I Took 25 Supplements a Day Instead of Facing My Drinking.

My wife used to make fun of the supplements. I took 25 of them a day for four to five months. Milk thistle. NAC. Electrolytes. Whatever forum post promised it would undo what the night before did to me.

I told myself it was about staying healthy. It wasn't. It was about staying drunk without paying for it.

That's the part nobody puts in a sobriety post. Not the drinking itself. The engineering around it. The research. The stacking. The Sunday morning ritual of laying out pills like I was managing a chronic condition, because by then I was, I just refused to call it that.

I had IBS every single weekend for years. Woke up Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and my gut was wrecked. I knew why. I chose to research supplements instead of skipping the second bottle of wine.

There was a stretch where my in-laws would come out from North Dakota every December and stay a month. My father-in-law liked a cocktail every night, so I did too. My office was a shed in the backyard. More than once that December I'd walk out there and my heart would be pounding so hard I thought I might have a heart attack. Multiple times. Same month, different years.

And I still didn't stop.

That's the thing about the exception clause. "Just this weekend." "Just because they're in town." "Just until the holidays are over." You get to write your own exceptions when you're the one making the rules. I was smart enough to build a whole supplement protocol around a problem I wasn't ready to deal with. Smart people are good at that. We can build a business case for almost anything if we want the outcome badly enough.

The supplements didn't fix anything. It just bought me a few more years of telling myself a story.

What actually changed things wasn't a supplement. It was surgery in April 2025, and being told I had to stop drinking two weeks out. I remember thinking I was fine with it and not totally understanding why. Looking back, I'd been quietly rehearsing that decision for years without knowing it. That's Stage 4 in the framework, Decision Point. Not a rock bottom. Just the moment the thing you'd been avoiding finally gets said out loud, even if it's a doctor who says it for you.

I haven't touched a supplement like that since. You don't need 25 workarounds when you remove the thing you were working around.

If you've got a version of that, a stack of fixes for a problem you haven't dealt with yet, book a call and let's talk through it.

If your heart pounds or races like that, see a doctor. Don't wait. If you drink every day and feel shaky, sweaty or sick when you go without, talk to a doctor before you stop.