5 Reasons You Crave Alcohol
Alcohol cravings make it more difficult to stay sober, and studies have found that people who crave alcohol are 14x more likely to relapse. This makes sense because a craving is a powerful urge to drink alcohol. It feels really uncomfortable, and it's hard to stop thinking about alcohol when you are craving it. Here are 5 reasons why you may be experiencing cravings.
Withdrawal
When we drink heavily for years the brain learns that alcohol is going to be around a lot and it adapts to function with alcohol. When you suddenly remove alcohol from your life, your brain doesn't remember how to function without it. This is why you have withdrawal symptoms.
Your brain thinks it needs alcohol to function correctly, so it's going to send you signals to drink in the form of cravings. Once you get through withdrawal (~1-2 weeks), your brain will start to learn how to regulate itself again.
Emotional Triggers
We use alcohol to control the way we feel, to avoid feeling things we don't like, and to enhance positive feelings and make them even better. My biggest emotional trigger was always anger, but I know some people who really struggle when life is good because they want to celebrate with alcohol.
Understanding which emotions push you to crave alcohol is important because then you can identify ways to handle these situations without alcohol. If you like to drink to enhance (I hope you've listened to episode 103 to learn why you do this), then are there other ways you can celebrate your accomplishments and good news that feel rewarding and fun? If you drank from anger, then what can you do to get rid of that anger without stuffing it down with alcohol?
PAWS (Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome)
1-2 weeks isn't enough time for your brain to heal years of damage from all your drinking. PAWS represents the long term healing of your brain. These are mostly mood related symptoms which occur in cycles and are usually triggered by something, like stress. One of the main reasons people drink is to control our emotions, so when your mood is off, you may crave alcohol because you are used to managing your mood with alcohol.
In fact, I was on the Hello Someday Podcast to discuss PAWS more. You can listen to that here.
Situations/Places You Used to Drink At
If you're used to coming home from work and drinking, then you're going to crave alcohol when you come home from work. This won't last forever though, and the more you disconnect the idea of not drinking with deprivation, the easier it will be to stop craving alcohol. Not drinking after work is something I discuss in my course The Sober Mindset.
No Other Coping Skills
When we drink all the time our resilience muscle becomes weaker and weaker. Now this doesn't mean we are weak-willed losers, it just means we start to have less and less options when bad things happen to us.
I didn't know how to cope with anything so I always went outside of myself for relief, like with drinking alcohol or trying to go on a diet. When we lack coping skills, we are going to crave alcohol every time something happens because we don't know what else to do.
Learn more about cravings and how to reduce their frequency and intensity in my Cravings Crusher Course
Recommended episodes on cravings:
E128: why cravings are so powerful
E116: drinking envy and wishing you could be “normal”
E114: why we believe alcohol helps and how to break these beliefs
E106: what happens in the brain when we are overwhelmed?
E89: how dopamine strengthens our cravings and weakens our willpower
E67:how alcohol impacts cortisol and causes cravings
E61: how alcohol memories are triggered in sobriety
E55: how to power through when you want to give up
E51: why we crave alcohol and what to do about it
