“I Will Seek Another Drink”: The Craving Cycle

This is one of the most vivid portraits in Proverbs. It opens with a riddle of six questions and answers it with the man who lingers over wine. Then it shifts to his own voice. He was beaten and did not feel it. His first thought on waking is the next drink. The sage is not describing a single bad night. He is describing a pattern: harm that no longer registers, and a pull that comes back with the morning.

It is worth being clear about what the passage does and does not say. Scripture treats wine as a gift (Ps. 104:15) and drunkenness as a danger (Eph. 5:18). Proverbs 23 is about the man who “lingers long,” not the man who has a glass at dinner. The research below should not be stretched into a case for or against all drinking.

The cycle the proverb describes. Addiction research describes a repeating three-stage cycle, summarized in a review by Volkow, Koob, and McLellan (2016). In the first stage, intoxication, the drug produces a large surge of dopamine in the brain’s reward circuits. With repetition, those circuits adapt. The surge from the substance weakens, and ordinary pleasures lose their pull too. In the second stage, withdrawal brings a negative state, as stress systems become more active when the substance is absent. In the third stage, craving and preoccupation, cues tied to drinking trigger strong urges. The prefrontal regions that support judgment and self-control function less well at the same time. The review’s authors present this as the scientific basis for treating addiction as a brain disorder, which some researchers dispute. The pattern itself is well established.

Read beside Proverbs 23:35, the parallels are close. “I did not know it” fits the blunted response. “When shall I awake? I will seek another drink” fits the morning craving that runs ahead of judgment.

Even moderate drinking. For a long time, light drinking was thought to be harmless to the brain, or even protective. Daviet and colleagues (2022) examined brain scans from 36,678 generally healthy middle-aged and older adults in the UK Biobank, controlling for many possible confounds. Alcohol intake was associated with lower overall brain volume, lower gray matter in many regions, and poorer white matter. The associations were already visible at one to two drinks a day and grew stronger as intake rose.

What the studies cannot tell us. The Biobank findings are correlational. People who drink more may differ in other ways, and the effects at low intake are small. The addiction cycle describes people who have developed a use disorder, not everyone who drinks. And none of this replaces the text’s own concern, which is wisdom and the life it protects.

Practice

Living it out

Five practices drawn from this passage. Each says how strong the research behind it is. What the labels mean.

1. 1

   Know your own pattern, honestly

   For two weeks, write down every drink: when, how many, and what you were feeling just before. Look for the cue, not just the count.

   StrongStrong that cues tied to drinking drive craving in people with a use disorder (Volkow et al., 2016). Self-monitoring itself was not tested in the studies cited here.
2. 2

   Keep the daily average low, or at zero

   If you drink, keep it occasional and small. If you can’t keep to your own limit, take that as information.

   ModerateIn a very large cohort, brain-volume differences were visible at one to two drinks a day and grew with intake (Daviet et al., 2022). The data are correlational.
3. 3

   Change the setting, not just the resolution

   Remove alcohol from the house for a season, change the route that passes the bar, or change what you do at 6 p.m.

   ModerateModerate that cue-driven craving is central to the cycle (Volkow et al., 2016). Proverbs 4:14–15 gives the same advice; see Addition 15.
4. 4

   Tell one man the truth

   If you suspect a problem, say so to one trusted brother or your pastor this week, and ask him to check on you.

   ObedienceObedience. Commended by Scripture (James 5:16). Accountability for drinking specifically is not tested in the studies cited here.
5. 5

   If you can’t stop, get treatment

   Craving that returns every morning, drinking in spite of harm, or failing again and again to cut back are reasons to see a doctor or an addiction specialist. Treatment works, and seeking it is not a failure of faith.

   StrongStrong that addiction changes brain systems for reward, stress, and control in ways that make willpower alone unreliable (Volkow et al., 2016).

Studies cited on this page2

1. ↗ Daviet, R., Aydogan, G., Jagannathan, K., Spilka, N., Koellinger, P. D., Kranzler, H. R., Nave, G., & Wetherill, R. R. (2022). Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. Nature Communications, 13(1), 1175. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28735-5
2. ↗ Volkow, N. D., Koob, G. F., & McLellan, A. T. (2016). Neurobiologic advances from the brain disease model of addiction. New England Journal of Medicine, 374(4), 363–371. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMra1511480