How to break up with WINE, by DR MAX PEMBERTON: I’ve seen the damage caused by the insidious creep of holiday drinking. But doing THIS before your first sip will transform your relationship with alcohol for good

Picture the scene: a terrace somewhere far-flung and warm, the sun going down, a bottle of rosé in an ice bucket and nothing to do the next morning.

Or a garden party at home, where the jug of Pimm’s gets topped up without asking and nobody’s glass stays empty.

Or simply a run of hot evenings when the cold beer in the garden at 6pm became a cold beer in the garden at 5pm, and then a couple more because it was far too nice to go inside.

I’m not about to tell you off for any of this. I love a drink too. Summer is meant to be enjoyed, and for many people a drink in the sunshine is one of life’s small pleasures.

But it’s now September, the children are back at school, the evenings are drawing in, and every year in my clinic I see plenty of people who noticed that the holiday habits weren’t shelved with the suitcases.

This isn’t just my impression. Drinkaware published its annual survey of the nation’s drinking at the end of last month and the findings make for sobering (excuse the pun) reading.

Half of drinkers say they drink more on holiday. One in five drink more when the weather’s nice, and nearly as many drink more when there’s nothing on the following day.

Put those three together and you’ve described significant chunks of June, July and August for many people.

The same survey found weekly binge-drinking has risen from 11 per cent to 13 per cent of drinkers in a single year – that means about six million people are binge-drinking every week.

The trouble with alcohol is that it’s easy for the goal posts to move without you realising. It’s sneaky and insidious. Tolerance builds within a few weeks of drinking more, so the two glasses that used to be enough no longer have the same effect, and you find yourself pouring a third without a second thought.

At the same time, cues around alcohol get rewired. Sunshine, the end of the working day, cooking supper, a phone call to a friend: each one becomes linked to reaching for the bottle, and by September that link is well and truly bedded in.

The good news is that all of this is reversible, and you don’t have to go teetotal to do it. What you need is to bring your drinking back inside the guidelines, which is no more than 14 units a week, spread over at least three days, with several days off.

So here are the steps I suggest to patients who want to reset rather than stop:

Count before you cut

Most people have no real idea what they drink, so for one week write down every drink and its units. A standard bottle of wine is about ten units, a large 250ml glass is over three units, a pint of ordinary strength lager is nearly three and a double gin is about two. A pint of ale (4 per cent strength) is 2.3 units.

People are usually startled by the total, and that jolt is helpful, because you can’t change something until you understand what needs to change and by how much.

Have drink-free days

This is the single most effective thing you can do and, according to Drinkaware, it’s the moderation technique British drinkers use most.

Aim for at least three, and ideally have them run consecutively rather than dotted through the week, because a stretch of clear days lets your tolerance fall back to where it was, which in turn means less alcohol will satisfy you when you do drink.

Pick your drink-free days in advance and treat them as fixed appointments.

Shrink your glass

Over the summer, measures creep up. The 125ml glass gives way to the 175ml, and then to the 250ml, or a third of a bottle.

Go back to the small glass at home. In the pub ask for small glasses of wine, half pints and single measures of spirits. You’ll drink less without feeling you’ve gone without.

Start later at night

If the holiday routine had you opening something at 5pm, make it 7pm for a fortnight, then 8pm.

Eating first helps too, since alcohol on an empty stomach is absorbed faster, making you more relaxed faster and more likely to reach for a second drink.

The aim is to break the link between the end of the afternoon and the start of drinking.

Take the soft option

Begin with one drink, then have a glass of water or a non-alcohol version, then another drink.

It halves your intake over an evening, keeps your hand busy and nobody will notice. The low and no-alcohol options are now good enough that Drinkaware says half of young adults are using them, and I have patients who swear by them for the first drink of the evening.

Set a review date

Give yourself four weeks, then tot up the units again and see where you got to. If you’re back under 14 and it felt manageable, well done.

If you found the drink-free days hard, or the numbers didn’t move, or you told yourself you’d cut back and somehow didn’t, then please don’t shrug it off as a summer hangover.

That is precisely the thing to talk to your GP about, and the earlier you have that conversation, the simpler it tends to be.

Those who drink their tea and coffee very hot have about three times the risk of a type of oesophageal cancer compared with those who have it warm. It may be due to repeated heat damage to the gullet lining. Add milk or let it sit.

A shocking 44 per cent of the time adults spend on social media or other video sources is now spent alone. That’s up 10 per cent on a decade ago. To make it worse, adults now spend 11 per cent less time talking to each other face to face, figures from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising show. Normal interactions are essential for mental health so if we’re no longer getting together around the TV, get together round the table. I’m obsessed with the family evening meal and the 30 minutes of attention and conversation it brings. Adolescents who regularly eat with their families have lower rates of depression, substance misuse and disordered eating.

Maryam’s crucial blood tests

BBC presenter Maryam Moshiri has spoken about living with polycythaemia vera, a rare blood cancer she was diagnosed with in November 2024. Maryam, 49, said she had few symptoms and was diagnosed from routine blood tests, that her doctor happened to be thorough about, rather than from anything she’d gone in to complain of.

That is how polycythaemia vera is usually caught. The bone marrow churns out too many red blood cells, the blood thickens, and the danger is clots, which means stroke, heart attack and deep vein thrombosis. 

Yet for years it may cause nothing more than tiredness, headaches or itchy skin, if that, and a great many cases only surface when a full blood count done for some other reason comes back with haemoglobin that’s too high. 

I’ve had several patients over the years for whom an abnormal result was the first they knew of anything being wrong, and it’s a reminder that routine bloods aren’t a box-ticking exercise. It’s incredibly important to actually go when a GP orders them.