Aish's story: "Services designed to make everything easier are making things worse.”

I'm very familiar with rapid delivery services. Something that had once started as convenience eventually saw me ordering vodka at 7am daily directly to my door, spiralling deeper and becoming not only a round-the-clock drinker, but physically dependent on alcohol by the age of 27.

At one point, I was very much still ‘functioning’, and to be seen buying alcohol at 7am from my local store was absolutely not on the cards. But having it brought to my door, to the comfort of my own home? That was something only the delivery driver and me knew.

This continued for years. The shopkeeper, who had once been my only point of human interaction all week, slowly disappeared from my life altogether. Days became weeks, and weeks became months. Isolating, alone, and drinking myself into, well, alcohol-induced psychosis. But the deliveries kept coming, and I kept drinking.

Those brown paper bags with branded stickers were scattered across my apartment like an episode of Hoarders. But it didn’t matter, because it was only the delivery drivers and me that knew. Except those visits became more frequent, until double daily deliveries were the norm.

That was my reality back then with deliveries, and it appears my brain hadn't forgotten about this trigger after finding recovery in 2024.

Fast forward to September 2025 and I was one year sober. For some reason on this particular day, my cravings felt surprisingly loud and more persistent. I kept playing the tape forward, grounding myself, riding the wave, letting them pass. I told myself, ‘I’ve heard it before. These are nothing more than fleeting thoughts.’

I did everything I was meant to do. Box breathing. Tapping. Grounding. Changing rooms. Shifting environments. Going for a walk. All the textbook coping strategies.

There was no way I’d ruin all my hard work, jeopardise my sobriety, my health, and my mental sanity, right? Plus, I didn’t even have control of my own finances at this point, so I couldn’t even buy alcohol even if I wanted to, right? Wrong.

The promise of ‘fast, reliable, convenient delivery’ that I’d fallen prey to at my lowest point had now started niggling away. It was tempting me again. The decision I took next made everything worse and wasn’t exactly the empowering, everyday convenience promised.

That delivery arrived at my house in 20 minutes sharp, and I didn’t even have to leave my house or pay for it upfront. Conveniently couriered to my house and financed with Klarna. That finance option at checkout might seem innovative, but it was a big problem for me. It meant not only that I didn’t need to leave the house to go to the shop, but that there was no longer any financial barrier either.

I fell head first straight into a very big relapse. ‘Just one drink’ to celebrate a year of sobriety. I'd be fine, it's only one and no big deal. My addict brain told me I deserved it, that I’d earned it, and the convenience of it arriving at my door made it feel even easier to justify in the moment.

Something that was meant to be a celebration turned into the start of slipping back into a cycle I thought I’d escaped. That one drink became 5k runs fuelled by vodka. It became lying to the people I loved and withdrawing from them completely. Hiding alcohol in flower beds. Wearing oversized hoodies to conceal bottles of vodka at 9am. Playing podcasts loudly enough to drown out the sound of clinking glass in my bag.

My family started questioning my ‘strange’ behaviour, but I became so skilled at deflecting and gaslighting that I would give them just enough reassurance to stop them asking further questions. Before I knew it, I was face-to-face with the version of myself I had fought so hard never to become again. A version of myself that forced me to confront the harsh reality that I was, in fact, an alcoholic.*

What scared me most was how quickly alcohol wrapped itself around my life again. The way it could feel like comfort whilst quietly destroying everything around me within a matter of days. Suddenly I was back to ordering alcohol at 7am on Deliveroo, recognising the same drivers from the year before.

I had only been drinking again for a few months, but I already knew where it was heading. I was taken into hospital by ambulance and ended up back in detox, lying in the exact same bed exactly one year later. There was something deeply confronting about that moment. Realising how quickly addiction can pull you backwards, no matter how far forward you think you’ve come.

Something clicked in me that day. I realised that if I didn’t truly commit to my sobriety and start addressing the mental health struggles underneath it all, I would spend the rest of my life trapped in the same repeating cycle. And not everybody makes it back from that.

Sometimes what feels like convenience comes at the highest possible cost. And eventually, I realised that was no longer a price I was willing to pay.

While rapid delivery apps do indeed keep to their promise of quick and convenient delivery - which I’m sure is incredibly helpful to some customers when buying household items or groceries - they can be dangerous for anyone struggling with their relationship with alcohol and those keen to stop drinking, or stay stopped in recovery.

As someone who is now sober and has experienced first-hand how the speed, ease and unlimited aspects of rapid deliveries can fuel addiction, and make it harder to stay away from or cut back on alcohol, some simple changes would go a long way for people like me.

Restricted hours, better safeguards, limits to how much or how often alcohol can be ordered, and stronger ways to opt-out of marketing and block yourself from ordering, all feel like sensible steps that can be taken to better protect people and prevent others from following in my footsteps, without banning them altogether for those not struggling.

Read more about Aish’s story in The Telegraph.

*Editor's note: You can read more about the language used to talk about alcohol harm, including the word ‘alcoholic’, here.