High-intensity drinking escalates among teens within two years of first drink

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Study: Initiation of and escalation to high-intensity drinking in young adults

For some teenagers, heavy drinking begins well before they accept their high school diploma, according to a new University of Michigan study.

The average time of escalation from first drink to high-intensity drinking (eight or more drinks in a row for women; 10 or more drinks in a row for men) occurs within two years of first trying alcohol. And teens who initiated high-intensity drinking at younger ages or who had a faster escalation to high-intensity drinking were at greater risk.

The findings, published in JAMA Pediatrics, also indicate that having a family history of alcohol problems and not attending a four-year college by age 20 were associated with starting high-intensity drinking earlier.

U-M researchers followed a national sample of adolescents from the Monitoring the Future study who, as 12th grade students in 2018, reported alcohol use in the past 30 days. This group of 451 participants was surveyed again in 2020 at age 20 as part of the Young Adult Daily Life Study.

The analysis focused on the grade level of initiating any alcohol use, first binge drinking (4+ drinks for women and 5+ drinks for men) and first high-intensity drinking. Respondents disclosed current consumption rates and high-intensity drinking frequency, as well as personal background information including sex, race/ethnicity, family history of alcohol problems and college status.

Attention to heavy alcohol consumption often tends to focus on drinking in college, where parties, tailgates and other events foster this behavior. But the fact that there is heavy drinking in high school suggests that “waiting until college for intervention may be too late for some people because these patterns have already started for many of them,” said Megan Patrick, the study’s lead author and a research professor at the Institute for Social Research.

“Additionally, young adults who do not attend college are often overlooked but are also in need of intervention resources,” she said. “I think it’s important to be aware of when teens start drinking, and whether and how quickly they escalate to heavier drinking so we can appropriately target prevention and intervention efforts.”

The study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The study’s authors included Rebecca Evans-Polce, Brooke Arterberry and Yvonne Terry-McElrath.

Drinking alcohol at home feels different from drinking in public places: a qualitative study of midlife Australians

Highlights

• •Affective experiences on drinking in one’s home differ from those in public settings.
• •Alcohol was used at home to decelerate and in public to become more enlivened.
• •In contrast to drinking at home, drinking in public required heightened vigilance.
• •Drinking outside the house felt more volitional and less habitual.

Abstract

This paper shows how drinking in one’s own home affords different affective experiences to drinking in public settings such as bars, pubs and restaurants. A thematic analysis of interviews with 40 Australians aged 30–65 identified three main variations in alcohol-associated feelings, sensations and urges. Alcohol was used at home to decelerate, but in contrast, people were enlivened when drinking in public venues. Drinking in public generated a sense of vigilance and greater requirement to self-monitor than usually felt necessary at home. For some, drinking at home seemed more habitual; governed by urges rather than intentionality, than drinking outside it did. Policy and interventions that target drinking in the home should be prioritised, such as those focussed on off-premise pricing and availability.

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1. Introduction

Alcohol research focuses overwhelmingly on drinking in public settings (Callinan and MacLean, 2020) yet a substantial proportion of drinking occurs in a person’s home. In Australia 63% of all alcohol consumed is drunk in the drinker’s own home (Callinan et al., 2016), an estimate that was made before the COVID-19 pandemic. It is likely that home drinking is responsible for alcohol-related harm commensurate with its proportion of overall drinking (Mäkelä et al., 2022).

Survey data indicates that home drinking patterns differ somewhat from drinking that occurs in public settings. For example, home drinking has been associated with more frequent drinking, while public drinking has been associated with heavier but less frequent drinking (Callinan et al., 2016). Shifts in the location of drinking can influence alcohol consumption at the population level. Mäkelä et al. (2022) suggest that an increased proportion of drinking occasions occurring at home between 2000 and 2016 in Finland contributed to an overall decline in alcohol consumption. Fenton et al. (2023) make a similar finding specifically in relation to young people.

