My Recovery Tools
#2 Avoiding alcohol & practicing HALT
Why do you drink? Can you identify people, places, certain times of day, or feelings that make you more likely to want to drink? Can you make a list of all the things that make you want to drink? What are your main triggers? Would you like advice on how to deal with them? Comment below and I can address these in a future newsletter.
I want to write about how we can deal with all of these different triggers as we progress through life sober, but just for today (see what I did there?) I’m going to focus on avoiding alcohol itself and a very useful tool called HALT that we can use to identify our shared common triggers.
Naturally, the number one ‘trigger’ is alcohol itself. Remove all alcohol from the house and ask your family and friends not to bring it into your home. If you live in a shared house, let your housemates know that you are determined to stay sober and ask them not to bring alcohol into your personal space and keep alcohol out of shared spaces. Hopefully the people you live with can respect your wishes.
Avoid places where alcohol is served. This can be a challenge in western society! If you are meeting friends for a drink, go to a cafe or coffee shop. Do not go to pubs, bars or clubs! If the weather is nice, arrange to meet outdoors with a takeaway drink or even bring your own tasty non-alcoholic beverages from home. Some cities now have alcohol free bars. If you are lucky enough to live near one of these, by all means meet there if you feel comfortable with it.
Restaurants can be harder to navigate. Have you noticed that in upmarket restaurants, wine glasses are set on the table before you arrive? That the assumption is that everyone will be drinking wine with their meal. If you are nervous about eating out somewhere that serves alcohol you have a number of options. Option one is to decline the invitation. Simply don’t go if you don’t feel safe or comfortable. Your sobriety is far more important than any invitation. There will be plenty of opportunities for you to socialise in the future once you feel more secure in your sobriety. Option two; call ahead and let the venue know that a member of your party will not be drinking alcohol and that you would appreciate their waitstaff’s discretion when serving your table. Option three; when you are seated, either turn your wine glass upside down to indicate that you will not be drinking wine or, quietly ask the waitstaff to remove your wine glass and let them know that you are alcohol free.
Weddings can be similarly difficult to attend in early sobriety. I did attend a wedding in England in my first six months of sobriety. I was warned not to go by members of AA but I felt ok with it. I was a little nervous about being the only sober guest, but I told myself that I could leave at any point. I had my husband with me who was a huge support, and I would not have gone without him. My number one tip for weddings is to ensure that you have a taxi booked for soon after the dinner and the speeches have wrapped up, so that you can leave before everyone else gets really drunk!
I must clearly state that I have never once craved alcohol since getting sober in hospital and that is how I have managed to get through otherwise difficult situations like weddings and parties. If you still have cravings and are not convinced that you will never drink again, I strongly advise you not to accept invitations to any gatherings where alcohol will be served and consumed as you could be putting yourself in serious danger of relapse. You have to weigh up the disappointment of missing a party against the devastation of relapsing.
You should also avoid foods with alcohol in. Alcohol is often used in cooking to flavour meat and fish dishes as well as desserts. If you are invited to a friend’s place for dinner, be sure to let them know that you are avoiding alcohol in all forms and always check with your waitstaff when eating out which of the dishes on the menu are alcohol free.
If you frequented certain bottle-shops or watering holes, you could avoid driving or walking past these establishments in early sobriety. Take a different route, even if it means adding time to your journey. A further safeguarding tactic is to let the owners or staff working at these places you used to frequent and ask them not to serve you in future, should it come to that. Supermarkets and mini-markets in the UK can be confronting as alcohol is served in the same retail outlets as food (compared to the USA and Australia where you have to buy booze from bottle-shops). If you feel nervous about the aisles of alcohol or the bottles of spirits staring out at you from behind the cashier, ask a trusted friend to accompany you when you go shopping. Seeing alcohol for sale won’t stop being weird, but it will get easier.
As well as the obvious first step of avoiding alcohol itself, an incredibly important skill to learn in sobriety is to learn how you can recognise triggers that are common to us all (but we often don’t stop to notice and assess them).
