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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.
I think here in Japan (where if I am not mistaken you also live) drinking is much more seen as normal--I almost never hear anyone talk about alcoholism (アルコール中毒者 or アル中) except as a joke. No doctor has ever verbally asked me about how much I drink (though it's on the forms that I fill in) and none have ever told me to stop drinking unless I expressly asked "Do I need to not drink with this drug?"(antibiotics.) Then it's a reluctant ”お酒はだめ" (no alcohol). Never for how long, never a recommendation on lifestyle choices. Booze seems just part of the culture here--which is bizarre in a way when you think of how many people just can't drink in Japan without going full ゆでだこ (an oldish term meaning boiled octopus, referring to the redness of face many get after consuming even a little booze).
At my tops I was at 4-5 a night, typically 2-3 beers and then a couple of vodkas or whatever I had on hand (bourbon usually). When I quit for a month at the end of summer I....didn't feel much different. The main difference was in my morning self; when I rose I felt more rested, more clear-headed, less dubious about whatever I had said or done the night before. My wife took a less-than-helpful stance in telling me to just have a beer as she insists I am much more personable and, probably, interesting, than when sober. "It's like you're at a funeral," she said one night as I sat listening to my family speak Japanese. I think this has more to do with my default self, which is fairly quiet and reflective and not willing to jump into conversations that aren't directly related to me (especially if they're in another language). I find I am typically also quite functional on this much, making dinner, putting away dishes, setting the dishwasher, sorting out the kitchen, all after 4 or 5 drinks. Then I would crash.
My worry was twofold: Was this affecting my health? But also was this an unbreakable habit? I think drinking like this does affect health in well-documented ways if consistent, if it's a habit, but in my case it was a habit I was able to break with a bit of willpower--the first few days (where you are now) tended to be the most difficult, simply because the whole act of drinking had become ritual. I would suggest (without having myself done this) to substitute a new ritual (maybe involving a non-alcoholic drink?) which you can adopt to replace the drinking, and in this way stave off that sense of something missing (if that's what you feel) in the early evenings when the news comes on.
I am no longer teetotaling, but like to think I am more aware now of when I drink and how much, and consciously limit myself. All this as commiseration and a wishing you luck in whatever your goal ends up being.
Edit: With doctors, on reflection, it may not be that booze is so much part of their culture as it maybe the Japanese tendency, even among professionals, to not want to introduce any sort of discord into a moment. Saying "Don't do xyz" could be met with resistance. So they assume, I suppose, you already know, or will read the papers they give you, without having to say it directly. But now I'm armchair theorizing.
I came to the sober (heh) realisation a long time ago that I'm much more charismatic when I'm drinking. However I've cut my drinking down for my own benefit, not for others and if sobriety damages my relationships, so be it.
In the past I'd have these Tinder dates where the girl was really into me on the first date when we were drinking and then would lose interest on the second date when I was sober. It happened quite a few times until I realised I needed to switch to coffee so they could see more of who I really was day to day.
Regarding ritual, I've had mild success with switching to uncaffeinated herbal teas in the evening to have something to do when I
couldn'tshouldn't eat or drink alcohol. I've had mixed success with zero alcohol beers when socialising with drinkers. They still seem like they want you to get drunk with them.Non alcohol beers I also tried, but soda water wins. The 0 alc beers in Japan have a bizarre taste (I tried about 4 different brands), and maybe it was just my mind but I got a weird, non-buzz but definitely weird feeling after drinking a couple. As if my body were telling me "This is not something you should be drinking."
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