Anxiety And Quitting Alcohol. What Nobody Tells You (My Experience)

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Stop Drinking Podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol-free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. Today I'm going to share with you my experience of stopping drinking alcohol and anxiety. I've not drank now for seven years, after a decade of struggling. So I'm going to break the video up into a few sections. I want to talk to you about what life was like when I was drinking. Then I want to talk to you about the transition period where I went from a drinker to a non-drinker seven years ago, because, listen, that was no joke. Then I'm going to talk to you about the first year, and I am going to be so realistic with you. I'm not going to sugarcoat things. I'm not going to say, yay, everything was perfect. It wasn't. Then I'll talk to you about years two and seven, and then I'll bring it back to the present day, because I want to give you a realistic picture of what to expect.

Speaker 1: 1:00

This topic is pretty damn universal. Since stopping drinking alcohol myself, I have started a coaching company. It's SoberClearcom. We've worked with over 450 clients, and we work with business owners and professionals and we help them get control of their drinking in as little as 24 hours. Not everybody gets results that quickly. It's happened. It's usually about two to seven days, but I can probably count on two hands the number of people who haven't experienced what I'm about to talk to you about. So whatever you're going through right now is normal, but the goal of this video is to give you a realistic expectation. But then I'm going to share some strategies that have almost eradicated any anxiety that I feel, and very quickly.

Speaker 1: 1:39

If you want instant access to a brand new video training that I've just finished, showing you how to control alcohol in as little as 48 hours, then click the link in the description. This new method is not about using willpower therapy or AA meetings. It's totally different. I do not publish this video anywhere else online and it's already changing thousands of lives. So click the link below for instant access. Once you're on the next page, enter your name and email address and your free training will begin. It takes just seven minutes to watch, but it'll feel like somebody flicks a switch in your brain and, honestly, I'm not sure when I'll start charging for this seven minute video training. That's how good it is. But whilst it's still available, click the link below, enter your name and email address and watch that video now.

Speaker 1: 2:21

So before I talk to you about what happened after stopping drinking alcohol, I'm just going to touch on what happened as a drinker. So when I actually drank alcohol, right when I was physically drinking, getting drunk, going out, having some drinks at home, whatever, I had zero anxiety. See, alcohol is an anxiety relieving drug. I'm not going to get into the chemical properties in this video, because I really want to just talk about experience in this video. But when I drank alcohol, I had no anxiety.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Now, this actually was a problem in itself, because what would happen is I would make stupid choices. For example, I would have no anxiety if I wanted to drive a car. I wouldn't think about the long-term consequences, I wouldn't be anxious about what's going to happen tomorrow if I make this ridiculous decision and I've drink-driven in the past. Man, I really hope I don't get in trouble one day by saying that, but I've done it. I don't want to start talking about all the stupid things. But you know, drugs, all of it right. But when I drank alcohol, my anxiety. It didn't feel like it was zero, it felt like it was minus 10. As in, I wouldn't even consider the consequences of the next day. I just make these ridiculous decisions.

Speaker 1: 3:20

Anyway, now, the major problem I had when I was drinking alcohol, when it comes to anxiety, was what would happen the day after, and the longer that my drinking continued, the worse this got. I would get these anxiety attacks when I was hungover, and I think the term now people like to say is anxiety and boy, that would happen to me, but this would last for multiple days. So, naturally, when I stopped drinking alcohol, I thought that maybe that this would just go away completely, but it didn't Trust me. The story gets better, but I don't want to overhype it. I want to be realistic with you. So what happened is I stopped drinking alcohol seven years ago and I got off pretty lightly. A lot of the clients that I work with have drank for way longer than I did 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years and they experienced it a lot more severely than I did. I might have felt bad for two or three days. Honestly, it's such a distant memory now that I can barely remember it, but compared to how I felt when I drank alcohol. Even if I felt anxious during that time, I didn't care. I pushed through it. That was my experience. That's not everybody's experience.

