Recovering but struggling

[Joaitch]

I have managed to quit but recently my work colleague (only 3 of us in the office) is making me look to alcohol again to calm down. Please suggest legal alternatives! I do not want to go down the booze road again but she is making me so stressed. Any supplements available for stress?

You have to change the way you deal with stress and the stress you bring into your life. There are no magic pills to help you numb out now that you aren’t drinking.

I did find in early sobriety that exercise (I did a lot of hiking) and cold water swimming helped me when I felt anxious. But ultimately, I had to change my life: I left the job that was making me miserable and I cut awful people out of my life who were being jerks.

As you get used to dealing with stress without alcohol, it does get easier though. It just takes time and practice. I’m NC with my mum for instance and every so often she sends me an email to tell me what a terrible person I am. Drinking me would have used that as an excuse to drink 3 bottles of wine. But now it makes me annoyed for like 10 minutes and then I think, well, how pathetic for you. At least my life is not as sad as yours is, and I move on. But it took a bit of getting used to the new normal.

Giving up alcohol after abusing it to cope means you have to now deal with ALL THE FEELS!!

Rehab would teach you about triggers and coping mechanisms. You need to build new habits to cope.

For me, it was crafts and being outside in the fresh air in an open space. My sanity is in the middle of a field. 😁

You can do it. It will feel hard at first. It gets a lot easier. Get outside and take some long slow breaths. You are worth more than drinking again.

One thing we were taught in rehab was, if we were tempted to take a drink, to ‘play it forward’.

So - imagine you have a drink, it might feel good in the short term, but play it forward to tomorrow, and what would that feel like? You’d potentially be hungover, with the familiar vile-headedness, nausea and guilt, plus the knowledge that you’ve relapsed, PLUS the original problem that prompted you to have a drink in the first place would still be there.

What I tell myself on the now very rare occasions I’m even vaguely tempted is that this is going to go one of 2 ways - and I get to choose. I’ve never yet chosen the drink.

I used cbd drinks a lot - legal and the same relaxing feeling that I needed to keep going x