Binge drinking side effects
 

Hello. I am a college kid who has been engaged in binge drinking quite a bit on weekends for a little under a year now. This weekend my friends and I were black out drunk for like 3 days straight. I have been sober for 48 hours. For the last 36 hours I have been really depressed and anxious. Also with slight tremors. I have nothing to be depressed or anxious about nor has it happened before. Has anyone else experienced this before? Will it go away soon?

Hi Collegekid - welcome

there's this thing called kindling which you can get if you regularly drink hard - no only will your withdrawals get worse with things like tremors but you'll probably also find that you'll get more depressed and anxious, and that those things will last longer and longer before they disappear.

Drinking 3 days straight is no good for anyone, alcoholic or not - even if you are a college kid and made of titanium :)

D

I have definitely experienced that under similar circumstances, and now (up until I decided to quit 6 days ago) my hangovers, even after just one night of drinking were like that. Even just a few drinks, after a while, made me feel like that the next day. Alcohol had major effects on my pre-existing depression and anxiety. In just six days of being completely sober, I feel so much happier.

Yes. I have experienced those very same symptoms. In the early days I could laugh off hangovers and spend the day eating soup and watching TV. Often there were friends who were also hungover as we laughed about how hungover we were.

I continued drinking into my early thirties and the hangovers became much more pronounced. I no longer vomited but I started to feel "trembly" inside, anxious, and feelings of doom and depression. And the friends were no longer there. I was drinking alone and hungover alone. My normal non-alcoholic friends had left those hangovers days in their early 20's. I wasted every weekend feeling sick and anxious on the couch with my heart pounding, sweating, and chills.

It'll go away soon. Withdrawal (which is what you're experiencing) takes 3 - 5 days to go away and it often peaks sometime in the middle.

Hang in there and take it as a lesson! If you're going hard enough to get withdrawal, it's too hard. Keep an eye on yourself and treat yourself well. :)

Be very careful college kid. I'm in my mid-twenties now, but my alcoholism turned nightmarish when I was in college just like you. One time in college I went on almost a week-long binge, drinking to blackout every night. Had one of the most horrible feelings of doom when I tried to stop one morning and postponed the first drink. Slammed a couple of beers and the feeling subsided. Then, I knew deep down I was in trouble.

6 months later I was checking into a hospital suffering an alcohol induced breakdown from acute withdrawal.

My advice, stop abusing alcohol. If you can't drink without abusing it, don't drink at all. Leave any friends behind who encourage you to drink after you tell them you're taking it easy. They are probably alcoholics themselves whether or not they know it. They want to see you go down with them if they do anything to encourage your drinking. The ones who support your healthy choice are your true friends. Trust me.

Also, if you're drinking like this, you are not getting the most out of your education. Doesn't matter what grades you're getting. Alcohol abuse is destructive and you would be better off not doing it. Take it from a guy who graduated by the skin of his teeth and was once considered to have extremely high potential, drinking can do more than give you a rough day that makes you want to post on a forum, it can kill you.

I've got my life together now and have been sober nearly 4 years. I have a ton to be grateful for. But I would give almost ANYTHING to get a chance to do over my college education sober. I'll be working the rest of my life and there's no intellectual discussion or people interested in teaching me in this environment, trust me. Where are my drinking buddies now? But I thought we were friends!

Save yourself from the nightmare. Those friends you're drinking with won't be at your bedside in the hospital when you're being restrained and pumped full of ativan as I learned the hard way. It's going to be your loved ones, and eventually it will be no one if you keep it up.

All of this this may seem overdramatic to you. But as anyone on this board and in recovery in general will tell you it is certainly not. Check for alcoholics anonymous meetings in your area, if just to hear some stories of people who may have more in common with you than you'd guess. You don't have to participate, just listen.

If there is any bitterness detected in my message, I'm working on that. I'll leave it in as it may help communicate the pain I still feel multiple years later as a direct result of becoming addicted to alcohol when I was, like you, a college student.

The choice is yours, I hope you choose the path of health, happiness and meaning (sobriety) over tears, lost potential, illness and death (alcohol addiction).

Please don't waste your education and youth binge drinking and chasing the eternal buzz. If you can drink in moderation, great. If not, please cut it out now so you don't have to stop in middle age with your body messed up and regretting wasting half your life.

Have you had issues with anxiety and depression before the binge drinking?
Be really careful from now on with the drinking. This is a sign to slow it down or stop all together. I know it hard being so young, but its not worth what is to come with the binge drinking. Especially if you have experienced depression and anxiety before.