Benefits of giving up alcohol for a month.
The liver calms down, the mind clears and family and friends become warmly supportive. But all this is to no avail when the drinking resumes.

There’s no point in giving up alcohol unless it is causing damage. But if alcohol consumption is causing damage, it is vital to give it up, and work the Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous as a continuing prevention against relapse.

Giving it up for medical reasons may be sensible – but probably for ever rather than for just a month.

When people say they are giving up drinking for a month, they are usually trying to prove to themselves and to others that they can.

But what does it prove? Nothing. Certainly not that they’re not alcoholic. Any alcoholic or addict of any kind can give up for a day, a week, a month, a year or more. That’s not the point. What matters is not determination and willpower but the capacity to give up and stay cool, calm and collected. That can be done only with continuing commitment to working the Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The benefits of stoping drinking alcohol.
The benefits of giving up alcohol are as widespread as the damage caused by continuing to drink. Everything gets better provided that the illness is tackled at source by countering cravings. This is achieved by working the Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But alcoholism and addiction of any kind are described as family illnesses for very good reasons. They run in families and the illness of one member of the family has knock-on effects on the others.

The implications of these observations are, firstly, that we can see an addictive nature in other members of our family. This can be reassuring in helping us to recognise that we may well have a genetically-linked illness rather than a personal weakness. We may not like that idea, and we have to acknowledge past and continuing responsibility for our behaviour, but it sets us off in the right direction: looking at ourselves.

Secondly, we need to acknowledge the damage our behaviour has done to other people. In due course, if we are to get into lasting recovery from our illness, rather than have recurrent relapses, we shall have to make amends to those people by changing our behaviour and asking what we could do for them in some way to make recompense.

The benefits of stopping drinking are as profound and far-reaching as the damage caused in drinking days.

Home remedies.
Home remedies on how to quit alcohol can be dangerous. Medical advice should always be sought. Gradually reducing alcohol consumption over 10 days can be successful in a supportive environment.

Finding a supportive environment is easier said than done. Alcohol is not only a neuro-toxin, damaging the brain and nervous system, it is a social toxin. While the pretence continues that alcohol makes people more convivial, the truth is that it makes them thorough crashing bores. You’ve seen one alcoholic, you’ve seen them all.

By the time people are getting to the stage when they need detoxification, at home or elsewhere, they will have relatively few close friends left. Most have got fed up and gone. The ones who remain tend to be drinking companions who have similar dependency.

Home remedies are therefore dependent on the definition of ‘home’. If it is a genuinely supportive environment with loving people in it, then fine. If it’s a single room in a squalid basement, not fine. It’s too dangerous. Quit all pretence at self-reliance. Ask for help.

How to give up alcohol on your own.
This can be dangerous. Seizures and brain damage are the most significant risks. Asking for medical help is sensible. Cut down gradually over ten days if medical care is not available.

People who drink alcohol to the extent that they become dependent on it, and get withdrawal symptoms when they suddenly stop, took a long time to get to that state. They did not become physically dependent overnight.

The crucial realisation for them is that they have a chronic illness, not an acute one. They can give up for a time but then they go back to it. Or they may develop the ‘dry drunk’ state in which they have all the abnormalities in mood and behaviour without the comfort of alcohol.

Giving up alcohol on one’s own is certainly possible – with the appropriate safety precautions already mentioned – but the psychological acceptance of having a chronic illness is far more important than the short-term relief of acute symptoms.

Accepting that one has a chronic illness is always difficult. Nobody votes for that. We all want acute illnesses – in/out and finish like appendicitis – but that isn’t what we get with alcoholism, any more than it is with diabetes, asthma or thyroid deficiency. We want someone else to wave a magic wand but there isn’t one. By all means we can give up alcohol on our own. But that’s only a short-term issue. The long-term challenge is how we stay off it comfortably. The answer to that riddle is in the Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Side effects of giving up alcohol.
These include physical shivers and shakes and psychological cravings. All these symptoms can be managed gently with experienced addiction specialist care.

The appropriate treatment is the continuing use of the Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous. This prevents a recurrence of the illness of alcoholism and addiction. A chronic illness needs a chronic treatment, in exactly the same way as short sight or diabetes require continuing treatment. There is no ‘magic fix’ treatment for alcoholism, however much patients may want it and however much some therapists may offer it.

There is no shortage of therapists who claim to have found the secret cure. Sadly there are so many of them that none of them holds the ultimate key. The reason for that is that recovery has to be a continuing process, worked on from the inside by each individual patient. Therapies of one kind or another can contribute valuable insights but none can cure. Even the Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous is not curative. It has to be worked, one day at a time, for life. In that circumstance the long-term side-effects of giving up alcohol are stupendously beautiful.

