"It relaxes me"

Alcohol is a sedative, so the belief that it relaxes you starts from something true. The useful question is how much of the evening's relaxation the drug accounts for.

Researchers have tested this in laboratories for decades. The usual method is to give some people alcohol and others a placebo or a plain drink, then put everyone through something stressful, often a speech to strangers, and measure how bad they feel. In 2019 a psychologist named Bresin pooled 52 of these studies. People who'd had alcohol did feel less bad after the stressor, and the size of the difference was small to moderate. When he looked instead at how much distress rose from before the stressor to after it, the difference between drinkers and non-drinkers wasn't statistically reliable. He described the evidence overall as mixed.

Set that beside the kitchen. There the relief feels total and close to instant. In the lab, with the setting held equal for everyone, the drug's own contribution is modest and doesn't always show up. My reading is that the gap between the two is the setting. In the lab nobody's working day has just ended.

A second piece of research says something about how the drug part works when it does. In 1990 Claude Steele and Robert Josephs described what they called alcohol myopia. Alcohol doesn't dissolve a worry. It narrows your attention to whatever's immediately in front of you, so that there's less room for anything else. Their conclusion was that alcohol together with a distracting activity reliably reduces anxiety, because the activity takes up the attention that's left.

You probably know both halves of this from experience. If there's cooking or a film or company to absorb you, the narrowed attention goes there, and the bad meeting fades. If there's nothing, and you're alone at the table with the problem, your attention narrows onto the problem. That's the evening when the second glass makes things darker.

So even the pharmacological part of the relaxation leans on the activity. The radio, the chopping and the person telling you about their day are doing part of the job. All of those are available without the glass.

Here's the honest objection. You may have tried an evening without a drink and found yourself twitchy and irritable, which felt like proof that you need it. I think three things were going on. The ceremony was missing and nothing replaced it, so the working day never got its full stop. You spent the evening watching yourself for signs of missing the drink, which is an unrelaxing way to spend an evening. And if you drink most days, there may have been a mild rebound from the night before, which chapter 7 explains. One evening is a poor test, in the same way that one night in a new bed tells you little about the bed.

What relaxes you at ten to seven is stopping. You need a way to stop, and I take that need seriously. People whose work follows them home, or who go straight from a job to children, need it more than most. The ceremony deserves to be kept. It doesn't have to contain alcohol to work, because the alcohol hadn't arrived yet when it worked.

If you have a drink tonight, you can test this in ten minutes. Do the whole ceremony first. Shoes off, something cold in a decent glass, sit down, radio on. Pour the wine ten minutes later if you still want it, and notice how much of the relaxation had already turned up.