In AA I learnt about HALT. HALT is an acronym for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. It’s a tool used to remind people of four of the most common stressors in recovery. When you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired, you are more likely to react without thinking and potentially pick up a drink. When you feel like you are craving a drink pause (halt!) and ask yourself if you are feeling hungry, angry, lonely or tired. If so, take action to remedy this.
If you are hungry, eat something. As a Fitness Professional I would say eat something nourishing, however, in early sobriety it’s sensible to reach for something sweet, as alcohol is full of sugar and your body will be craving the sugars that it is no longer getting from alcohol. You can avoid getting too hungry by eating three meals a day, avoiding skipping meals, and keeping snacks in your bag, desk or car. If you attend AA you will know there are always biscuits available at all meetings!
We all have times when we feel frustrated, irritated or just plain angry. Instead of getting wound up and reaching for an intoxicating drink, stop for a moment and consider whether you are hungry, thirsty or tired. A drop in blood sugar caused by not eating enough can cause feelings of irritability and anger. Often a snack, a nice refreshing non-alcoholic drink or sitting down and relaxing with a cup of tea can really calm your mind. Once you have stopped to consider how you are feeling you can take steps to improve your mood. You can pick up the phone and talk to a friend. If you have attended AA or are in rehab you will be surrounded by people who are happy to chat. Talking about how you are feeling is so important and you will always feel better for it. Exercise is my personal favourite way to dissipate negative feelings. It really is an instant mood booster. You can head outside for a brisk walk or jog, find an exercise class to go to or turn to meditation and breathwork to relax your state of mind.
When I am tired, everything seems so much worse than it really is, and I cannot trust myself to make sensible decisions. I nap most days and I know now never to take my pre-nap feelings seriously. Post-nap I will feel much more positive about everything! Being tired can make you feel despondent and miserable, and you should avoid this at all costs if you can. Make sure you are getting enough sleep and good quality sleep. You should be aiming for 8 hours of unbroken sleep per night. Some people need more, and some people need less but 8 hours is a good guide. Early sobriety can be mentally and physically exhausting. Getting enough rest is so incredibly important for your mental health. If you are struggling to sleep or have insomnia, you should speak to your GP. The importance of quality sleep has been a popular topic in the last few years and there are thousands of articles online about improving sleep hygiene. The most common tips that pop up include, having a set bedtime every night, removing blue light (phones, laptops etc.) a couple of hours before bed, eating dinner at least two hours before bed, and ensuring that your bedroom is dark and quiet when you go to sleep. Some people swear by listening to guided meditations to help them drift off.
Alcoholism felt to me like the loneliest state of being in the world. When I first attended AA, I no longer felt alone and that was the most enlightening and wonderful feeling yet being a recovering alcoholic can still be very lonely. Alcoholics often drink because of feeling alone or ‘other’ and therefore feeling lonely in sobriety can be a major trigger. If you do feel lonely, do not be tempted to sit with it. Identify it, name it and then do something to counteract it. Call a friend or family member and have a chat. You can call and chat with as many people as you like, there’s no limit on that! See if anyone wants to meet up for a cuppa or a walk. Avoid spending too much time alone. Make sure you have plans to fill any empty evenings or days that are ahead. Keep in regular contact with your sobriety support group or person. If you don’t have many friends (let’s face it, being in active addiction tends to thin out friendship groups!) then you could look into starting a new hobby or group activity where you could meet likeminded people.
Practicing HALT really works as an effective warning system, reminding you to pause (halt!) and identify common triggers before picking up a drink.
Although much of what I’ve written may seem obvious, it certainly wasn’t obvious to me when I first got sober. I started drinking alcohol age twelve and stopped twenty years later. In those twenty years I had not developed the skills required to really stop and think about how I was feeling and why I was feeling that way. I simply reacted.
I hope that you find this edition of My Secret Sobriety helpful whether it’s you or someone close to you that is working to get and stay sober. Thank you for reading. Kate xox