How long did it take hangovers to turn into withdrawal?
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Sobersville
Posts: 28
How long did it take hangovers to turn into withdrawal?
How long did it take for your hangovers to turn into withdrawal symptoms?
Reading various withdrawal related threads on this forum, especially where people ask if they are having withdrawal symptoms or not and sounding confused about it, has got me thinking about my own experiences. I've not done much research on this so I'll just relate how withdrawal symptoms developed for me and see if it's in any way typical.
I'm 40. I started drinking really heavily when I was about 20, so I can divide the last 20 years up into various bite sized chunks.
1. Aged 20-26: Heavy drinking, mainly beer and sweet sherry. Sherry may be an unusual choice but I loved the taste and used to glug bottles of it before going out to drink beer. I kept a chart at the time of standard units of alcohol consumed. It would vary between 50 and 100 a week. I prided myself on having a strong head for liquor and always being ready for anything, drunk, sober or hungover. If I happened to stop drinking for a few days, after a particularly wild weekend for instance, I would have a not too serious hangover the first day, feel a bit subdued on the second, then be back to normal on the third day. That pattern didn't change. I assumed delirium tremens and the horrors of withdrawal, warned about in books, were a bit of a myth, probably an exaggeration of rare, extreme cases written up by doctors as a scare tactic. I found the idea of dipsomaniacs seeing pink elephants bizarre, and more of a subject for jokes than caution. Still, I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to carry on drinking the way I was.
2. Aged 27: Sober for a year. In retrospect this was more of a self-test to see if I could quit drinking if I wanted to rather than a concerted effort to change my ways. I played a lot of sport and became a picture of health. My liver couldn't believe its luck. I was confident that any worries I'd ever had about alcohol being a problem for me were a thing of the past, or unfounded in the first place. I was definitely not one of those people.
3. Aged 28-30: Drifted slowly back into heavy drinking. To begin with I'd occasionally have a couple of beers at the weekend, and only then if I was in a social situation where everyone else was drinking. After six months of this polite regime I got drunk again. The first hangover was horrendous, worse than any I'd had since I first got drunk. I'd really poisoned myself and was sick for days. The next couple of hangovers were the same. This shook me, as before I'd always thought of hangovers as a nuisance rather than crippling car crashes. These nuclear proportioned hangovers, I now believe, were due to my tolerance to alcohol being zero and my newly healthy liver being unprepared for, and outraged by, a sudden booze barrage. I've read somewhere that as tolerance to alcohol increases the liver produces more enzymes to deal with it. These are the enzymes they test for when checking liver health. I'm sure one of you can give a more knowledgeable explanation, but whatever the biochemical reason, as my drinking returned to my pre-sober levels so my hangovers subsided to merely nuisance level again. By the time I was 30 I was right back where I'd been at 26.
4. Aged 30-35: My hangovers start to change. My weekends are lost weekends. My Monday morning hangovers have begun morphing into something much more sinister. They've developed two new alarming symptoms: anxiety and depression. Being fairly slow on the uptake, it takes me a long time to recognise the symptoms as anxiety and depression, and once having recognised them, to attribute them to the hangover. I usually assumed I was feeling shame and remorse at what I'd managed to do this time. It took me a long time to realise that It wasn't because I'd drunkeny fallen over and gashed my leg the night before that I was feeling panicky and depressed, or because I'd told the tubby railway employee behind the ticket desk at the station that he was a fat *******, although that didn't help, but actually because my hangovers were beginning to turn into withdrawal symptoms. This, I suspect, is when a doctor or psychiatrist, looking at me objectively, would have said my mental health was starting to go down the tubes.
5. Aged 35-40: Goodbye hangovers, hello withdrawal. My drink of choice becomes vodka. I drink it every evening. I develop the shakes. I can't remember when the shakes first appeared, maybe it was an unsteady hand when trying to pick up my first drink of the day in a pub. But soon I'm having trouble with knives and forks, and pens. Writing anything when being watched is impossible, unless I've had several stiff drinks, which is a bad idea at work. This problem soon permeates every part fo my life. The morning dry heaves which have only been occasional now become routine. Accompanied by shaking, of course. And the anxiety and depression. Pretty soon, if I've not got half a bottle of vodka in me, I feel sick and disorientated, as if I've just been flung off rollercoaster into a brick wall. I try to work with withdrawal symptoms. It's impossible. Walking up a staircase induces vertigo. I take to hiding in the first aid room, lying on the sickbed, shaking and sweating with my eyes closed, coloured shapes and flashing neon lights drifting under my eyelids. I throw up water in the sink, and then bile. At 3 o'clock, when I can officially leave the building I walk straight to the pub, feeling like a nauseous spaceman, and try and cure myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I become terrified of withdrawal symptoms. It's at this point I realise I need a doctor.
