Be honest—when was the last time you told your doctor exactly how much alcohol you consume, down to each individual unit? If you enjoy a beer, a gin, or a glass of wine, chances are you might have glossed over the precise details during your last check-up.

It’s a common scenario. While I don’t make a habit out of deceiving my doctor, I often find that general practitioners can be quite judgmental about alcohol consumption. Personally, I don’t have any apparent issues with drinking.

Thanks to my solid build and genetic disposition, I rarely find myself intoxicated and seldom suffer from embarrassing moments or debilitating hangovers due to drinking.

Despite this, I don’t need a doctor to point out that my drinking habits exceed healthy limits. According to the NHS, the maximum recommended intake for a woman is 14 units per week. I regularly consume four times that amount—yes, four times!

And that’s just a typical week. On summer vacations, my consumption skyrockets as I sip rosé from noon until midnight, potentially doubling the weekly recommended units in a single day. To break it down: with a standard 175ml glass of wine clocking in at 2.1 units (and a hefty 250ml glass at three units), I drink the equivalent of about 27 standard glasses in a normal week—nearly four glasses a day.

On holiday we eschewed those tiny French glasses, so I guess I was drinking three medium-to-large measures at lunchtime and five in the evening.

I sound like a confirmed alcoholic and I clearly go on holiday with a band of raging (dipso) maniacs.

Needless to say, I’m usually the same at Christmas – especially since my birthday is the week before.

‘Food tastes better with wine, life tastes better with cocktails,’ writes Susannah Jowitt

As we enter December, the season’s parties are already hoving unsteadily into view. As a prosecco princess, I can see the festive fizz slipping down all too easily – and it’s no good me saying that it tastes like a soft drink. The units will inevitably ramp back up to the madness of those summer levels.

Unless I do something about it now.

For the fact is, at 56 and hovering just this side of a free bus pass, I’m worried about the sheer volume of information that suggests drinking to excess exacts a toll later in life.

I want to be fit and well for as long as possible. I want to kick that bucket, not stumble foggily into it. And with a mother and father who both died with Alzheimer’s, I am scared stiff about the evidence linking even moderately heavy drinking with the onset of dementia.

Even so, I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to be that person who puts their hand over their glass and says, piously, ‘Have you got anything soft?’

I actually hate soft drinks – I hate the sugar rush (or the aftertaste of artificial sweetener) and the fizz and the furring of my teeth.

Water is fine, but wine is better: I love the hit of an icy knock-back of rosé, the roll and savour of a rich red, the nutty headiness of sherry, the sweet kiss of a pudding wine. I love spirits, too: the botanical kick of good gin, the warmth of a smoky bourbon.

Food tastes better with wine, life tastes better with cocktails. I am funnier, more confident and assuredly more relaxed with a glass or two inside me.

Susannah came across hypnotherapist Tansy Forrest’s book, Ten Steps To Drink Less And Live Well

And after a hard day at the coalface of work, boy oh boy, do I love that first glass – that feeling of deserved, anticipated reward.

So when I saw hypnotherapist Tansy Forrest’s book, Ten Steps To Drink Less And Live Well, it stopped me in my tracks. Could this be the end of my search for that Holy Grail of drinking: moderation?

As for so many people, moderation has always eluded me. I can give up drinking for Sober October – or Dry January, if I must – and my husband and I generally don’t drink anything on Mondays and Tuesdays because we once read that 48 hours off per week gives the liver a chance to bounce back before the next onslaught.

But what neither of us can do is have just a single glass per night – which is, really, the most we should drink. Once we pour, we just want more.

I’m not keen on a self-help book or any suggestion of a 12-step programme, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) style, but Tansy’s book is clear, offering achievable goals, and has the right mix of science, research and personal interpretation needed for everyday use.

It’s also non-judgmental, talking about ‘overdrinking’ (rather than drinking too much or being dependent on alcohol), which is a genius phrase.

Indeed, she’s consistently good at reframing the negative. The chapter on lapsing from your new regime of moderation calls it a ‘positive learning experience to strengthen you and build self-knowledge for future temptations: it’s a stumble, not a crumble!’.

Overall, I like the cut of Tansy’s jib. Lapsing, by the way, isn’t having a drink or two more than you planned, it’s having a bit of a bender – but that’s OK, you’ll know better for next time.

On Susannah’s last summer holiday, she estimates she drank 130 units. She has cut this down to 18 units

Best of all, if you log into the accompanying website, drinklesslivewell.com, you can reap the benefit of Tansy’s skill as a hypnotherapist by settling down to listen to any or all of her free MP3 hypnosis recordings.

This is what clinched it for me: self-care is all very well – and I filled out the various exercises in the book like the good student I want to be – but there’s nothing like the nudge of cognitive suggestion to help a girl out.

‘This is your time now,’ starts one of the recordings. ‘Your chance to be the best version of you, letting go of old habits, so that you can enjoy drinking…’ – there’s an artful pause – ‘… less.’

I’m hooked. After the first half of the half-hour recording, which involves the usual set-up of imagining a lovely beach, focusing on the glitter of the sunshine and the tropical warmth all around, she counts me down deeper and starts repeating key phrases.

‘Now you are noticing that when you do drink, you are drinking so…much… slower, so… much… more mindfully, enjoying each sip… this is who you are now, a person who really enjoys… drinking less alcohol.’