Existing qualitative studies of home drinking tend to focus on the meanings and functions of home drinking in people’s lives. Drinking is regarded as a ‘pleasurable activity that smooths their passage through everyday life’ (Holloway et al., 2008, 543). Importantly, drinking at home enables people to demarcate leisure time (Lyons et al., 2014) or “adult time” once children go to bed (Brierley-Jones et al., 2014). Drinking at home is also identified as a means of celebrating domestic relationships. Alongside this, it mutes friction between partners or irritation at children (Holloway et al., 2009; MacLean et al., 2022). While alcohol’s capacity to signify relaxation and release is potent, its patterning into everyday life alongside tasks such as cooking dinner also regularises consumption at home for many people (Lyons et al., 2023; MacLean et al., 2022).

Studies emphasise how sensations associated with drinking alcohol at home interact with its social meanings. These include pleasure and improved mood (Cook et al., 2022a; Holloway et al., 2008; MacLean et al., 2022), relaxation and unwinding from the day’s demands (Foster and Ferguson, 2012; Holloway et al., 2008), stress reduction (Emslie et al., 2012; Wright et al., 2022) and enjoyment (Wright et al., 2022). Wright et al. (2022) observe that meanings associated with drinking are influenced by the time and setting when it occurs. For example, drinking on weekends at social occasions is regarded as a means to engage with others.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in steep reductions in on-premise alcohol consumption and commensurate increases in consumption in the home (Fitzgerald et al., 2022). Home drinking literature has been greatly augmented by studies examining people’s experiences of drinking at home during COVID-19 lockdowns, when people in various countries were largely confined to domestic settings. In the UK for example, home spaces were found to afford a range of consumption practices during lockdown, with proximity and availability of alcohol within the home constituting domestic spaces as pleasurable and social for some, while encouraging reflection and decreases in consumption for others (Conroy and Nicholls, 2022). COVID-19 restrictions also transformed the home from a predominantly domestic setting to one also used for work, often involving the repurposing and adaptation of spatial boundaries. In Australia, parents reported using alcohol to navigate these changes and the entangled emotional experiences (Cook et al., 2022a). During lockdowns, the home also became a space where drinking was less bound by structures and routines. This led to some people describing home drinking as feeling increasingly unremarkable and intertwined with domestic activities, influencing when and how they drank (Caluzzi et al., 2022; Cook et al., 2022b) and also how much they consumed (Nicholls and Conroy, 2021). Drinking in the home was experienced by some as habitual (Conroy and Nicholls, 2022; Lyons et al., 2023), consistent with pre-lockdown research (MacLean et al., 2022). While these studies necessarily touch on the sensations, emotional states and urges that people experience when drinking at home, how these differ from those associated with drinking in public has rarely been a focus in the literature.

1.1. Affective experience

For this paper, we use theories about affect to explore variations in people’s experiences of drinking at home compared to drinking in public places. Affect is a term used to describe forces that influence capacity for change to occur. Affect functions as ‘broad tendencies or lines of force’ (Thrift, 2004, p. 60), literally ‘affecting’ us to act in particular ways. Affect operates on us to some degree pre-consciously, as something ‘to which [individuals’] body parts (broadly understood) respond and in which they participate’ (Thrift, 2004, p. 60). For Massumi (2002), affect moves continually between and among people and their physical worlds, surfacing as emotions, sensations and drives.

Affect has been understood as part of socio-material assemblages. This is to suggest that emotions and sensations emerge through engagements between bodies, places and other forces, rather than arising in sovereign individuals, as they are usually thought to do. Fox and Aldred argue, for example, that emotions may be regarded ‘as part of a continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environments’ (2017, p. 115). Similarly, Stewart’s (2020) work highlights how affect is part of everyday life, where affect is produced and experienced through seemingly mundane interactions with people, objects and spaces. Thus, theorists make a case that emotions, sensations and urges originate in people’s collective interactions with the world, including its material and non-material elements.

Alcohol and other drug researchers have applied these arguments to make sense of substance use. They posit that feelings and sensations felt by individuals who use substances emerge through contingent configurations or networks of forces that include, but go beyond, the persons themselves and their internal physiologies (Bøhling, 2015; Demant and Landolt, 2014). In doing so, they critique pharmacological accounts where drugs such as alcohol are understood to act directly on the body to produce relatively consistent effects (see here Hart and Moore, 2014). Jayne et al. (2010, p. 544), write about affective states experienced when drinking alcohol as generated in people’s relationships with the physical world around them: ‘emotions both reside in bodies and places and exist as relational flow, fluxes and currents in-between people and places’.

