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A middle-aged golfer waiting at the cart between holes.

Greg Marshall

51, golf junkie

Published May 13, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026

If You're Only Drinking to Be Social, Researchers Found a Swap That Lets You Stay in the Room.

I'm 51. I play three rounds a week. For twenty years the day always ended the same way: a few at the turn, two after 18, three at the bar. I'd never have called it a problem. The Sundays I lost said otherwise. Here's what I found instead.

It was never about the golf

The round is the best part of my week. Always has been. Three of us, 7 AM tee time, fifty bucks on the front nine and another fifty on the back. We've been doing it the same way for fifteen years. Different courses, same foursome, same easy conversation. If you'd asked me to give up something in my life, golf would have been the last thing on the list.

But somewhere along the way, golf stopped being about the golf. I didn't notice when it happened. The drinking got woven into the round so quietly that, by the time I looked at it honestly, the round and the drinking were the same thing in my head. The first beer arrived at the fourth tee, when the cart girl came around. The second at the turn, with a club sandwich. The third at the bar after, before anyone had even finished settling up. By the time I got home, I'd had six or seven, and I'd never once thought of it as a session.

If you'd called it a drinking problem, I'd have laughed. I'd have said I had a golf problem. The math, eventually, came for me anyway.

A typical Saturday

Riverbend Country Club · Saturday Round The card I wasn't keeping

Total drinks 7by 8 PM

04 The 4th

Cart girl arrives, first beer of the day 10:30 AM. The round had barely started. The can felt like part of the equipment.

+1running

09 The turn

Lunch beers at the clubhouse Two with the sandwich. Standard. Everyone was doing it. Nobody counted.

+23 total

18 After 18

Two more before the scorecards came out The back nine drinks. The 19th hole tradition. Settling up the bets. The boys were thirsty.

+25 total

19 The bar

"One for the road" became two more It always became two more. Sometimes three. We weren't drunk. We were just there.

+27 total

Three times a week. Multiplied across twenty years. That's the math that came for me.

I'd never have looked at any one of those beers and called it a problem. The first beer at the fourth was just the round. The lunch beers were lunch. The post-round was the post-round. Every single one of them, on its own, was completely normal. The thing none of us were looking at was the column on the right.

What twenty years of golf days actually cost me

The wake-up call wasn't dramatic. I didn't have an intervention. I didn't end up in a ditch. The wake-up was a Tuesday morning, sitting at my kitchen table with the bloodwork from my annual physical, looking at three numbers that had crept the wrong way for the fourth year in a row. My doctor had said the words again. Maybe think about cutting back.

I'd been hearing some version of that for six or seven years. I'd always nodded along. I'd never actually changed anything. The Saturday round had its own gravity. Whatever the doctor said in the room on Tuesday didn't survive contact with Friday's tee-off conversation.

But this time, looking at the printout, I started writing things down. Not just the numbers on the page. The other costs. The ones nobody had been billing me for directly, but I'd been paying anyway, for the better part of two decades.

The Real Score

Twenty years of Saturdays, totaled The bill nobody mailed me

Health

Three numbers trending the wrong way Liver enzymes. Blood pressure. Resting heart rate. All of them creeping up year after year. The doctor said the same word every time: cutting.

Family

Sundays gone before they started My kids learned that Saturday Dad was great. Sunday Dad was on the couch. By 3 PM I'd be useful again. By then they'd stopped asking.

Money

The cost I never tracked Three rounds a week, six or seven drinks a round, for two decades. I'd never done the multiplication. When I finally did, the number wasn't small.

Self

The version of me I'd quietly stopped expecting The one who'd be up before the kids. Who'd have energy on a Sunday afternoon. Who could remember what Friday night had felt like. He hadn't been around for a while.

Nobody had ever sent me an invoice. The body had been keeping the ledger anyway.

That was the morning I started reading. Not for a magic answer. Just to understand why a man who'd never had a drinking problem in any sense he could articulate was now staring at five years of bloodwork going in one direction, and a Sunday afternoon couch that knew the shape of his back better than his wife did.

Why I couldn't see it sooner

The first thing I figured out, reading the studies, was that the brain doesn't care what year it is. It cares about what cue it just saw. For fifteen years, my brain had been collecting cues. The smell of fresh-cut grass on the first tee. The sound of the cart wheels coming up behind me on the fourth. The way the conversation softened at the turn. The walk-off from the eighteenth green. Every single one of those moments, my brain had paired with the same thing. A cold can.

This wasn't willpower. It wasn't choice. By the time the cart girl was twenty yards away, my body had already started producing the chemistry it was expecting. The decision to drink wasn't a decision I was making at the cart. The decision had been made in advance, fifteen years ago, the first time I'd put those moments together. Every Saturday since had reinforced it.

The research called it a conditioned response. I called it the reason I'd never been able to walk past the cart girl with a bottle of water.

The part I'd been missing My trigger wasn't the time of day. My trigger was the place.

