How to Stop Alcohol and Other Drug-Related Cravings

[post_slider]

Alcohol craving has no single proven method or a silver bullet. Some of the ways are more likely useful early on in one’s effort to change his or her drinking habit. This can be whether to cut back little by little or to stop drinking entirely.

The decision to do away with alcohol entirely is usually hard to come by and requires much courage by the individual. Once taken, it comes with a firm resolve to sail through cravings and maintaining sobriety. At some point, even after undergoing a long term and conservative treatment, the concerned individuals still get themselves in circumstances where it is entirely difficult to resist alcohol.

The herein list is based on detailed research on clinical protocols for addressing those undergoing treatment. And the good part is that using them can significantly improve one’s ability to manage and make reductions. They can also be of much help for those making gradual changes in their drinking protocols and not in any related alcohol use disorder treatment program.

9 Quick tips to STOP alcohol on your own

#1. Keeping track

Having a track of your own helps with identifying your “triggers” to drinking if your sole goal is to abstain entirely or if you are drinking heavily and your goal is to cut back
With one keeping his or her track, he/she gets to understand that they aren’t always badly off since with strict adherence, you will realize that you aren’t where you were last month, and that keeps on and on changing.
One can use urges to benefit. For instance, if you have a desire to drink when restless or feeling anxious, the desire can be an addiction. Figure out better means to take care of your anxiety and how to deal with stress.

It’s of fair use for people to keep track of the date, duration, time, and intensity (between a scale of 1-10). This always allows you to learn that urges decrease and increase in intensity over time. It also gives a chance for one to see if his/her effort to reduce urges and cravings are working or not.

#2. Meditation

Meditation and being mindfulness are two great topics today. If you learn and practice meditation, you can get to reduce urges and cravings as well as enable an individual to develop a sense of well-being and calmness.

#3. Awareness

it’s necessary to develop a warning habit. One has to learn to recognize the urge and when it comes to calling. Find out your initial red flag signals. Don’t be caught off guard at any cost remembering that stopping a cause at its start is more comfortable to come by as compared to when it’s got a full head of steam.

#4. Refusal

Immediately, it would be best if you refuse firmly. Do not even think of a possibility as a choice. You have decided not to drink and made it a top priority. On general principle, you don’t have to reason it out again and again. And whenever an idea rolls over your mind about drinking, you can tell that idea to disappear to hell. You don’t have to debate on it.

#4. Medication

Medication prescription is another helpful means that you can consider to reduce your urges and cravings to drink or to drink heavily. Naltrexone is a prescription available as a pill that is generally inexpensive and should be diagnosed once in a month given in a physician’s office. Some countries like in the U.S haven’t approved naltrexone for moderate drinking. However, with Europe, it is widely used for this purpose. So, it is upon your primary caregiver to decide or not to decide to prescribe for you naltrexone for cutting back on your drinking habits if that is your sole goal.

#6. Distract yourself

Most of the time, it gets difficult to avoid triggers that can be the feelings you have or a physical condition that may arise from time to time. Immediately you get to experience the urge, distract yourself with something, for example, a movie that sways away your attention. Then check back with yourself in, say 40-50 minutes, and find out if the intensity of the urge has changed. If the quick distraction hasn’t worked, try another. Or employ another strategy altogether.

#7. Avoid triggers to drinking

This can play a more significant role in your earlier efforts to change your drinking and to manage your urges. Take, for example, you mostly drink on Saturday afternoons or evenings with your drinking buddies. Alternatively, come up with plans to be handling something else during that time with other friends or family members who are not into drinking spree. Come up with a dinner date with your spouse. Go work out. Involve friends over the dinner that you prepare and enjoy oneself.

#8. Name the urge

Destructive self-talk is not you; it is your sworn enemy. Give the desire a name as if it were a fellow being. Come up with terms for your urges that are imaginative, powerful, and meaningful only to you. That little voice in your head that badgers and coaxes you from time to time. Give it a label; some call it “Alcohol sales,” “The devil itself,” “Sworn enemy,” “The destroyer of men.” Come up with a name that best fits your experience. This strategy will enable you to disarm your urges little by little until you overcome it entirely

#9. Countering the urge

Discuss it with yourself. Out and loud, if possible. What are the reasons that are making you change? How comfortable will you be later if you’ve been successful by not giving in to the urges? Check how giving into a desire keeps it all going and alive while not giving in to the same notion slowly kills it all at ago. While you can’t ensure the urge goes away, you can see it in direct what it is. It is all that gets to remain with your engagement with alcohol.

One can’t always change the situation that’s creating these feelings. But you can be able to change how to respond in one way or another. If you can change your total response to the urge, then you can change your response to the negative feelings too.

More: