effortjoy

Since my last post I have been thinking about what one of you often replies when someone isn't sure if they have a problem or not: try stopping for 30 days and see if your life improves. So I think my first mistake when I initially tried stopping was that I thought of it as either stopping forever or continuing drinking. So now I am committing to a month of sobriety and it is much easier to deal with psychologically. Thank you to the poster who suggested stopping for 30 days. (was it Anna?) Here are some other mistakes that I am working hard not to repeat this time around:
1. Pressuring myself to be more at productive at work: I thought that if I wasn't spending evenings drinking then I should be achieving even more than I was when I was an active drinker. But then when I was too tired or unable to focus, I found that I was just creating unnecessary anxiety and frustration. I need to allow myself to take this whole month to just focus on staying sober. Exercising, eating a healthy diet and taking care of my children. I have never allowed myself to simplify my life in this way, but I don't think I can recover if I am constantly berating myself for "not getting ahead" all the time.
2. I need to eliminate the triggers for at least this month: decrease dinner parties as much as possible, substitute relaxing activities during the time of day that I used to drink (late afternoon/early evening) and finally, I have stopped buying wine, which I used to justify as absolutely necessary for entertaining. I am not going to try to be the life of the party anymore; for this month I am going to take a step back and not feel responsible for entertaining everyone around me
3. Allowing myself to spend a lot of time on SR without feeling like I am wasting my day: right now everything that I read and any support I can get for quitting this month I will consider crucial and productive even if I have to spend all day on SR and put my other work aside
4. Letting myself rest when I'm tired, eat when I'm hungry and read when I need to unwind: I think that somewhere along the way of my increasingly heavy drinking I completely disconnected myself from my body- it takes work to listen to our own signs of hunger and exhaustion esp when our bodies are used to alcohol wreaking havoc with all of our normal signals for sleep or/and nutrition
If anyone can post about mistakes they made that led to relapse and how they corrected them, that would be really helpful- I am determined to make it through this month.