There is a quiet time between drinking and your life after drinking. You sleep a lot and you feel a little down your body and your mind and your emotions are adjusting to life without alcohol. But it will lift little by little and new interests and joy will come into the picture.
“I cannot stand the boredom.” Binge drinking expectancies in adolescence
Here are some tips to stop drinking alcohol out of boredom. And one day, it will occur to you that you’re actually happy and enjoying your life. Will eating salads and drinking water make your boredom go away? Not exactly, but it can make you feel better, which has a ripple effect on whether or not you enjoy your life. Volunteering is a great way to reconnect with your community. Helping others actually boosts our own mental health and feelings of self-worth.
How To Overcome The Boredom When You Stop Drinking Alcohol?
- When you get sober, you realize there is an entire daytime pulse in your city or town that you never really felt before.
- These are all things you’re trying to overcome from drinking.
- The activity of drinking is not a fun, exciting, or interesting activity.
This finding corroborates quantitative studies suggesting that policies increasing the availability of alcohol during the pandemic were directly related to elevated drinking 47,48. During the pandemic, social distancing measures were enacted 49 which vastly restricted what people could do and where they could go, resulting in many people being homebound. For some participants this confinement seems to have drinking out of boredom lessened barriers to alcohol use, that is, alcohol was seen as one of the few easily available options to reduce negative feelings and/or boredom. Furthermore, social distancing and quarantine measures effectively eliminated typical drinking contexts for many people.
• Volunteer Your Time
- Different activities will in turn create different thoughts and even the smallest change can start to make a big difference.
- Without a steady supply of drugs, the brain begins to lose its tolerance to substances.
- Someone experiencing an alcohol overdose can faint and may choke on their vomit.
The current study provides evidence for how the COVID-19 pandemic may have impacted motives to use alcohol among a sample of U.S.-based alcoholism symptoms alcohol using adults. Through qualitative analysis of participants’ accounts we determined that both contextual and individual level forces interacted to shape participants’ self-reported alcohol use during this time. These factors helped catalyze participants’ individual reasons for drinking including drinking as a means of emotional regulation (e.g., to manage chronic boredom resultant of being confined to their home). These findings help to frame quantitative research showing elevated alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sometimes being sober is boring because your life revolves around alcohol.
Boredom can cascade into serious issues like battling loneliness, uncovering deeply seeded shame and self-loathing, and even feelings of high stress can become prevalent. Drinking out of boredom is how some choose to deal with the dull moments life throws at us. The contrast between the heightened emotional state while drinking and the flatness of mood when sober can make everyday life without alcohol seem uninteresting – sometimes unbearably so.