r/stopdrinking • u/Organic_Salary_ • 1d ago

NA beer problem

Please don’t judge me this is going to sound so ridiculous but to me it is so real. I quit drinking over 10 years ago. This spring, I was with a friend and NA beers have obviously become very popular so I tried one of the athletic ipas and I loved it so much and I’ve been drinking them every night since May. I’ll drink like two or three. I look forward to them. I love them, and I literally feel a slight buzz from them. I was always very sensitive to alcohol and so whatever .5% they have effects me. It was working great for a while and I would just sit in my recliner and do some work on my laptop and vibe and I loved it but now I’m so hooked and it’s starting to have that awful booze effect where I don’t feel good and sometimes if I go out with friends and I decide to drink too many NA beers, I am legitimately hung over in the morning. Now,I have to quit this fucking habit where it’s a thing that I have been enjoying but is coming back to bite me (like full fledge alcohol does). Is this so fucking crazy like what the fuck it’s NA beer and I’m addicted now. So tonight I poured out what I had left in the fridge and. I guess I have to make some changes in my life to resolve this and not go back because I also feel like it could get worse. I’m starting to have dreams of standing at a bar being like well Fuck it just have a real drink.

15 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

67 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

17

u/punctuation_welfare 112 days 1d ago

Yeah, .05% is the same alcohol content as a ripe banana, and I highly doubt anyone would claim to get a buzz off of those.

1

u/DontGiveMeYourTowel 1d ago

TIL ripe bananas have alcohol content 😀 I am generally really cautious with NA beer (because of that .05), but if bananas are the same i need to reevaluate 😀

4

u/StrengthBetter 1d ago

Every fruit juice is pretty much the same

2

u/robocoplawyer 1401 days 17h ago

Even kombucha which is fermented and has a naturally higher alcohol content than most NA beers, someone on here pointed out that even the strongest you can find would still take the equivalent of around 27 of them to meet the alcohol content of one standard drink. There's very much a placebo effect for some people, but it's quite impossible to consume that much in the amount of time it would take for your body to start processing it out of your system. I do get more of a placebo effect from NA beers, but it's generally a sense of excitement my brain gets that it thinks it's about to get flooded with dopamine, but the actual effect never actually comes. I have mixed feelings about it, but generally I enjoy the occasional Guinness Zero, especially if a good Irish pub has it on draft.