I'll have 8 months on the 26th, I can definitely relate to the auto pilot thing as well.

Before I started drinking I read a lot. When I was drinking heavily I essentially stopped, mainly because I couldn't find any motivation but also, have you tried reading when you're drunk? It's both hard to do and hard to remember what you read.

Took me a month or two after quitting but I hopped on Amazon and now have a pile of books I'm working my way through. It was really helpful rediscovering something I loved to do.

Thanks for the kind words! AA has a lot to offer imo. I'll probably start going to meetings out in Reno, if only to find some friends who can have fun without getting ****faced.

I'll also be dabbling with the legal pot once I get out to Nevada. I haven't had a problem with it up to now, but I'll keep an eye on it. If I start changing my life around to accommodate it, it will have to go.

Grats on the 7+months! Keep it up, man. I have a big pile of books that I'll have to whittle down a bit before I move . I don't like giving them up but I need to get everything into a reasonable-sized trailer.

Yeah, it's a bit seductive for me in that there are no obvious downsides - no hangovers, I usually feel great the next day, much less addictive than most drugs. That's fine if it's once or twice a week, but like you said, the downside is when it starts taking over your life. I've gone periods of a week or two recently where I've smoked every night, and there have been some social occasions where I've thought "this is boring, I'd rather go get stoned". That's not a path I want to go down.

I left a relationship a little over a year ago and got rid of a ton of my books. My advice is keep the ones that are interesting/little known (so people can still browse your bookshelf) and for all the common stuff get an e-reader, if you don't already have one.

Discovering who I actually am has been an ongoing process in sobriety for me. At over four and a half years sober I'm more comfortable and certainly healthier than I've ever been, but I still don't really have a firm grip on "fun". I have some non-AA issues that relate to that, and should definitely be going to Al-Anon/ACA, but that's another subject. From ages 13 to 39 it was never necessary to be able to be comfortable/have fun without the aid of substances. So it stands to reason it would take a while to figure that stuff out. The truth is, I don't like to have feelings of any kind, positive or negative. My natural approach is to avoid them at all costs, which was aided greatly by booze and drugs. But I still take that approach and am constantly working on it.

In AA people are generally advised not to make huge changes in their lives in their first year of sobriety because our perspective is still so skewed. Sometimes people are also told not to date/have relationships in the first year. This may be good advice, and perhaps someday someone will try it so we'll know for sure. But I think the principles behind this advice are sound. I think we need to try to get ourselves in as much of a state of balance before we start ****ing too much with the outside world. Otherwise I can't tell what is real and what is not. I'm married with two kids, great career, lots of great things in my life, but it's still pretty typical for my brain to just tell me to get in the car and go when something isn't going the way I want it to go. One way I can tell that this might be alcoholism and not a brilliant realization that God wants me to live the life of a nomad on the open road is the fact that I hear tons of other geniuses at meetings express the same thought constantly. We chuckle at each other, and sometimes I can even chuckle at myself.

The pot subject is tough. I, for one, am absolutely sure that I cannot mess with anything like that. Anything that allows/helps me to not deal with real life is not conducive to my overall well-being. In some ways pot could be more dangerous to me than alcohol or drugs, because I think it's more possible to just maintain indefinitely smoking pot. Alcohol and drugs were always, I think, doomed to crash into the mountain. I could probably keep on keeping on much longer smoking pot, and therefore never work on the things I really need to work on. But everybody is different, and now that pot can be prescribed by a doctor that makes it even more complicated. I'm not against people taking anti-depressants / anxiety meds (if they can take them as directed by a doctor), and that's a big part of the reason many people smoke/use cannabis. With alcohol and drugs, I cannot control and enjoy my use at the same time. If I'm enjoying it I can't control it, and if I'm controlling it I can't enjoy it. I think that's a pretty good test to know whether any substance/activity is going to work.

Thanks for sharing and listening fellas.

LFS and others,

If AA is working for you, awesome, keep kicking ass.

If it hasn't worked for you, here's an article I found interesting: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...nymous/386255/

Good luck to you all.

Yeah I've read that before. I think it's pretty pointless doing population studies to determine what works and doesn't, it's like doing a population-wide survey to determine what job would make you happy. It's fine if the conclusion is that there are a lot of other options and AA doesn't work for many people, but a conclusion that AA doesn't work for anyone would be unwarranted.

If I ever need a serious intervention, I'll probably give naltrexone a go because I have a genetic predisposition to it working, specifically, like only 2.5% of the population, I am G;G for rs1799971:

Curious as to how you know this. What caused you to test for it? Assuming you're OK with discussing.

