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Old 12-27-2010, 08:53 AM
  # 9 (permalink)  
Toronto68
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Toronto, ON
Posts: 1,591
Bingen, it sounds like what is improving is that you don't feel as rotten as before, and what is helping with that is a healthy enough attitude to include these vitamins and to try to make changes.

But that reminds me of when I would manage to drink 4 beers instead of 8 and would accomplish a lot of things in a week instead of just living life like I might as well get in a coffin when I get home. Along the same lines: when 4 beers would be a sufficient buzz; when I managed to get full from food and get the buzz and they were timed nicely...etc.

Those would always bound back up to 8 beers and living a pretty incomplete life (go home from work and might as well get into a coffin and come out after the self-induced mini-coma). And that progressed over the years to the point where I rarely ate when I got home.

I don't know what it's like for you, but if you're like me, then the switcheroonie to wine from whiskey isn't going to last long as an improvement. My version of that effort to drink differently was to try to drink only on weekends or to only drink with others, only when going out; those all became every day anyway, with others and by myself anyway, and both outside and inside the house anyway. One time I thought I could change by having wine, since that is something that is supposed to go with food (I could be normal and still get a buzz). That didn't last either. It all reverted back to having beer every day at home, no matter how well I was doing at work, on the outside of the coffin. Alcohol from the beer was the great regulator of my life. The problem falling asleep was rarely there, it made me more driven, it made me less likely to worry, and I could always count on it to keep my digestive mechanisms in operation (ahem).

But other people didn't need to do it to feel normal, and I was in the middle of a sea of bottles I couldn't keep on top of. I decided I wanted the absence of alcohol to be normal. I also wanted to move on in my career and remembered reading in an old book that if you drink about 5 beers every day for 10 years, you approach the end stage. I had already done that, and figured I was probably lucky to be alive by a few years. Then I stopped and several of the things that the great regulator of my life controlled, like difficulty falling asleep, like poor self-confidence, like being "too sensitive," returned to taunt me. "Ah, THAT's why I drank," crystallized for me and I still have lightbulb moments like that. It was for the buzz but always for so much more.

And if you're like me, then there's more to do besides switching what to drink and how much and when and what nutritional aids to use; you would need to stop altogether and face the things underneath and get into the world of having a choice not to drink. A lot of what is unpleasant will still be there, but you would be out of the drinking mode and in a position to look at what you can change for the better. It doesn't start without quitting drinking for a day and then repeating it until it's a habit though.
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