Places are regarded as having distinct affective atmospheres, that emerge through interactions between their characteristics (for example buildings, music, size), the people present and the kinds of sociality or practices that are enacted within them (Anderson, 2009). Moreover, affective atmospheres are experienced collectively by people who inhabit them (Vašát and Váně, 2023). So, for example, atmospheres of excitement experienced in night-time city centre entertainment precincts arise through a confluence of characteristics of venue characteristics, expectations of what will happen within them, people’s determination to maximise leisure time, styles of policing, fighting, and sexual engagements, as well as the presence of alcohol (MacLean and Moore, 2014; Shaw, 2014). While affective atmospheres in domestic settings have been less thoroughly explored (for exceptions, see Böhme, 2017; Shilon and Eizenberg, 2021), home as a place can afford feelings of comfort and safety through the relative privacy and autonomy it offers (MacLean et al., 2022).

Taken together, the literature above highlights important entanglements of place, alcohol and affect. Such arguments provide a theoretical explanation for something that emerged compellingly in research interviews conducted with a sample of 40 Australian drinkers, and which underlies our research question. In this paper we ask whether affective experiences afforded by drinking alcohol at home differ from those that arise when drinking in public places, and if so, how these differences might be characterised.

1.2. Method

We report here on qualitative interviews conducted with 40 people as part of a larger mixed methods study of drinking in the home in Australia. The study commenced with a survey in 2018, with respondents recruited through targeted Facebook advertisements. People were eligible to participate if they were Australian residents, aged 30–65 years (midlife) and consumed alcohol in their homes at least once per week. Potential respondents were advised that they could win a grocery voucher if they completed the survey. The 2113 respondents who completed the survey were asked whether they would consent to be contacted again to request their participation in an interview.

1.2.1. Sampling

A selection of those who agreed to be recontacted were approached and invited to participate in a telephone interview. We targeted participants for this qualitative component purposively to ensure a mix of ages, genders and drinking patterns. Our sampling strategy was also designed to access light drinkers who consumed alcohol at a level that was either within (fewer than 14 Australian standard drinks (ASD) a week) or heavy drinkers who consumed considerably above (at least 35 ASD weekly) Australian drinking guidelines at the time (National Health and Medical Research Council, 2009).

We interviewed 40 participants, which allowed us to access people with a range of demographic characteristics. Interviews took between 15 minutes and 1 hour and were conducted by telephone by two researchers from late 2018 to mid-2019. Ethical approval was provided by La Trobe University [HEC18343].

The eventual sample in this qualitative study included 19 men and 21 women. Participants were drawn from all Australian states and territories. Each drank at home at least weekly, with the sample evenly split between light and heavier drinkers. Study participants were relatively economically advantaged compared with people in the Australian population as measured by average income (see Table 1).

Table 1. Participant demographic information.

Gender	Number of participants	% (rounded to nearest whole number)
Woman	21	53
Man	19	48
Non-binary	0	0
Drinking status
Light drinker	20	50
Heavier drinker	20	50
Age
30-39	10	25
40-49	13	33
50-59	12	30
60-69	5	13
State or territory
Victoria	12	30
New South Wales	7	18
Queensland	6	15
Australian Capital Territory	2	5
Northern Territory	1	3
South Australia	1	3
Tasmania	1	3
Annual household income (Australian dollars)
$0-$29,999	4	10
$30,000-$64,999	8	20
$65,000-$109,000	12	30
$110,000+	16	40

1.2.2. Interviews and analysis

Open-ended questions and extensive probing (Travers, 2013) were used to encourage participants to share detailed accounts of times they drank in different places. Our questions explored how much participants drank at home and elsewhere, who they were with, how drinking felt to them at home and elsewhere, and what they were doing alongside drinking (see Appendix A for the theme sheet which guided interviews).

Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and the transcripts imported into QSR NVivo 12. Data were coded by the first author, using a thematic analytic approach (Willis, 2013). We focus here on accounts that interviewees gave us in response to questions about whether and how they experienced drinking at home as different from drinking in public venues such as bars, pubs and restaurants, or for one participant at a community cricket match. Themes were generated through an iterative process of reading and discussing the data. Participants are referred to here by an interview number and as man (M) or woman (W).