I'm nearly 6 months sober now. A work friend recently told me that this time last year I was "shaking all the time". I thought I'd hidden it so well. What a joke. Those pink elephants don't strike me as quite so amusing now.
Anyway, that's pretty much how my withdrawal symptoms developed from routine hangovers, but clearly it's not the same for everyone. If I'd discovered this site in my twenties I would have been faintly perplexed by all the withdrawal posts and wondered if I was a medical freak. Similarly, I read posts on here about bad withdrawal by people who are barely out of their teens, and I find it scary.
What determines how long it takes for withdrawal symptoms to appear? Is it really just volume of alcohol consumed for a given period? If so, how much and for how long? What about body weight and metabolism? How long did it take for you? And were your stages roughly similar to mine?
Bananaman
Reading various withdrawal related threads on this forum, especially where people ask if they are having withdrawal symptoms or not and sounding confused about it, has got me thinking about my own experiences. I've not done much research on this so I'll just relate how withdrawal symptoms developed for me and see if it's in any way typical.
I'm 40. I started drinking really heavily when I was about 20, so I can divide the last 20 years up into various bite sized chunks.
1. Aged 20-26: Heavy drinking, mainly beer and sweet sherry. Sherry may be an unusual choice but I loved the taste and used to glug bottles of it before going out to drink beer. I kept a chart at the time of standard units of alcohol consumed. It would vary between 50 and 100 a week. I prided myself on having a strong head for liquor and always being ready for anything, drunk, sober or hungover. If I happened to stop drinking for a few days, after a particularly wild weekend for instance, I would have a not too serious hangover the first day, feel a bit subdued on the second, then be back to normal on the third day. That pattern didn't change. I assumed delirium tremens and the horrors of withdrawal, warned about in books, were a bit of a myth, probably an exaggeration of rare, extreme cases written up by doctors as a scare tactic. I found the idea of dipsomaniacs seeing pink elephants bizarre, and more of a subject for jokes than caution. Still, I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to carry on drinking the way I was.
2. Aged 27: Sober for a year. In retrospect this was more of a self-test to see if I could quit drinking if I wanted to rather than a concerted effort to change my ways. I played a lot of sport and became a picture of health. My liver couldn't believe its luck. I was confident that any worries I'd ever had about alcohol being a problem for me were a thing of the past, or unfounded in the first place. I was definitely not one of those people.
3. Aged 28-30: Drifted slowly back into heavy drinking. To begin with I'd occasionally have a couple of beers at the weekend, and only then if I was in a social situation where everyone else was drinking. After six months of this polite regime I got drunk again. The first hangover was horrendous, worse than any I'd had since I first got drunk. I'd really poisoned myself and was sick for days. The next couple of hangovers were the same. This shook me, as before I'd always thought of hangovers as a nuisance rather than crippling car crashes. These nuclear proportioned hangovers, I now believe, were due to my tolerance to alcohol being zero and my newly healthy liver being unprepared for, and outraged by, a sudden booze barrage. I've read somewhere that as tolerance to alcohol increases the liver produces more enzymes to deal with it. These are the enzymes they test for when checking liver health. I'm sure one of you can give a more knowledgeable explanation, but whatever the biochemical reason, as my drinking returned to my pre-sober levels so my hangovers subsided to merely nuisance level again. By the time I was 30 I was right back where I'd been at 26.