Benefits of giving up alcohol.
None at all, other than reduction in physical damage. The ‘dry drunk’ is a miserable state where all the emotional and behavioural ‘isms’ continue even in the absence of alcohol. This dry-drunk state illustrates the illness of alcoholism (neuro-transmission disease’, as I prefer to call it in order to specify what we are dealing with and take away all shame for having an illness, even while feeling guilt over harm caused to others) in its pure form, before it is ‘treated’ with alcohol. It is a wretched state indeed. The immediate treatment is alcohol itself or, sometimes, a pharmaceutical drug. The more effective long-term solution is the Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The physical benefits of giving up alcohol are that the body takes the opportunity to heal itself. Generally it does that very well on its own but sometimes medical and nursing assistance is helpful.

The social benefits of giving up alcohol are considerable. Drinking friends are seen to be no more than that. One of the tragedies in the rake’s progress of alcoholics is that true friends, who confront them with the truth, are seen as enemies, while false friends say what the alcoholics wants to hear.

What to expect when giving up alcohol.
Acute withdrawal effects include shivers and shakes and a craving to reduce these symptoms by having another drink. Medical detoxification should be gradual over 5 to 10 days (usually by using benzodiazepines in reducing doses). Seizures may need to be prevented by using specific medications such as Phenytoin. Brain damage should be protected against by using Vitamin B6 (Thiamine) for one week.

This – or something similar – is standard practice in most rehabs. But there are rehabs that use nothing more than warm baths or saunas and massage. Many drugs are fat-soluble and therefore enter the fatty tissue of the brain. Sweating gets them out again. In this there is reason beyond allaying the financial, physical and regulatory fear of employing doctors and nurses.

What to expect when giving up alcohol or drugs therefore depends on the clinical beliefs and practical methods of each institution. A psychiatric hospital will tend to have a very different approach from a Twelve Step rehab, although the one may contaminate the other when regulatory bodies get involved.

In either case the patient will feel comforted or fearful as a result of personal interaction with the staff – far more than from any chemical process. Working in the alcoholism and addiction field is a people business. Or should be.

What is the definition of drug and alcohol abuse?
Any level of alcohol or drug use that results in physical or social or any other form of damage. There is no clear dividing line between ‘misuse’ and ‘abuse’ other than in the minds of those who want to rationalise a particular level of alcohol consumption. Anything that causes damage is obviously ‘too much’ and that’s that.

Medical and political pundits like to make distinctions between use, misuse, abuse and whatever. But these are merely theoretical concepts. They have no relevance in clinical practice. Doctors can tell alcoholics whatever they choose but they won’t be heard. The alcoholics listen only to their internal voices that rationalise and justify their drinking behaviour and explain away its consequences.

The only reason for continuing to use a damaging substance is that it provides the user with a perceived benefit. If the alternative to alcohol is suicide, the sensible choice is to drink alcohol rather than cyanide.

Families and doctors find this difficult because they use ‘normal’ rather than ‘alcoholic’ reasoning. Alcoholics drink to make themselves feel better. When the alcoholism really takes hold, they drink because they drink. The first drink triggers the craving for the next. That’s abuse in anyone’s language.

What is misuse of alcohol?
Any level of alcohol consumption that causes damage in any aspect of life.

It is extraordinary that alcohol, a major damaging drug, has such a significant place in our society. Every headache or hangover that results from alcohol consumption is evidence of the brain being damaged. Functional PET scans of the brains of alcoholics show very alarming distortions. Yet alcohol is seen as fundamental to comfort and celebration. These scans should encourage us to be fearful of alcohol and envious of the normal scans of minimal drinkers.

Our problem originates in the belief that we should be happy all the time and that we need something external to ‘fix’ us if we are not.

The natural use of alcohol is as a tasty drink. Alcoholics would never contemplate such a ridiculous definition. Or they might pretend they do while disguising the fact that they would drink rot-gut if that was the only alcohol available.

Misuse of alcohol is anything that makes it into a medicine, something used as a tranquiler, antidepressant or sleeping tablet. Ideally those pharmaceutical drugs should also be avoided. There are more successful, and less damaging, ways of altering the mood – creative work, exercise, entertainment, sexual activity – than through the enticements of Big Pharma.

Why alcohol is so addictive?
It acts on the mood centres of the brain. In people with a genetic predisposition to alcoholism and other addictive behaviours, this sets up a craving for more. It is the first drink that leads to the next and then the next.

People who are born with an addictive nature have an inexplicable sense of inner emptiness. In that state they tend to blame their outside circumstances and do everything they can to change them. But the central problem is inside them, in the structure and function of the mood centres of the brain. Therefore the problems go wherever those people go.

These ‘alcoholics’ have these mood problems before they ever take alcohol. They discover that alcohol works in changing their mood, whereas potatoes and rhubarb do not. Therefore they continue to use alcohol in good times and bad whereas they might not be too bothered about potatoes and rhubarb.

As time goes on, the mood centres get bashed about and become less efficient in their response to alcohol. ‘Tolerance’ develops. A larger quantity of alcohol is needed to get the same mood-altering result. The addiction takes hold and inexorably progresses.