The ‘Happy Hour’ Syndrome
 

I made up what I like to call the ‘Happy Hour’ syndrome 😕 Its when paws hits during the late afternoon thru the early evening while in recovery. I’m usually ok and feeling good in the mornings till around 3-4pm. After that, the pawsy symptoms come around (you guessed it) Happy Hour… Bout 4-7pm… 😟 Not always…Lately its been getting fewer and farther between. I just notice at times after a good stretch, the brain was so used to being sloshed around that time it tries to induce relapse by causing symptoms.

Am I making any sense here? At 159 days in, not a whole lot of time, but I have read a lot of books that consistently says paws peaks around 6 months to two years. Everyone is different. (Nothing y’all haven’t heard before)

Im still marching on…Still checkin in here, and still posting….Been searching SR to see if anyone else had the same thought about this ‘Happy Hour’ thing. Haven’t found it but Im sure somebody can relate https://www.soberrecovery.com/forums...s/thinking.gif Not a big deal…just something I’ve put a label on for myself 😐

Hang in there :grouphug:

When I was drinking, the happy hour started before I even left work. The busier I was the happier I was during the last hour of work knowing that I would have my escape in short order. Actually, the anticipation became better than the drinking! I call it my anticipation drinking.

repeating a behaviour like that every day, year after year, sets up some seriously hard wiring in the brain.

We can break it though as long as we abandon the old wiring and set up some new wiring. I’m in year two and doing well. My golden rule is to never ever let my thoughts go to romanticizing alcohol.

A happy hour inevitably turns into days of misery 🙏

When I was on one of my crazy binges every hour was happy hour all day and all night too!!....I don't have any paws symptoms but I see what your saying, the symptoms are showing up at a regular drinking hour....Kinda weird they would show up then......Well looks like happy hour will have to change to coffee hour!!

You're doing great Introvrtd.

Even if you have a resurgence of PAWS, every hour is a happy hour when we are sober. So endlessly sad to be continually drunk.

It will pass Introvrtd.

You are making total sense Introvrtd. The booze huckster figured out long ago when our heads played with us the most and they called it "Happy Hour." I had to track my daily cravings for a good 6 months when I quit. At first it was 3-7 p.m. and then it shrunk a bit each day from there.

I drank habitually which means at a certain time i would drink, and if that is the case then until a habit is broken you will feel like that. I always talk about pattern of drinking, by which i do not mean quantity, but pattern in terms of time of day or night, there are a lot of people who happy hour was 24/7 which was not my pattern, it was similar to yours in some respect. 159 days in you have gotten out of the habit so it sounds like the paws thing of which i have no experience but can stick around for a while so i'm told.

Hi Introvrtd. Congrats on 159 days. I didn't have PAWS per se. But I did experience my mind getting "itchy" after work, at the time I used to drink wine. The addicted part of our minds will use all kinds of tricks, including making us feel physically bad or emotionally off, to try to induce us to drink. Especially around our usual time of day for drinking, or locations /settings we used to drink in. Same was true for me regarding painkillers that had been prescribed for me for chronic back pain. I noticed that my body had a lot more pain flare-ups when I was taking the opiates. After I quit and threw them all away, I actually had less pain ... I think I had become addicted to those too, and my inner addict would drum up pain so I'd take more. I know we're always saying "it takes time", but really, it does get easier with time. I also found it helpful to have specific activities (non-alcohol-related) planned for happy hour.

Happy hour for me started at around 5 when I used to start thinking of the drink/s I would have at 7.30 when my kids went to bed. Now, 20 or so days sober, I feel myself becoming irritable, at about 5pm. I would really like to be own my own just in a room staring out of a window until, it passed - a bit like disassociating - BUT that is not possible - I have to start cooking for my family - as of yet I am still feeling physically wretched - but have found buying fresh raspberries ( expensive here) and eating them without sharing them with anyone is something I like to secretly look forward to - I look forward to happy hour being a thing of the past.

Sometimes my work is very tough physically, especially when you could stand to be in better shape and have a hangover to boot. I was in the routine of having beer in a cooler in the work truck, and the instant I quit and got to the truck, I would begin drinking. Often, I would drink two beers just in the time it took to get my stuff squared away. Then drink another couple on the way home. When I pulled into the drive, the floodgates would open. All day, I would look forward to little else. A lot of thought would go into how many I could possibly drink on the way home without getting a DUI. I didn't realize it, but I was leaving little mental capacity for anything else.