2. Findings

Our findings are structured around three main themes which reflected key differences between experiences of drinking at home and in public settings as described by participants. These are: using alcohol to mediate energy levels, urge to monitor the self when drinking alcohol, and habituality and intentionality in consuming alcohol.

2.1. Alcohol in mediation of energy levels

Many participants in our study described how drinking alcohol improves mood and helps people enjoy being with family or partners. This was evident in their discussions both of drinking at home and of drinking elsewhere. However, as observed in other research on home drinking (Brierley-Jones et al., 2014; Lyons et al., 2014; Wright et al., 2022), drinking at home was valued by participants in our study for its capacity to mark a retreat from the public world on returning home or release from childcare duties once children were asleep. In this context, drinking at home effected a sense of relaxation and a slowing of pace for our participants: ‘It gives me a mental benefit; it makes me relax and makes me deal with my circumstances happily’ [#37, M]. This capacity makes alcohol an effective marker of moving from a task- and other-oriented mode, to a self- or domestic family-oriented private mode (Lyons et al., 2014), as one participant explained:

[Alcohol] doesn’t really affect my experience of being at home but I do find that it can be a way of relaxing and letting the workday go, helping me transition into being home. [#18, W]

Drinking at home affords or produces an affective capacity (Thrift, 2004) for a different orientation to the world. For our participants, home drinking provided a way to shift one’s affective register towards slowing down and engaging with emotions and oneself in the present. The change in affect described by participants as occurring in tandem with drinking at home was overwhelmingly from activity and stress to relaxation: ‘It’s nice to finish work physically and just have a beer and a sit down and try and relax’ [#24, M]; ‘it’s a relaxing agent’ [#8, M]. The term to ‘switch off’ [#13, M] was frequently used to describe this (see also Holloway et al., 2008):

Yeah, it’s definitely a switch off sort of thing that I associate with coming home and then forgetting about work or whatever is going on in your life …. Like if you’re at work and coming home from work or if you’ve been out for a morning doing stuff with whatever, it’s a time to sit down and relax. It is one of those things where I think it’s a bit of a routine — that instead of going to grab a cup of coffee, I’d go and get a beer. [#15, M]

One woman noted that drinking allowed her to ignore mess in the house and defer tasks to a later time, rather than continuing work around the house: ‘If I’m drinking, I write on a bit of paper to remind myself to do it the next day’ [#7, W]. Others spoke similarly of using alcohol at home to quiet the mind, disengage from other people’s requirements, enjoy the present and render their bodies less ‘restless’; calmer and more comfortable:

It enables me to not think about work pressures. It enables me to, I guess, just be more present […] being able to listen to the radio or watching the TV, or playing some computer games or something. [#8, M]

I think it’s just relaxation, I think. It just makes me a little bit more relaxed. I think it’s just – makes you a little bit calmer or – just relaxation [#23, M]

It makes me less restless and feel a bit more relaxed and more comfortable …. There’s less pressure to engage with people when you’re [drinking] at home. [#3, M]

A couple of participants in our study said that there was little difference in how they felt when drinking at home or elsewhere. As one told us: ‘If I have 10 beers at a pub or 10 beers at home, that’s going to feel exactly the same’ [#39, M]. For these people, it was often the presence of others that determined how they would register the effects of alcohol. Another felt that her mood on drinking was ‘heightened’ when her partner or friends were present, regardless of where they were:

If I’m staying with my partner for a while or if he’s here, or if I have friends over for dinner or something, I think drinking socially whether it’s at home or out is always different because … it heightens – I tend to laugh a lot. But I guess it does make everything that little bit easier. [#34, W]

Above, we introduced the concept of affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009), which emerge in the interactions between places, bodies, practices and alcohol, producing distinct sensations and emotions. As one woman observed: ‘I think what’s going through my head when I have the drink in my hand is so much more than just the chemical reaction of the alcohol’ [#16, W]. Sensations associated with drinking within public settings were contingent on context, as one participant reflected when asked what intoxication meant to him:

