Anxious by nature
Good morning all. I am by nature an anxious sort of person. I wish I wasn't but it has dogged me all my life one way and another. It is one reason alcohol was so attractive to me I think. It temporarily sedated and calmed me down and gave me a break from my anxious thoughts. I can even remember waking up with a hangover but the alcohol still swimming around my system still delivering a feeling of being at some sort of peace with myself and the world.
Of course ultimately when we drink problematically the times when one isn't drinking (most of the daytime in my case) become a nightmare of anxiety and anguish. Even so we keep drinking because when the alcohol hits the brain later that evening all that is washed away almost instantly. It its a horrible merry go round.
Now that I am returning slowly to some sort of normal, my 'natural' slightly elevated anxiety levels don't have the oblivion of alcohol to leaven them and so are returning. Relative to the hell while in drinking mode it is much reduced, but more so than when actually drunk, if that makes sense. So the point of this post is really to ask people with more time under their belts than I do and who perhaps suffer the same thing, as I suspect many problem drinkers do, what if anything do they do to cope with being less than serene and calm as their normal state?