4 alibis the job supplies for… by Jim Leitch

High-functioning drinking is alcohol use that keeps escalating while performance holds, and the career itself becomes the proof that nothing is wrong. In my work with professionals, the job is the last thing to break, not the first. By the time work slips, the evenings, the sleep, and the marriage have been absorbing it for years.

Key takeaways

Intact performance is weak evidence about drinking, because work is usually the most protected part of a professional's life.
Four alibis come up again and again: the hard week, the industry, the sleep story, and the skewed comparison group.
Career dissatisfaction and nightly drinking often prop each other up, so treating only one of them tends to stall.
You do not need a disaster, a diagnosis, or a label to run a two-week experiment and see what the drinking is actually doing.

High-functioning drinking in professionals: why the job is the last thing to go

Work is the most defended structure most adults have. There are deadlines, other people watching, money attached, and an identity built on being reliable. So when drinking starts taking up more room, it gets paid for somewhere quieter first: the hour after dinner that used to belong to the kids, the Saturday morning that now starts at eleven, the conversation with a partner that gets shorter and flatter every month. Performance holds because it is the thing you will sacrifice everything else to protect.

Co-occurring difficulty is the norm rather than the exception. Figures compiled by American Addiction Centers from 2024 United States national survey data put 21.2 million adults as living with both a mental health condition and a substance use disorder in that year. The numbers are American and the population I see is Ontarian, so treat them as scale rather than local prevalence. Still, the pattern matches what I hear: the drinking is rarely travelling alone. Anxiety, a stalled career, unprocessed trauma, a marriage running on logistics.

Alibi one and two: the hard week and the industry you happen to work in

"It was a brutal week" is the first alibi, and it works because it is true. The week was brutal. What makes it load-bearing is that every week qualifies. When I ask someone to name the last week that did not earn a drink, there is usually a long pause and then a laugh. The drink is not a response to an unusual week anymore; it is a response to Tuesday.

"It's the industry" is the second alibi, and it also contains truth. Client dinners, deal closings, team offsites, the golf day, the standing Thursday thing. Sales, finance, law, trades, and hospitality all build drinking into the social machinery of getting ahead, and refusing a drink genuinely costs something. What the alibi hides is the gap between the two drinks the occasion requires and the four more that happen after you get home, with nobody watching and no occasion left to blame.

Alibi three and four: the nightcap that fixes sleep and the colleague who drinks more

"I need it to sleep" is the alibi that sounds the most medical, and the one that reverses fastest under observation. Alcohol does get people down quickly, which is why it feels like it is working. What it does to the back half of the night is different: lighter sleep, more waking, the reliable 3 a.m. stare at the ceiling with the heart going. People often describe discovering, two or three weeks into a break, that the insomnia they were medicating was partly the medication.

"Compared to the guys I work with, I'm moderate" is the fourth alibi, and it is the one I find most worth challenging directly. The comparison group has been selected for drinking. You are benchmarking against the people whose habits most resemble your own, which is the one sample that cannot tell you anything. When I ask instead about the people who were around before the career, the siblings, the friends from twenty years ago, the number usually changes shape.

When career dissatisfaction and drinking keep each other upright

A lot of the drinking I hear about in Oakville arrives through the side door. Someone books career counselling because the work has gone grey, we run the Strong Interest Inventory or the MBTI, we start mapping what the next version of their working life could look like, and somewhere around the third session the wine comes up on its own. It almost always comes up as an aside. It almost always turns out to be central, because the drinking is doing the job of making an unlivable work situation livable one evening at a time.

Treating one and ignoring the other tends to stall. Cutting the drinking out of a life you resent is an exercise in willpower against reality. Redesigning a career while drinking six nights a week means the planning never converts into action, because the evenings where you would do the work are already booked. I usually suggest working both, with small moves on each: a 1% pivot on the career side, a bounded experiment on the drinking side, rather than one dramatic overhaul that waits for January.

What to try instead of waiting for a consequence big enough to count

The most useful thing I know is to stop waiting for proof. People hold out for a consequence serious enough to settle the argument, which means the threshold keeps moving and the answer never arrives. The older clinical literature on assessment makes a point I still think is right: an honest account of pattern and quantity, asked plainly and without flinching, does most of the diagnostic work. The 2011 review in Focus, the American Psychiatric Association's journal, frames straightforward questions about how much and how often as the foundation of the whole assessment. You can ask yourself those questions.

Three experiments I suggest often, none of which requires you to decide what you are:

Write down every drink for two weeks, at the time, in actual ounces rather than "a glass of wine". The count is usually the surprise, not the conclusion.
Take fourteen consecutive days off and notice what gets loud. Sleep, irritability, and the 6 p.m. reach for something are all information.
Tell one person the real number. Shame survives on being the only one who knows, and it loses a lot of weight the moment someone else holds it.

If the two weeks turn out to be unexpectedly hard, that is not a verdict on your character. It is data, and it is the kind that tends to move people toward help faster than any amount of self-argument. You are allowed to look at this before it costs you the thing you have been protecting.

Citations

Frequently asked questions

Can drinking be a problem if my performance has not slipped?

Yes. Work is typically the most protected area of a professional's life, so intact performance tells you where the cost is landing instead, not that there is no cost.

Look at the parts of your life with no external accountability. Weekend mornings, time with your kids, exercise, how present you are in conversations after 8 p.m. Those usually erode years before a review does. People who wait for the work to show it often lose a decade of evenings first.

Is cutting back a reasonable goal, or do I have to quit?

Cutting back is a legitimate starting goal for plenty of people, and for some it holds. For others it becomes an exhausting management project that quietly confirms abstinence would be simpler.

I do not open by telling anyone which outcome they need. I would rather we test moderation properly, with a defined limit and an honest log, and then look at the results together. A plan that fails repeatedly despite real effort is telling you something useful about the substance, not about your discipline.

Do I have to go to AA?

No. Twelve-step programs help a great many people and I work comfortably alongside them, but they are one route among several, including SMART Recovery, individual therapy, medication, and structured outpatient programs.

What matters more than the format is whether you stop doing it alone. If church-adjacent language or the surrender framing puts you off, say so rather than concluding recovery is not for you. A room that fits is worth looking for, and there are secular ones.

My drinking got worse after I stopped liking my job. Which do I address first?

Both, at the same time, with small moves on each. Fixing the career while drinking nightly rarely progresses, and quitting drinking inside a job you dread is an uphill fight you should not have to make alone.

In practice this looks like modest career work (clarifying interests, testing a single adjacent role, one conversation) running parallel to a bounded drinking experiment. The two reinforce each other. Clearer evenings make the career work possible, and a direction worth staying sober for makes the drinking easier to put down.