Wow, thanks Andante! This is very helpful to me, and helps visualize what I am experiencing. Here I was thinking I was making some progress during this months of stopping and starting...but maybe it's the opposite. I appreciate your post, tremendously. What eventually led you to quit permanently?
Originally Posted by
Andante 
I posted this over in your Anxiety thread, but am re-posting it here because I think it's essential for folks to learn that a switch from daily drinking to a cycle of stopping and starting again can actually mean the opposite of "progress":
Stopping and starting drinking multiple times is putting your brain through multiple withdrawal cycles, which is actually harder on it than daily drinking. It's setting the stage for increased persistent withdrawal symptoms, which include anxiety. The development of worsening withdrawal symptoms over multiple cycles is called "Kindling." I'm attaching a graph because a picture can be worth a thousand words.
I went through this. During the years I was sort of trying to quit drinking but not really committed to sobriety yet, I stopped and started numerous times, all while experiencing worsening anxiety and mental health in general. I kept researching this puzzling decline in my well-being, coming up with all sorts of abstruse diagnoses and elaborate possible courses of treatment, while never confronting the obvious solution: STOP DRINKING.
Once I finally did stop drinking for good, my mental health improved by leaps and bounds over time. At 5 years sober, I can say my anxiety level is the lowest it has been since well before I started drinking alcoholically.
So I guess this goes back to this thread's topic after all: one big reason for me to get sober was to eliminate an increasingly grave threat to my mental health.
