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I’ve written many times about HALT—Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired—and its impact. I have found it to be a very valuable series of things to ask yourself when you are sober but feel a little off. It’s not always the answer. But I love HALT as a starting point.
So I came up with something that I found quite helpful the other day. I’ll call it an autopsy of HALT.
In my recent sobriety—let’s say the past five years—I have found that when I am a little squirrelly, I can often chalk it up to one of those HALT components. It’s probably in the 30-40 percent range. So HALT is significant in my life these days… but again, it’s not the answer to all of my problems.
But anything that is responsible for 1/3 of my headaches is worth sitting with and examining. So I decided to break out each of the four letters and see how I stack up. It might be valuable to anybody else out there to do a deeper dive on HALT, too. I’m going to carve up HALT by percentages, so if I think anger is half of my HALT issues, I would put it at 50 percent.
Here goes.
Hungry: This is close to 0 percent for me. I’ll put it at 5 percent for now. I used to have moments early in sobriety when I would be walking around with my fists balled up and part of the solution was that I eat a sandwich or a candy bar. Not so much any more, especially if you saw how tight my jeans are fitting these days. I’ll put it this way: I ain’t missing many meals. In fact, when I thought about this category, I thought maybe I have the opposite issue these days—I often am having a bumpy afternoon and think three KitKats might be the answer to all my problems. (Psst… it’s not.)
Angry: Huge problem. I’ve gotten way better at working through resentments to the point where I don’t think I ever am walking around irate. I actually think I manage to not quite get to a place where I would even use the word angry. The bigger issue for me is being annoyed. Annoyed at drivers, annoyed at people who don’t return their carts at the grocery store, annoyed at my kids, annoyed at the line of people in front of me at Target, annoyed at the people who don’t return their carts at the grocery store… wait, I may have mentioned that one already.
But being annoyed is one step away from anger. Like, if angry is Diet Coke, then annoyed is Coke Zero. I do get annoyed on a regular basis, and that usually means several times a day. That’s not much better, I have to say. And I have found that if I stack up enough instances in a day where I am annoyed, I will drift into angry. As often say in recovery, if you hang out long enough at a barber shop, you’re going to end up with a haircut, and that’s what I find with being annoyed all the time.
On the percentage scale, I’d put this at about 50 percent of all my HALT issues.
Lonely: I’ll put this at 20 percent on my HALT-ometer. I am married with three kids and have a full-time job. So by the traditional definition of lonely, I don’t have any days—and usually no hours—where no one is around and I am looking for someone to talk to. I get to tons of meetings, I talk to at least 2-3 alcoholics and addicts every day and I don’t ever feel alone. I will say, though, that I can sometimes be pretty good at sitting amongst many people and somehow retreating emotionally out of what looks like a busy scene. It’s not uncommon for me to feel a little isolated even though I spoke with 50 people that day.
Tired: So the main reason I wrote about this newsletter topic is because of the concept of sleep. I have struggled my whole life falling asleep. My brain would get going, I’d start chewing on things that happened earlier in the day or things that might happen tomorrow, and I just used to lay there, tortured by my own brain. Then drinking came along and I immediately liked how it helped me slide into sleep better.
Of course, the myth of “having a beer or two at night to take the edge off” is that a) I would often drink 10 beers, not one or two and b) I have read quite a few reputable sources over the years that mention how getting drunk or buzzed to fall asleep often leads to bad quality sleep. I certainly used to find that. I’d wake up at 4 am after having passed out for four hours, and the booze will have worn off, and I felt like I had never even gone to bed. It was a mess.
Fast forward to sobriety, and I of course realized within a few weeks of being sober that I had built sleeping into an insurmountable reason to keep drinking… and it wasn’t quite true. I had a bumpy first few weeks learning to sleep again without any kind of mood-altering substance. But it ended up being fine.
Now fast forward to the past few years, and I find that being tired is less of an issue than ever, and it’s because I have grown to like sleep. Is it because I am old and decaying and my husk of a human body collapses every night mostly due to being a geezer? For sure, that’s part of it.
But I also think that there’s a point when you get a little older where you make better, healthy choices about sleep just because you’ve matured. In sobriety, as recently as a few years ago, I would go to bed at 10:30 at night on a Friday, stay up till 1:30 am to watch a UFC on a Saturday, go to bed at midnight on Sunday, then go to bed at 10 pm on Monday. I was all over the place.
Not so much any more. Again, being a 45-year-old with a 900-year-old mummy’s body certainly cause me to run out of gas and hit the mattress earlier. But I also choose to do that because it seems pretty wise to consistently go to bed earlier and wake up earlier, and also to sleep at roughly the same time every night. I’m not exactly a sleep doctor but every study seems to indicate that you gotta try for 7-8 hours, at roughly the same times every night.
So I would put this number at about 25 percent for me on my HALT list, and I do think that that number has declined every year for awhile. It’s significant and worth bringing up because I can’t believe how many alcoholics have mentioned to me over the years that sleep is an issue for them. I absolutely catch myself sometimes acting badly and I know that a 30-minute nap is the answer. or that the problem exists because I decided I had to watch Saturday night football, Sunday night football and Monday night football and skimped on sleep.
Those are my thoughts on HALT. I’m tired and forgot to see if they add up to 100 percent…
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
“Do you realize," said a man in a cafeteria to a drunk across the table, "that you are reading your paper upside down?"
"Of course I realize it," snapped the drunk. "Do you think it's easy?"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, July 1959)
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