There’s an old (not very good joke) which goes something like:

I used to think drinking was bad for me. So I gave up thinking.

This is exactly what happens when you go on vacation. The tenuous link between having fun and consumption of alcohol, which is partly (but not entirely) fuelled by advertising clicks into action in your brain. The feeling and behaviors associated with drinking a lager with your full English breakfast, to line your stomach from the massive hangover which finished at 4am, are caused by a person’s thoughts, not outside stimuli like people, situations and events. To ever have a hope of sticking to something like the same recommended limits people on vacation have to change how they think about being on holiday which will then alter how they behave.

However, this as we all know is unlikely to happen. I recall a quote from the TV show Booze Britain which went something like this:

Why is it that certain people are so against solitary drinking, as if it’s somehow ’sad’? If I fancy a heavy drinking session, I would rather wake up at 4am in a pool of my own urine and sick, having passed out 2 hours earlier, in the comfort of my own living room than lying in some dark alley next to a low-grade nightclub, minus my wallet and leather coat, any day of the week.

Good grief.Why do we drink more alcohol when we’re on vacation?

There’s an old (not very good joke) which goes something like:

I used to think drinking was bad for me. So I gave up thinking.

This is exactly what happens when you go on vacation. The tenuous link between having fun and consumption of alcohol, which is partly (but not entirely) fuelled by advertising clicks into action in your brain. The feeling and behaviors associated with drinking a lager with your full English breakfast, to line your stomach from the massive hangover which finished at 4am, are caused by a person’s thoughts, not outside stimuli like people, situations and events. To ever have a hope of sticking to something like the same recommended limits people on vacation have to change how they think about being on holiday which will then alter how they behave.

However, this as we all know is unlikely to happen. I recall a quote from the TV show Booze Britain which went something like this:

Why is it that certain people are so against solitary drinking, as if it’s somehow ’sad’? If I fancy a heavy drinking session, I would rather wake up at 4am in a pool of my own urine and sick, having passed out 2 hours earlier, in the comfort of my own living room than lying in some dark alley next to a low-grade nightclub, minus my wallet and leather coat, any day of the week.

Good grief.