I just did a 23andme test, idk if you know how it works but they test a whole pile of what are called "SNPs", which are basically a change in a single letter of the genetic code. I did it for interest mostly, but a few useful things came back. I would definitely recommend it for people who are planning to have children, which I'm not. For example, I am a carrier for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, you need two copies to have the condition (and my cousin does actually have it). If having children I would definitely want to know if my partner was also a carrier, because it can cause serious liver and lung problems in newborns.

Aside from the gene in my last post (which is thought to increase risk of alcohol abuse, although study results are mixed) I also carry a couple other risk genes for alcohol dependence, both relatively rare (population percentages are listed below):

Happily, I have the lower-risk variants of a couple genes which influence liver damage from alcohol and likelihood of severe symptoms on withdrawal.

Good thread. I'm 29 and been sober for about 10 months, before that I was a full on binge alcoholic. For the last 5 years or so I would be sober for anywhere from a week to 2 months or so at a time, then drunk the rest of the time. I'm self employed and managed to keep things from completely falling apart during that time, but in no way prospered. Basically I would be sober for a few weeks, decide to drink one night for whatever reason, and 3 days to a week later be drinking vodka for breakfast and drunk 24/7 from anywhere to a week to several months.

While I was sober I would kick ass and keep my life and business on track, then just barely hold things together while drinking. Rinse and repeat. Usually after a bender I would have 1-3 days of recovery. Laying in bed with the fear of God in me for no particular reason, sweating, shaking, unable to sleep, and couldn't hold down a drop of alcohol no matter how badly I wanted it. Alcohol Withdrawals aren't fun, and the psychological torture is hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it.

My last bender ended with some hard truths about who I've hurt doing this. I started going to AA and substance abuse counseling and vowed to make it stick more than 2 months this time. I adopted the mentality that drinking wasn't an option, and so far I've stuck with it. Lately, I've really had the urge to say screw it and go off the deep end for awhile.

Hey man, thank you for sharing.

The "**** its" are deadly. I totally know what you mean. In my opinion and experience, the thing that never seems to fail is reaching out with the intention of helping somebody else. If I call another alcoholic, ask them how they're doing, and then actually listen, I get out of my own head for a bit, which I desperately need.

The other thing that helps me is intense physical exercise.

Thanks LFS. I've never really done the reach out to someone else in need and listen thing. I will keep that in mind.

I'm not really worried about relapse right now. I know I will make a year no problem. Its mostly just a slow general realization that sobriety can be real boring and maybe a life of drinking, even with all the downsides, is better than a life of boredom and constant existential crisis.

Before I drink again I will try a psychologist first. I figure my brain is probably still a bit messed up from years of benders. It will be interesting to see how things feel at a year.

Man, I completely understand this feeling. Don't know if you read the whole thread, but I spent a lot of time posting when I first quit drinking. During that time I had no program, and I figured the rest of life was just a matter of grinding out each gray lifeless day until I eventually mercifully died. That's what I believed life without alcohol was. For me, this post from when I had quit alcohol for six months is so hard and sad to read. If you are like me, and I bet you are, that condition simply cannot continue. Something will give. I'm just as susceptible to it now as I was then. For me, I've been through the ringer enough to know that alcohol is not the answer. But if I really truly believe there are no answers anyplace else either, the only choice I have left is to kill myself. Plenty of people do it. That is the fate I fear the most. But obviously plenty of people just start drinking or using again. Which is what I did - I knew I couldn't drink, so I started taking tons of pills. It totally got me through life for about 2 1/2 years and then I was wayyyyyyyyy worse off than I was before. And that's what finally got me into the program.

All I can tell you is that all the stupid AA slogans and all the standard advice people give ended up being true for me. The calling other people, the calling my sponsor, prayer, the steps, etc. They worked for me and I believe other people when they say they worked for them. If right now it seems like your choices are 1) a life of misery with alcohol or 2) a life of misery without alcohol, you might as well give the program a real shot. Maybe the people who wrote the book and the steps are ****ing lunatics, and everybody else like me is too. The only way you can know if it works is by actually doing it the way they said they/we did it. If you really go through the process and nothing has changed, I absolutely guarantee that the miserable options will be right there waiting if you want them instead.

OK that sounded way more AA preachy than I want to be in this thread. But I just relate SO MUCH to that sentiment you expressed and know that there's another path if you truly want it.