4. Aged 30-35: My hangovers start to change. My weekends are lost weekends. My Monday morning hangovers have begun morphing into something much more sinister. They've developed two new alarming symptoms: anxiety and depression. Being fairly slow on the uptake, it takes me a long time to recognise the symptoms as anxiety and depression, and once having recognised them, to attribute them to the hangover. I usually assumed I was feeling shame and remorse at what I'd managed to do this time. It took me a long time to realise that It wasn't because I'd drunkeny fallen over and gashed my leg the night before that I was feeling panicky and depressed, or because I'd told the tubby railway employee behind the ticket desk at the station that he was a fat *******, although that didn't help, but actually because my hangovers were beginning to turn into withdrawal symptoms. This, I suspect, is when a doctor or psychiatrist, looking at me objectively, would have said my mental health was starting to go down the tubes.
5. Aged 35-40: Goodbye hangovers, hello withdrawal. My drink of choice becomes vodka. I drink it every evening. I develop the shakes. I can't remember when the shakes first appeared, maybe it was an unsteady hand when trying to pick up my first drink of the day in a pub. But soon I'm having trouble with knives and forks, and pens. Writing anything when being watched is impossible, unless I've had several stiff drinks, which is a bad idea at work. This problem soon permeates every part fo my life. The morning dry heaves which have only been occasional now become routine. Accompanied by shaking, of course. And the anxiety and depression. Pretty soon, if I've not got half a bottle of vodka in me, I feel sick and disorientated, as if I've just been flung off rollercoaster into a brick wall. I try to work with withdrawal symptoms. It's impossible. Walking up a staircase induces vertigo. I take to hiding in the first aid room, lying on the sickbed, shaking and sweating with my eyes closed, coloured shapes and flashing neon lights drifting under my eyelids. I throw up water in the sink, and then bile. At 3 o'clock, when I can officially leave the building I walk straight to the pub, feeling like a nauseous spaceman, and try and cure myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I become terrified of withdrawal symptoms. It's at this point I realise I need a doctor.
I'm nearly 6 months sober now. A work friend recently told me that this time last year I was "shaking all the time". I thought I'd hidden it so well. What a joke. Those pink elephants don't strike me as quite so amusing now.
Anyway, that's pretty much how my withdrawal symptoms developed from routine hangovers, but clearly it's not the same for everyone. If I'd discovered this site in my twenties I would have been faintly perplexed by all the withdrawal posts and wondered if I was a medical freak. Similarly, I read posts on here about bad withdrawal by people who are barely out of their teens, and I find it scary.
What determines how long it takes for withdrawal symptoms to appear? Is it really just volume of alcohol consumed for a given period? If so, how much and for how long? What about body weight and metabolism? How long did it take for you? And were your stages roughly similar to mine?
Bananaman
not little, a stranger no more
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: in the crowd
Posts: 410
Difficult to answer. When I quit, I was 28, my mental health had been slowly deteriorating over the last 2 years, and I am now sure that some of the hangover symptoms were in fact withdrawal symptoms. No shakes, but completely disrupted sleeping patterns, night sweats, anxiety.
Good post too, Banananman, because it shows the progressiveness of alcoholism well. I can relate to your description, I had a similar parcours, a bit quicker because I jumped from part 1. directly to part 4. without the 1 year sobriety stint. I was just on the verge of the 5. stage when I decided I couldn't do this anymore. Beer starting to give way to hard liquor. Drinking nearly every evening. Binges turning into regularity. Watching a trainwreck happening from the conductors seat. I am so relieved that I don't need to do this anymore.
Good post too, Banananman, because it shows the progressiveness of alcoholism well. I can relate to your description, I had a similar parcours, a bit quicker because I jumped from part 1. directly to part 4. without the 1 year sobriety stint. I was just on the verge of the 5. stage when I decided I couldn't do this anymore. Beer starting to give way to hard liquor. Drinking nearly every evening. Binges turning into regularity. Watching a trainwreck happening from the conductors seat. I am so relieved that I don't need to do this anymore.
bona fido dog-lover
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: SF Bay area, CA
Posts: 99,759
What determines how long it takes for withdrawal symptoms to appear?
I relapsed quite a few times after finally getting sober. Each time the withdrawals got worse. I'm 58 yrs old and don't know if I have any more 'recovery' left in me, don't know if I could stand any more withdrawal. So I'm staying sober today, and every 'today' because I like myself better sober and because I'm scared sh!tless of going thru withdrawal again! I'll use any tool to stay sober, fear of withdrawal is one of my tools!