Speaker 1: 4:19

If you drank a lot for a long period of time, when you actually stop drinking alcohol, you can expect to feel pretty damn anxious. You can feel very panicky. You can feel like your heart keeps racing. You can't fall asleep at night. There's like this impending doom that's a way to describe it. It's like something bad's going to happen and that's okay. It will subside. It will reduce massively. But you can expect in the first couple of weeks, sometimes even up to the first month, that anxiety levels will have heightened. Like I said, I got off pretty lightly with this. For me it actually came a few months later, which I'll get to in a second. But again, it all depends on the individual, how long they've drank, how much they've drank. But when you go through that transitionary period, just expect anxiety could be very high. But this is all about your brain rebalancing. The chemicals are just starting to normalize and level out and you will get past it. So I want to bring it back to my experience After I stopped drinking alcohol.

Speaker 1: 5:07

The first few months were fine. I felt like the old me was back, like this flood of self-confidence came into my life where I just felt like I can do anything and I know not everybody feels like this, but I just felt turbocharged. I just felt like a bull in a China shop, just bam, bam, bam. I can do everything. And I just started taking so much action. I got back into the gym, got back into peak shape, I started a new business, I started personal training. Then I ended up moving to Thailand. I booked a one-way flight, started an online business. I was just in action mode.

Speaker 1: 5:35

But then I hit a roadblock and I didn't expect it to happen. But around maybe month three to six something like that is anxiety came back into my life and there were some days where I would have this feeling in my chest and I'm not even joking, I was almost immobile, like I couldn't do anything with those days and, honestly, I was in Thailand at the time. The only thing I could go and do was go and get a Thai massage or a foot massage and my day would be finished. And this came out of nowhere. It was quite strange, because I went from this euphoria and this, you know, this great feeling of self-confidence and self-belief to then feeling like pretty damn anxious. I was afraid of the future. I didn't know what was in store for me. Now I do believe I found a fix that worked for me. There were four things that I did that I'll explain towards the end of the video.

Speaker 1: 6:18

But that first year was pretty up and down, but then it kind of subsided and I'm telling you it must have dropped by 95%. It was almost like a phase that I went through. But on reflection, when I really look back, it was because I'd stopped drinking alcohol. But my life didn't mysteriously, just magically go perfect. Sure, I was feeling better, I had more clarity, I had more energy, I did have a lot more self-confidence and a lot more self-belief. But that didn't mean that all of a sudden my financial problem was fixed or my career problem was fixed or my relationship problem was fixed. I still had a lot of problems in my life and I think what happened is I went through this euphoric period of just feeling on top of things because I could remember how painful life was when I drank. And then, once the pain subsided, then reality hit.

Speaker 1: 7:02

And I like to talk about this on the channel because this happens to a lot of people. We get sold that stopping drinking alcohol is going to fix all our problems, but it ain't Now, luckily, the action mode that I was in of just go, go, go, go go, that's still kind of here to this day. I've just not stopped, which is a blessing and a curse. It's hard for me to switch off, but all the things that were causing that low level of anxiety were problems that I could fix and rather than do what I've been doing for the past 10 years, which was going to the bottle to escape these feelings, to escape any you know bad feeling that I had about the future, about my life, I'd just have a drink and that feeling would go away. Now I could deal with them. So in years one to two it was so much easier. I think the turning point probably came somewhere around month six to nine, around that point Now probably came somewhere around month six to six to nine, around that point Now.

Speaker 1: 7:53

The good news is is I truly believe I found the real root cause of my own anxiety, which is why it's reduced to like 99%. I'm not saying it's perfect, but years one to two it was like 95% down and then, when it comes to year two, up until the present day, I can safely say that it's pretty much at zero. Don't get me wrong. I have my moments and I have my days. They do come, and I want to just preface this by saying that I found a fix to my own anxiety. I'm not saying I found a cure, I'm not saying this is going to work for you for sure, but the four things that came up for me, I think, have made all the difference.

