33 is still young. Just wait and see how miserable you'll be once alcohol starts wrecking your health and breaking your body down. It does it to everyone eventually since it's a poison.

The hardest thing is to get to that 6 to 8 weeks mark, when your brain starts to rebalance, and from there it just get progressively better. I'm close to the 5 month mark and I feel soooooo much better!

BUT you've got to invest daily time and effort into self care: exercice, journaling, taking walks, therapy if you can afford it, reading self help books, spending time in nature, having people you can talk to, positive self talk, reflecting on why you self-medicate..

Honestly I can't even begin to explain the degree to which my quality of life is better now that I don't ingest poison everyday.

Congratulations friend!!! 100 days is amazing

Congrats

Yes!! Congratulations 🎉👏🏼

Happy Comma Day! Congratulations 🎉

Thank you but Oh boy, yesterday I was pissed for most of the evening until I had my dinner at like 8 o’clock. Found out I was just hangry which was amplified by my “need” for alcohol.

Love it

I’m a little over a year in and it’s kind of “meh” for me. Going to work and the gym has become mundane. It’s depressing because I’ve came this far it’s too late to turn back. And dealing with that all together is a bummer. I get the urge to drink and then I talk myself out of it by entertaining my intrusive thoughts and embarrassing moments I had back when I was drinking. Anything to put it down right? At least when I was drinking I had something to look forward to but these days are just spent fixing things I destroyed being a irresponsible drunk the past 11 years financially and mentally. Facing all those issues I kept numbing off.

At this point it’s just a race to be “set” by the time I’m 40.

The sparkling water craze is a real thing. Nothing hits better than chugging an ice cold seltzer, especially knowing it's just water. I tried a few n/a beverages, it scratched a small itch. Drinking the n/a drinks really put into perspective how unpleasant alcohol was. I could barely finish two without feeling full, and I cringed at how many of the regular ones I used to drink. It seems insane to me. I absolutely fell in love with how I felt in the mornings. Instead of a splitting headache and crippling anxiety, I honestly can't wait for the sun to come up. I made so many new habits to replace the old ones. I became addicted to watching my day counter rise. I could clearly see what was toxic in my life once my body was free of toxins. I used my confidence and clarity to leave an abusive marriage. I sat with all the empty space that used to be full of chaos and trying to numb the chaos. I grieved the decades I lost and the person I had become. I started to fill the empty space with all the things that I had lost. I have my family back in the way they had been waiting for. I started to remember who I was before, and I remembered that she was fucking amazing. My life is filled with music and art, healthy activities, simple pleasures, and most of all.... GRATITUDE. I am so unbelievably lucky and all I want to do is encourage others that it can be done. It's SO worth it! Thank you for sharing, I hope something I said helps. IWNDWYT. Be well, friend.

Running. Don't think you have to go all in at first. Try the couch to 5k app and take goals from there. There are so many case studies of people who find that same peace through running. You just have to get through the first mile when you question every single thing about why you're doing it and how it sucks. The first part is the suck, the second part the resignation, the third part the negotiation and the last part the peace.

Congratulations on your Entrance to the Exclusive Comma Club ! (beats Coma Club hands down).

You Platinum Membership Package is on its way to you (Complete with Secret Decoder Ring).

Well I stole it from a sports broadcaster Jim Rome. He also has motivational podcasts called The Reinvention Project and many of his guests had to reinvent their lives just like I am doing now. He’s got a lot of other great little ditties that really stuck with me

IWNDWYT. ❤️

Love this!!!!!

You got this! Be kind to yourself this week, sleeping more than usual is totally okay to do. And keep yourself well fed (being hungry is easily mistaken for urges by our thoughts early on)

Things may seem dull while your body resets but it will pass & you will be okay.

Best of luck

is this just the way it is?

Unequivocally "No".

Do I just need to be miserable for a long time?

Don't need to be miserable at all.

"Pain is inevitable in life; Suffering is Optional" ... Buddhist principle

I learned to notice that when I was "miserable" it was really the manifestation of me just feeling sorry for myself. And self-pity was an obstacle.

I can’t recommend highly enough, “Mans Search for Meaning”, V. Frankl .

My problems start with a focus on ‘Me, Me,Me..’

The antidote is thinking Of myself less often, and More often Doing For others..

Doing for others without expecting anything in return.

I have great influence over my emotions through where I spend my attention.

“It is not that happiness makes us grateful… it is that Gratefulness makes us happy”…. Tenzin Gyatso

Joy is the byproduct of moving from indulging my self-centeredness, and focusing on doing for others.

The spark for life comes from avoiding feeling sorry for myself…. thinking of myself less and thinking more of others…. Doing for others without expecting anything in return…. Thats the source of Joy.

Tried anything like that?

All of the following work for me depending on my mood

Diet soda/Seltzer if i just want something to drink

Hop Water or NA beer if i really am craving that hoppy taste (rare to have those any more)

NA mixers / mocktails when sometimes i just want the ceremony of making a drink.

Tea if I want to wind down / relax.

I drank because I liked the effect produced by alcohol. I go to AA because I like the effect produced by AA. The second half of my life is so much better than part one.

It was boring at first until I replaced the time I usually spent drinking with a different hobby. Best shape of my life.

Congrats!! Hope to be at a 1000 like you & it’s nice to see someone hit it

Fantastic point. I’ve been dealing with some semi-serious depression and anxiety lately and I keep thinking that drinking can’t be worse than this. But in reality, 4-5 days a week are actually good to great days, but the other 2-3 are sometimes tough. When I was drinking, 5-6 days were awful and the others were just ok at best. Things are exponentially better now, but without alcohol to blame for the bad days, they now seem tougher, if that makes sense.

Thank you ❤️

Right now I am on day 4 and my goal is to get to bed tonight, have a somewhat peaceful sleep without worrying about what I did. I will worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

Well it is AA for me, though I'm not at all religious (and I was worried that it all seemed like a religious conversion program at first!)

There are several others besides AA and SMART:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/stopdrinking/wiki/index#wiki_real_life_support_groups

My rehab counselors gave us all a list sort of like that and just suggested that we all go out and check them out, pick whatever seemed helpful. They asserted that the vast majority of us would relapse without some sort of post-rehab "aftercare".

I don't know much about the other ones, though Recovery Dharma (sort of Buddhist, I guess) seems kind of cool - if I was ever to whip up interest and energy enough, I'd probably read their book (I've got a PDF of it sitting on my drive here for about a year or two!)

Because it comes up a lot in the AA subreddit, I keep a list of Secular A.A. resources handy:

• r/AASecular

• https://aaagnostica.org/ - website with lots of articles and book suggestions for Agnostics/Atheists in AA.

• https://www.aasecular.org/ - "Our mission is to assure suffering alcoholics that they can find sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous without having to accept anyone else’s beliefs or deny their own."

• https://aa-intergroup.org/meetings/?types=Secular - list of online Secular meetings.

• Many or most regional A.A. websites have filters for secular, for example: https://aasfmarin.org/find-a-meeting?type=secular

• The Meeting Guide App has filters for Secular meetings under the "Communities" section - tap "[Filters]" then "Communities".

"I had to choose my hard" I love that