Laozi Old Man
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Detroit, MI
Posts: 6,665
I drank for 25+ years without experiencing any DT's (withdrawals). Somewhere around 30 years I started taking "a hair of the dog that bit me" in the morning to avoid hangovers and soon after the hangovers stopped and the DT's took their place.
IMO it had little to do with time and a lot to do with drinking 24X7.
IMO it had little to do with time and a lot to do with drinking 24X7.
Member
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: scotland
Posts: 126
Agree great descriptive non fiction post! from the horses mouth so to speak, do you
think also once you get late 30s early forties those hangovers/withdrawals become a
little more severe! and last the whole day through,i used to find sometimes they would
be the opposite of what a hangover should be! like i could wake early for work an get
myself together feeli rough but manageable.. then as the day wore the hangover came
on stronger and more intense.. Alcohol though like other drugs is evil in the sense that
you can wake and feel like a bag of c##P an then crack a beer and hey presto,lets just
put that on hold a bit longer!! with this little leveller ,poison to cure poison almost.
think also once you get late 30s early forties those hangovers/withdrawals become a
little more severe! and last the whole day through,i used to find sometimes they would
be the opposite of what a hangover should be! like i could wake early for work an get
myself together feeli rough but manageable.. then as the day wore the hangover came
on stronger and more intense.. Alcohol though like other drugs is evil in the sense that
you can wake and feel like a bag of c##P an then crack a beer and hey presto,lets just
put that on hold a bit longer!! with this little leveller ,poison to cure poison almost.
Member
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: OH
Posts: 9
Background: 20 years heavy beer drinker. Stints of vodka and rum for some years to accompany the beer.
My hangovers were normal up until 4-5 years ago. They started lasting longer and render me immobilized for a day. About 1-2 years ago they got to be unbearable. I'm talking fatigue, remorse, depression, shame, guilt, loser-i-tis, everything. I knew something was changing within me and this was gonna have to stop real soon.
I've been sober a week, but up until last week - I was going hard. Drinking drafts upon drafts upon drafts (the good stuff too). This started to put me down for the count too. I thought I was becoming allergic or something to the alcohol. Maybe it was withdrawal symptoms.
My hangovers were normal up until 4-5 years ago. They started lasting longer and render me immobilized for a day. About 1-2 years ago they got to be unbearable. I'm talking fatigue, remorse, depression, shame, guilt, loser-i-tis, everything. I knew something was changing within me and this was gonna have to stop real soon.
I've been sober a week, but up until last week - I was going hard. Drinking drafts upon drafts upon drafts (the good stuff too). This started to put me down for the count too. I thought I was becoming allergic or something to the alcohol. Maybe it was withdrawal symptoms.
Member
Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 21
Great post there.I found that the older I got,the harder it was to bounce back.The depression,and anxiety were the worst.It was to the point were almost anything triggered anxiety..,which caused the cycle to start again to relieve it...not good.It has taken a long time for my brain to start healing,and the symptom to fade.It has taken sometimes a full year for me to feel normal.
Member
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Oklahoma
Posts: 68
I drank for roughly 10 years. I am 30 now.
When I was 20-25 I could stay out all night drinking with my friends (or by myself!) and go to work the next day with NO problems! It was a blast. So much fun... I think. I don't remember most of it. I had a few girlfriends during this time that lasted for a few months each and I don't remember their names now. How I kept a job/paid bills/stayed alive during this time of my life is a mystery to me because I barely remember it.
25-28 - I knew I had a problem, so I stepped back and stopped drinking "so much". I still drank daily (usually 1-5 beers) and on the weekends I'd get smashed except for Sunday. Sunday I would generally have a beer in the morning to help with the dreadful hangover I'd have all day. My hangovers would generally last two days - even if I drank nothing Sunday. Monday evening I usually started feeling a bit better, so I'd have a few beers after work!
28-30 - Feel like crap all the time. Even after 1-5 beers. The hangovers were killing me and I realized I had wasted my 20s by being a good for nothing drunk. When I got a new high paying job I went on a 5 day bender to celebrate. It took me 3 days to start feeling better after that. I am thinking I went through minor withdrawals during that because I was shaking/sweating/having bizarre dreams. Also, Anxiety ALL THE TIME had become "normal" for me. I knew I had to do something and I had a very strong desire to stop so I did... 5 months ago.