Speaker 1: 8:23

So there have been days where I wake up with this tight feeling in my chest and honestly, on those days sometimes I can't do anything. I'll press record on a camera and I can barely speak, I can barely get a word out, I'll sound almost incoherent, and then I'll think about all of the lists of to-dos and the tasks that I've got to do, and then this thing and that thing, and then I'm just like overwhelmed. And the first cause of all of this for me is sleep. I'm telling you I'm pretty sensitive to not getting a good night of rest. If I'm waking up two or three times in the night, I can feel the difference emotionally the next day. And I have noticed this link over the past seven years of not drinking alcohol. Whenever I got really bad sleep, that is when anxiety would start to peak. And that's why, when we stop drinking alcohol, that first two to four weeks however long it is for different people that's part of the reason why anxiety can feel so high.

Speaker 1: 9:13

Sure, you've got the drug aspect of things and the chemical changes in your brain, but then you're also going to have some level of disrupted sleep, which is all linked to anxiety. So if I have a terrible night of sleep and the next day I get that feeling, the second thing that I've got to do is accept it. If I try and fight it and I try and just blast through it and make videos and do the to-do list and work really hard, some days I can't do it. I just can't do it. I'm like, ah, and if I beat myself up about that, then the anxiety gets worse and what I've learned to do on these days is just be at peace. It's just to totally accept it and be like, okay, well, this day all I'll do is what I can do and let go of the rest. If I have a plan for the day where I'm going to do X, y and Z and I only do the first thing on that list and nothing else. Then what I try and do is just count the day as a win, but being at peace with these emotions, feelings, whatever you call it, it just takes the edge off.

Speaker 1: 10:07

The third thing that I have found to be a massive help is gratitude. See, my old mentor used to teach me this. He used to say every single day, when you plan your day is to write down a list of things that you're grateful for. He would always say that if you project too far into the future, you will get anxious, you will get fearful, you'll be thinking how am I going to deal with a problem that's not even at your doorstep yet? You'll be thinking all over the place. And he taught me that gratitude is actually the solution to this problem. If you can just feel grateful for what you have right now, you lose a lot of the fear of the future. And this was huge for me, because anxiety was always thinking about the future. Oh, what about this problem? What about that problem? This financial thing, this health thing, this business thing? I was always projecting into the future, which was really making me struggle to just be present in the moment and take action and writing down things that I was grateful for. What it did is it brought me back to the present moment. I'd look at my surroundings, I'd look at my environment, I'd look at my life and I'd get this feeling of actually life's pretty damn good, and this made a huge difference in my life.

Speaker 1: 11:07

The fourth thing was a technique that I actually Googled. I think I found it on Quora I might have even pronounced that wrong, quora, whatever it's called Reddit. I can't remember where I found it, but somebody gave a technique of when you've got that really peak anxiety. They said what you want to do is you want to focus on your senses and you want to find three things that you can taste, touch, feel, hear and see. I don't know if you're ever going to taste three things, but anyway, the whole point is that you bring yourself into your senses and then you start to think, okay, well, I can see this, I can see that, I can hear, and then you just kind of bring yourself into the present moment, so you stop projecting into the future and that was a pretty cool technique. I remember using that. I've not used it for years now because as long as I get a good night of sleep. Usually I'm fine.

Speaker 1: 11:47

But going back to the topic of sleep for one last time, why I think sleep is so important is because if you don't have a good night of sleep and you've got this list of things that you're going to do and then you come to your day and start to attack the day when I don't have a good night of sleep, I can't function as well. Honestly, they say like sleep is this miracle drug and blah, blah, blah. And I always think, nah, pseudoscience, whatever. I think I saw some quote that said the number one performance enhancing drug is sleep and I'm always thinking, shut up, nah, no chance. I'm highly sceptical, right, but I get it, because when you have a bad night of sleep, it does kind of ruin your day.

Speaker 1: 12:20

So then when you come to tackle the list of things that you've got to do and you can't take the action that you want to take, what I think happens is that we think, okay, well, oh dear, if I'm going to be like this every single day, how am I ever going to achieve my goals? If I can't function and follow a simple plan? At least, this is what would happen for me, is the thought pattern would spiral and get worse and worse and worse, which is why I had to learn to just accept those days. Not every day is going to be perfect. I will have bad days. We all have bad days. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by Sober Clear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.