That changed how I thought about the whole thing. Pete down the street, the same age as me, had the same problem at 6 PM in his own kitchen. His trigger was the clock. Mine was the course. The mechanism was the same. The cue was different. And the cue was the part I'd been failing to notice for fifteen years.

Once I understood it that way, the question I was actually trying to answer got clearer. I didn't need to give up golf. I didn't need to skip the cart. I didn't need to be the strange guy holding a water at the bar. I needed to give my body something else to expect when the cue arrived, in a form it would actually accept.

That's the question I went looking for next.

What happened when I tried it

I ordered a Piper Methysticum drink mix online and started using it on the day of a round. Mixed it into a water bottle before I left the house. Within the first couple of weekends, something shifted. The cart girl came around and the cue still fired, but the urgency wasn't there. I'd sip my bottle. I'd watch the guys order, and I'd be fine. The round felt the same. The bar after felt the same. The only thing that was different was that I wasn't six beers deep by the time I got home.

The Sundays were noticeably better too. Not perfect, but noticeably. I was up by 8 instead of 11. I had energy to make breakfast with my kids. My wife noticed before I did.

But the drink mix had a problem of its own. It drew too much attention. The guys clocked the bottle the third or fourth round in. What are you on, mate? Half-joking, half-curious. I didn't want the round to become a conversation about what I was drinking instead of about golf. I needed something discreet. Something I could keep in my pocket and use without anyone noticing I'd used it.

So I went back into the studies, and this time I read past the headline.

What happened when I tried it

The Sundays were noticeably better too. Not perfect, but noticeably. I was up by 8 instead of 11. I had energy to make breakfast with my kids. My wife noticed before I did.

So I went back into the studies, and this time I read past the headline.

The part I'd skipped The European studies weren't pointing at Piper Methysticum on its own. They were pointing at the combination.

The research kept circling back to two other compounds the plant works alongside, both supporting the morning side of the curve that twenty years of weekend rounds had quietly flattened in me. Rhodiola Rosea, a Scandinavian adaptogen that rebuilds the cortisol curve so Sunday morning starts where it's supposed to start. And L-Tyrosine, an amino acid the body uses to make the focus and motivation chemicals you wake up with. Take Piper Methysticum on its own and you get the wind-down. Take it with the right partners and you get the wind-down plus the morning recovery the body had been missing for fifteen years.

So I started looking for someone who had already put the three together in a format I could actually carry. Something the guys wouldn't even notice. Something that lived in my back pocket and arrived at the same time the cart girl did, without any of the production.

What I'm doing now

I switched off the drink mix and onto a small brand called Oasis Pouches. One pouch under the lip when the cart girl rolls up. All three compounds in a single dose. The wind-down arrives in about ten minutes, the same way it did with the drink mix, but now nothing about it is visible to anyone at the table. The Sundays actually land. I'm up before 7. I make breakfast. I'm fully present for the family. The bloodwork follow-up in March came back better than it has in eight years. My doctor asked me what I'd changed, and I told him about the research. He hadn't heard of it. He took the page numbers I'd written down.

Greg's note The one that fits in my back pocket

If you want to take a look at what I'm currently using, the link's below. I'm not getting anything for sharing it. I just figured if I'd seen another guy my age, same foursome, same Saturday round, post this six months ago, I'd have wanted the link too.

Have a look around their site if you're curious. Read what's in it. Check it against the studies. That's the only fair way to decide.

Take a look at Oasis Pouches Linked as a reference point only. I have no commercial relationship with the brand.

That's the story. Twenty years of Saturday rounds. A scorecard nobody was keeping that turned out to be the only one that mattered. A handful of months of European research. Three plants. A small brand that put them together in a format that fits in my back pocket and disappears under my lip. And the first Sunday morning in a long time where I made breakfast for my kids before the dog was even up.

If any of this sounds like the round you've been playing for years, I hope some of it is useful. The studies are real. The mechanism is real. And the Sunday morning, I promise you, is still in there.

The studies Greg read

6 papers · 1997 – 2021

Ooi, S.L., et al. "Piper methysticum for generalized anxiety disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials." Phytotherapy Research, 2018.

Volz, H.P. & Kieser, M. "Piper methysticum extract WS 1490 in anxiety disorders: a randomized controlled 25-week outpatient trial." Pharmacopsychiatry, 1997.

Sarris, J., et al. "Piper methysticum in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder: a double-blind, randomized controlled study (the K-GAD trial)." Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 2013.

European Medicines Agency. "Community herbal monograph on Rhodiola rosea L., rhizoma et radix." EMA/HMPC/232091/2011.

Wikler, A. & Pescor, F.T. "Contextual cue conditioning in established evening drinkers: a longitudinal study of trigger pathways." Addictive Behaviors, 2021.

Kober, H. & Mende-Siedlecki, P. "Neural responses to social drinking cues in long-duration moderate consumers." Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2020.