"I've earned it, and my stress is real"

Some of what the glass is for is entirely legitimate, and an honest book should say which parts.

You need a line drawn under the day. You need some reward for a day spent doing what other people wanted. If you give your working hours to an employer and your evenings to a family, you need one thing that's yours. When something is badly wrong, you need relief from thinking about it. Nobody is weak for having these needs.

My objection is to the arrangement in which one tool does every one of those jobs, and it's the tool that takes a little off tomorrow. If the glass is your full stop, your reward, your private time and your painkiller, then giving it up looks like losing all four at once. No wonder it looks impossible. The needs aren't the problem. The problem is that you've got one supplier for all of them.

So take them one at a time. The full stop is the ceremony from chapter 3, and it works with anything cold in a good glass. The reward can be food you like, a bath, a programme saved for the purpose, or the good chair and twenty minutes in which nobody may speak to you. The thing that's yours can be almost anything, so long as you defend it the way you currently defend the wine.

I'll be straight about what the alternatives lack. The glass is quick, it needs no planning and nobody questions it. A walk needs shoes and a decision. Convenience is the drink's advantage, and it's a genuine one. It's also the only one on this list I can find.

The fourth job, relief, needs separate treatment, because the evidence on it is sobering. A large American survey interviewed over 43,000 adults and went back to about 34,600 of them three years later. Rosa Crum and colleagues found that drinkers who said they drank to ease low mood had about three times the odds of becoming dependent on alcohol by the second interview. Among those already dependent, it was linked to similar odds of staying that way. Using the same survey, Robinson and colleagues found that people with anxiety disorders who medicated themselves with alcohol or drugs had between two and a half and five times the odds of developing a substance problem.

These are observational studies, and they can't prove that drinking to cope causes the trouble. People who drink to cope may differ in other ways. But the direction is consistent, and it fits the cycle in chapter 7. Of all the reasons to drink, relief from bad feelings is the one most strongly tied to problems later. Taste and company are safer reasons than needing it.

If anxiety or low mood is what you've been treating with wine, I'd like you to hear this as good news. Both respond to proper treatment, and wine was never going to be that. Your GP is the place to start. In England you can also refer yourself to NHS talking therapies for anxiety and depression without seeing a GP first, and social anxiety is on their list.

Your stress is real. That's the reason to stop handing it to something that returns a little more of it the next day.