One of the red flags for me that I noticed a few years before I quit was looking at myself in the mirror and seeing my face all white and red. My upper cheeks were just glowing, like I was out in the cold all day. In winter time it would get even worse, with the dry air, dehydration and alcohol consumption my face was starting to get pretty bad. I don't have that problem anymore.

And the fast food! I too lost tons of weight. It was a cycle of drinking big heavy beers, then waking up feeling like crap and "curing" myself with fatty foods and little to no activity. And I'm a avid cyclist too but it didn't make any difference because my intake was greater than my burning of it off.

Seeing how it was affecting my children. Plus I got tired of the lying and waking up feeling like ****. I like sober Greg better.

I simply did not want to win a Darwin award.

I can tell you what my non-tipping point is. Last week I told the waitress twice that I don't want my toast buttered. It came with butter! agh!

The point I decided to quit drinking is interesting. Because I was not ready to quit. I just stocked up for the holidays - lots of everything.

I had to short swing from nights to a couple days to a night shift the next day. Up at 430 for my 12+ hour shift. Since I was so tired from Day shift on Friday - I fell asleep around 830/9P. I woke up early. Needed to sleep so started drinking beer so I could "fall asleep" by noon. Fell "asleep" around 12:30. Had a random alcohol screening at 8 PM - yeah almost 8 hours later. It wasn't .000. Don't ask for more details than that - it's all you need to know. I have not worked since. Like I said, don't ask details and don't try to figure it out. I got home around 10PM and surprised the wife, instead of getting home at 7AM. That nite I made the decision to never allow alcohol to affect my life again. The only way to guarantee that is to never drink again.

Thing is, it was probably the best thing to happen. I'd still be getting drunk every day I didn't have to work. And who knows what would have happened this past year if I continued drinking. It was getting bad, real bad. I was in that whirlpool spinning toward the bottom. I luckily was flicked out by some random event that probably saved my life.

My tipping point was getting sober. I've commented on this before, but I'm not disinclined to comment again, even if it only helps a single person.

Despite daily, 'round-the-clock drinking, my XGF throwing me out, getting warnings from work and then being fired for my drinking from a dead-end job I'd taken so I could drink at work, losing my flophouse of a "home," suffering several medical symptoms, including acute pancreatitis, dangerously high blood pressure, nausea, vomiting, a near-complete loss of appetite, little or no sleep, a range of serious digestive problems, a complete lack of self respect, a severely tarnished reputation professionally, losing the love and support of my family, living in a constant cycle of drunkenness/blackouts/hangovers, and being passively suicidal, I continued to go on drinking as I was, and my plan was to die an active alcoholic. On at least three separate occasions towards the end, I wound up in one of the safest places on the planet during blackouts...the hospital. Once after falling from a two-story window, and coming to surrounded by about a half-dozen of New York's finest. I'd locked myself out. It was a warm summer late night/early morning. I wasn't concerned about staying outside for a few hours. I wanted to get inside to get to my vodka and then continue the drinking I'd done all through my shift. The most skilled cat burglar couldn't have accomplished what I attempted in my drunken state.

After all that, I could no longer take care of my basic needs, and was unable to function without a great deal of help, help that I wasn't interested in getting. That, and I could no longer support my drinking and I had no place to live.

I submitted to detox because I needed to be knocked out for a period of time in order to be able to function again, and because it offered a safe place, a bed, and food. But it was the drugs they shot me up with that got me through those five days. I was never fully awake or alert, and I was probably sleeping or in bed most of the day, every day.

I then went to rehab, thinking that this would help me get back on my feet when I could then find another drink-friendly job, and continue where I left off. I was transferred from detox to a state-run ATC/Addiction Treatment Center, that was populated by ex-cons, and people with multiple drug- and alcohol- related arrests. My roommate had just gotten out of prison for manslaughter. There was no treatment, and I was threatened by a few of the inmates. Like prison, my roommate installed himself as my body guard, so the threats never materialized. But...there was virtually no treatment, unless you consider watching TV all day treatment. And there was very little in the way of aftercare, which is what I thought I needed in order to start working again so that I could support my drinking. So I transferred to another, more comprehensive rehab facility, and went through the motions of working on my sobriety. I was well versed in the lexicon of recovery, so I "sounded good" when I spoke in groups.

When I was released from rehab, I was accepted into subsidized housing, based on my attendance in IOP followed by regular OP, and AA, with my remaining sober as a condition of my housing. This was all great for me, as it allowed me to interview for jobs that few other people would take, and I couldn't wait to start working and drinking again.