My dad was a raging alcoholic throughout my childhood. For about a year and a half he took on a project to convert an old bus into a mobile home. During that time, he quit drinking and it was a happy time for him and my mother and sister and me. He eventually sold the bus and fell off the wagon. He never really beat his addiction again until his heart got too bad to keep pace. He died at 65.

Trust me when I tell you that your family and friends love you and like you for your sober self. That's the person they want. Bless you for delivering that person to them. My wish for you is to accept and love yourselves in the same way they do. Your heart, liver and brain are thanking you daily for not having to process large amounts of alcohol. They will serve you well now as you get into middle age.

I can see where you may believe that life is boring without a buzz. Especially when you're young. But as you get older, I hope you'll realize that life itself is such a miracle, and you will find a path to contentment, with moments of great joy and happiness, along with moments of heartache and pain. And you can do it with a clear head and a healthy body. Huge props to you for recognizing your lives are beautiful and worth saving.

I celebrated 3 years on July 11th. My life is so much better than ever before. I feel content for the first time in my life. If I would have watched a "week in the life of RRH" the day I got sober I wouldn't have thought it looked very fun. The truth is,.for me, that it is fun and more importantly very fulfilling. I have real friends these days and I don't worry about trying to impress them. I have a woman I love. We were friends first then it became so much more. Wish me luck as next Friday I've invited 40 people to watch me ask her to marry me!

I was told "if you stick around you'll be stepping over bodies." How true it Is! A young man who lived in my sober house lost his sister to addiction a few months ago. He moved out, got a job, and a girlfriend. He relapsed a week ago and died 3 days later.

Happy belated bday RRH, and best wishes today. We are the lucky ones, that is for sure.

I can't believe I've done this, much less am about to post it, but I've had some pretty good success lately with mindfulness meditation. I've always felt like meditation and yoga and such were generally ridiculous. Then I started seeing scientific studies that showed marked improvements in blood pressure (I know) and depression (I think) for people that do it. This is not counting the vast amounts of anecdotal evidence for other things that people feel it helps.

So I decided, **** it, what have I got to lose? Picked up a recommended book called Mindfulness in Plain English and just started reading and trying it. I gotta say, in the short term......it really seems to have helped. Especially with anxiety.

I, too, suffer from that grey feeling that you guys are talking about. I drink to not feel and not think. I drink to enjoy myself because I just don't know how to otherwise. Still working on the second thing, but meditation has really helped with the first. My brain is always either going a thousand different directions at once, or focusing in on some ****ty topic, taking the feeling that topic produces, and amplifying it. Like mentally tonguing a sore tooth.

Worth a shot.

INAR,

I can say my experience is like yours. In hindsight I was always focused on something. Like shopping for a gun, buying the gun, then putting it in the safe or selling it. Because once I had it I lost interest in it. Same with TV's, I'd buy a lot, build the house, move in and then put a for sale sign in the yard because that one wasn't good enough any longer. I'd get fat, join a gym, go to the gym and within a month I was at the gym 2-3 hours a day. I'd get skinny, then start lifting to get big, then getting cut. I'd go days without eating real food only drinking protein drinks etc. Then after a couple years stop all together. Etc etc etc. My then wife said once "can you do anything normal?" It didn't matter if I was drinking or not drinking.the majority of the above examples were during a time of a 9.5 year dry spell.

I agree meditation can work wonders. However it's one of the hardest things for me to do. The reason? If I'm honest it's probably because I haven't been putting in the work to get better st it.

I'm happy you're progressing in that area. Maybe I'll hit you up with help when I have the proper motivation. I usually get that motivation through pain.

LFS, thanks man! Last night went off perfectly. Had about 40 friends there to surprise her and she had no clue what was going on until I got on one knee!

Study of meditation is in its infancy, but there's a lot more known about it than what you've written above. This is a summary from Sam Harris's excellent book Waking Up. The studies etc are all sourced in the original text.

One thing to note is that it's probably not that mindfulness is more useful than other forms of meditation, but that mindfulness is both the most accessible form of meditation and the easiest to study objectively. Mindfulness is a set of instructions which can be followed in everyday life, while other meditation disciplines can involve a lot of practice and can culminate in subjective insights which are difficult to study objectively.

If you can, I would recommend finding somewhere to get instruction, but you'll need to be careful to dodge religion. The Western Buddhist Alan Watts says there are three aspects of Buddhism: Buddhism the religion; Buddhism the philosophy (for example, advocacy of vegetarianism); and Buddhism the science. It's this last one we're interested in. "Science" is being used very loosely, but within Buddhism there is a tradition of learning about one's own mind via subjective exploration. That aspect can be divorced from the rest and studied in isolation.

