Do you have to have a drinking problem to decide that alcohol isn’t working for you anymore?

Kate Bee on Knowing When Alcohol Isn’t Working for You

Do you have to have a drinking problem to decide that alcohol isn’t working for you anymore?

That question kept coming up for me during my recent conversation with Kate Bee, founder of The Sober School, because I think it’s one of the things that keeps so many people from ever really examining their relationship with alcohol. We’ve been conditioned to think there are essentially two groups of people: those who can drink “normally” and those who have a serious alcohol problem. If you’re working, raising a family, paying your bills and generally functioning, it’s pretty easy to look around and decide you must be fine.

But what if “fine” isn’t really the point?

Kate spent years in what is often called gray area drinking, that enormous space between severe alcohol dependence and a relationship with alcohol that feels completely comfortable and uncomplicated. She was a successful BBC journalist. She had worked hard to build the career she wanted, and from the outside there was nothing about her life that fit the stereotype she had in her head of someone with an alcohol problem.

Alcohol was also woven into the culture around her. There were drinks after work, celebrations, networking and the familiar “work hard, play hard” rhythm that is so common in professional life. Other people were drinking too, and there were always people whose drinking looked worse than hers. All of that made it remarkably easy to conclude that whatever was going on, it couldn’t really be a problem.

I understand that thinking because I did some version of it myself. For years, I had perfectly reasonable explanations for my drinking. I was working too much. I was raising children. I was dealing with difficult circumstances. Life was complicated, and alcohol did what I needed it to do for a while: it quieted the noise.

That’s something I think we sometimes miss when we talk about drinking—or really any coping mechanism. People don’t generally develop ways of coping because they’re foolish. We find things that work. The problem is that something can help us through one chapter of our lives and quietly stop serving us in the next.

The Space Between “Normal” and Rock Bottom

One of the things I found so interesting about Kate’s story was that she once believed you were either a “normal drinker” or a “raging alcoholic.” There wasn’t much room in her thinking for anything in between. And because she clearly wasn’t the latter, she assumed she must be the former.

That’s where the idea of gray area drinking can be so helpful. It gives language to an experience that doesn’t necessarily include a dramatic rock bottom. Someone can have a successful career, loving relationships and a life that looks completely normal from the outside while still wondering why alcohol is taking up more mental or emotional space than they want it to.

Maybe they regularly drink more than they intended. Maybe they find themselves using alcohol to cope with stress, loneliness or anxiety. Maybe they keep taking breaks and then returning to the same patterns. Or perhaps there isn’t anything obviously “wrong” at all. They simply have a growing sense that life might feel better without it.

Kate talked about drinking as a way of escaping loneliness and feelings of inadequacy, but eventually the escape began feeding the very feelings she was trying not to experience. Drinking alone made her lonelier. Feeling ashamed of her drinking made her feel worse about herself. The thing that had once made life easier was gradually making her world smaller.

That’s where I think the question needs to change. Instead of looking around for evidence that things are bad enough to justify making a change, what if we simply asked ourselves, “Is this working for me anymore?”

There’s something incredibly freeing about that question because it doesn’t require a crisis. It doesn’t require a diagnosis, a label or permission from anyone else. And it certainly doesn’t require us to prove that we’re suffering enough.

What Happens When You Stop Asking Whether It’s “Bad Enough”?

This is one reason I find the growing sober-curious movement so interesting. More people are examining their relationship with alcohol before their lives fall apart. They aren’t necessarily identifying as alcoholics or even deciding they’ll never drink again. They’re simply becoming curious about whether alcohol is adding something to their lives or taking something away.

That curiosity changed things for Kate. It changed things for me too.

One of the most surprising things I remember about getting sober was discovering that my external circumstances hadn’t magically changed. Work was still demanding. My children still needed me. Money was still money, and difficult people were still difficult. Sobriety didn’t remove the problems; it removed the illusion that alcohol was my only way of handling them.

Suddenly, I had to learn things I probably should have learned much earlier in life: how to set boundaries, how to tolerate discomfort, how to say no, how to rest and how to ask for help. In other words, I began discovering that I had choices.