My job-seeking wasn't working out, and I became increasingly miserable. But I was generally feeling much better overall, and my medical conditions had pretty much resolved themselves without me doing very much about them. It was around this time, about four months after I'd had my last drink, that I decided it was worth a try to get sober. I got a sponsor and, despite my dreading our weekly meetings, I got through it and started feeling different. I had intense, daily cravings from the time I put down the drink until about ten months afterwards, and my then-current financial and living situations played a large part in my not drinking. But I made it to a year. It was around the six-month mark that I realized that, in spite of myself and my plans, I'd been working on my sobriety. Going through the motions had set me in motion.

Never gave a thought as to why I drank. Never mattered, and I knew what I was before age twenty one.

I'd learned at least two important things in life before I got sober and, with a more sober mind, helped me through the process: If I waited around wondering why things weren't going my way, or why my life wasn't what I'd wanted it to be, then things would only get worse. I'd demonstrated this too many times in my life, and there was and is no other possible outcome for this. Related to this, taking action on my own behalf is neither as risky nor as frightening as the alternative. When I don't let go of my fears, when I refuse to let go of my fears, then my nightmares come true.

I was laying on my bed with my little girl (she is only 3), she loves to play on the bed... well I was laying there on my back and she was looking over and down at me and I got this sick flash or vision of her looking down at my casket.

The health concerns of heavy drinking had been bothering me for a long time, so it had been on my mind every hour of every day. And I had tried to quit so many times before for her, because I can't imagine her having to grow up without me. But this moment on the bed, well let's just say it was a moment of awakening. A kind of "quit being a selfish b!%#h" kind of moment.

It's still been hard, and I have made mistakes, but doing this for HER has made me much more dedicated.

For me there was no one very specific tipping point, it was more a longer, non-linear process that led to my decision to commit to sobriety eventually. I also wrote about this before on other threads in bits or even the whole process...

I did not actually quit during my worst times. First I had a period (~1.5 year) about 6 years ago when I wanted to quit quite desperately and get my bf of the time (also an alcoholic) to do it together, but he was not receptive to it and my entire life was in such a chaos and I was emotionally so ***ed up that I could not focus on even learning about recovery. What I did eventually was an escape from that situation to start a new life in a few ways (new location, job, being single etc). Expecting that a big environmental change would solve everything...

All that worked out great, except that I continued drinking in the new situation. I had a job I dreamed of, living in a city that's most natural for me, new work started out very well, I got into a new relationship... but I would still drink. More and more, actually. So that went on for about the first 3 years in this new situation and was very hard to manage with my daily or quazi daily hard liquor drinking and hangovers. I never drank on the job though.

I think the series of events that initiated the process for me started late in 2012 when I had a lot of professional stress and that, with my increasing drinking and who knows what else culminated in a nasty major depressive episode that I still sometimes don't know how I survived. Let alone holding my job and all... Never sought professional help with it and drank through it. I finally gathered some energy and motivation to pull myself together somewhat and then things started to get better. I was pretty much out of the depression by the second half of 2013 and was motivated again to live and think about improvement. But still drinking.

I think a final push was around this time of year in 2013, when a good friend of mine fell terminally ill with cancer. I assisted him throughout the last couple months as he did not have family or anyone caring for him. I also spent a lot of the last days with him in the hospital. I guess it's easy to imagine how that was for me a serious hit in the head: me with my "dream life" held together magically at minimum but with herculian effort to accommodate my drinking, and looking death in the eye directly. I think that was when I made my decision that I want to choose life, and work on making it a decent one. It was very interesting actually now in retrospect... my head and thinking suddenly became crystal clear in ways I had not experienced for years before. And I suddenly had energy.

After my friend's death, I spent ~a month trying to figure out how to approach recovery, reading a lot etc. But still not sober. Basically the turning point was when I decided to come back to SR and took everything super seriously in January. Have been sober since. I had accepted 100% that I was an alcoholic many years ago but it took this long to finally act on it.

I've been drinking since I was 14, so 38 years. And drugging pretty heavily up til about 40. Smoking too.

Before the kids were born it was whisky and weed for breakfast, but I calmed down a lot when I got pregnant the first time. If it wasn't for having the kids I would have been dead by now.

I've had some close calls, like everyone else here.

I've been trying to stop for years but at 52 now, I was either gonna die or get healthy. I didn't want my grandkids to see me go downhill full of booze, an old smelly, self- centred alkie. I feel like I've never done anything of worth in my entire life. Maybe I can make up for that now.


I woke up one morning and a calm little voice in my head said,"that's it, you can do this now".

I initially quit when I was 18, due to my mom cutting back her own drinking, blackouts, being way more drunk than my friends, etc.

I started drinking again at age 39. Quit fairly quickly due to intense obsessions, compulsion to drink, not caring about other things in my life including career and husband, shame, guilt, misery, etc. I am miserable when I drink.

