Weekly Drinking Review Template

Sunday night. The kitchen's half dark, tomorrow is already leaning on you, and somewhere in the back of your mind a quiet accounting is failing. There was the beer with dinner Tuesday — or was that Wednesday? Friday happened. Saturday definitely happened. You know exactly how the week felt. You could not say, under oath, what it actually held.

That gap isn't a character flaw — it's how memory works. A week gets compressed into a mood ("not great," "fine, mostly"), and a mood is impossible to work with. A page is not. What follows is the Five-Line Week: five prompts, one honest line each, on paper, in about ten minutes. No app, no score, no diagnosis, nobody watching. You don't have to change anything yet. This week, noticing counts as the work.

Why a page beats a feeling

Two things happen when you write a week down instead of carrying it around. The first is that vague quantities become countable ones. "A couple of drinks" is doing a lot of quiet labor in most people's self-talk — a generous pour of wine or a strong cocktail can hold more alcohol than one drink's worth. NIAAA's yardstick for a U.S. standard drink is 14 grams of pure alcohol — roughly a 12-ounce regular beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine, or a 1.5-ounce shot — which means an evening of two generous pours can quietly add up to three or four "drinks."

The second is that patterns surface. A total tells you almost nothing; the shape of the week tells you a lot. Fourteen drinks spread across seven dinners is one pattern. The same fourteen packed into Friday and Saturday is a different one — NIAAA defines binge drinking as about 5 or more drinks for men, or 4 or more for women, in around two hours, the pace that typically pushes blood alcohol concentration to 0.08% or higher. Same weekly number, very different week. You only see that on paper.

The question the page asks is not "how bad was it?" It's "what happened?" That swap — verdict out, information in — is the entire trick.

The Five-Line Week

Once a week, same day if you can manage it, sit down with anything that takes ink. Answer these five prompts, one line each. Ten minutes is plenty; five is fine.

Count the week

Estimate your total in standard drinks, not in glasses or "a few." Round honestly — a heavy pour is closer to two than one. You're not aiming for lab precision; you're retiring "not that much" as a unit of measurement.

Do it now: before reading on, guess last week's total. Write the guess down. Next Sunday, compare the guess to the count. The distance between those two numbers is worth knowing.

Map the when and where

For each drinking day, jot the day, the setting, and the cue: after work, alone at home, everyone else ordered, the house went quiet. Don't analyze — just name the conditions. Cues written in ordinary language ("Thursday, kitchen, 9 p.m., bored") are far easier to interrupt later than a mood you're trying to out-muscle.

Do it now: name the one hour of your week when a drink is most automatic. If you can name it, you can plan around it.

Circle the surprise

One line on whatever didn't match the script. A night you dreaded was easy. One glass became four out of nowhere. You slept noticeably better after an alcohol-free Tuesday. Surprise is the most useful thing on the page, because it marks exactly where your story about your drinking and your actual drinking disagree.

Do it now: think back on the past week and finish the sentence "I didn't expect —." That's your first entry.

Keep one thing

Name something that helped, however small — eating before the party, the walk at 5 p.m., not restocking the fridge, leaving before the second round became automatic. A review that only collects mistakes turns into a courtroom, and people stop showing up to courtrooms where they're always the defendant.

Do it now: if nothing helpful comes to mind, write down the easiest drink you skipped or delayed all week. That counts.

Choose one experiment

Pick a single, checkable change for next week: one alcohol-free weeknight, a slower first hour, a non-drinking plan for the hour you named in step two. Not a life overhaul — one experiment, small enough that you'll actually run it, clear enough that next Sunday you can say whether it happened.

Do it now: write next week's experiment at the top of a fresh page, so it's the first thing next Sunday's review sees.

If you want a yardstick

The template deliberately doesn't score you, but sooner or later you'll want to know what your count means. Two public reference points exist, and it's worth being precise about what they are. The CDC's definition of moderate drinking is 2 drinks or less in a day for men and 1 or less for women — and the same page lists people who shouldn't drink at all, including anyone pregnant or in recovery from alcohol use disorder. NIAAA's binge threshold is the 4-or-5-in-two-hours pattern above.

Treat both as definitions, not verdicts. A guideline limit is where public-health agencies draw a descriptive line, not a personal threshold below which alcohol is harmless for you — risk runs on a slope that depends on how much, how often, and on things the page can't see, like your genetics, medications, and health history. And the shape question cuts both ways: a heavy-weekend pattern trips the binge definition even when the weekly total looks modest, while a drink with dinner every single night can quietly become a daily habit with no alcohol-free days at all. Neither pattern gets a pass; they're different risks, not a ranking. If the weekly total itself is your live question, how much is too much alcohol per week takes it up properly. If you'd rather build the habit daily than weekly, tracking your drinking without an app is the finer-grained version — more accurate, because memory decays fast, but harder to sustain. Weekly is the one most people actually keep doing. Pick the one you'll do.

When the review isn't the tool

Honest admission: a paper template can't out-write a fudged count. If you catch yourself lowballing the number for an audience of one, that's not a reason for shame — it's information, and arguably the most important line the review will ever produce. Note it and keep going.

And some weeks you'll skip it entirely. One skipped Sunday, one rough week, one experiment that collapsed by Tuesday — none of that is a verdict. The review only fails when it becomes a place you get punished, so keep the useful sentence ("the pull was strongest at 9 p.m.") and throw out the speech.

What the review genuinely can't handle is a pattern that keeps getting stronger no matter what you write. If the notes show drinking most days, repeated heavier episodes, experiments that never hold, or physical discomfort — shakiness, sweating, a jangling on-edge feeling — on days you don't drink, the page has done its job: it's pointing past itself, to a conversation with a clinician. That last sign matters most, because a body that protests when alcohol is missing is a medical situation, and stopping suddenly at that point can be risky rather than virtuous.

If a few weeks of notes keep pointing the same direction and you don't have a clinician to bring them to, Clero can connect you with a licensed clinician by telehealth — someone who can read the pattern with you and talk through whether a medication such as naltrexone belongs in the plan.

That conversation is rarer than it should be. In 2024, only 7.6% of people with past-year alcohol use disorder received any alcohol treatment, by NIAAA's count — not because help doesn't work, but because most people are never offered it and never ask.

Next Sunday

Picture the same kitchen, a week from now. The difference isn't willpower or a transformed life — just a page: a count instead of a fog, a mapped cue, one surprise, one keeper, one experiment already chosen. Ten minutes, and the week stops being a mood you carry and becomes a thing you can actually read.

That's the whole assignment. Five lines, once. Start this Sunday.

This is general education, not medical advice or a screening tool. If your notes show heavy daily drinking, talk with a clinician before stopping suddenly — and if cutting back ever brings shaking, confusion, hallucinations, or a seizure, that's an emergency: call 911 or go to an ER. If thoughts of harming yourself show up, call or text 988. For confidential treatment referrals, SAMHSA's National Helpline is 1-800-662-HELP.