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Before you put food in your mouth, stop and ask why you’re eating. If it’s because you’re stressed or bored, eat a small amount, then move on and find other activities to relieve stress or keep you occupied. Or skip eating the small amount and go find something else to do, coming back to eat when you feel physically hungry.
One of the best ways to deal with bored drinking is to anticipate it — why is not always easy. Say your main drinking occasion is when you socialize with friends. A drink or two while bored might make you too tired or too wary of driving to meet your friends. Before you know it, your list of things to celebrate when bored gets longer, and the number of drinks you enjoy each week goes up. There are plenty of situations where having a drink is a great way to celebrate an accomplishment. Unfortunately, problems can surface if you use “I deserve it” to justify bored drinking.
Mental Health Treatment
Volunteering is a great way to reconnect with your community. Helping others actually boosts our own mental health and feelings of self-worth. https://ecosoberhouse.com/ Plus, it helps us with our emotional sobriety and wellness. Sometimes boredom in sobriety looks like not wanting to be around anyone.
- Getting drunk did not magically change the dynamics of that situation.
- Many Americans increased their alcohol intake during the pandemic, with women and parents of young children disproportionately affected.
- It doesn’t help that although alcohol may be the world’s most commonly accepted drug, it’s also regularly left off the list of drugs that negatively impact people’s lives.
- You might have a drink to calm your mind, mellow out your mood, and take the edge off stress.
And to stay motivated, take a moment to jot down in a journal how you feel after making progress in your hobby. When boredom strikes and you find it more difficult to muster the motivation to work on your hobby, read these journal entries. That reminder of how good you’ll feel should keep you from heading to the fridge. If bored drinking becomes a habit – or if it’s occasional – it can affect your ability to sleep soundly.
How Mindfulness Helps With Emotional Regulation in Sobriety
If you do manage to meet your friends, the added drinks from socializing might affect your ability to get home, placing a burden on your friends. Hobbies occupy the mind and give you a sense of accomplishment. Bored drinking might elevate your mood briefly, but it won’t ever match the satisfaction of mastering a hobby.
The very things you should be doing to feel better require a level of motivation you might not be able to fathom. My social circle changed when I got sober because I realized that many of my relationships were based on getting drunk together, and that was it. Alcohol merely blurred my perception of social situations. I have gone to bars with people I genuinely like as a sober person, and I don’t stay for longer than an hour or two if nothing is happening. Sometimes we would watch a show, but even that become untenable for me after a couple of drinks because I did not have the attention span for it. It all felt normal, even the terrible parts like awful hangovers and hangxiety.
Boredom can be Destructive
Psychological symptoms like anxiety, restlessness, & anger outbursts, or irritability can be seen as an after-effect. If these problems persist, professional help may be needed. A Qualified mental health professional or psychiatrist can help and assist in managing these symptoms. Getting outside and communing with nature is scientifically proven to reduce stress and improve mental health and cognitive function in both kids and adults.
Fortunately, there are more ways than ever to connect with like-minded people who are fellow travelers on this path. Your friends are out getting drunk, the same as they always do. Meanwhile, you’re at home wondering how many days it would take someone to find your body after you’ve choked on those peanut M&M’s you’ve been knocking back during your latest Netflix binge. So many people quit drinking and end up walking around in a dopamine deficit state, struggling to find joy in anything. Now that you know the chemical reason for your boredom, let’s explore additional factors that might be contributing to these feelings.
Recently I spotted an interesting comment on my blog about feeling bored.
It’s particularly therapeutic to find something to do with your hands. Forming healthy connections with other people is an important of this process. It’s one of the many ways you will relearn how to enjoy life again without alcohol. Right now, you’re doing a very hard thing, and sometimes hard things feel lonely.
- But it’s comforting to know that you don’t have figure it out on your own.
- By focusing on eating healthy, nourishing foods, you are actively working on reversing those symptoms.
- When this emotion surfaces, it reveals our disconnection or lack of interest in our surroundings or activities.
- Drinking out of boredom may indicate a deeper issue at hand.
- That reminder of how good you’ll feel should keep you from heading to the fridge.
It also opens up space to approach your internal world differently. One of the biggest impediments to my sobriety during my relapse days was my inability to avoid getting consumed by emotions. I kept a notebook and pen beside my bed in case I woke up in the middle drinking out of boredom of the night with a brilliant song lyric or poem. Remember, it’s not that sobriety is terrible, but that your brain is trying to grapple with the sudden loss of dopamine. It’s hard to fill that time, especially when dealing with alcohol cravings and triggers.