Drinking alone

[Ricky47]

I don't drink every day, once a week, but I do drink too much when I start drinking, I drink alone, I am lonely, I can't change my situation at the moment, but it's not good, I think I may have ADHD, I just feel in a hole that I can't get out of, drinking is escapism for me, always has been, how do I change things.

Speak to your GP, get some support. Don't keep alcohol in the house. Do something else when you feel you want an alcoholic drink. Is it particular days of the week? If so, why? Avoid triggers.

Well done @Ricky47- admitting you are worried about your drinking, to yourself and/or others, is massively brave and an important first step.

As you are only drinking once a week, it sounds like hou will be drinking a lot less than, for example, a lot of posters on here who consider themselves to have no problem with alcohol at all...... But that's irrelevant- if your drinking bothers you/makes you (or other people) unhappy, that's when you need to change it - how it compares to other people's drinking is irrelevant.

Working out your triggers is a good place to start and it sounds like you have already done this - you drink when you are lonely. Try to focus on your precise thought process. Do you tell yourself the drink will cheer you up from the loneliness/take the pain away? Or that you deserve it as a reward for all you have been coping with?

Then the next thing is to reframe the language you use to yourself. For example, if you say to yourself "I am so lonely, I can't stand it " when it would be mor accurate to say "I am lonely but I have endured this in the past and I can endure it now....."

I would recommend the SMART Recovery Handbook. It gives practical advice for all kinds of addiction or addictive type behaviours (if you only drink once a week, you obviously don't have any kind of physical addiction to alcohol, but you may have a mental dependency nontheless). It massively helped me, and I recommend it to everyone I know who wants to stop drinking, smoking, using drugs etc etc.....

Good luck!

You can change.
Find a healthy escape or a less harmful one.
Change how you think about your sadness. Have little things to look forward to everyday. Do somethings that uplift you like music, art, exercise, gardening, make up ... etc. Keep talking to people who want an alcohol free life and who see the value and importance of sobriety.
For every time you escape for a couple of hours in alcohol, you return to reality with more shit and complications. So you wake up with the same problem + extra shit. In the end, Alcohol worsens everything.

Buy the mini bottle? Once that is had that is it. As other posts don’t have it in the home.

I also stopped watching things I’d associate with drinking.

For me it was cutting comments at Christmas, how can you drink all that and get good blood readings but it made me think. (primarily was a lone drinker)

Good luck 🤞