Well done for developing plan before the cravings hit, that’s excellent.

I found it helpful to break habits. So before I started cycling to work, I changed the bus I caught from the station, because the stop for that bus wasn’t near the supermarket where I’d go in to buy wine. If I’m working from home, I mark the end of the working day with an exercise session instead of a glass of wine.

I got more organised and started meal planning and getting groceries delivered, so I always had food in the house and didn’t go to the supermarket for a ready meal and “I’ll just get wine while I’m here.”

Saving up the money I wasn’t spending on booze and buying myself rewards for milestones.

Cycling to and from work, which in combination with the meal planning means that once I’m home, I’m not leaving the flat and there’s no wine in here but there are food and books and my bed.

Playing the tape forward - yes, it’s a lovely sunny day and a glass of wine sounds nice, but think forward to tomorrow morning when you’ve drunk the entire bottle and you’ve got a murderous hangover and you can’t cycle to work and you’ve got to get the Tube, with other people, and you with a hangover. Eurgh.

Going to bed. Nothing like being under the duvet in your pyjamas with your teeth clean for stopping a booze run. When you’re an adult, you can go to bed whenever you like and nobody can stop you.

HALT the BS - am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, Bored, Stressed/Sad? Address those and you may well find you’ve addressed the craving, because the craving is a symptom of something else.

I very rarely get cravings these days, and if I do, I just sort of watch it as it crosses my mind and then disappears out of sight. I’ll then consider what brought that on, and usually it’s the ghost of a habit, or an association, like the aforementioned lovely sunny day.

Alcohol upsets everything. Hormones, digestion, sleep, you name it, alcohol screws it up. These early days, frankly, suck. Your body is still operating in the old, toxic past where it has to deal with poison on the regular, and everything’s out of whack.

The good news is that this too shall pass. According to my sobriety app, you’re past the withdrawal systems, and in the next week or so, you should start seeing improvements in things like your immune system, digestion and energy. Sleep should also start improving round about now. I wrote a post on stuff you can do to help your sleep improve.

And good idea on the mani/pedi appointment, treats and rewards are important.

welcome, we’re glad to have you here 🙂

The ultimate answer!

Congratulations! 😁

I’m sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing your friend’s story, and I hope today goes as well as it can for your husband.

thank you!

I had been in the habit of pouring a glass of wine when I got in from work, and then when Covid lockdown hit and I was working from home, of marking that shift from “work” to “home” with a glass of wine.

I started doing exercise instead, going for a stupid little walk for my stupid mental health, weights, or Pilates. I also read, sew, and crochet. I have a nice teapot and a range of fruit and herbal teas, and I find that ritual is calming.

Thanks, Zerlyna, I’ve got a bit of a chest infection and I’d missed posting the DCI today.

IWNDWYT

I’m not sure where you live, but I’m in the UK and it feels like it’s rained non-stop since before Christmas. Nobody wants to go out because it’s grey and wet.

It’ll improve when the weather does, I hope.

onward!

congratulations!

Nah, just estuary English. (thanks, fixed).

ooof, good luck, hopefully the potty training is easy and the snow isn’t too bad.

My ADHD therapist said it was very common for people with ADHD to use alcohol to mask symptoms, as well.

I didn’t see many of the much-vaunted health improvements, either, so I’m always cautious about saying that everything is going to be marvellous straight off the bat, because sometimes it isn’t.

My entirely unscientific thought process is that your body spends much of that first month going “wait, what?” and scrambling to get back to normality. You’ve spent however long bathing your system in a systemic poison and it takes a while for your body to adjust to that not happening any more, and it all takes time.

Sometimes not drinking also reveals that you were drinking for a reason - in my case it was self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD, and oh boy was that an interesting few months…

congratulations!

both?

I don’t want to second-guess your therapist, but I wonder if she’s thinking short-term vs long-term? Unless you have a trip planned or an upcoming wedding in your immediate future, a sudden urge to drink is a more immediate thing to need to have a plan for than something which is a way in the future, after you’ve got a good long stretch of sobriety under your belt.

Bear in mind that this lack of urges can change. I did dry January in 2022, and thought “this is great, no cravings, nothing.” By March I was drinking as much as I had been before I did dry January, and this is quite common.

So when I stopped again in May 2022, I recognised that I needed to spend some time building sober supports and scaffolding, so that when cravings arrived, I had tools to deal with them.

Everyone’s different. Some people find the “recovery” model helpful, some people don’t. Some people find the AA model helpful, but I gave many years of my life to a “higher power” as a lay member of a religious order, and so I don’t find that model helpful, and the people who say things like “but this doorknob could be your Higher Power” just make me laugh. I’m glad the AA model is there for people who find it helpful, but I’m not one of those people.

I drank too much, I got to the point where I decided that I didn’t want to do it any more, so I don’t. I dug into the science behind addiction, about what alcohol really does to you, and read books by people who modelled the sober life I wanted, eg “Sunshine Warm Sober”. And now I mostly don’t think about it, I just don’t drink.

Congratulations!