Things I wish they told me about drinking
This post isn't meant to force my opinion on anybody else, rather to demonstrate a few aspects of how 'in the dark' I've felt about alcohol for years.
It's a bit ranty, but any insight is appreciated. I could be wrong about any one of these things, but they seem to be true for me.
From what I can gather, drinking basically gives you the boost of serotonin and GABA that you can actually get naturally by abstaining from alcohol and addressing any of the nutrient deficiencies involved with being a drinker (all drinkers have them to some degree, whether they impact their life or not). It doesn’t even take long after abstaining for your neurotransmitters to rebound (under the right conditions / self-care) and you’ll inevitably have those ‘good’ / drunk feelings seeping into your everyday life… except it’ll be the natural form, and won’t require vomiting or being hungover the next day.
The 80%+ drinkers in the US alone are clearly doing it to self-medicate, and to varying degrees for different purposes. Everybody drinks to relax, be more sociable, or to improve their mood - all of which are supposed to be inbuilt (not to mention physiological) processes, more or less. Alcohol has been proven to erode those very mechanisms, which is one of the aspects that makes it a highly addictive substance. No drinker is 100% safe from the toxic, addictive effects of alcohol.
For me, drinking tended to relieve my severe social anxiety and panic disorder symptoms - or so, that was the illusion it presented me with. In reality, I’ve always been a shy person, but these problems (and the severity thereof) never even existed before I started drinking heavily. Now, the only reason I needed a beer (or many) to ‘relax’ was because I was unknowingly ensnared by the cycle of addiction - the underlying tension was directly caused by alcoholic complications in the first place, but the illusion did a great job of fooling me into believing otherwise.
The tip (for me) is to always remember from where that stress / anxiety / insomnia /depression (or panic, in my case) actually originated. It wasn’t the lack of alcohol causing me so much grief, it was the fact that I had drank to begin with, and the effects proved to be far-reaching; far enough to trick my mind into believing that alcohol was ‘solving’ the issues that it itself created. This is exactly what drugs do - they fill the hole that they helped you dig. Knowing to watch out for that simple trap is probably one of the most important things I could do for myself, personally.
The last thing I’ll always have to remember is that any amount of alcohol can bring me back to square one - maybe it’s due to a genetic condition called pyroluria that I seem to have, part of an ongoing candida problem that drinkers tend to become afflicted with at some point or another, or just the disruption between chemical signaling within my own brain, but the truth remains the same - I’m always more resilient, sociable, happy, and excited about life without alcohol.
If it takes feeling truly awful to know what it means to feel ‘good’ for a change (and it’s a long way back to normalcy), then alcohol is an odd a blessing in disguise; it teaches you how bad things can actually get, which in turn makes your life without it even sweeter. If you can survive being a drinker and and putting your body and mind through chemical / adrenal / nutritional hell, every other way you turn is actually up from there. This applies to all drinkers, in my opinion, and quitting is just one of the many stages of maturity along the way.
Nobody told me that everyone is shy on the inside, and we’re all bullshitting each other anyway. They also sold me on the ‘alcoholism’ and ‘alcohol allergy’ theories above the truth - alcohol being an addictive, toxic substance - but it was worth it to figure it out on my own anyway. Billions of dollars would be going down the drain if we didn’t all think ‘that could never happen to me’. We all painted a horrid picture of alcoholism (like a poor homeless man sleeping on a park bench in the winter with a bottle of liquor by his side) to treat ourselves like we didn’t have just a lesser version of the same social cancer that led him there. It could happen to anyone, and there’s a lot of gray area even before that point that ‘casual drinkers’ don’t even want to think about.
Most importantly, I was taught to blame myself instead of blaming the huge amount of marketing and social conditioning involved that keeps the whole world hooked on drinking (and often times simultaneously driving). That self-blame led me to an awful lot of relapses, and I couldn’t believe there was another way out.