There's a thread about meditation in Health & Fitness, but nobody has posted in it for a while.

I'm a beginner myself. I've dabbled in it for a few months but have only really gotten into a routine this last month. The hard part is figuring out where to squeeze it in along with working out.

Yeah, keep me updated on your progress if you get into it. I find it very interesting to see how it affects other people.

ChrisV - just realized that my post was extremely half-assed and wishy-washy! Didn't mean to poopoo other forms of meditation or yoga, just emphasizing that up until very recently I had never seriously considered any of them for myself.

I'll have to check that book out.

It wasn't your post really, it's just if you look at the scientific literature you will be left with the impression that mindfulness is the only stream of meditation that matters.

I'd compare it to tactics vs deep strategy in a game (lets say chess). No question that practicing tactics is an excellent way for a beginner to improve, and that improvement can be easily measured, numerically, making it easy to study the effect of practice. It's also easy to dip in and out of. You won't reach mastery of the game just doing tactics puzzles, though. (In meditation as in chess, many people, myself probably included, aren't interested in reaching mastery, they just want to get to the point where they don't hang their queen every other move, that's fine as well).

Waking Up is a really solid book for people coming from a rationalist background who want to get into meditating. Halfway through he gets a bit bogged down in advocacy for his preferred school of thought (a stream of Buddhism called Dzogchen) but if you nod and smile through that part the rest is all tops. Very readable as well.

I actually started to meditate before I got sober. My addiction to and withdrawal from benzos was, unsurprisingly, making it impossible for me to sleep. I was totally losing my mind and thought that if I could just get some sleep it would be better. I joined an online community of people fighting benzo addiction and learned some people were having luck with meditation so I tried it. It didn't solve the sleep problem, but definitely helped my poor brain get just enough of a sliver of perspective to realize that I was in really deep **** and needed help badly.

I started with guided meditations, which I recommend for anybody interested in getting into meditation but having trouble. Lots of sources available for those. I have an app called Insight Timer that I use to time un-guided meditations, but it also has a huge library of guided stuff.

When I transitioned from guided meditations to doing it on my own I used a book called Real Happiness. I highly recommend it.

When I was in protracted withdrawal I couldn't sleep any later than 4AM or so for like a year and a half. So I always had extra time to read and meditate. Once my brain finally started to heal I continued to get up crazy early to fit everything in. I realize that won't work for everybody, but I value the upsides more than the extra sleep.

I don't know much about Buddhism, but I have done guided Buddhist lovingkindness meditations and think they're great. As a practical matter, thinking good thoughts for people I don't really care about, or for people I actively resent, puts me in a better mood. It's counter-intuitive to me, but it helps. FWIW.

In a broader sense I want to say that I totally understand a general avoidance of religion. People have all kinds of reasons for that and they're always good ones. A big part of my problem was that my concept of life (all life, not just mine) completely revolved around me. In sobriety, concepts like spirituality and a higher power mostly served (and still do serve) as a means to understand that it isn't all about me. Just simply that I am not the "highest power". Because I definitely did, at some point at least, think that I was.

I mostly put in the bit about dodging religion because most people on 2+2 aren't enamored by it and the ones that are are mostly already Christian. It's offputting to people who just want to learn to meditate to go along to a class and start getting lectured about the Noble Eightfold Path or whatever.

Real Happiness looks like a solid book.

The first draft had a lot more censored swearing and all-caps in it. Assume that it's still there.

I went to a close family gathering tonight for someone's birthday, and family members served everyone birthday cake infused with liquor; that's including the frosting, which is not cooked and out of which the alcohol does not evaporate.

Several people knew the cake was spiked and none of them told me until I had eaten a big slice--eaten enough to feel something from the booze.

Over the course of many family gatherings these past seven months, I have repeatedly made it crystal clear that I do not want any drinks, nor any alcohol infused foodstuffs, not even a small bite. It is not possible for me to have made these things more clear to everyone. I wasn't a jerk about it. I didn't go on and on, but I was very firm and polite and to the point.

I hid years and years of steady all-day drinking from everyone, like a pro. The people close to me didn't see it, therefore my problem is imaginary, in their eyes. If I just have a little bit of booze, like my old self, and lighten up, everything will go back to normal and they won't have to deal with any additional hard truths. That's the thought process behind this, and it's selfish and mean and wrong and treacherous. And tonight I have been betrayed by the people closest to me. Thank you for your time.