omm338.health.or.mental.health
This short message is extracted from a facebook live video, and i’m standing on the balcony outside my office, looking around. i talk about quitting drinking to feel better – and challenging the idea of whether we do it for our ‘health’, or for our ‘mental health’. if you’d like to see the full video, you can go here.
To listen to this short audio message, play below. nothing to download. just press play.
After you listen to this clip, you’ll want to go immediately to the podcast subscription page, look at the BONUS PHOTO I’m sending to new subscribers. TODAY IS THE LAST DAY FOR THIS BONUS PHOTO 🙂 the link is here > http://www.audiosober.com
this is painting #373 – Stay
Stay here, stay sober, stay focussed.
Stay true to you.
… sober art thanks to mr.belle
mental health. definitely mental health. When I answered the survey, I chose “sleep” as the biggest benefit of quitting drinking. By day 30 (approximately when I responded) I was clear headed and apparently had amnesia about the god-awful mental agony I was in when I was boozing. How can that be?
Anyways, after listening to this audio again, I was reminded about the pure hell of living in a perpetual self-inflicted pit of shame, despair, exhaustion, wasting money, wasting TIME, experiencing anxiety, depression, isolation, complete lack of motivation.
Funnily (is that a word?) enough, during my last month of boozing, it wasn’t the mental health hell hole that I was drowning in that made me want to stop, it was the fear that I had liver disease or cancer. Something that may or may not be. How could I not want to feel emotionally better? Since I have stopped drinking, I can very clearly see that mental health was definitely the reason I needed to quit, except in the moment I was so messed up and couldn’t see through the fog.
Being sober has cleared my head, opened my heart, increased my patience, renewed my confidence and I am experiencing peace and joy again. All mental health improvements that I am so thankful for.
This resonated with me, Belle. My husband is a “career drinker”. Meaning he’s in sales and says that he MUST drink, out and about, several nights a week to build new relationships and network. He’s also a “foodie”, so wine is a hand-in-hand part of that as well. Since I met him I’ve found that my alcohol consumption has gone from drinking with him only when we go out (or make a nice dinner at home, or it’s the weekend, or….) to drinking to entertain myself at home, or finishing a whole bottle of wine by myself because “I deserve it, don’t I?”. Along with my increase in alcohol has come a HUGE, monumental increase in depression, even suicidal thoughts. And unreasonable expectations placed on my husband followed by crying fits and many, many angry texts (which, the next morning, I have no recollection of having sent.) I have been trying to figure out whether I need to divorce my husband, to find a way to scrape together enough cash for a therapist, or to just off myself and forget the whole matter. It wasn’t until I listened to this podcast that I said to myself, “holy shit. It’s not the marriage…it’s the alcohol!” My depression is the direct result of me pouring a DEPRESSANT into myself in the name of…..fun?!? I consider myself to be a pretty intelligent person but how did I not see this?