On paper, Jesse Carrajat seemed to have built the kind of life many people spend years chasing.
He had a beautiful wife, two small children and another baby on the way, a six-figure income, a senior role at a major US health insurance company, and a pristine four-bedroom home in New Jersey that the couple had created from the ground up for their growing family.
To anyone looking in, it was the image of success fully realized.
But inside that seemingly perfect life, Carrajat was quietly losing control of a struggle few around him understood. He could not stop drinking.
Carrajat says his slide began during the Covid pandemic in 2020, when the lines separating his demanding career from his responsibilities at home abruptly vanished.
Like countless Americans thrust into remote work, he found himself logging on from home while finding it increasingly difficult to disconnect once the workday was supposed to be over.
‘I’d be working and dealing with all the stresses of that,’ he said. ‘And the moment I finished, I would walk down the corridor and have to be in dad mode, holding the kids, wrestling them, calming their temper tantrums. There was no break, no pause.’
Drinking, he discovered, offered the pause he felt he was missing.
Jesse Carrajat, now 41 years old, battled an alcohol use disorder after struggling with the strains of work and family life
At first, Carrajat, now 41, would slip unnoticed into the garage at the end of the working week and quickly drink an IPA before returning to his family.
‘It started as one just to take the edge off on a Thursday or Friday, but pretty soon my tolerance went up, so that became two, and then three,’ he told the Daily Mail.
Before long, the end-of-week release had crept into the rest of his life.
‘Alcohol became a daily ritual for me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes on a Wednesday, I would buy a four-pack of IPAs, thinking I had enough to last four days, and drink them all.
‘At 5.15pm on a Tuesday I was reaching for a beer. Other times, I would pour myself a shot.
‘When my drinking picked up in frequency, I felt weak and ashamed. I am a guy who prides myself on discipline, having it all together, and showing up for my wife and kids, and I was failing at that.
‘I didn’t want to reach out for help either, because I didn’t want to be held accountable for what I was doing and I didn’t want to feel judged.’
When he returned to the office, Carrajat said he never drank at work – or to excess around colleagues. Instead, the drinking remained a largely secret habit, carried out furtively at home.
He continued slipping into the garage to drink, crushing the empty beer cans beneath his foot and hiding them under piles of cardboard so his wife would not find them.
Soon, the deception became more elaborate.
‘I would buy drinks with cash just so my wife could not see it on the bank statement,’ he said. ‘And then I started to hide whisky bottles in obscure places, like at the back of the pantry. I thought if my wife found them it would look like they’d been bought ages ago and misplaced.’
Carrajat said that, at his worst, he would drink 11 or 12 alcoholic drinks on both Friday and Saturday, as well as several every weeknight.
Like roughly 28 million Americans, he had quietly developed an addiction to alcohol.
Known medically as alcohol use disorder, or AUD, it is not defined simply by how much someone drinks, but by losing control over alcohol – continuing to drink despite the damage it causes to health, work or relationships.
There is no fixed number of drinks that means someone has AUD. Instead, doctors look for a pattern of behavior: intense cravings, drinking that begins to interfere with work or family life, and giving up activities once enjoyed in order to drink.
For Carrajat, the consequences were becoming increasingly difficult to hide. After his secret weekend binges came mornings spent battling hangovers while trying to play the part of husband and father.
Carrajat is pictured above with his wife Meg and two of his three children. His children are now aged eight, six and two years
Carrajat is speaking out to show others a method that could help to curb their drinking
‘I constantly felt on edge,’ he said. ‘On Saturday mornings, the first five hours would be me faking it, being anxious and wanting to go somewhere to clear my head, when I should have been enjoying myself with my family.
‘On Sunday mornings, I could barely make it through the church service.’
The turning point came in 2023, when Carrajat decided he was ‘sick and tired of always being sick and tired.’
He had tried to quit several times before, promising himself he would go a week without drinking, only to give in on the first day.
‘I remember there was a moment where I crushed a beer can again and put it under the garbage this time, and just thought to myself, “Wow, you are in trouble here.”
‘The very next thing I did was go to my wife and say, “Hey, Meg, I think I need help drinking less.” And I remember her response was like, “Yeah, no s***.” Clearly I wasn’t hiding things as well as I thought I was.’
At first, he tried using an app to track the days he managed not to drink. But within two weeks, he found himself slipping back into the same familiar pattern – convincing himself that just one beer wouldn’t hurt, only to find one quickly became several.
It was then, while scrolling through Instagram, that he stumbled across an influencer talking about a treatment he had never considered: naltrexone.
The above shows the page on the new guidelines that details alcohol consumption recommendations
Although better known as a medicine for opioid addiction, naltrexone is also FDA-approved to treat alcohol use disorder.
It works by blocking opioid receptors involved in the brain’s reward system, reducing some of the pleasurable effects of alcohol and, for some people, helping to dampen the urge to keep drinking.
Naltrexone is available in two main forms – a daily oral tablet and a long-acting injection, which is typically given once a month.
Costing about $3-per-pill, it has been dubbed ‘Ozempic for alcohol’ because of its ability, in some patients, to dramatically reduce cravings. It is available on prescription and is not addictive.
Carrajat was skeptical. But after contacting a telemedicine provider, he received a prescription and took his first tablet that evening. The effect was almost instant.
Because oral naltrexone’s effects vary over the course of the day, patients may be advised to take their daily dose shortly before the period when their cravings are typically strongest – in Carrajat’s case, the early evening.
‘I took it that first time just before dinner,’ he said. ‘I remember sitting at the table and looking at the wine, and I just didn’t care about it.
‘I was staring at it thinking, “I should want that.” And I didn’t. It was so wild that such a tiny pill could do that.’
Carrajat, now 41, put on about 25lbs during his drinking. He is pictured above when he first cut down his alcohol consumption, left, and today
He continued taking naltrexone daily for three months and said his desire to drink virtually disappeared.
There were some initial side effects. For the first two weeks, he said he sometimes felt anxious and noticed a dip in his energy levels, but both effects quickly subsided.
He did not drink at all during those three months. But on the day he stopped taking the drug daily, he cautiously poured himself a glass of wine.
For perhaps the first time in years, one was enough.
Today, Carrajat can have the occasional drink with his wife or friends without finding himself pulled back into the patterns that once dominated his life. He still takes naltrexone, but now only before social occasions where he expects to drink.
The transformation has extended far beyond alcohol.
Around the time he began tackling his drinking, Carrajat walked away from his high-powered corporate career and launched Stronger Weekly, a podcast focused on health, fitness and self-improvement. New episodes are released every Wednesday and its YouTube channel now has around 5,000 followers. It has also become his main source of income.
The change helped rekindle his interest in fitness, too. He says he has lost 25lb, taking him from 220lb to 195lbs, and is now in the best shape of his life.
Most importantly, the man who once spent weekend mornings anxious, hungover and wishing he could escape his family now says he is able to be present for them again.
And, for the first time in years, he is excited about what comes next.
