The "stop button" (feeling when enough is enough while drinking and stopping there) for me looks like this:

  • It starts with the increased awareness of how booze makes us feel. You first become aware of the drinking process - that is one of the reasons why counting is so important. You feel the effects of the first one. Then you feel how it starts changing as you drink more. But you drink very consciously. Some people are bothered by this - but it is the greatest gift you can give yourself
  • As the awareness deepens, you start feeling how gentle and enjoyable effects of the first drinks morph into uncomfortable feelings of loss of control, when you start getting caught in that blunt strong grip that alcohol can have over us. Something definitely changes as you approach this threshold. I suspect this is somewhere around 0.05% BAC 
  • After some training, this awareness of the change as you approach your threshold, is followed by a desire to stop. The more you respond to this desire, the stronger and clearer its voice becomes.

Watch out: this is not a linear process. Sometimes it's enough to ignore the good voice of our body two or three times for it to go silent for us. That's why I would really try to practice sticking for a while to strict limits (e.g. BTB) and really try to avoid exceptions for a couple of months. I remember the first time I've done such a practice, sticking to BTB, I started to hear the stop button more clearly around day 52, but I continued to count to 100 BTB days, when stopping became a habit.