Boredom and Substance Abuse

Problems in relationships tend to be one of the top relapse triggers people face when they’re a recovering alcoholic. Relationships can include marriages or romantic relationships, friendships or relationships with family members. Pay attention to how you’re feeling when you’re tempted to drink. You might find reading a book, listening to music, going for a walk, calling a friend, or watching a movie can also help you cope with uncomfortable feelings. I always knew alcohol took up a lot of time in my life, but my mind has been blank about what to fill it with. These are absolutely awesome ideas and i appreciate knowing that I’m not the only dealing with these new parts of sobriety.

I realized that sobriety was not fundamentally boring. Alcohol merely blurred my perception of social situations. Sometimes we would watch a show, but even that become untenable for me after a couple of drinks because I did not have the attention span for it. Alcohol robs you of the ability to feel naturally motivated and inspired. Those feelings don’t come back immediately when you quit.

Carol Weis On How To Achieve Great Success After Recovering From An Addiction

It’s hard to be bored when you’re stoned out of your head or drunk as a skunk but take those away and you’re left with a racing mind looking for any excitement. Recent research indicates that adolescents and teens who are frequently bored or who have plenty of spending money are at doubled risk for drinking and illicit drug use. Youngren writes about one interaction where she talked about her pandemic drinking with a fellow parent who said consuming alcohol isn’t compatible with raising small children.

Many people use alcoholic beverages to enhance experiences. Drinking at concerts, sporting events, and dinner can, as one casual drinker put it, transform a situation into a moment. The problem is that overindulgence or even regular drinking is known to cause a number of drinking because of boredom health issues. Alcohol is one of the leading causes of preventable death in the United States. It’s responsible for more than 95,000 deaths annually. Dangers of boredom are addiction and the development of mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety and even phobias.

Dry January 2023

In particular, we expected boredom to have a positive effect on binge drinking via the mediation of drinking expectancies. Firstly, our findings reveal that binge drinking is a very common behavior in Italian adolescents, in particular among males. Our data are indeed very high even when compared to national surveys investigating alcohol consumption. The ESPAD survey (Hibell et al., 2012) claims that binge drinking involves 35% of young Italians, a percentage slightly below the European average.

People put family, friends, food, gym, banter on their Tinder profiles for a reason. No one writes getting slightly boozed whenever possible because I don’t find things as exciting as I did when I was a child.

Alcohol didn’t make life fun. It just made you not care.

It’s pretty normal to reduce the entire experience of boredom in sobriety to missing alcohol and believing that getting drunk is the primary way you have fun. Getting sober is like learning to walk again after a terrible accident. You should be able to go about living your life without drinking alcohol, but you feel utterly useless and have no idea what to do with yourself.

I over-identified with every negative feeling in my body. We are stressed-out, overstimulated, tech-obsessed creatures. Pile on some sobriety struggle, and it’s a recipe for madness. Eventually, you’ll become good enough that you can get lost in it.

Why Are You Bored Without Alcohol?

Conrod P.J., Castellanos N., Mackie C. Personality-targeted interventions delay the growth of adolescent drinking and binge drinking. Carlson S.R., Johnson S.C., Jacobs P.C. Disinhibited characteristics and binge drinking among university student drinkers.

• Whatever the reason for your boredom, drinking can create a negative cycle around it.
• The sad thing is that it is really the life of the addict that is boring and predictable.
• For reference, healthy men are usually encouraged to drink no more than 14 standard drinks per week.
• To stay sober, you must keep yourself and your thoughts occupied.
• If they do not find ways to fill this time then it can mean that they end up feeling bored a lot of the time.