That’s a good question. That’s quite a hard question to answer. It’s sort of a feeling that – I guess each time’s different depending on the situation you’re in. [#11, M]

In response to questions we asked about whether drinking at home was different from drinking at a venue, most participants agreed that alcohol’s effects varied according to setting. In contrast to drinking at home, drinking with others in public places made participants feel livelier, lending them the energy and alertness required in such a situation:

… [I’m] much more relaxed at home. Simple as that. I think the simple answer is, relaxed at home, whereas … when I’m drinking and I’m out, well, I would be sociable, I’d be with people, and therefore I’m more on-edge. Yeah, more anxious …. more hyped up too, probably. So, much more relaxed at home. [#12, M]

Some interviewees noted that they did not need alcohol to do as much work when they were at home as when they were out. This was because being at home required less engagement, whereas being outside the home demanded a more animated self. Thus, feelings of relaxation and detachment (at home) and sociability (outside home) were co-produced by both drinking and the context in which drinking occurred. For one participant, this manifested as feeling that alcohol’s effects were more apparent to her outside the home, acknowledging that this might have been because she drank more in public settings:

I don’t really notice its effects at home other than the relaxation. I certainly think I get more affected when I’m out, probably because I will drink more when I’m out but also … we have a lot of socialising to do with our job and it’s not fun [laughs]. I think sometimes in that situation, alcohol can make you feel better about what you’re going to say. At home, I don’t really think it affects me other than it does contribute to my relaxing at the end of the day; but [when I’m] out, definitely I think it has more of an effect … it’s quite a different feeling from being at home. [#18, W]

For other participants, an affective atmosphere of ‘vibrancy’ at a bar or pub produced through other people’s interactions within the setting would seep into the way they felt while drinking, making them feel more energetic and voluble, or lending them energy to stay out longer:

Whereas if you’re at a pub, obviously you know, it’s a noisier more vibrant environment so you’re probably more … likely to go the other way and a few drinks sort of gets you a bit chirpier and a bit louder. [#25, M]

Oh yes, I’m much sleepier at home. I go right to bed, whereas [when I’m] out [alcohol] might give me more energy to keep partying for a while. [#36, W]

One man observed that he would not be able to achieve the same ‘silly mood’ at home as he did at the cricket club drinking with friends, where an affective atmosphere would spread and build. He contrasted this with his more subdued mood when drinking at home:

[At] the club, you’re surrounded by other friends and a lot of the cricketers. You probably get a little bit more rowdy than at home. If I had three or four drinks at home, I might be a little bit happier or act a little bit silly, I suppose. But at the club – yes, it feels a little bit different, because [it’s] more about the friends and enjoying the occasion.… Everyone’s in a happy mood – some people drink more than others, and their happy mood becomes a silly mood later – whereas at home, yes, I don’t know if you get to the same level … [#30, M]

2.2. Urge to monitor the self when drinking alcohol

Configurations of places, people and alcohol can create varying felt imperatives to self-monitor. Different settings where alcohol is consumed generate particular anxieties concerning appropriate behaviour, physical hazards, and the potential for conflict. In previous work (MacLean et al., 2022), we argued that drinking at home interacts with meanings and features of the home to contribute to the constitution of homes as ‘home-like’ – as places that offer a sense of sanctuary and retreat from the world and its demands to be or act in particular ways. One participant explained how drinking alcohol does this:

I’ve been lying on the sofa with my book, it’s a bleak and grey afternoon out there, but I’m cosy with the book. So, I don’t think it’s the alcohol that’s wholly contributing to that relaxed feeling. It’s the whole sort of circumstances of the occasion. [#38, W]

Self-monitoring around alcohol was not always absent in homes. A few participants noted that they avoided getting drunk at home when children might witness them intoxicated. However, homes offered a space that, for most, reduced compulsion to worry about how they appeared to others. This is evident in participants’ discussion of feeling relaxed and ‘switching off’ when drinking at home, in the quotes above.

Drinking outside the home did not produce commensurate sensations of ease and cosiness for our participants. Rather, drinking alcohol helped to constitute an affective atmosphere that rendered public drinking establishments such as bars and restaurants, and the people inhabiting them, more engaging and vibrant, also as we saw above. But relatedly, participants articulated feeling less control over what would happen to them and less secure in public drinking establishments than at home. Drinking in public places rendered them, at least to some degree, vigilant about the threats, both small and large, that accompany this practice:

… when I’m out – having worked in the [nightlife] industry for so long I’m very wary of my surroundings. Whereas at home I take it – well I don’t need to look after my safety [#11, M].

