Paddy123

Hi Vindawgs, how you getting on? hope better!! yes I had all your symptoms and still have some, they come and go at this stage at I think 65 days.. looking forward to 90 days as they say is a bit of a milestone, hope I feel better then. Still get foggy head, but not as bad, feeling blah and fatigue, don't know what now to put down to quitting cigarettes' after many years on and off.. Anyway, one thing I know is that time will cure with bit of exercise (dont get enough with a desk job) and good sleep and diet... still not sleeping great wich has a knock on effect the following day, especially with my mood etc.. saying that I better get to bed soon, I have a nice warm shower every night which makes me feel bit better, night night, over and out for now, take care..

Vindawgs

Hey paddy.

We've come a long way here. Been up and down with waves and windows for all these months. Seems like im a slow healer and was in a wave for the past 2 days. Bearable but kept me in a sluggish mood. Woke up this am and I feel good. Seems like the wave is gone and hitting a window. I wish I can say that the waves are behind me but I really can't say so. Glad to here your symptoms are alleviating and your feeling better. Stay away from the poison. Have a great day. 👍🏼

BettyP

I've hit a stage where my waves are almost entirely apathy and low grade depression and I just don't feel like I can do anything or face the day. Been struggling through the last five days or so. I guess it's better than feeling terrified to the core, but it still sucks. How's everyone else getting on this week?

CBS62

Hi Betty, Vinny and Paddy. My old friend boaty/dizziness just won’t go away. Also anhedonia is persistent. If it wasn’t for those things I would say I am good. Grateful my insomnia and anxiety has really improved. It will be 20 months on the 17th. I just have to keep faith that I will be totally healed someday.

CBS62

Double post

Vindawgs

Betty I know the feeling. Your a fewonths behind me. It takes time and healing is really slow but we do heal. The stage your in just gets u so frustrated. One day you feel good then the next you yell yourself, how can I feel this way. " I wasn't like this yesterday, and am I getting worse". Sometimes the feeling is just so unbearable. But we need to be strong and have faith. Continue to post here and let it all out. Meditation helps and just knowing that others been through it and are coping gives us strength. Hope and meditation help me. I'm a believer and prayer gets me through my day. Wish you all the best.

Vinny

Vindawgs

CB the boaty feeling will improve. It takes time. I've been boatey for well over 26 months. Improvement is so ow you sometimes don't notice it. But you will see the improvement with time. Continue to take care of yourself and do what's right and good for your body. I hear many say healing is slow and starting to see that it really takes time. It so easy to pound those drinks and get us in thebsyahe that we were at and numbing ourselves out, but improvement and reversing the face done takes time. Feel better and don't touch thr poison. Hope you have a great day ahead of you.

Vinny

spen71

29 days sober now. Feel exhausted all the time, just want to sleep the clock around! Also quite emotional, keep telling me this shall pass.

CBS62

Spen you are so early in sobriety. It will get better. Keep going you are doing great. Everyone is different but you will heal. Don't pick up.

spen71

Thanks! I’ve been here before, went 8 years without a drink. The wheels fell off when my parents died.

Paddy123

Sorry for your loss CBS62.. you doing good, its a demon, don't pickup.... still sick @ 2.5 months, on and off feeling crap and blah... but gradually getting better!!!

BettyP

spen - this too shall definitely pass! Alcohol is a really rotten drug, turns out. But we are all here for you - if all you did all day is just not have a drink, that's a win. Your brain is doing a TON of heavy lifting right now trying to figure out how to regulate things - good news is that it will! It took me a really long time and I had literally every symptom in the book, but I'm really feeling a lot better these days and much more like my pre-drinking self. You will too!

adair

Loss of a loved one is a challenging obstacle for anyone to navigate, let alone those of us with substance issues.

My mother passed in early June and I dipped my toes back into the bottle on five separate occasions over a three week period while dealing with that. There was simply no way I, being who I am, was not going to drink after such a momentous loss. Though I was fully mindful of the damage it causes, alcohol allowed me to wallow unashamedly in my grief, to cry tears that otherwise would have struggled to flow and to fully feel the ache and lament of my mother's passing to the very core of my being. It was the one bout of drinking in recent memory I don't regret, even though I do not advise it.

