Dealing With Boredom in Recovery: Tips From a Coach

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space. Alarmingly, studies reveal the extreme lengths to which boredom can drive human behavior. For instance, a study found that a majority of participants preferred to self-administer electric shocks rather than sit idle, underscoring the discomfort boredom creates. You can also find groups of folks who are in the same situation as you are. Organizations like Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, and Alateen have networks all over the country and online to support those dealing with a loved one’s heavy drinking.

#5 Stay Physically Active

The winter months often meet a halt to favorite outdoor activities. This shift in routine, coupled with earlier darkness and cold temperatures, can lead to SAD. Once SAD and downtime collide, bored drinking can result.

The best thing about stopping drinking is that you get your feelings back

Among your many options for New Year’s resolutions and fresh starts, dry January is a thing, which means a monthlong break from alcohol. It turns out that doing this even briefly has some health benefits, and NPR’s Allison Aubrey is here to talk about it. This can be a difficult journey, but you don’t have to go it alone. Let us be your guide and provide you the environment needed to regain control of your life and begin the path to recovery. Whether it’s boredom or something else, you will find yourself in a situation where you will have to either turn down alcohol or stop yourself from going too far when drinking.

Physical Exercise and Outdoor Activities

You need to reset your reward pathways and that’s not going to be possible as long as you are drinking alcohol. This is what happened to me towards the end of my drinking days, I didn’t want to do anything that didn’t involve getting drunk. That would just get in the way of being able to drink as much as I wanted. When you experience GABA withdrawal, you feel things like intense anxiety, moodiness, and intrusive thoughts. It’s why some people suffer “hangxiety” after a night of heavy drinking.

1. I just wanted to go home and crack open a bottle of hard cider.
2. This kind of patterned behavior can lead you down a path toward alcohol addiction.
3. The longer you stay away from alcohol and give your brain some much-needed TLC, the less you’ll feel like life is dull and uninteresting.
4. It typically occurs when we find ourselves disengaged from what’s going on around us or when there’s a lack of interest or enjoyment in our activities.

Valuing and prioritizing yourself in recovery can be a powerful way to remove the hold alcohol has on you. Often, being bored without alcohol seems intimidating because when there’s no task to put your mind to, you’re forced to notice the things that are making you unhappy. And if you’re curious about your drinking habits, the following quiz may be helpful to you. If you’ve reached a point where you can’t experience joy in anything and use alcohol as a way to escape, don’t brush it off as a rough phase. The sooner you get help and start working on it, the sooner you can break free of it. What if you’ve tried to do the “normal” stuff people do for fun and don’t like any of it?

Then we’ll show you how to better manage boredom and avoid unhealthy drinking patterns. People often use alcohol to enhance experiences, but this kind of drinking is problematic because it makes 8 best opioid detox and rehab centers you dependent on alcohol to not feel bored or to have a good time. For example, most people drink at concerts, sports events or parties to transform their experience and heighten the moment.

It’s very common for people, especially those with additional mental health issues like depression and anxiety, to drink out of boredom. Learning healthy coping skills, unfortunately, is not as intuitive as it might seem. Dealing with monotony and underlying mental health issues typically requires self-awareness and outside assistance through various forms of therapy addressing underlying conditions. However, because it’s so common, we can fail to recognize the importance of addressing it. 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.

Ironically, this will cause their symptoms to worsen dramatically and they might find themselves in a cycle that is quite difficult to break. If you’ve found yourself noticing, “It seems that I drink because I’m bored and lonely,” the answer lies in our brain’s reward system. Understanding this relationship between boredom and alcohol is crucial for breaking an unhealthy cycle of drinking out of boredom and finding more fulfilling ways to spend our time.

There are ways of coping with how you feel that don’t involve self-medicating and alcohol. Surround yourself with people that support you and help you in whatever you’re going through in the present moment. It can be your friends, colleagues, or family who know you for ideas of things you can do to fill your time differently. Meet and connect with such people regularly and let them know when you are feeling down or lonely. We go around on auto-pilot when it comes to certain patterns or behaviors. Stopping at the moment to look around at what’s happening, what emotions you are experiencing, sensations, and thoughts that are present, bringing awareness, and then making a choice.

If you drink alone, monitor how often you do this and consider why. If it becomes frequent, try to taper off or contact an alcohol addiction treatment center. When discussing boredom in recovery, I often suggest that my clients look at some of the activities they are willing to do to help pass the time when feeling bored. For members who report drinking out of boredom, I often remind them that there are probably a lot of other things to do within their busy lives, if they take a moment to reflect. There are many reasons for this, from previous patterns of alcohol use to brain chemistry. Because the dopamine release makes you feel good, your brain starts to crave alcohol whenever you’re bored, reinforcing the behavior and making it harder to resist.

What I don’t advise is trying to tackle it by yourself. And if you need a place to start, we have a wonderful private Facebook group full of people wrestling with some of the same questions and concerns you have. You slowly transform into someone who can’t have fun or feel happy without alcohol. Chronic alcohol use can also affect the brain regions responsible for regulating mood and stress. This, in turn, makes you feel more bored more frequently, which reinforces the desire to drink, and round and round you go. When you drink, it floods your brain with an artificially high amount of dopamine.

But if you add it to the drinks you have with friends and that everyday glass of wine with dinner, your total number of weekly drinks can increase rapidly. Bored drinking takes place when cannabis marijuana national institute on drug abuse nida people reach for alcohol to kill time, simply because they have nothing else to occupy their minds. Boredom and stress are two emotions that can feel as if they are never going to leave.

An almost alcoholic may engage in activities such as drinking out of boredom or alone. Knowing how to identify the signs of heading toward alcoholism can allow you or a loved one to seek treatment and recover. Over time, with regular alcohol consumption, our brain starts to adapt. Our reward system gets recalibrated to account for the frequent dopamine hits coming from the alcohol.

If you need support in your journey, our team at Ria Health is always here to help you, and we’re only a call away. Often, it really comes down to being willing to do something that doesn’t entertain you alcoholic ketoacidosis wikipedia or make you feel good immediately. In other words, it’s about suspending the need for instant gratification. But truthfully, it’s something we all experience—and struggle with—throughout our lives.