Sober October: 5 Good Reasons You Should Give Sober a Chance & Quit Alcohol

Sober October: 5 Good Reasons You Should Give Sober a Chance & Quit Alcohol

You begin to enjoy your own company, perhaps on a deeper level

By giving sober a chance you will find that what you may have been looking for all is along is within you already. You may even begin to understand that you are no longer a victim of alcohol and its claws dragging you down.

By reconnecting with your real actual self, you begin to understand your feelings and emotions better without the clouded judgment that alcohol has the power to bestow upon you. Trust me, when you ditch the booze, you really do find your true self once more.

Your relationships improve

I am not just talking about your marital relationship or that with your partner of choice. I’m talking about all relationships, from friends and colleagues to siblings and parents. How many times have you argued with a parent or spouse about how much you drink and what you could or should have been?

Well, no more of that because you are now proud of what you have achieved and whether people show it or not, they will be too, perhaps a little envious. Building on this, when sober, you become a much calmer person, so where once you may have reacted to a particular person or situation, the much more content you will deal with any provocation with ease.

I’m not suggesting that you now walk around on air or are a snowflake to the world around you, it’s just, with a clearer head you are much better equipped to deal with the daily bump and grind and the odd nugget that pisses you off. Speaking of bump and grind; there is the sex and the fact that you can now remember the intimacy of it all.

From personal experience, my relationship with my wife and kids has improved exponentially! When I was drinking I couldn’t be arsed with the day-to-day and had a short fuse, whereas now it is the total opposite and I can deal with the challenges that everyday life throws at me, which to be honest are not always massive, but when I was drinking, I would believe they were part of a global crisis!

No longer feeling that your hopes and dreams are out of reach

Sure, you have to look at this with a hint of realism but even then, I truly believe that by changing the words ‘blocks’ and sticking point’ to ‘limitations’ you can teach yourself that you can go around limitations.

Here’s an example: You have a problem with alcohol and you want to quit, but you travel for work and traveling is a trigger because your alone, but you can’t stop working because you need the money and if you did stop working you would need to get another job, and you can’t do that because you need to stop drinking, (breathe) so you just carry on and continue this inner dialogue whilst doing nothing about it…. Meanwhile, you’re still drinking. It’s because you have set fictitious limitations in your mind and you are stuck in your fictitious comfort zone.

Comfort zones can be pushed, and limitations have solutions if you’re prepared to look and go around them. Don’t create fictitious limitations in your mind because deep down you don’t want to do it or you’re not prepared to be creative with your potential, be honest, if you really don’t want to do it, don’t.

It’s like thinking outside the box and you need some serious self-talk. By understanding this continuous dilemma and working with your limitations, you, as a human being, are more creative than you give yourself credit for and there is a solution if you want it. Follow your dream.

Lower your anxiety levels

Waking up feeling like a bag of spanners isn’t good whoever you are, and alcohol is known to increase feelings of anxiety. In my case, I honestly feel like the majority of these feelings were as a direct result of drinking. OK, drinking caused other issues in my life that led to issues with anxiety but there lieth the root course.

In addition to this, I have been given some tools such as breathing exercises, etc. that work 100 times better now alcohol is not involved. This is a massive benefit to stopping drinking and giving sober a chance. In-fact my new calmness was one of the first things I noticed, and it was eagerly picked up by my closest loved ones too.

Knowing when you are having fun

I couldn’t even begin to count how many times I have lost my memory from the session before, and so how do I know if it was fun or not? Chances are, at the time I thought it was fun, I was fun and whatever I was drinking made me fun, but the reality is different. Alcohol plays with your mind in such a way that it bamboozles your brain into thinking that you can’t have fun without it.

Any occasion that I used to go to, 9 times out of 10 would involve alcohol, and that ultimately became the fun part. If it was a dinner or a wedding or whatever, it wouldn’t be about the food or the great band, it would be about how pissed I could get and that was my fun. Without the involvement of alcohol, everything is viewed in a different light and you will begin to appreciate things for being what they are and not overshadowed (or ruined) by alcohol.

Obviously, there are more, and I could go into health benefits etc. but let’s save that for another post.

All the best… Darren