It’s safer if I do drink a lot, [that] I’m at home. I don’t have to worry that I’ll get hit by a car or something … It’s me, just me in my own place. Yes, there’s risk factors, but I feel like there’s a lot more risk factors externally, if I drink too much if I’m out [#21, W].

Some participants felt fearful of getting into conflicts in the night-time economy, particularly those who were heavy drinkers. This produced a more acute feeling of needing to monitor their alcohol consumption and subsequent comportment. The following quote shows how an urge to self-monitor is affectively learned through past experiences in places such as nighttime entertainment venues where police are likely to quickly attend to disturbances:

I tend to get in trouble when I go out if I’ve had too much to drink.… I tend to get a bit mouthy I suppose. I’m usually quite a shy, polite person. I think that’s probably why I started drinking in the first place, to overcome my shyness; but it’s just – it all seems to backfire on me. [For instance,] my last experience with the police, oh, probably 10 months ago. So I’m quite wary of going out in public being drunk nowadays. Yeah, so it’s just – feels more secure at home. [#31, M]

Women in the study were particularly anxious about safety at night-time drinking venues. Drawing on previous experiences of violent relationships, one woman described her fear of unwanted attention from men when she drank outside her home:

I have trust issues with men. I was in two violent relationships …. I go out and I can’t really deal with men who want to pick on me or anything. And I’m not nice. It’s better for me to just sit at home quietly [and drink] [laughs]. [#20, W]

Some of our older participants were anxious to ensure they did not put themselves at risk of a fall when drinking in public – a concern that was less pressing at home, as two women explained:

I do go out to lunch and dinner and so forth, and I suppose, depending upon whether it’s a weekend or something, I might have a glass of wine with a meal. But that’s where I’m particularly conscious about mobility issues.… It’s really something I have to be so aware of and so careful about, so one glass of wine is fine, spirits are definitely not on the list. [#38, W]

I don’t like being intoxicated when I’m out. If we’re out at a pub for a social function I don’t like that feeling at all … I can’t tell you the last time I got so intoxicated I couldn’t stand up. If I had a bottle of wine when I went out, I’m very cautious. I don’t want to walk to go to the toilet in case I fall over or something and I’m really more conscious of not being in control. [#7, W]

One participant compared drinking at home to consuming alcohol at a beer garden or pub, observing that she felt scrutinised while drinking in public settings in a way she did not at home:

I think in a beer garden or pub, it’s a lot more – it’s more scary, because you know that these days, particularly, you’re going to be viewed by the security people at the bar and the pub and [are] very much in danger of being thrown out. Sometimes, those situations escalate into fights and whatever, or being cut off at the bar and told you’re not allowed to have another drink, and then sometimes people get angry about that – and potential violence and potential legal [consequences] even, police getting involved. [#16, W].

As is evident in this quote, participants were concerned not to appear intoxicated outside their homes. When drinking in public they felt an imperative to monitor both how much they consumed and how drunk they appeared to be. While the participant quoted above aimed to avoid violence or being ejected from a venue for drunkenness, others were motivated to avoid embarrassing themselves and others to reduce the risk of a humiliating denial of alcohol service on a business class flight or, especially, of being judged as acting inappropriately in a setting:

… when I’m out of the home … I’d be more aware of how my intoxication was observable to other people.… Look, it might be my gait or my speech or what I’m saying. Any of those kinds of objective signs. I’d want to keep a lid on that so it wasn’t so apparent … But the only public place I would really drink now would be in a restaurant or when travelling. When we travel, we travel business class, so I wouldn’t want the service to be stopped. So, it would be very important that I’m not appearing to be drunk. And in a restaurant, it’s just not a good look. It would be embarrassing to me and whoever I was dining with. [#8, M]

