Your liver can start to heal, your risks of heart disease and cancer go down, and you may begin to sleep better. At the end of the day, one of the most important tools you have at your disposal is self-compassion. Instead of criticizing yourself for having a hard time or slipping up and having a drink, remember that no one’s perfect. What matters most is your ability to maintain an open, curious outlook as you learn what does and doesn’t work for you. What’s most important is looking at your drinking habits and finding a way to cut back that works for you.
Why You Get Sugar Cravings After Quitting Alcohol
Certain personality traits can make you more prone to engage in binge drinking. If you’re a highly impulsive person, you may be more likely to reach for another drink without stopping to think about the consequences. If you’re the type of person who likes to seek out novel sensations and situations, you might also be more willing to engage in risky drinking habits. If you don’t have people currently in your life who can help you quit drinking, you’re still not in this alone. There are people willing and waiting to support you, guide you and love you through the ups and downs of ending unhealthy drinking patterns. Your decision to want to stop drinking is powerful.
Download the Drink Free Days app
It also provides worksheets to help you uncover the nature of your urges to drink and to make a plan for handling them. The following activity offers suggestions to support you in your decision to cut back or quit drinking. It can be used with counseling or therapy and is not meant as a substitute for professional help.
Be mindful of your friends’ drinking habits
Positive support persons are those who recognize your goals and stand by you as you work to accomplish them. They’re the people you feel safe being vulnerable with, and you trust to hold you accountable. Because substance use disorder is a complex disease, you likely have more than one trigger.
Steps on How to Stop Drinking Alcohol
If you quit drinking and experience any new or worsening mental health symptoms, please consider therapy. So what should you do if your loved one initially denies having a binge drinking problem? You might want to give them a few days to reflect on what you said. If they continue to engage in the same unhealthy patterns, you could revisit the conversation later. In some cases, the people around you might continue to pressure you to drink.
Figure out what scares you about getting sober
I’m currently at work, and super tempted to pick up some drinks right now. It’d be far from the first time I drank on the job, even though I know it’s not a good idea obviously. Part of it is definitely that I’ve had a rough month and struggle with depression, but another part is simply that it’s a slow day. Just imagining the next few hours slowly creeping by – with nothing but my thoughts to occupy me – really makes me crave that drink. Will eating salads and drinking water make your boredom go away? Not exactly, but it can make you feel better, which has a ripple effect on whether or not you enjoy your life.
Instead of worrying that people will leave you behind for your bad behavior, you’re afraid that people will do it because now you seem too good. There are withdrawal symptoms, environmental temptations, and outright stress. If you put down the bottle for 30 days, but you slip up and have a drink on day 31, this doesn’t undo the 30 days before.
Mind & Mood
- It’s when you bond with your co-workers after work.
- In addition, some new, non-addictive medications can reduce the desire to drink or lessen the rewarding effect of drinking so it is easier to stop.
- I believe the real answer lies in how human brains are wired, specifically, the human need to resolve internal conflicts, or what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.
- When you’re working to quit drinking, writing can help you come to terms with and realize things about your relationship with alcohol that you didn’t know before.
- In other words, if you have a hard time stopping drinking, not only is there nothing wrong with you, quite the contrary, your brain is functioning the way it is designed to.
Are you beating yourself up for a mistake you made earlier? Dissect and challenge those worries with more realistic thoughts. The truth is other people are usually far less focused on you than you believe. If no one’s pressuring you, but you still feel a desire to fit in, have a non-alcoholic beverage. Simply having a drink to sip on might make you feel more at ease.
- People in AA are either working to become sober or are in recovery.
- Simply being here, reading tips on how to quit drinking, considering the possibilities of your future is a positive first step.
- It might be more fun than sitting in one spot and filling your body with liquid.
- This is where it becomes essential to think of the progress you made.
What happens to your body when you stop drinking?
If you’re a binge drinker, you may not drink every day, but when you do start drinking, you likely have a hard time calling it quits after just one or two drinks. Completely cutting alcohol out of your life is always an option. But if you don’t want to take that big of a step, there are ways to drink more responsibly. Some binge drinkers only drink drinking out of boredom once a week; others even less frequently.
That translates to about four or more drinks for an adult female or five or more drinks for an adult male. Alcohol has a way of seeping into various parts of your life, including how you spend time socializing and how you spend time by yourself. One of the most exciting—and sometimes intimidating—parts of becoming sober is discovering who you are without alcohol. They could be family, friends, significant others or mentors.
