The Secret to Feeling Better: Giving Up Alcohol
by Tim Stoddart
Do you always feel tired even when you think you’ve had enough rest? Do you take alcohol?
- Constantly feeling tired throughout the day can mess with your ability to concentrate. It can even cause you to gain weight. But more than that; you’re not living your best life if you’re not 100%.
Alcohol may make you fall asleep faster, but it can cause you to have a restless sleep. This is the kind of sleeplessness that you feel the next day.
And that’s not the only ill effect alcohol has on the body. Not by far.
You don’t have to drink heavily for it to have a negative impact on your body. If you have one drink a night or more, you’ll see the following benefits when you quit:
Sleeping better
When you stop drinking, your energy levels will improve and you’ll feel better. Studies have shown that when you drink regularly, alcohol disturbs your sleep. High doses of alcohol result in sleep disturbances in the second half of nocturnal sleep.
You may not realize that you’ve had a poor night’s rest until you’re yawning mid-day. But once you let go of alcohol, you should feel more energized throughout the day.
Better hydration
Alcohol is a diuretic. This means that drinking alcohol will most certainly result in more trips to the bathroom.
Instead of hydrating your body like most liquids, alcohol leads to dehydration.
When you give up alcohol, you’ll reap all the rewards of good hydration. These rewards include a dewy complexion, improved concentration and better physical performance.
Improved mental clarity
In the short term, alcohol can cause blackouts, memory impairment and impaired decision-making. These things usually happen while you’re intoxicated.
But when you drink heavily over a long period of time, you run the risk of experiencing a loss of attention span, diminished brain size and memory loss.
Regardless of how much you drink and for how long, you should expect to see some improvement in mental clarity.
Better relationships
When you stop drinking alcohol, you’ll never again have to worry about what you said or did when you were drunk. Those can be some fairly embarrassing conversations. And the more you drink, the worse your relationships will get. Relationships take work, and you can’t work on them when you’re intoxicated.
Improved mood
If you recently started feeling like you can’t handle stress, alcohol may be the culprit. When you drink regularly, you’ll experience reduced serotonin levels in your brain.
Serotonin is a chemical that helps regulate your mood. If you think alcohol may be affecting your mood, look for the following signs:
- Hangovers
- Increased anxiety
- Poor sleep after drinking
When you quit drinking, your serotonin levels should return to normal and so should your mood.
Improved complexion
Dehydration can cause ill effects on your skin, but it’s not the only way alcohol will age you. It also causes systemic inflammation. This type of inflammation causes a histamine reaction that leads to redness and skin flushing.
When you first see the signs, they may seem manageable. But drinking over a long period of time can cause irreversible skin damage.
Avoiding dependence
There are many scary things about alcohol, but dependence is possibly the scariest.
Alcoholism can be lethal, and you won’t know exactly when you’re getting addicted. Addiction happens at different times for different people. But once you’re addicted, you will experience physical withdrawal symptoms whenever you stop drinking.
To find out where you stand, try to stop drinking. If it is difficult but you don’t have physical symptoms, you have a problem with alcohol. This is important to recognize because problem drinking can often lead to alcoholism.
Lowered health risks
When you drink alcohol in excess, your risk of developing certain diseases increases.
You may already know about cirrhosis of the liver, but did you know that alcohol can increase your risk of stroke and certain types of cancer?
In fact, alcohol has been linked to head and neck cancers, esophageal cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. If you want to keep your disease risk low, your best bet is to avoid drinking altogether. By cutting it out of your life may also help improve your odds.
If you’re still on the fence about quitting alcohol, just give it a try for 30 days. Keep a journal of how you’re feeling during that time, including mood, energy and mental clarity.
Depending on how much you’re drinking now, you may see a drastic improvement in these markers.
After the 30 days is up, you may be on board with quitting drinking for good.
Tim Stoddart is the co-founder and president of Sober Nation.
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