I think if you’re drunk at home, …you’re not making an idiot of yourself. Like we had an event a couple of weeks ago. It [involved drinking] in this group and I thought, ‘Jeez, I’m really going to have to pace myself with this’, because it was going to be a big night. I didn’t do anything stupid, but the next day, I thought ‘I hope I didn’t do anything stupid or was I okay? Was I being a dickhead or anything like that?’ Whereas at home … if you’re being a dickhead and your husband’s there, it doesn’t really matter, because he knows what I’m like. [#29, W]

2.3. Habituality and intentionality in consuming alcohol

Habits are grounded in individual and collective past practices, including when and where we drink alcohol. Habits shape our affective urges in the present (Poulsen, 2015). Habit is at work in how we feel when we take a drug such as alcohol to produce states of pleasure and relief (Dennis, 2020). Regularly drinking at home, in the same setting with the same people, creates a desire to do so again. In turn, this makes practices such as home drinking that are driven at least in part by habit, to some degree less intentional.

Alcohol use at home is patterned into daily life for many people (Lyons et al., 2023; MacLean et al., 2022). Home engenders an affective sense that the active and self-directed personhood required in the outside world may take a back seat (Holloway et al., 2008). Thus, it is a place that enables routines and habits.

One woman whom we interviewed [#7, W] described looking forward to and then savouring what she referred to as her ‘habit’ of drinking wine at home every evening. Often, the habit of drinking dulled painful feelings or discomfort:

I feel like if I’ve had a really stressful day it helps. I don’t know if it does or if it’s just habit. … I don’t know whether I do it as a reward for myself because I got through the bad day or whether I do it as a numbing thing. [#34, W]

Indeed, participants in our study were much more likely to describe drinking at home as a habit, than they were when referring to drinking in public places: ‘It’s just become such a habit now’ [#16, W]; ‘It’s probably a habit’ [#27, W]. The degree to which habits make up home life was evident in some participants’ discussions of their efforts to reduce home drinking by establishing new habits of non-drinking. One woman [#26] had established a ‘habit of not drinking’ on weekdays so she could help with her children’s homework.

Drinking at home appears to require less thought or active decision-making than drinking elsewhere, because alcohol is on hand in the house and drinking occurs at the same time of day, prompted by the same repeated events such as cooking dinner (Brierley-Jones et al., 2014; Conroy and Nicholls, 2021; Lyons et al., 2023; Wright et al., 2022). People drink alcohol as part of these quotidian repeated home-based activities, many with a sense of reduced volition or control: ‘I like to have a glass of wine with dinner and then I end up just continuing’ [#13, W].

In contrast to the habitual nature of home drinking, participants told us that drinking in bars and pubs offers more distractions and requires decision-making that makes it feel somewhat more intentional. This is at least in part because events involving drinking outside the home are usually social, so a person’s focus is on conversation and engagement, with drinking regarded as a means to support that, rather than an activity in itself:

I guess if it’s in another place I’m usually with somebody, so there’s conversation and a different focus. So, it’s more positive. It feels more like an event, I guess. It’s not so much a celebration, but there’s a reason you want to have a drink. You want to be social and all those things. Whereas at home there’s just doing it because that’s what you do. It’s just habit. [#13, W]

As some of our participants described in the sections above, drinking outside the house was constrained by anxiety to remain cognitively in control. Further, the range of public drinking places one could attend and the choice of alcohol products available in them necessitated active decision-making. Selecting what beer for his partner to drink was, as one man commented wryly; ‘like choosing perfume’ [#2, M]. This again introduces intentionality into drinking and modifies the effects of habit. These factors worked together to make it easier for some, such as the participant quoted below, to moderate her drinking when she was out of the house:

I feel like when I’m out I can have a few drinks and not go completely overboard if I decide to. At home once I’ve had a couple, I have to have a large amount. [#21, W]

This is not to say that people in midlife always drink moderately in public settings. Some of our interviewees told us that they would drink more heavily in bars and pubs than at home. However when this occurred, it was often opportunistic rather than driven by patterned habits. For example, a couple of women with younger children at home said they took opportunities to drink more heavily when they were out of the house without their children. Further highlighting the link between alcohol, affect and place, one man also talked about how he drank more at pub ‘happy hours’, when drinks are cheap: ‘So that has sort of encouraged me to have as many as I can within that hour’ [#31, M].