In the last few years before I quit drinking alcohol, I was noticing that my anxiety was soaring.

I would go to the Dr. and complain about it and ask him for a prescription, to change my prescription, to tweak it or add something to it. Every time he would ask if I was still drinking alcohol and I would lie to him every time and say “every now and then….maybe a couple of glasses of wine a week”. You know, what everyone on the planet does. He would tell me that whatever he was trying to help me with wouldn’t work if I drank alcohol, blah blah blah. Fa La La. Whatever….I didn’t believe him and I didn’t WANT to believe him. I wanted to go home and celebrate with a glass of wine, pat myself on the back, that I had gone to the Dr and that my anxiety would FINALLY be taken care of! Yay! Hmmm. Do I have wine left? Maybe I should stop and get some just in case…..

I was drinking most every night by that point and more on the weekends. I couldn’t wait to get home on workdays and pour a glass of wine, to unwind, to relax, you know…..to take care of myself! My sleep was suffering, I was waking up almost every night and grinding thru about two hours worth of past regrets and memories that I could do nothing about because my mind wouldn’t SHUT OFF. I was exhausted ALL THE TIME.

It wasn’t until I got sober that I realized that I was POURING GASOLINE on my anxiety. I was feeding my anxiety the FOOD it needed to stay alive and well and GROW in my mind and body…. Like a freakin’ Gremlin…and it was thriving!!!

I know this because shortly after I quit drinking alcohol I noticed not a small, but a SIGNIFICANT decrease in my anxiety. A HUGE Drop!!!!! For the first time in about 10 years I felt what “calm” feels like. Like a 0-1 on the anxiety scale. I would catch myself when I was talking to a neighbor or speaking on a conference call at work. I could actually pronounce my thoughts more clearly, it was like everything in my brain had slowed down just a tiny bit…and my heart wasn’t beating out of my chest..It was just beating…like what a normal heart should do. Calm was a feeling I actually had to get used to because it was so foreign…… but I knew that I loved it, I knew that I never wanted that feeling go away. Oh, and I started sleeping….sleeping the whole night…it was euphoric kind of sleep.

It was then I knew that I was never going back. In a world filled with stress and anxiety, it is far better for me to be sober.