Now: I'll never drink again. What the hell was I thinking?!
When I was 20-25 I could stay out all night drinking with my friends (or by myself!) and go to work the next day with NO problems! It was a blast. So much fun... I think. I don't remember most of it. I had a few girlfriends during this time that lasted for a few months each and I don't remember their names now. How I kept a job/paid bills/stayed alive during this time of my life is a mystery to me because I barely remember it.
25-28 - I knew I had a problem, so I stepped back and stopped drinking "so much". I still drank daily (usually 1-5 beers) and on the weekends I'd get smashed except for Sunday. Sunday I would generally have a beer in the morning to help with the dreadful hangover I'd have all day. My hangovers would generally last two days - even if I drank nothing Sunday. Monday evening I usually started feeling a bit better, so I'd have a few beers after work!
28-30 - Feel like crap all the time. Even after 1-5 beers. The hangovers were killing me and I realized I had wasted my 20s by being a good for nothing drunk. When I got a new high paying job I went on a 5 day bender to celebrate. It took me 3 days to start feeling better after that. I am thinking I went through minor withdrawals during that because I was shaking/sweating/having bizarre dreams. Also, Anxiety ALL THE TIME had become "normal" for me. I knew I had to do something and I had a very strong desire to stop so I did... 5 months ago.
Now: I'll never drink again. What the hell was I thinking?!
Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Michigan
Posts: 758
I think it's different for each person honestly. Back when i was younger 21-25 or there about's it was nothing to stay out drinking till 3am then be at work by 6am and really have no problems at all. From my late 20's to early 30's I did have hangovers and I guess what you would call "withdraws" (shaky hands, fast heartbeat, sweats and all that good stuff. Then the later few years of my drinking I stopped having what I would call hangovers/withdraws....yet the days after drinking were worse then when I did have hangover/withdraws. Mainly because my mind was feeling the shame/guilt so that actually made me feel worse physically&mentally than when I had the hangovers/withdraws.
So personally I think it's different for each person as to what they feel like and feel after drinking.
Steve
So personally I think it's different for each person as to what they feel like and feel after drinking.
Steve
Member
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Louisville, Ky.
Posts: 58
I'm 41 years old and have been sober for 37 days. For me the hangovers, which were always bad, had just become literally unbearable. It's barely an exaggeration to say that I would be completely paralyzed the entire next day. I wouldn't even get out of bed to do anything but use the bathroom.
In a way though, I now consider them a blessing. That's probably what kept me from the morning drink becuase I couldn't drink feeling as bad as I did. And they're a large part of what inspired me to get sober - for good this time.
In a way though, I now consider them a blessing. That's probably what kept me from the morning drink becuase I couldn't drink feeling as bad as I did. And they're a large part of what inspired me to get sober - for good this time.
Worn out by booze
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: London, England
Posts: 205
Originally Posted by Bananaman 
How long did it take for your hangovers to turn into withdrawal symptoms?
Reading various withdrawal related threads on this forum, especially where people ask if they are having withdrawal symptoms or not and sounding confused about it, has got me thinking about my own experiences. I've not done much research on this so I'll just relate how withdrawal symptoms developed for me and see if it's in any way typical.
I'm 40. I started drinking really heavily when I was about 20, so I can divide the last 20 years up into various bite sized chunks.
1. Aged 20-26: Heavy drinking, mainly beer and sweet sherry. Sherry may be an unusual choice but I loved the taste and used to glug bottles of it before going out to drink beer. I kept a chart at the time of standard units of alcohol consumed. It would vary between 50 and 100 a week. I prided myself on having a strong head for liquor and always being ready for anything, drunk, sober or hungover. If I happened to stop drinking for a few days, after a particularly wild weekend for instance, I would have a not too serious hangover the first day, feel a bit subdued on the second, then be back to normal on the third day. That pattern didn't change. I assumed delirium tremens and the horrors of withdrawal, warned about in books, were a bit of a myth, probably an exaggeration of rare, extreme cases written up by doctors as a scare tactic. I found the idea of dipsomaniacs seeing pink elephants bizarre, and more of a subject for jokes than caution. Still, I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to carry on drinking the way I was.
