Hello all,
This is a thread for people who have decided that life is much better without alcohol!🤩 These threads were started by @Drybird, and they have changed the lives of many people.
Some posters on these threads have been sober for a long time, and some are only just starting. We are a very friendly and inclusive bunch and we are always excited when someone new joins the thread. The only thing we ask is that our posters have given up alcohol completely. Talk of moderation can be triggering for some people, so this thread is not the right place for that (there are other moderation threads🙂).
I hope to see many familiar names on this thread, and some new ones too! We always welcome anyone to share their feelings, ask questions or simply “check in”🙂
I’d also like to thank @Breathmiller for hosting the last thread (and to ask for your forgiveness for shamelessly stealing your thread title😳) - Thank you @Breathmiller 💐
Thanks all!
Bunnies
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Alcohol support
The Freedom Thread (Continued) - Enjoying the positives of an alcohol free life *Title edited by MNHQ*
BunniesBunniesBunnies · 24/11/2021 16:21
Hi, I'd like to join in if that's okay 
I'm kind of new to this- day 1. I've been feeling more and more uncomfortable about my drinking maybe for the last year, and last night I decided to make a change.
Drinking has been a feature of my life always really, I associate it with good times, relaxation, so its going to be a hard habit to break. I'm not physically dependent but I am definitely psychologically dependent, i often look forward to my evening drink all day and can be seen counting down the minutes to 5pm. Which has sometimes become 4pm...
I rely on alcohol for stress relief, as a crutch for getting through parenting my young children which I find pretty hard. I'm not sure anymore that I'm in control. I'm looking forward to making a change, I'm fed up of sleepless nights, twitchiness, fuzzy head mornings, the dread at 3am when the hangover kicks in.
I want to be a better version of myself. So I'm joining in here to read your posts and keep myself on track - willpower and 'giving up' things never works for me so I need to reframe it for myself as gaining something- new energy, better health, better coping strategies, hopefully better skin! Great to virtually meet people in the same headspace!
Morning everyone. Lots of new joiners! Welcome, from another relatively new joiner. I’ve got over my three week slump from last week; in retrospect I can see that the feeling of flatness and exhaustion was another stage of the alcohol withdrawal; my body/brain was trying to get used to not having the artificial highs of dopamine and GABA, followed by the noradrenaline, glutamate and cortisol. My mood picked up towards the end of the week, and I’m feeling much clearer this week.
Several posts mentioning not drinking in pregnancy made me realise that I’d totally forgotten about pregnancy when I said I hadn’t gone more than a month without getting drunk since I was 15. 🤦🏻♀️ It just shows that we can (mostly) give up when we really have to.
Having said that… I didn’t stop drinking entirely, even then. 
Before pregnancy I never drank wine - I was a spirits drinker. I knew I couldn’t do that any more, so I ‘just’ had a glass of wine every so often (to me, that was barely drinking at all! ) I never did go back to spirits, really; it was mostly wine from then on.
So, Day 30 for me today. I signed up to the Annie Grace Alcohol Experiment, but didn’t realise I had to activate it until a week or so in, so I’m not on day 30 in that. I’ve also taken my time over watching the videos, as I knew from the second week that this was going to be a much longer term change. I’m on day 17 of the videos, iirc, and I’m finding them incredibly useful actually (I wasn’t entirely sure at the start, tbh, especially after attending a webinar that turned out to be a hard sell for her paid courses); they really prompt me to think about things at a deeper level, to challenge my beliefs around alcohol, and to look on this as freedom from alcohol and a catalyst for change, rather than ‘giving up’ something I want. The app has a very supportive community to it, too, and I intend to keep reading that and re-watching the videos. Realising how much work and insight has gone into the course has changed my thinking about the paid coaching/support courses that the sales pitch never lets up on 
- I’d recommend that investment for someone in crisis who was really struggling to change their thinking.
For me, I’m still not quite ready for ‘forever’, but I’m already thinking of extending my seven month commitment to a round year, and then I’m thinking ‘well it’s 18 months to my 50th birthday, and that’d be a lovely milestone to be alcohol free…’. 
I still have this lingering hope that I’ll eventually be able to have a small glass of wine with a good meal, or a glass of champagne to celebrate, but… BUT… I can see how very easily that could/would slip back into a routine thing, and how smoothly that would turn into manufacturing excuses to ‘deserve’ a drink. 
I feel a huge sense of relief, at the moment, that I’ve made the decision and commitment, so I’ve removed all that mental wrangling. It feels very freeing.
It hasn’t all been sunshine and roses; I had a busy and physically demanding weekend doing stuff to the house, and late afternoon on Saturday, when my back was killing me (pain is a HUGE trigger for my drinking), I would have murdered for a glass - well, a bottle, frankly - of wine. I vaped some weed instead - not ideal, but it did the trick, and it’s the first time I’ve wanted to do that this month, whereas I’d do it several times a week when I was drinking. On the plus side, I wouldn’t have even been doing stuff to the house usually - I’ve done more in the four weekends since I stopped drinking than in as many months when I was! I don’t ever want to go back to that hungover, lethargic feeling of flatness, clock watching until 5pm when I can have my 2 hours of happy drunkenness that I’m sacrificing the other 22 hours of the day for!
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