Kate described something very similar. Once alcohol was gone, she began to realize she had choices she hadn’t really considered before. She could change her work schedule. She could reconsider relationships. She could decide how much access difficult people had to her. Eventually, she could even admit that she no longer loved the journalism career she had spent years building.

I found that part of her story particularly powerful. She had wanted to be a journalist since she was young and had moved around the country chasing jobs and promotions. On paper, she had created exactly the career she was supposed to want. But once the alcohol was gone and some of the noise had quieted, she could finally hear herself asking whether she still wanted it.

Maybe that’s one of the more interesting things about changing any long-standing behavior. We don’t necessarily become different people. Sometimes we simply become more able to hear the person who was there all along.

And Then There’s the Way We Connect

This is where my conversation with Kate moved into territory that has become increasingly important to me and to the work we’re doing at Sober Life Rocks.

Alcohol isn’t only an individual choice. It has become part of our social infrastructure. We gather around it, celebrate with it, network over it and use it to signal that the workday is over or the party has begun. In many places, alcohol has become a kind of currency of connection.

That creates an interesting challenge when someone decides not to participate. If so many of our rituals for connecting have been built around drinking, what replaces it?

Kate told me a story from the tenth anniversary celebration of The Sober School that I loved. Women traveled from around the world to attend, and she was particularly concerned about those arriving alone. She wondered whether, without alcohol acting as the familiar social lubricant, people would know how to connect, so she planned activities to help everyone get comfortable.

It turned out they barely needed them. People talked and talked and talked.

There’s something almost comical about how much we’ve convinced ourselves that people need alcohol to loosen up and connect when, given the right environment, human beings are actually pretty good at it.

That story made me think differently about hospitality. Perhaps the first question when we’re planning a conference, workplace gathering, wedding or even dinner with friends shouldn’t be, “What are we going to serve?” Maybe it should be, “How are we going to help people belong?”

How do we welcome the person who arrives alone? How do we make those first few minutes less awkward? How do we help strangers find something meaningful to talk about? And how do we create a room where someone who drinks, someone who doesn’t, someone in recovery and someone who is simply questioning their relationship with alcohol can all participate without having to explain themselves?

Those are the questions behind much of our work at Sober Life Rocks and AMPLIFY Sober Choices. We aren’t interested in creating a world where everyone makes the same choice about alcohol. We’re interested in creating one where alcohol isn’t the price of admission to connection.

Because belonging doesn’t require everyone to make the same choice. It requires enough room for people to make different ones.

Maybe Nothing Has to Be Terribly Wrong

Toward the end of our conversation, Kate described stopping drinking as the “upgrade” to her life that she didn’t know she needed. I loved that description because sobriety is so often framed in terms of deprivation: giving something up, missing out, becoming the boring one, saying goodbye to fun.

Kate discovered almost the opposite. Alcohol-free living created room for a version of her life she couldn’t quite see while she was drinking.

I think that’s why her story matters to people who may never identify with the traditional recovery narrative. You don’t need a dramatic rock bottom to become curious about something in your life. You don’t have to wait until the consequences outweigh the benefits so dramatically that you have no other choice.

Sometimes nothing is terribly wrong.

Sometimes something just doesn’t feel right anymore.

And maybe, instead of asking whether our drinking is bad enough to justify changing it, we could ask a much more interesting question: What might become possible if I made a different choice?

That’s what Kate and I explore in our full conversation on the Sober Life Rocks podcast, including her experience with gray area drinking, the decision to leave alcohol behind, the creation of The Sober School, and what she discovered once she stopped assuming that the life she already had was the only one available to her.

And if the larger questions about belonging, alcohol and the way we create connection resonate with you, they’re also at the heart of our Sober Life Rocks Connection Hours and AMPLIFY Sober Choices—because the future we’re interested in building isn’t necessarily alcohol-free. It’s one where everyone has the freedom to choose what’s in their cup and still know they belong.

Stay Connected with Kate:

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