Inevitably, though, the innumerable negatives of drinking began to make themselves felt again - elevated anxiety, emotional over reactions, depressive thoughts, insomnia, physical pains, etc. - and I knew it was time to put a stop to the stupidity before I tipped over into a catastrophic tailspin that would prove exceedingly difficult to recover from.

I am now almost 2 months sober and am relieved to say that PAWS-wise, I am back to where I was before this latest slip. What prevented this from being worse is over the last few years, I have been sober for 98% of the days. Though I have yet to get a continuous year under my belt, my drinking is but a pale shadow of what it used to be and those compounding sober days do slowly but surely nip away at all the symptoms PAWS likes to throw our way.

Looking back, my PAWS was actually at its worst back in 2014, though at the time I lacked the awareness to see just how bad things really were. If I had made a clean break back then, I may have gotten over the worst of the symptoms in a couple of years. As it is, I've been on the 8 year plan, largely due to my own hesitancy to give up alcohol completely. How could I have been so stupid, how could I have been so blind to the damage alcohol was causing? At least I know now.

The bottom line is: remove alcohol from the equation and things do get better. Dramatically so. Just depending where you are in the process, the healing can be incredibly slow and sometimes it seems like nothing is getting better. As long as we're not drinking, though, healing is happening.

Stay the course, spen. You know how much worse things are when drinking vs sober. Feel the loss, feel the pain, but stay away from the poison. No amount of temporary numbness is worth the pain and suffering alcohol brings.

VikingGF

Just coming by to say hello- I come here often because at 9 months I hit a terrible spot with my memory/concentration and it slowly has been improving. If anyone is out there going through that, it seems to improve, but from what I read, 9 months can be a bear. Hang in there and keep going. Many thanks to this thread- it was good to know I wasn't alone during a rather discouraging time.

LazaB

How much effect do slip ups have on PAWS ? So hypothetically if i slip up every few months will i still continue to make progress ? ( i am not planning to do this but i am interested in how disastrous slip ups are when it comes to PAWS , and i am talking about a 1 day slip up , not full on benders that last for days. )
Does anyone have experience with this ?

biminiblue

Why do you call it a slip up?

Do you have agency over your own hand and mouth? I would call that choosing to drink. I think it's important to understand that you do have control over this.

I don't think any of us really want to test your theory and report back. Here's a good article from the NIH on Kindling, which is what happens:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6761822/

BettyP

I don't think any of us really knows how much of a difference slipping up makes - it obviously depends on the slip (how much, how long, etc.). I think the real dangers here are that if you slip up you could just go back out into active addiction and that can go on for years (or kill you). And if you go back out, you'll not only have to start back at the beginning with PAWS, but as you might have read with the OP that the second time around is somehow worse. I would say try really hard not to take these chances - build more support around you. I do AA meetings, but if that's not for you then for sure amass people in your life who don't drink, read books about sobriety, get exercise regularly, come post on here when you're having a day of it - and so on. Build out your toolkit of coping, because life will serve up other bad news - that's just the nature of things - and if your only coping mechanism in the past was drinking, then you're gonna need other things to get you through the rough spots. We are here for you! Just don't drink, one day at a time :-)

LazaB

I am asking because i have 2 months sober but last night i was at my brothers party ( we were going to find out if my sister in law is having a girl or a boy ) so of course everyone was drinking and i also had 2 small shots of brandy and 3 and a half beers ( i didn't even finish my fourth one ) , so today i feel mild hangover and no withdrawal , just depression because i don't know how much i set myself back with this.
My main PAWS symptom is anxiety/panic , so it's very hard to not have that drink in social situations especially when everyone else is drinking.

biminiblue

Do you want to quit completely? I know you've posted before that you're still playing around with sometimes still drinking...

I don't think you'll ever escape the anxiety/panic as long as you keep adding a toxic chemical to an already damaged nervous system, whether it's in smaller doses or intermittently. Actually I believe intermittently is even worse for kindling. The easier softer way is to just stop completely.

The only way out is - out. Total healing.

Did you read that article I posted above on Kindling? That's what you are experiencing and the cure is complete abstinence and TIME.

LazaB

Yes i read about kindling , but i also read this on this page a post by @adair
" I have been sober for 98% of the days. Though I have yet to get a continuous year under my belt, my drinking is but a pale shadow of what it used to be and those compounding sober days do slowly but surely nip away at all the symptoms PAWS likes to throw our way. "
I know i need to stop completely but i was interested in how much does a slip up set you back , because many people here posted about it at different times.