The routine was a little tough to break, but stopping for a tea instead of beer helped a lot. Every time I thought about it but didn't stop, it got better.

Great points Introvertd.. I only get the cravings at the evening hour also.. used to do my biking and walking then which kills the urge for a cold one.. but it's too hot here now. So I find it helps to replace it with something else if the craving comes along. I just had a Root Beer, haha. Virgil's Handcrafted.. delicious.

Good name. I have the exact same thing. Around 5 everyday I start to get extra anxious and irritable. Also, sometimes emotional. I also suffer from lots of PAWs symptoms and am 173 days sober. Today I was playing tennis with friends. Something I normally enjoy but it was 5 PM and I almost started crying on the court. I have read that PAWS symptoms can be particularly bad when it is a time or setting where you used to drink. For me that was 5 PM when the wine started pouring and did not stop until bedtime.

I do think the "happy hour" syndrome leaves eventually. I did experience this in the first few months. I made it habit to replace the hour or few hours with other healthy activities that I still do today. Get home, eat some food, hot tea or limeade, take a bath, evening practice of chanting and then read or watch a series. Its bedtime by then. Our brains are so hardwired that even after months of not feeding it alcohol the thoughts and cravings can still come. You are doing so well. Keep doing well. Keep going. You are changing your life.

I was listening to a podcast by Annie Grace, author of ‘The Naked Mind’. Studies have shown that our brains begin to experience the perceived relief of the drink prior to our drinking it when similar circumstances present themselves (time, etc) even though we haven’t yet taken a drink, which is why we begin looking forward to it at the time we are conditioned to drink. Our brains have made a path. Not drinking at that time will create a new path for our brains.

Thanks for all the replies…I’m reading every one…Y’all give me encouragement to carry on in spite of feeling this thing…Knowing it won’t be this way for good sounds hopeful. 😇

Yes I’m hanging in there and best wishes to all as we continue this journey of sobriety 🙂🙏🏾👍🏾✌🏾

PAWS is not something I ever experienced. When I first heard of it here. It was one of those things about addiction that did not resonate with me. Happy hour syndrome does resonate, however.

Like DriGuy, I know nothing about PAWS, but what you described sounds a lot to me like what happens when you try to break a drinking habit. It takes time to break a habit you likely spent years cultivating. Hang in there and it will happen, perhaps sooner than you think.

I replaced the alcoholic drink with a tea habit—I order really nice tea in bulk off Amazon at a reasonable price, and kind of make a “ritual” of prepping and taking time to drink the tea as I used to sit down to savor that first glass of wine, a cold beer, a dry martini after work.

There are so many amazing kinds of tea to try—blends with caffeine or not, rooibos and blueberry, chamomile and mint, blood orange and vanilla, hibiscus and lime, and a big favorite for me is Chai tea (caffeinated or not) full of spices like nutmeg and cinnamon. There are also traditional tea preparations like roasted rice and green tea (Genmai), smoky Lapsang Soochong, citrusy Earl Grey with milk. So many new tastes and cultures to explore. . .

I also began blending my own herbal teas, again, buying some herbs in 1 lb. packages and mixing myself. My favorite blend is 3 parts peppermint, 2 parts chamomile, 2 parts nettle, and 1part oatstraw. I call it “CrossFit Tea” as I made it to replace nutrients lost while sweating—I joined a local small CrossFit box when I first quit drinking in fact to specifically target my happy hour craving times and get my body and mind back in shape. That really helped with everything—something you might consider as well :)

Another hugely effective tool for happy hour is yoga—lots of free videos on YouTube and also quite a bit on other media—dvds, Gaia channel, etc.

This really put me in touch with my body again, and I got lots of benefit working to release the chronic tension and tightness I had built up over the years. It was astonishing how inflexible I had become—the metaphor was not lost on me either ;)

I never developed a fondness for tea, but I probably drink way too much coffee, and I enjoyed trying out some of those more exotic coffees from Starbucks, Sumatra being my favorite. My mother was a tea drinker, but it was always from Lipton tea bags, and I could drink it, but I just didn't find anything enjoyable about it. One more thing about coffee. In my travels, I came across one of those small coffee rosters. This one was in Olympia Washington. I can't remember the name of the roaster, but they did make one variety that I really liked, partly because of its name. It was called "Dancing Goats." But it was actually one of the better coffees I've had.