30 Weeks of Sobriety

Practice makes progress- My thoughts on the link between mental health and cravings.

Sam Wilson

Nov 15, 2022

Today I have been sober

for 30 weeks! 210 Days!

Sobriety

It’s not getting easier…

Recently I’ve spoken about these fucking dreams that I’ve been having. I’ve said enough about them and why they might be happening so much, particularly last week. I even spoke about what I thought I might be able to do to stop them. But I guess ultimately, it’s one of the things in life that I have no control over whatsoever. I know this because I had another fucking one this morning. They’re only a slight hiccup but man they are fucking inconvenient. Like, It’d just be better if they didn’t happen.

Cravings

I went to lunch with some family on Saturday. It was at an RSL club. The young fella was being a bit grizzly that morning. I had a bit of shit to do around the house and I wanted to get it done before we left. As someone with ADHD of course I overestimated my ability and underestimated the amount of time I had to get these things done and ended up being a bit late. I fucking hate being late. But I’m so fucking good at it. Anyway, I had allowed myself to slip into a bit of a shitty mood.

When I got to the RSL I walked past the bar. I saw some people around my age standing there waiting to be served. The sun was shining through the big floor-to-ceiling glass windows. It had that warming, magnifying glass kind of effect on your chest. The first thing my brain thought of was “how good would it be to saddle up at that bar all fucking arvo and just tip ‘em?”

I quickly talked myself down from that ledge so to speak, and kept wandering over to where my family was sitting. I was hit with this sudden sadness. I’ll never get to sit at a bar, in the sun, drinking schooners all afternoon, ever again. This is frustrating because usually, I don’t care about that. As hard as it is at times, my life is better without alcohol. My son’s life will be better if I abstain from alcohol.

I think what happened here was due to the lead-up. We were seeing some family that hadn’t met my son yet. He’d had a pretty shitty morning. I was a little anxious about them expecting him to behave in a certain way when he wasn’t up to it. I was already a little high-strung from the self-inflicted hurry I had put myself in due to my own poor time management. When we arrived, my partner realised she’d forgotten her wallet, you can’t get into an RSL without a photo ID. So she had to duck back home and I had to look after a grizzly 12-week-old without the armory that is milk-filled tiddies for the next 30 minutes or so. Luckily, he fuckin’ loves the pokies! I’m kidding. Relax.

I’m starting to learn that it’s not always the same or traditional triggers that provoke these thoughts. I suck at identifying this at the time, and I’m working hard to rectify it, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can see and understand why I ended up having this little battle at the RSL. I’ve been to lots of licensed establishments over the late (almost) seven months and I don’t usually have these moments. I’m putting this moment down to how I reacted to the challenging events in the hours leading up to arriving at lunch. I allowed them to get to me more than they should have. That put me in a stressed mental state.

Stress is one of the leading causes of relapse in addiction. Here's a random internet article that explains it much better than I can.

I think this aligns with my true and original why. Sobriety was the short-term goal. A stepping-stone goal, if you will. The main goal was to gain enough mental clarity through sobriety to get to the root cause of my mental health issues and then work to resolve them. The issues that have led me to have low self-worth. The same issues that hinder my ability to ever feel proud of anything I have achieved. The issues that have caused me to run from any negative emotion I’ve ever been faced with. The same issues that get washed away when I drink and in turn make it so fucking hard for me to stop drinking once I have started.

If I can go into situations in a better head space, I am at less risk of allowing them to stress me out, I am at less risk of relapse. How do I do that? By continuing to work hard on being conscious of triggers and then working on eliminating those risks or controlling them better. By continuing the hard work of catching and processing my thoughts properly. instead of letting them instantly stress me out.

It is my fault that I felt the urges I felt on Saturday because I let myself get stressed out about dumb shit that didn’t ultimately matter. Everything was fine, it was always going to be fine. But my neural pathways send these thoughts straight down the “stress the fuck out way more than necessary” shoot.

This might sound like I’m being a little harsh on myself. But I’m choosing to see it as a positive. I had an experience that made me uncomfortable. Whilst I’m disappointed I allowed it to happen, I can’t change that now. What I can do, and what I believe is my responsibility moving forward, is to review what happened and take a look at what I could have and should have done differently. It’s made me realise that maybe a lot of these urges or cravings that I’ve had over the last near seven months probably had a similar lead-up to this one, I just wasn’t conscious enough to notice it. So, even if it’s on reflection and with the benefit of hindsight, I feel like this realisation is progress for me. There’s no right or wrong metric for this kind of progress. Progress is progress and we have to be happy with that. I just hope next time I can catch it sooner, then sooner again the next.

