Running on 40 Percent

The Cognitive Cost of the Drinking Life

For 30 years, I ran a corporate career on a hidden program.

The program looked like this. By 2pm I was thinking about the wine. By 6pm I was pouring it. By 8pm I was alone with it. At 3am I was awake, ashamed, calculating how much I'd had and whether anyone could tell. By 5am I was punishing myself at the gym, trying to sweat it out. By 9am I was in a meeting making big decisions, wondering if the people in the elevator could smell last night on me.

I thought I was capable. I was. I crushed the goals, made the numbers, got the promotions. From the outside, nothing looked wrong.

What nobody could see was the bandwidth.

Was I hungover? Would my clothes fit? Would my team notice? How worn down was I, really? Why couldn't I stop? Why did everyone else seem to drink normally? I felt like I had two personalities: the put-together director by day, and someone unrecognizable by night. How could I run my workday and then come apart the minute I was home alone?

That program ran during every meeting. Every presentation. Every client dinner. Every quiet moment in the car between appointments. It never stopped. I just got used to the noise.

I thought I was tired because I was busy. I thought I was distracted because the job was demanding. I thought the shame was just part of being me.

I didn't know how loud the loop was until it stopped.

I quit drinking in 2017. Over eight years ago. The emotional eating took longer to resolve, and that's a story for another day, but eventually that quieted too.

Here is what I want every professional reading this to understand. When I was still drinking, I only thought about what I'd lose if I quit. The wine with dinner. The drinks at networking events. The unwinding ritual. The identity of being someone who could keep up.

Nobody told me what would come back.

Brain space. So much brain space.

I started thinking about the actual problem in front of me instead of the one I'd created the night before. I started feeling joy without a film of guilt running underneath every interaction. I started having real ideas again, the kind that come when your brain isn't running a 24-hour surveillance program on your own behavior.

I had been running on roughly 40% of my mind for three decades and didn't know it. The other 60% was managing the secret.

If you recognize yourself in any of this, I want to offer you one reframe.

The wine and the emotional eating aren't just costing you sleep. They are costing you the bandwidth to think, feel, lead, and live as the person you actually are. The exhaustion you can't explain isn't your age, your job, or your kids. It's the program running in the background.

The program can be turned off. I turned mine off, eventually, after decades of trying the wrong ways. The methods that worked were not what I expected. They had nothing to do with willpower. They had everything to do with how the brain actually works around reward, ritual, and rewiring.

That's a longer conversation. If any of this caught you, I want you to know it caught me too, for a very long time.

You're not alone in the elevator.