2. Aged 27: Sober for a year. In retrospect this was more of a self-test to see if I could quit drinking if I wanted to rather than a concerted effort to change my ways. I played a lot of sport and became a picture of health. My liver couldn't believe its luck. I was confident that any worries I'd ever had about alcohol being a problem for me were a thing of the past, or unfounded in the first place. I was definitely not one of those people.
3. Aged 28-30: Drifted slowly back into heavy drinking. To begin with I'd occasionally have a couple of beers at the weekend, and only then if I was in a social situation where everyone else was drinking. After six months of this polite regime I got drunk again. The first hangover was horrendous, worse than any I'd had since I first got drunk. I'd really poisoned myself and was sick for days. The next couple of hangovers were the same. This shook me, as before I'd always thought of hangovers as a nuisance rather than crippling car crashes. These nuclear proportioned hangovers, I now believe, were due to my tolerance to alcohol being zero and my newly healthy liver being unprepared for, and outraged by, a sudden booze barrage. I've read somewhere that as tolerance to alcohol increases the liver produces more enzymes to deal with it. These are the enzymes they test for when checking liver health. I'm sure one of you can give a more knowledgeable explanation, but whatever the biochemical reason, as my drinking returned to my pre-sober levels so my hangovers subsided to merely nuisance level again. By the time I was 30 I was right back where I'd been at 26.
4. Aged 30-35: My hangovers start to change. My weekends are lost weekends. My Monday morning hangovers have begun morphing into something much more sinister. They've developed two new alarming symptoms: anxiety and depression. Being fairly slow on the uptake, it takes me a long time to recognise the symptoms as anxiety and depression, and once having recognised them, to attribute them to the hangover. I usually assumed I was feeling shame and remorse at what I'd managed to do this time. It took me a long time to realise that It wasn't because I'd drunkeny fallen over and gashed my leg the night before that I was feeling panicky and depressed, or because I'd told the tubby railway employee behind the ticket desk at the station that he was a fat *******, although that didn't help, but actually because my hangovers were beginning to turn into withdrawal symptoms. This, I suspect, is when a doctor or psychiatrist, looking at me objectively, would have said my mental health was starting to go down the tubes.
5. Aged 35-40: Goodbye hangovers, hello withdrawal. My drink of choice becomes vodka. I drink it every evening. I develop the shakes. I can't remember when the shakes first appeared, maybe it was an unsteady hand when trying to pick up my first drink of the day in a pub. But soon I'm having trouble with knives and forks, and pens. Writing anything when being watched is impossible, unless I've had several stiff drinks, which is a bad idea at work. This problem soon permeates every part fo my life. The morning dry heaves which have only been occasional now become routine. Accompanied by shaking, of course. And the anxiety and depression. Pretty soon, if I've not got half a bottle of vodka in me, I feel sick and disorientated, as if I've just been flung off rollercoaster into a brick wall. I try to work with withdrawal symptoms. It's impossible. Walking up a staircase induces vertigo. I take to hiding in the first aid room, lying on the sickbed, shaking and sweating with my eyes closed, coloured shapes and flashing neon lights drifting under my eyelids. I throw up water in the sink, and then bile. At 3 o'clock, when I can officially leave the building I walk straight to the pub, feeling like a nauseous spaceman, and try and cure myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I become terrified of withdrawal symptoms. It's at this point I realise I need a doctor.
I'm nearly 6 months sober now. A work friend recently told me that this time last year I was "shaking all the time". I thought I'd hidden it so well. What a joke. Those pink elephants don't strike me as quite so amusing now.
Anyway, that's pretty much how my withdrawal symptoms developed from routine hangovers, but clearly it's not the same for everyone. If I'd discovered this site in my twenties I would have been faintly perplexed by all the withdrawal posts and wondered if I was a medical freak. Similarly, I read posts on here about bad withdrawal by people who are barely out of their teens, and I find it scary.
What determines how long it takes for withdrawal symptoms to appear? Is it really just volume of alcohol consumed for a given period? If so, how much and for how long? What about body weight and metabolism? How long did it take for you? And were your stages roughly similar to mine?
Bananaman
Reading various withdrawal related threads on this forum, especially where people ask if they are having withdrawal symptoms or not and sounding confused about it, has got me thinking about my own experiences. I've not done much research on this so I'll just relate how withdrawal symptoms developed for me and see if it's in any way typical.
