and the impact of your substance use on your health. Lastly, how do mental health struggles and early life trauma contribute to your alcohol use? There is always a “why” that leads to what our relationship with alcohol looks like.
The drinking score will give you a customized report based on where you stand in these areas. It’s so important to have a customized report, because after working with thousands of people over the past decade I can tell you that there is no constant level for addiction. What I’ve seen is that people’s addiction problems go up and down - they moderate themselves and become more extreme based on life circumstances, environmental issues, mental health functioning, etc. The drinking score is free, because I want you to finally get an answer of, where do I stand? Instead of having to second guess yourself all the time, you are able to see exactly what level you are at. This is so important to know where you are starting, because you can be on your path to your goal around drinking, but there is no way to indicate that things are getting better. Or you may think that you’re failing because you’re not completely abstinent and give up, without knowing that things were actually going really well.
The Drinking Score is a tool that finally makes it easy for people to measure how they’re actually performing, get a baseline, and do whatever they want to try to do to start seeing improvement. You can go to meetings, go to a therapist, try a medication, or join IGNTD and see how it changes your drinking score. This gives you the ability to know if what you are doing is actually working by seeing your drinking score improve. This notion that success happens as an all or nothing equation is false. The idea that you either beat your addiction struggles or you failed is false. Reality is that sometimes you will screw up, relapse, but what’s important is that you’re on the right path and you keep moving forward. This drinking score is going to change the game, because it’s going to give you a way from the comfort of your home, your phone, your tablet, your laptop to assess where things are at right now and keep tracking them on an ongoing basis.