3 scary ways alcohol made me forget my good life before booze
When I started drinking alcohol daily (and heavily) in my mid-20s after a particularly stressful string of work events, I did so thinking it would make my life better overall.
Sure, work sucked and I was deeply depressed that I’d spent 4 years in university preparing for a career that I immediately knew I hated.
But after that first night of sipping rye on the rocks, reading a book, and feeling like a big boy, everything suddenly seemed a bit brighter.
I still hated my job and my boss, but at least I could look forward to having a nice, stress-relieving drink and forgetting my troubles and cares for the night.
Little did I know at the time, booze would drag me into the darkness for 15 years and make me forget just how good my life actually was before alcohol stepped in and ruined everything.
The sneaky alcohol trap
This is how alcohol acts like quicksand in your life, right?
You dip a toe in, and before you know it, it has completely pulled you under.
One of alcohol’s most insidiously negative qualities is it quickly makes you forget what it was like to live without it.
It makes you forget your baseline health and state of being.
It quickly puts itself at the center of your life, stealing your freedom to live a normal, happy existence before you even realize that freedom is gone.
Here are the 3 ways the demon booze made me forget my good life before alcohol.
The first thing alcohol makes you forget
The first thing alcohol makes you forget is what it’s like to mostly be in a good mood.
Yes, I had work stress and yes I had undiagnosed ADHD that really did a number on my brain most days, but for the most part, I was doing an OK job of managing everything.
It wasn’t easy by any means, but it was doable.
Alcohol tricked me with the promise of making things “easy”.
And it seemed like it was doing the job … at first.
The problem, of course, is that alcohol frigs up all your brain chemicals and neural pathways and hormones and trains you to be unhappy whenever you can’t drink it.
It slowly drains all the color out of your life until everything feels grey.
The only time the color returns is the next time you have a drink.
Remember when you were a kid, how everything was interesting and new experiences were exciting?
That fades somewhat in adulthood, of course, but I still found myself getting interested in a great many things.
Eventually, the only thing I was all that interested in was drinking every night.
Yet after I quit alcohol a little over a year ago, I suddenly found myself smiling more.
- I was quick to laugh.
- I was more interested in the people and the work around me.
- I could actually sit down and read or watch a little TV without becoming overwhelmed by discomfort or boredom.
- I was calmer, had better perspective, found more patience.
I also received the greatest gift of all — the return of optimism.
The second thing alcohol makes you forget
Alcohol also makes you forget what it was like to have lots of sustainable energy throughout the entire day.
It would be bad enough if alcohol only wrecked your mental health, but it comes for your physical health and energy too.
Of course, there are the ways it actually physically kills you — the cancer, the heart disease — but it also attacks your energy in sneakier ways.
One of the biggest, almost immediate health benefits I found from quitting alcohol was how much it improved my sleep.
My drunk sleep was brutally bad: Lots of time in bed, but with constant wake-ups and an angry, groggy feeling upon waking.
My solution was to respond with way too much coffee, which boosted my anxiety and caused my energy to whipsaw around all day. Then, to take the edge off the anxiety, I’d start drinking again.
Almost immediately after quitting alcohol, I started sleeping through the night — and I could feel how much better quality sleep it was.
The next day, there were no more dips and crashes and I had more energy to tackle my myriad life responsibilities.
I also stopped saying no to more experiences and opportunities because I was too damn tired to take part.
The third thing alcohol makes you forget
The third thing alcohol makes you forget is what it’s like to build your day around something other than alcohol.
One of the biggest things booze steals is your mental bandwidth.
So much of it is taken up by the same stupid questions:
- When can I get to the store to get alcohol?
- What should I drink tonight?
- If I do this, will I be able to drink tonight?
- What time can I start drinking tonight?
- Can I put this off until later so I can drink tonight?
- What time do I need to stop drinking to not ruin tomorrow?
Quitting alcohol gives you the freedom to just flow, and the energy and positivity to tackle whatever comes up.
Without alcohol to plan for, you can build your day around things that actually improve your quality of life — cooking proper meals, going to the gym, spending time with friends and family, or whatever is important to you.
You’re free to let your body and mind wander where they want to because they don’t have to operate within the structure of an alcohol-dominated life.
The good life
The good news is the good life you used to enjoy is closer than you think.
It took me about two full weeks to be completely free of alcohol.
For the first 10 days or so, I was wracked with anxiety and cravings.
But at some point after that, the last of my bad feelings tapered off until around the 14-day mark. At that point I didn’t really think about alcohol at all.
And all of a sudden, I started to remember how good life was before alcohol tossed a grenade into the middle of it.
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