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As you get older, your awareness of your drinking limits increases. The younger you may have accidentally disappeared into a black hole of beer at a moment’s notice, but as the years go by you come to terms with how much your body can tolerate before you transform from a tipsy, fun lovin’ kinda guy into a hammered train wreck.
However, no matter how much you think you know about yourself, there’s still the off chance that you’ll accidentally overdo it. Since there’s a thin line between having the time of your life or wanting the ground to swallow you whole, we’ve compiled a rundown of the five telltale signs that you’ve drunk too much beer:
You’ve agreed to do something you have no intention of actually doing
Being drunk and agreeable is the worst possible combination. Not only will you wake up in the morning with that familiar, unshakable sense of regret, but the repercussions of your evening will last long after you’ve finished drinking. Waking up the next morning, you may initially believe that you’ll only have to deal with a headache and nausea for the rest of the day, but then the WhatsApp messages start to roll in: “So, when are you planning to book the flights for Carl’s bachelor party?”
Wait, what? Flights? Bachelor party? Who the heck is Carl?
Then you’ll remember it; the chat at the bar with that friend of a friend, who after one long-winded conversation about that sport you don’t watch but pretended to enjoy anyway, invited you along to his upcoming bachelor party. You’re not even sure that you like this guy, but now you’re being sent a barrage of links to flights to Puerto Rico and they’ve already booked you a seat at his wedding. A hangover is tough enough without it leading to a $1,300 drinking session in San Juan with some random people you’ve only just met.
Your Uber driver has enough information to direct a biopic on your life
It’s great that after drinking you arrange for a sober ride home. But there’s something about a heavy night that will make your drunk brain mistake an Uber driver for a therapist. He just wants to get you from A to B; you just want to explain why the breakdown of your parents’ marriage is likely contributing to the downfall of your adult relationships.
In your inebriated state, the beauty of the Uber driver is that a) you’ll never see them again, and b) they don’t actually care about what you’ve got say, but will listen to you regardless due to the implicit understanding that you will give them a 5-star rating for doing so. It’s like receiving actual professional help, but in the back of somebody else’s car.
It’s worth giving your Uber driver an earful of TMI from you to ensure you avoid drunk driving at all costs and arrive to your destination safely.
Also: Get Smart | ABV and Beer: How Much Is Too Much?
You make poor culinary choices
In the weekday your diet is dictated by six health apps that each combine to give you an overview of exactly what you’re stuffing into your body, filling your day with a casual feeling of shame whenever you digest anything that tastes nice but is otherwise nutritionally useless. On the weekend those shackles are loosened from your stomach, and after several drinks you allow yourself to eat like a king. A sloppy, slovenly king.
If you’re the kind of guy who views the word “gym” as a verb, i.e. your Instagram is a collection of progress photos and images of you picking up heavy things, then you’ll value the break from your routine that alcohol provides more than most. Whereas most view drunkenly shoving a hamburger into your mouth (a la David Hasselhoff) as a pretty depressing sight, to you that could probably be classified as a vacation — a break away from protein shakes, lean meats, and steamed vegetables. For everyone else, the “drunk diet” of overcooked kebabs, greasy pizza, and salty fries is just another terrible drunk decision to add onto a mountain of similarly terrible decisions.
You’re suddenly the most honest man on Earth
Every now and again you’ll hit a very specific point of drunkenness where you’ll be greeted by the insatiable urge to be as plainly honest as is humanly possible. The alcohol will have dissolved that important filter between your brain and your mouth, resulting in your evening becoming one elaborate, seemingly endless deconstruction of every lie or “mistruth” you’ve ever told your friends, as you lay your soul bare like a drunk Alanis Morissette with facial hair.
They say a drunk man speaks a sober heart, but it eventually becomes a problem when your sober heart just won’t shut up. Your excruciating crusade to prove that honesty is NOT the best policy seemingly won’t stop until you’ve offended everyone within a 2 mile radius, and ensured that everyone you know will wake up the next day feeling a little bit worse about themselves, and a LOT worse about you.
You’re so bloated that you could roll yourself home
Regardless of how in-shape or out-of-shape you are, the downside of drinking too much beer — aside from the aforementioned issues that it presents — is that you’ll reach a point where you feel so incredibly bloated that rather than getting an Uber at the end of the night, you could simply lie on your side and roll all the way home. The beer bloat is real and unavoidable, making you feel as light on your feet as a Japanese kaiju while you stumble around the club, looking like you’re about to give birth to a basketball.
While this is a problem in and of itself, the worst thing about beer bloat is waking up in the morning and seeing the photos of yourself from that night. Even if you have pretty good self-esteem, seeing a snapshot of yourself looking like a doughnut with a haircut is never good for the ol’ morale and, thanks to the wonders of social media, now all of your friends can witness your helium balloon body after downing too many cold ones.
