When You Stop Drinking Alcohol
January 28th, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized — Addiction Recovery AuthorIt used to be that your life revolved around doing something – drinking. When you stop drinking, suddenly your life revolves around not doing something. Not using alcohol. You are a now a non-drinker, a non-alcohol user.
The irony of putting down the drink is in order to stay sober, you need to be stronger than you’ve ever been, when you are at your weakest point. Your nerves are shot, your brain is foggy, and you are probably having trouble sleeping. Due to your fogged up brain, you don’t feel as confident to handle things as you would like to.
Feeling shaky and afraid, you now get a clearer view of what shape your life is in, in the aftermath of using for as long as you have. This alone is enough to get you longing for just one more drink to take the edge off, to get some relief. But if you are serious about getting and staying sober, you have no choice but to rally what resources you have to be as together as you can be. That is now the extent of your options.
Putting yourself on a self-imposed schedule is always a good idea. Alcoholics need structure. We all know this with a ten second mental review of how we’ve been spending our free time. Keeping busy helps to stave off the ongoing urges you are going to have, at least in the beginning, to pick up that drink. You can also make yourself a daily list of things that need to be addressed, to start pulling yourself out of the hole we all end up residing in. The daily list needs to be realistic so you are not overdoing it. Piling on an unrealistic amount of daily issues to address, particularly when they are unpleasant, can send you running back to the bottle. So after a night of very little sleep, you get up, get ready, and be as productive towards rebuilding your life as you can.
There is an A.A. saying that is good advice for anyone. Keep it in today. In other words, just focus on today. Try not to lament over what you did yesterday and what tomorrow has in store for you. Living in today only will make your efforts that much more effective, and that increase in effectiveness will take you where you need to go that much sooner.
If you have a drinking problem, you can find help here:
http://HowIStoppedDrinking.org