This.

For me I think it was just that I finally came to 100% accept that fact that when I start drinking it sets something off in me that can never be satisfied, and that abstinence was the only solution.

My attempts at trying to outsmart addiction had certainly failed, and I had spent a lot of time trying.

I found divorce process in ohio in the search history today. It was dated a week ago, during my binge. She says was looking in case i continued. If I stay sober she's not going anywhere.my Tipping point just got updated.....

Seizures. Particularly my second batch of three where I severely smashed up my face.

Like others have shared, I guess I didn't have just one specific "tipping point" per se, but things like increasing blackouts, hospital detoxes, car accidents, jail time, physical sickness, increasing mental instability, increasing fear, argh. I could go on. When I continued to drink and lost more control and my life just got increasingly worse, I guess the tipping point was I decided I didn't want to die.

I've already posted on this thread, but I feel like elaborating.

For a few years in my early 30's I thought I would just drink until I died. I figured that I would just drink and drink until I was ready to kill myself. Seriously, my mindset was that I would eventually commit suicide, but until then I was going to be drunk. I'd been drinking heavily before that, but after dropping out of college (I told myself it would just be a semester off to get my head straight) and getting dumped by my then girlfriend it was a blank check to just drink all day everyday when I wasn't at work.

That continued until I saw some pictures of me that a friend had taken during a trip to Las Vegas. I hadn't realized how much weight I had gained, almost didn't recognize myself. As a kid and through my 20's I'd been trim, so it was weird to see myself like that. Vanity kicked in and I started working out and eating healthy, even stopped drinking every day. It wasn't my intention to quit drinking, just did it to facilitate the weight loss.

After a while I started to look and feel better and rebuilt a little bit of my shattered confidence. Before long I had bought a car and was looking at apartments so that I could have my own place (I'd been living in a Craigslist roommate situation where we weren't friends, just shared living space).

I found a nice place to live and kept working out and even started playing music again (I'd dropped out of music school). Then I started thinking that maybe instead of drinking insane amounts of booze until I was ready to end it, I could actually give life a try. Of course, I'd still drink insane amounts of booze, but I took suicide off the table.

Then, ten years after I dropped out I decided go back and finish my degree. I had dropped out with just 18 credits to go (what a HORRIBLE mistake that was), so it really wasn't too difficult to do.

I feel like I've come a long way already: from hopelessly drinking and ready to die with a bottle in my hand, to wanting to take care of myself and have a life again. I know that the next step is to stop drinking. I've come about as far as I can with booze in my life, so it's time to kick it.

Wicked fight with my wife that almost cost me my marriage. I had tried to quit a few times before and always realized drinking was a problem for me. I found SR the next day and started to understand that my hangovers from binge drinking had crossed over to withdrawals.
I finally put it all together and I am 10 days short of 1 yr sober. This fight was a tipping point for me. The argument I had with my wife. In my drunken state I called the police after my wife punched me. The police suggested she leave the house with our children. My kids were 4 and 7 and terrified by police escorting them out of the house in the middle of the night. They still bring it up. We told them we were evacuated because of a snow storm that had occurred that night. Feels good to write this again. I become a different person under the influence of alcohol.

I too, in my early 30s had the thought of just drinking until I died. Sober life just seemed pointless. I loved to be drunk. I think I’m a completely different person.

I stopped drinking a bottle of vodka a day yesterday as the depression in between bottles was just getting crazy and was amplifying all the negative aspects and anxieties of my life.Eg getting older, I really hate the fact I’m 42 years old, not having fulfilled my ambitions, being single and childless. Life can be fantastic sometimes but not with booze anymore.
Rant over! I wish you all the best of luck :)

I think the tipping point or 'realization' so to speak that I had problems was when I had only been a month or so into a new job (mon-fri 9-5) and I went along to a friends party do on a Wednesday night. Why on earth it was a school night I have no idea. Anyway, one thing led to the next and I was high on coke, drinking heavily throughout the night, I think eventually retiring to bed about 4am. Waking up for 7am the next day. I did my best to hide my hangover but it got to about 11am and my anxiety was through the roof, and was having serious heart palpitations. I had to leave work due to feeling 'sick'. It was a low moment for me, to have to leave a new job in the middle of the day due to alcohol.

It was then when I realised that I had a problem.

After realizing I was drinking too much and everyday, I stopped drinking during the week which led to a weekly Friday night blowout. It took four months to get to the point of saying enough. I threw in the towel. Feels so good to be up early with no hangover on a Saturday!

I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Everyone has to hit a bottom, mine was very deep and low.
I hated being a "guest" at a government run B&B.
I hated hurting family and everyone around me.
I hated loosing everything that I loved and cared about.
I hated myself.