Used to do it 2 or 3 times a week for 10+ years. I wasn't an alcoholic, it just seemed like what there was to do at the weekend. When I grew out of it I didn't miss it.
These days I get terrible heartburn, and I have to be very careful what I eat and take care of myself.
Only thing I can suggest is asking yourself some questions which I eventually asked myself :
Why bother? You're just throwing money away, there's no actual fun in it. It affects your health, seriously. It affects your friendships/relationships. The high from alcohol can be replicated by feeling healthy and enjoying yourself on a night out. I'm not tee-total, but I only drink for pleasure now. I.e. a few pints because I enjoy it. Drinking to get drunk is rare. The downsides I had was I stopped too late and the damage to my health is done. It's nothing chronic, it's just if I skip a meal I get reflux, or if I don't keep to a regular sleeping pattern etc. I also struggle to keep to a regular sleeping pattern through occasional bad heartburn. Tonight for example I had 4 hours sleep and then woke up, thankfully tomorrow is a day off so I can sleep an extra couple of hours in the morning. The other downside is losing touch with some people. People I used to see when I was down the pub/clubs every weekend. It's not a great deal of fun being sober when everybody else is totally mashed and can't string a sentence together. The lesson from that though is if I was mashed then I'd not be enjoying myself either. The only real fun is having a laugh about it afterwards. But then again when you think about it, all that happens is a group of friends go out and damage themselves, so that the next day they can play Sherlock Holmes to work out what happened, and laugh about how bad their hangover is, how much money they've spent or how they've embarassed themselves.
I think if I was to try to describe the larger problem it's nothing too bad. It's just lack of things to do, if all your friends are getting drunk then it's no fun being the only one that doesn't. And it's also apathy, rather than taking the effort to find something else to do, you just plod on with doing the same thing every weekend.
Before I finally gave up getting mashed all the time I found myself complaining to my friends that I felt we were throwing £100 away on a saturday night and losing the entire sunday and turning up for work on Monday rough. It took maybe 9 months to a year of me either not going out with them on a saturday night, or going out but leaving early before everybody reached the same conclusion as me. We now go out less often, maybe half the time now we'll just go round to someone's house and have a night in. The other half of the time we find something better to do. We'll go out for a meal and a few drinks, or go see a comedian, or go to a comedy club or something along the same lines.
The thing I find so difficult to comprehend is why for so long did I just continue doing it when clearly it wasn't particularly enjoyable. Again I think that's just apathy. It gets to a Saturday night and it's either I stay in or I go out and do it again.