The 15-Minute Rule

I kind of feel a bit silly that I only recently remembered about this one, but it’s something that drifted back into my mind recently and something that I think has been quite beneficial for me. They say that alcohol cravings only last 15 minutes. I have used this technique in the past when I gave up smoking and drinking coffee. People often talk about it like the tide of an ocean. So Imagine low tide is at zero minutes, and high tide is at around seven minutes and 30 seconds. then low tide again at 15 minutes. The craving starts off quite mild. Slowly, it builds and builds over the first seven or eight minutes, then it will start to taper back out again.

It sounds simple, who can’t go 15 minutes without a drink? Most of us would handle that pretty easily. It’s uncomfortable, for sure, but all you have to do is ride out that 15-minute period, and you’re sweet, right? This is something I’ve been reminding myself of recently and it seems to be fairly effective for me. I don’t know how I got to over six months of sobriety before I even remembered about this tool. Whatever the case, I am glad I rediscovered it.

I think where addicts battle with this one isn’t so much with the fifteen minutes. I think the struggle comes when addicts have two or three of these cravings per hour for a period of a few hours. Let’s go back to the tide of the ocean analogy. If the tide comes up nice and high and the seas are rough but it’s only for 15 minutes twice a day, usually, the sand on the back will remain largely unaffected. But if the tide comes up twice every hour, slowly but surely it’s going to wash a whole heap of sand away with it until the sand has been stripped back to the bare minimum.

Think of the sand as an addict’s willpower. There is only so much sand on the beach. When in a volatile situation, and the seas start to stir up, more and more sand is going to get washed away each hour until eventually the sand that helps to hold up the headland that people have built their houses on starts to erode. Once enough of the sand gets washed away, there’s not enough strength left to stop the headland from washing out.

Kinda like what happened to these very poor people on Sydney’s Northern Beaches in 2016.

How do we Manage the Tide?

We can put measures in place to help control our own tides. While we will never have complete control of them, we can certainly do things to manage them a little better and limit the damage the tides will do. For me, it’s proving difficult to achieve at times, but it’s something I believe is worth every second of the work I have been putting into it.

As I mentioned at the top, I believe the craving I had on the weekend was caused by some of the events leading up to it. I believe stress induces cravings. When we stress out, our brain craves calm and comfort. This is why people smoke or eat more when they are stressed. Have you ever seen a smoker in a car crash? As soon as they get out of the car, they will pull out a smoke and light up straight away, I’d argue that oftentimes they didn’t even consciously think to do it. It’s just an automatic response to the stress they are under.

I truly believe that had I controlled my reaction to the stimulus’ that were my son being grumpy and the non-existent expectations I thought my family might have placed on him, my partner forgetting her wallet, and the consequences of us being a few minutes late I wouldn’t have found myself in such a vulnerable situation.

I know I have crapped on about this stuff a bit lately, but it’s important for me to write this down because I think I’ve made slight progress from this experience. My goal was to sort out why I would drink the way I did. I’m pleased that I’m able to look back and do a Lessons Learned style review of the morning in question and find some key takeaways for me to work on moving forward. I think moving forward the challenge for me will be trying to be conscious of these factors sooner. I figured this out a couple of days after it happened. I need to be conscious of them as they happen. it’s going to take hard work and it could take some time yet, but I think if I can keep working on catching these negative thoughts, particularly the exaggerated ones where I panic and think that the consequences could be worse than they really are, they’ll be dealt with sooner and won’t have as much impact on me after the event. I think between that and doing these little reviews where I look back on how I came to be in the position where I was craving alcohol, incrementally I will keep making the progress I desire.

The hard work involved is dwarfed by the consequences of the alternative. It’s better for everyone involved. Baby steps. Elephant Burgers, etc

Worst case, read this blog out loud to yourself, I was generous and gave you all an extra minute!

Movember

Last week I wrote about Why I Committed to a 60k Run on 16 Days Notice so I won’t go too deeply into it here.

Movember now offers more ways to raise money for prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health than just growing a mo. I have a double chin, so I ain’t shaving.

60 men die every hour around the world by suicide.

Six Australian men die every day by suicide.

So I am going to (try to) run 60k on Saturday the 26th of November. I am thinking I will do two laps of the great sediment trap that is Lake Burley Griffin. I am going to start nice and early because I want to avoid running in the heat of the day as much as possible and I have to get to mum’s family Christmas party for lunch. I’m sure the sober guy who’s too tired to talk to anyone will be the life of the party, but fuck ‘em. This shit is important.

If anyone is interested in donating to a very important cause click here. Any donation big or small is hugely appreciated and will go towards saving lives. Movember donates all proceeds to charities such as The Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, Livestrong, and Beyond Blue who all do amazing work.

Thank you for reading Sobering Thoughts. If this blog helps you or you think it could help others please share it!

Thanks

Thanks again to everyone who reads my blog. I really appreciate the accountability. I truly don’t think I would be sober without it.

Cheers Wankers.

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