When I was a drinker, I was exhausted all of the time. In part, it was physical, but the mental and psychological exhaustion was even worse.
The physical side of my tiredness is easy enough to explain. Before getting sober in 2016, I had spent a decade drinking more or less every night. All of that alcohol interfered with my sleep in a big way.
The quality of my sleep was terrible. Instead of falling into a deep sleep, I’d wake up again and again throughout the night. Several times each night, I’d have to get out of bed to use the bathroom as the alcohol made its way through my system. Other times, I’d wake up from small noises, or for no apparent reason at all.
I also slept fewer hours than I should, because I often stayed up late drinking. On the rare occasion that I went a day without drinking, I’d typically be up even later, because I wasn’t used to going to bed without being drunk.
All of that sleepiness added up. During the day, I was normally in a slog, especially in the morning. I didn’t even realize how bad it was at the time, because it had been my normal state for years. I thought slowly, had poor proprioception, and zoned out all of the time. It wasn’t until I got sober and saw the contrast that I understood how much more I was capable of when I was properly rested.
However, as I said in the opening to today’s newsletter, physical tiredness wasn’t the worst type of exhaustion I experienced back then. The worst was the mental exhaustion of constantly feeling my addiction hanging over my head.
I realized that I had a drinking problem when I was in my early twenties, but it wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I finally quit. What was I thinking in all of those years in between? In short, I was a confused mess.
Every day, I struggled with questions about my addiction. I’d go from being sure that I was out of control to questioning whether I even had a drinking problem. I’d think about quitting, then come up with an excuse to put it off until the next day. I’d imagine my life sober, and flip back and forth between thinking it would be miserable or perfect.
Going through all of those confusing thoughts ended up completely wearing me down. I spent over half a decade debating the same thing day after day, instead of simply taking action. In retrospect, I can see how absurd that was, but at the time, I just felt stuck.
Meanwhile, as I questioned whether I had an addiction and what to do about it, deep down I knew that I had this enormous problem in my life that I eventually would have to address. No matter how little I wanted to think about my drinking problem, I knew that if I didn’t do something about it, I’d eventually destroy myself with alcohol.
What a miserable feeling it was to know that there was something massively wrong in my life for years on end. I can’t believe I allowed myself to sit with it for as long as I did.
Getting sober took many tries, a lot of misery, and probably even a little luck. And yet, going through all of that struggling was still far better than the alternative, which would be to keep letting that awful problem build and build.
These days, it has been practically a decade since my last drink, and it still feels strange when I stop and realize that there isn’t anything drastically wrong with my life. That’s not to say things are perfect. Regular readers of this newsletter know that I’ve moved cities a few times in the last few years and have been struggling to establish a social life. That’s a real problem in my life, but it’s something that I work on and regularly gets better. It’s not the same kind of feeling as having enormous impending doom lurking in the back of my mind.
In my day-to-day life, things are pretty good, and I don’t have the feeling that I’m procrastinating dealing with some major, life-threatening issue. Now that my drinking days are behind me, I feel more relaxed than ever.
I was exhausted from worrying about my addiction, and just like the physical tiredness, I didn’t realize just how bad it had been until after I was already a few years sober.
Many people who are heavy drinkers hem and haw about whether to quit. We ask ourselves if life would be better or worse without alcohol in it. We weigh the pros and cons, we go back and forth, we decide to quit one day and reverse our decision the next.
The reality is that none of us can truly understand the profound effect sobriety will have on our lives until we actually get sober. We learn to live with all of the harmful effects of our addiction. We don’t even realize how many of the bad things in our lives are caused by drinking.
I think that by the time most people even start questioning whether they might be addicted to drinking, their addiction is typically already fairly advanced. Normal, moderate drinkers rarely have these thoughts.
I’m glad I quit drinking, despite the difficulties, and I hope that any current heavy drinkers reading this have success in leaving their exhausting addictions behind too.