I'm 40. I started drinking really heavily when I was about 20, so I can divide the last 20 years up into various bite sized chunks.
1. Aged 20-26: Heavy drinking, mainly beer and sweet sherry. Sherry may be an unusual choice but I loved the taste and used to glug bottles of it before going out to drink beer. I kept a chart at the time of standard units of alcohol consumed. It would vary between 50 and 100 a week. I prided myself on having a strong head for liquor and always being ready for anything, drunk, sober or hungover. If I happened to stop drinking for a few days, after a particularly wild weekend for instance, I would have a not too serious hangover the first day, feel a bit subdued on the second, then be back to normal on the third day. That pattern didn't change. I assumed delirium tremens and the horrors of withdrawal, warned about in books, were a bit of a myth, probably an exaggeration of rare, extreme cases written up by doctors as a scare tactic. I found the idea of dipsomaniacs seeing pink elephants bizarre, and more of a subject for jokes than caution. Still, I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to carry on drinking the way I was.
2. Aged 27: Sober for a year. In retrospect this was more of a self-test to see if I could quit drinking if I wanted to rather than a concerted effort to change my ways. I played a lot of sport and became a picture of health. My liver couldn't believe its luck. I was confident that any worries I'd ever had about alcohol being a problem for me were a thing of the past, or unfounded in the first place. I was definitely not one of those people.
3. Aged 28-30: Drifted slowly back into heavy drinking. To begin with I'd occasionally have a couple of beers at the weekend, and only then if I was in a social situation where everyone else was drinking. After six months of this polite regime I got drunk again. The first hangover was horrendous, worse than any I'd had since I first got drunk. I'd really poisoned myself and was sick for days. The next couple of hangovers were the same. This shook me, as before I'd always thought of hangovers as a nuisance rather than crippling car crashes. These nuclear proportioned hangovers, I now believe, were due to my tolerance to alcohol being zero and my newly healthy liver being unprepared for, and outraged by, a sudden booze barrage. I've read somewhere that as tolerance to alcohol increases the liver produces more enzymes to deal with it. These are the enzymes they test for when checking liver health. I'm sure one of you can give a more knowledgeable explanation, but whatever the biochemical reason, as my drinking returned to my pre-sober levels so my hangovers subsided to merely nuisance level again. By the time I was 30 I was right back where I'd been at 26.
4. Aged 30-35: My hangovers start to change. My weekends are lost weekends. My Monday morning hangovers have begun morphing into something much more sinister. They've developed two new alarming symptoms: anxiety and depression. Being fairly slow on the uptake, it takes me a long time to recognise the symptoms as anxiety and depression, and once having recognised them, to attribute them to the hangover. I usually assumed I was feeling shame and remorse at what I'd managed to do this time. It took me a long time to realise that It wasn't because I'd drunkeny fallen over and gashed my leg the night before that I was feeling panicky and depressed, or because I'd told the tubby railway employee behind the ticket desk at the station that he was a fat *******, although that didn't help, but actually because my hangovers were beginning to turn into withdrawal symptoms. This, I suspect, is when a doctor or psychiatrist, looking at me objectively, would have said my mental health was starting to go down the tubes.
5. Aged 35-40: Goodbye hangovers, hello withdrawal. My drink of choice becomes vodka. I drink it every evening. I develop the shakes. I can't remember when the shakes first appeared, maybe it was an unsteady hand when trying to pick up my first drink of the day in a pub. But soon I'm having trouble with knives and forks, and pens. Writing anything when being watched is impossible, unless I've had several stiff drinks, which is a bad idea at work. This problem soon permeates every part fo my life. The morning dry heaves which have only been occasional now become routine. Accompanied by shaking, of course. And the anxiety and depression. Pretty soon, if I've not got half a bottle of vodka in me, I feel sick and disorientated, as if I've just been flung off rollercoaster into a brick wall. I try to work with withdrawal symptoms. It's impossible. Walking up a staircase induces vertigo. I take to hiding in the first aid room, lying on the sickbed, shaking and sweating with my eyes closed, coloured shapes and flashing neon lights drifting under my eyelids. I throw up water in the sink, and then bile. At 3 o'clock, when I can officially leave the building I walk straight to the pub, feeling like a nauseous spaceman, and try and cure myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I become terrified of withdrawal symptoms. It's at this point I realise I need a doctor.
