graciepearl

I'd rather be bored and remember than drunk and forget..

Berrybean

Starco, maybe have a read of your old thread. It might help you to realise just how far you've come, and how much better things actually are... https://www.soberrecovery.com/forums...ng-myself.html (Weekend warrior and hating it and myself)

Dee74

for me it was things like not hanging around in bars, not being around drinking buddies, not finding myself in social situations where the main focus was drinking.

As you get stronger in your resolve not to drink again you may adjust your social life as you see fit, but I think zero tolerance is a good place to be at for a newly sober person for a while

Outside of social situations if I used drinking to alleviate boredom, stress anger fear social anxiety or whatever I needed to find new coping strategies for those emotions and situations.

Its things like that - not always fun things, but necessary things that really reflect a desire to be sober.

D

starcco

Thanks. I have come a little ways I would say. I have cut down somewhat but not completely stopped. It is still one or two, sometimes three days, but mostly two, sometimes one day.

ScottFromWI

I think you'll be a lot happier and have a lot better chance of things getting better if you can cut that down to zero. Even just drinking one or two can still hold you back.

starcco

Yes it does. One day of heavy drinking stil wrecks me for a couple days after.

Purpleman

I'm not 100% sold on "life" getting better, but what I do know from my own experience is that I've gotten better, in mind & body. I'm healthier, making better, more mature & balanced decisions, &, for the first time in a long time, possibly ever, I'm following my intuition, which I've learned to trust again.
The fallout is that, yeah, some parts of life have gotten better, but some have stayed the same, & some got worse. In the end, though, I'm better at dealing with what life hands me each day, & that's plenty enough for me right now.

daredevil

Things get better by virtue of not getting drink-related worse, but beyond that, it’s incumbent on me to make the requisite changes trying to effectuate improvement, as most good things in my life didn’t come by happenstance.

soberlicious

Drinking is the only thing that makes you happy? Out of how many things that you've tried?

soberista

It takes a while for brain chemistry to get back to anything like normal. You will certainly need to get some solid sobriety under your belt to feel those rewards but with them comes the ability to see how life has got better with a sustained period of recovery.

waynetheking

Thanks berrybean!

Grungehead

I found that when I quit drinking life got "better" in the sense that all the problems alcohol was causing started to go away. So in early sobriety it wasn't so much that life turned into nirvana but that it became more tolerable. Then I set about making improvements to areas of my life that had always seemed to cause problems and life got even better.

I had to put the drink down first before I was able to realize what I really wanted and was capable of accomplishing in life. It turns out that what I thought was important in life when I was drinking wasn't necessarily the same after I got sober and made some necessary changes in my life.

FindingMyNext

I distinctly remember heading to a conference and when wheels went up on the plane, I prayed that it would crash so I could die.

How sad is that?

So, yeah, life gets better. It took time, for sure, but that heavy blanket of hopelessness, depressing, and self-hate (the same blanket I could only “take off,” albeit briefly, by drinking to blackout) is gone.
In its place is hope, normalcy, and even—yes!—moments of joy.

Keto

I definitely think there is a lot of sugar coating about things.

Its not just the act of stopping bit everything that comes with it.

Most frustrating thing for me is people saying things like
"Lots of people dont drink"
"Just avoid situation x, y, z"

"Not drinking is the new trend"

Yet expect u to be the life of the 'party'.