One way to control my daily alcohol habit was to switch to beer only, since there is a long standing human experience that more diluted drinks are easier to control. And as my after-work fluid intake is mostly beer, I realized that now my brain cannot tell the difference between thirst and alcohol cravings. Literally, I just managed to train my brain to thirst -> want a beer and cravings -> want a beer and now it does not know the difference.

One idea would be thirst-like feeling -> drink water -> re-examine, but water is not a very good thirst quencher. Cold, fizzy things quench it better, and sour, bitter things quench it better, so beer is in and of itself close but I even trained by brain to feel better thirst-quenching from beer because it also works on the alcohol cravings. Well, now that feels colossally stupid.

I am toying with the idea to alternate alcoholic and non-alcoholic beer in the evenings to de-train the association, but I wanted to ask it before because maybe that would be even worse. One thing I know is that intermittent rewards lead to worse addictions than constant ones: that is why gambling is so addictive, because it only rewards occasionally, not all the time, and this fires the "anxiously expectant, nail-gnawing" dopamine routines which lead to strong addictions. And intemittent rewarding of alcohol cravings (when they come hand in hand with thirst) by sometimes with alcoholic beer sometimes with non-alcoholic beer could be thus a very bad idea.

Maybe I should stick to non-A beer for a while completely and that would de-train the association better?