I'm nearly 6 months sober now. A work friend recently told me that this time last year I was "shaking all the time". I thought I'd hidden it so well. What a joke. Those pink elephants don't strike me as quite so amusing now.
Anyway, that's pretty much how my withdrawal symptoms developed from routine hangovers, but clearly it's not the same for everyone. If I'd discovered this site in my twenties I would have been faintly perplexed by all the withdrawal posts and wondered if I was a medical freak. Similarly, I read posts on here about bad withdrawal by people who are barely out of their teens, and I find it scary.
What determines how long it takes for withdrawal symptoms to appear? Is it really just volume of alcohol consumed for a given period? If so, how much and for how long? What about body weight and metabolism? How long did it take for you? And were your stages roughly similar to mine?
Bananaman
I guess now I know what I have coming if I keep it up.
For me, I first crossed the line when I was 27. Up until then I could always binge drink for however long and my hangver would just consist of bad tiredness. Nothing else. One decent night's sleep and I'd be right as rain. I was like that for years and had much pride in the fact that I could drink a lot without bad hangovers or being an alkie.
This changed when I was 27. After a 5 day bender I first got withdrawals in the form of weakness and a panic attack. I had to go to the hospital. Course I'd lied to them about how much I was drinking so they just put me on a hydration course and sent me home.
Anyhow, from there on whenever I have a binge drink I'd get anxiety for a few hours the next day. If I didn't eat or drink I'd be fine by the evening and would carry on the rest of my week without drink until the next social occasion came along. However, over the months I got carried away with the social scene since I had come into some money. I began to get withdrawals and depression more often. I didn't know what it was and started to drink spirits. This lasted several weeks until my functionality went out of the window. I had to then wean myself off the heavy stuff and go back to beer and wine. Since this point on I have gone through cycles of beer and wine binges. The problem I have is that I have experienced the effect of heavy spirits, so I have largely avoided them since three years ago. Now I fight a battle of taking myself just before the point that I will lose functionality and then go through detox periods, which are always horrid during the early days.
The greatest problem I have at the moment is that I do not enjoy life. Therefore the cycle exists because I am using drinking as an excuse to find enjoyment or cure boredom. I need to put myself in a place again where I am excited about things without the booze.
bona fido dog-lover
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: SF Bay area, CA
Posts: 99,759
without experiencing any DT's (withdrawals).
Member
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: massachusetts
Posts: 2,216
Thank you, Bananaman, for the educational / inspiring / terrifying / humbling post. I hope to God I never feel that way again and I will do everything in my power to ensure it. What's truly frightening to me is that we incorporate these "routines" into our lives so that slowly they become "normal" and we alter our lives to accomodate this type of "living", relinquishing everything we value.
You give new meaning to the phrases 'Scared Straight" vs "Scared Stiff".
Thank you again for the reminder of why we should be so grateful for the gift of sobriety!
You give new meaning to the phrases 'Scared Straight" vs "Scared Stiff".
Thank you again for the reminder of why we should be so grateful for the gift of sobriety!
Member
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Michigan
Posts: 14
Originally Posted by Bananaman
How long did it take for your hangovers to turn into withdrawal symptoms?
5. Aged 35-40: Goodbye hangovers, hello withdrawal. My drink of choice becomes vodka. I drink it every evening. I develop the shakes.
Bananaman
5. Aged 35-40: Goodbye hangovers, hello withdrawal. My drink of choice becomes vodka. I drink it every evening. I develop the shakes.
Bananaman
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Sobersville
Posts: 28
StillSober27:
No, I wasn't drinking caffeine at all. I was drinking vodka with lemonade, cider, and water. That was it. The shakes were entirely due to alcohol.
Bananaman
(Some very interesting replies in this thread. I'll try and write again when I'm not so busy.)
Where you mixing your Vodka with caffeine drink like Coke. If you have just a lot of caffeine even without alcohol people develop the shakes.
Bananaman
(Some very interesting replies in this thread. I'll try and write again when I'm not so busy.)
Currently Active Users Viewing this Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
