allishope73

Hi everybody . I m on 15 day sober . I looked at letter from doctor . It is saying alcohol misue was secondary to anxiety disorder and loss. I looked at this now with understanding . I removed secondary and now i am dealing with primary. If i continue to drinkni would never manage to start adressing. It is long way as i cannot remove stressors but i can change a bit my way of thinking and be aware it will pass. I can sleep . I can eat well. I can do many things i was not able when self medicated. So to everybody who like me self medicated i can honestly say anxiety loss grief is awful but anxiety and alcohol is a vicious neverending story. It s worth to bear. And it is only day 15. I was walking through shopping centre looked again at folks dining and drinking and said to myself naw its not worth sweats , sleepless nights loosing self respect . No no no . Hope this motivate some folks and if you go to my posts and serial relapser over year you ll see i m going through major life changes...very scary . Walking through this tunnel with no much help but i can see the light now its not so dark as two weeks ago . X D

Dee74

Hi allishope

to me all my problems were primary because they all fed each other.

I've made the mistake before in the past of thinking maybe I could drink again because I dealt with other issues - but of course that was not the case.

I think you are totally right tho that not drinking is the only way to get to some of the other issues.

D

Primativo

I definitely think there are a percentage of the population who are more susceptible to bad anxiety and thus because of that, they are more likely to develop an addiction to alcohol through self medicating.

I'm pretty sure that is exactly how I ended up in the situation I found myself in. The problem is, alcohol is fantastic at "curing" / masking anxiety very short term, but it is so short acting and it actually exasperates existing anxiety and makes it even worse in the long run.

So if you, like me, are predisposed to anxiety, or let's just say, having higher generalised anxiety levels than the majority of the population, it explains a few things. It explains to me, why I used to suffer really bad anxiety on hangovers compared to my peers, and meant I drank on hangovers to stop the anxiety, which opened the door to dependence because I wired my brain to become medicated by alcohol.

It also explains why I got along with alcohol so well in the first place, because it numbed my generalised anxiety whenever I drank.

The good news is, once you stop drinking for a period of time, I realised my anxiety isn't as debilitating as I thought. To cut a long story short, for many many years I thought alcohol was my friend because it was helping me to medicate my bad anxiety which I was suffering from. But all along, it was actually the alcohol causing my anxiety which I was then using the alcohol to medicate the anxiety which the alcohol was causing me in the first place.

Once I stopped drinking, my anxiety has hardly been a problem anymore.

allishope73

Thanks Dee thanks Primative. Very true indeed. I will relate to relationship between alcohol and anxiety in further posts. Today i wanted to say i m day 16 and actually putting days in diary as i reached the stage in life when no drinking is normality and drinking would be abnormal. And in first week when i was learning how to cope with panick raw ... Dee mantra was my safety pillow...whatever happens in life i do not drink . Now i learnt to bear panick and stress sober but lots of work to do to heal from primary issues. I read great stuff by phd doctor Peter Levine who found out how ptsd affects freezing energy and causing all unpleasent symptoms of anxiety. But i d write more when test on myself . I m quinea pig here and i tested not drinking is working for me and i guess for humans. This one sorted. Rest i will be updating x D ps i d advise folks to get addicted at beginning to SR 😉😚

Free2bme888

Congrats on over half a month!