If I had one criticism, it’s that her one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t always tally with my own ‘lived experience’ of drinking.

There are chapters in her book that deal with trauma and the triggers of drinking, for example, but I’m not a sad drinker – any trauma response is catered for by emotional eating, thank you very much.

Tansy also invokes the AA acronym of HALT: stopping the automatic move to drink if you think it’s triggered by being Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. I think about this and realise that my triggers are all about carousing, so I give myself the cautionary acronym of CUPID: Celebrating, Unaware, People-pleasing, Ingesting (food), Deserving (or thinking I deserve). The aim of this is to get me to pause when I’m about to dive into a drink and ask myself whether I’m simply responding to one of these triggers.

This is when I realise my biggest stumbling block is the people-pleasing part. In particular, the husband-pleasing part. In our 28 years as a couple, a lot of our fun together has been accompanied by alcohol.

That’s not to say we don’t have a laugh without glasses in our hands, but our habit has been to relax together of an evening or at a weekend and tuck into a bottle or three of wine. Without the blurring of alcohol, will any cracks in our relationship be revealed?

I arrange a Zoom call with Tansy to ask her how to fit moderate drinking into a hectic social life when I still want to be the life and soul of the party and don’t want to part ways with my beloved.

Our session happens to fall on a Friday afternoon. ‘You’re being hypnotised about drinking less just before the weekend?’ my husband says as I prepare to go online, ‘Bo-o-o-o-ring!’ Not helpful, I tell him, sighing heavily. ‘The narrative around alcohol is very catastrophist,’ Tansy tells me, ‘and that’s what your husband is tapping into – that, and the very male resistance to change.

‘People are told that drinking is a disease and encouraged to cut down to the point where giving up altogether is presented as easier. This works for some people but, for others, who are beginning to dislike or fear their overdrinking but don’t want to stop, the option to minimise it is much easier if you think of it as “planned drinking”.

‘Also, if you downplay the change for him, say that you’re still open to having that lovely end-of-day glass with him and that you’re just tweaking your lifestyle to enhance your clear-headedness for both your career and your approach to ageing, he will soon see the attraction for you.’ And she’s right, he does. Who wouldn’t?

Tansy’s approach – in a world of TikTok extremes and gimmicks – is refreshingly pragmatic and hard-wearing. She talks about still having days of no drinking at all, not for the sake of abstinence itself, but because that means you can have a couple more units on the days when you do drink.

The trick is to plan when and how to drink – and to track your units so that you keep within your prearranged weekly total. Apps make tracking easy, thankfully.

I bridled at first – nothing says fun like stopping to log that Jagerbomb into your Drinkaware tally – but the great thing about sticking to a plan is that you are level-headed enough at the end of an evening to remember what you drank. So you can do it then.

Tansy’s advice is to cut down on your alcohol intake gradually.

Gratifyingly, she classes my drinking habits as not impossibly heavy – apparently her clients, who are all obviously honest with her, often drink at a level that puts me into the only moderately boozy category. But I’m impatient and curious to see if I can get down to that magical 14 units a week, so that’s what we plan. After reading the book, listening to her recordings every night that I remember to, and planning my approach to nights out a bit, I’m down from what I estimate was 130 units on my last summer holiday week to 18 units. But I had a cold for the first three days of that week and didn’t really want to drink, so I disregarded this result.

By the second week, I was down to 16 units – six or seven glasses of wine in medium-ish home measures.

The next week, I was out three times and had what would usually be a boozy weekend away with friends, and my weekly tally was 18 again – just nine glasses over the whole week. I didn’t drink in between social events and started off with a zero-alcohol option for the first two drinks at each outing. I then ‘rewarded’ myself with a glass or so of the real stuff after that. As of writing this, I’m four days into a week, and I’m currently standing at two units. I had a glass of red wine last night. It tasted delicious. I rolled it around in my mouth and luxuriated in it, but I didn’t need any more and was quite happy to skip ahead to a glass of water, then a hot drink.

It’s a miracle that I can’t quite believe myself. This has taken almost no effort. I’ve never had to fight a craving. It’s as if my body was actually waiting for me to provide it with an alternative.

I have tried not to overthink it and, other than making the effort to listen to the recordings (Tansy recommends doing this nearly every night for the first few weeks to ‘retrain’ the brain), I haven’t been too obsessive.

Somehow the combination of Tansy’s hypnosis and the CUPID acronym is working.

It would seem I really can carry on with my attempts to be the life and soul of the party without ‘overdrinking’.

Best of all – and most surprising – nobody has even noticed. So I haven’t been outed as the ‘boring one’; not even by my husband who, while cocking the occasional eyebrow as he makes me a cup of tea instead of topping up my glass, has had to admit that I’m really no different, and that we can still have our fun together.

For the first time, I can look forward to being honest with the doctor and to having that glass of wine at the end of whichever day I decide to allocate it. To enjoying the Christmas party season and not feeling like the boring one. To looking the possibility of Alzheimer’s in the face and thinking, ‘At last I am doing my bit to put you off, you b*****d’.

Or, as Tansy says in the finishing seconds of her hypnosis, ‘Lighter and brighter, eyes wide open. Welcome back.’