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I quit drinking cold turkey 4 days ago.
I feel mild anhedonia, experiences I normally enjoy are muted or feel like they're happening to someone else and I'm only watching, if that makes sense. I have too much energy during the day and it's hard to relax fully in the evening. My appetite has dropped a lot, but I still want to eat because I've increased my lifting recently. It's kind of the way you feel hungry when you have a cold. You feel your body's need for sustenance, but no foods are particularly appealing. My libido has dropped considerably, though that may also be due to the extra fatigue from increased lifting. In the evening, light is too bright and noises are too loud, kind of like when you have a bad hangover. My baseline stress level feels higher; on a scale of 1-10, I was previously around a 3 or 4 most days, and now I feel like I'm stuck at 6 all the time. Sometimes I suddenly feel exhausted during the day and want to rest, but I'm too wired to actually relax before bedtime, sort of like when you've had too much caffeine to sleep.
On the bright side, my feels like it's working at 200% speed. While I was doing well at work before, now I'm absolutely crushing it. I don't have heartburn or any other gastric trouble anymore, I don't have much appetite for junk food, and I find temptations to my various vices almost trivially easy to resist. Getting up in the morning is getting a lot easier. I have the focus and the patience to listen to chat with my kids in the evening after dinner. I can handle more chores. I can take care of my wife better. I can control my temper much more easily. I spend probably 1 hour less per day lying on the couch. I picked up a physical dead tree book and started reading it for the first time in many months. I'm not thirsty all the time, and my body doesn't hurt as much when I wake up in the morning. My heart rate gets back down to the low 50s when I sleep at night. My sleep quality is much better. And maybe best of all, I don't feel the sense of guilt and self-loathing I've learned to live with every night when I go to bed and every morning when I wake up. That's probably what keeps me going each day more than anything, I don't feel like I suck anymore.
I was (am? well, hopefully was) a 5-8 drinks a night kind of guy which, while clearly not good, doesn't really seem like "real alcoholism" when you google alcoholism and read stories from people downing a fifth or two of vodka and blacking out every night. But that amount was apparently enough to slowly change my mind and body over months in ways I hadn't even realized, and I'm dealing with the aftermath now. It's very... sobering.
I wrote this as a personal reflection and thought I'd share it in case any other folks are on the same path.
Speaking as someone who drinks occasionally, that really looks like alcoholism to me. Good to hear that you've been able to go cold turkey.
Have you considered naltrexone? It might be worth getting some on hand if you feel like going back on the bottle.
Yeah, definitely alcoholism, though unfortunately there are people who will gatekeep the term and claim that you need to get blackout on 20 beers a night or something. IMO it's more about the effect that it has on you mentally and physically than the volume of alcohol, and the effects on me were becoming increasingly negative.
I hadn't heard of naltrexone, but I'll look into it. That said, quitting booze is part of a bigger "detox" I'm trying to do. I'm also planning on cutting down my caffeine intake (2 cups of coffee a day) and my sugar intake to find out what my body's baseline is like.
Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported fame (who TracingWoodgrains was formerly working for) came out as a big proponent of naltrexone, apparently she has a book coming out about it as well. Seems like pretty promising stuff.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sea-change/id1743666262?i=1000653826427
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