People drink for many different reasons.
Sometimes, there is a tragic event that acts as a catalyst. The alcohol provides a way to forget about that temporarily, and the damage from drinking that eventually starts to rear its ugly head still feels like less than the escape it offers from the emotional turmoil you’d otherwise feel.
But before you know it, you’re dealing with the pain from whatever you’re using alcohol to help cover up, along with the damage and harm that can come from the alcohol itself. Now, you have even more problems, and only one coping mechanism to deal with them. A “solution” to a problem that makes all of your other problems worse isn’t much a solution at all, is it?
Or, in some cases, people develop drinking problems without using it as a coping mechanism at all. Sometimes, you just start and enjoy partying, and the party just kind of keeps going, until years have passed and you can’t imagine going a day without alcohol.
At this point, the alcohol becomes the problem itself, and drinking becomes the way that you deal with it, creating a vicious cycle that just gets worse and worse, things get darker and darker, until something changes.
And that change can be a rock bottom, it can be a near-death experience, it can be any number of things for different people. Sometimes, it’s just a realization that you have to do something differently, even if you haven’t had any huge negative consequences yet. That’s the ideal situation, to be honest, to realize that your drinking is starting to get out of hand and to start taking steps to correct this before you’ve suffered too much from the negative side effects of alcohol.
We recently did a post about meditation to quit drinking, and it raises some interesting questions. The biggest question is whether or not meditation can help you stop drinking, and the answer is very simple: Absolutely.
There are a lot of things that can help you to stop drinking. There are stop drinking books, podcasts, rehab and other support groups, and more. Some of them might help you, some of them might not. When we say “help”, that doesn’t mean there’s some magic all-powerful way to stop drinking where you’re going to suddenly wake up and never ever think about alcohol again. That’s not what it’s all about.
