If you're giving up alcohol for a month and are wondering what the benefits will be, Priory has outlined the positive changes you can expect to see over the weeks.
This section will give you some of the tools for quitting. Wanting to stop. Deciding to stop doing something you enjoy can be challenging, there may be times when it feels impossible but remember lots of people have quit gambling and we can help you. Do your best to stay away from gambling, the ideal outcome is that you stay away.
Week One
After one week away from alcohol, you may notice that you are sleeping better. When you drink, you typically fall straight into a deep sleep, missing the important rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. While you are supposed to have between six and seven cycles of REM sleep a night, you typically only have one or two when you’ve been drinking.
Better sleep comes with many benefits. You will be more productive, where you can learn and problem solve better. Your ability to control your emotions and behaviour will also improve.
You’ll also have more opportunity to manage your food and drink intake. Sleep helps to balance the hormones that make you feel hungry or full. After drinking, your ghrelin levels (the hormone that makes you feel hungry) go up and leptin (the hormones that make you feel full) go down.
More hydrated
When you drink alcohol, you lose around four times as much liquid as what you actually drank.
Dehydration can cause headaches, as your organs take water from the brain due to their own water loss. Salt and potassium levels also reduce, which can impact nerve and proper muscle function while also causing headaches, fatigue and nausea.
Therefore, giving up alcohol can help you keep well hydrated, which is in turn beneficial for your brain. Your mood and concentration will be more stable, and the frequency of headaches is likely to decrease. You also won’t suffer from the effects of dehydration such as lack of motivation and increased fatigue, so will have more energy throughout the day.
Calories saved:
If you were to give up drinking six 175 ml glasses of wine a week, you would save around 960 calories, which is the equivalent to three burgers or five and a half bags of crisps.
And if you were to stop consuming six pints of average strength lager a week, you would save 1080 calories, which is similar to six bags of crisps or five chocolate bars.
Week Two
After two weeks off alcohol, you will continue to reap the benefits of better sleep and hydration.
Benefits To Giving Up Alcohol
As alcohol is an irritant to the stomach lining, after a fortnight you will also see a reduction in symptoms such as reflux where the stomach acid burns your throat.
After a fortnight, you are also likely to start losing weight as a result of giving up alcohol’s empty calories. If you were to stop drinking six 175ml glasses of wine per week, you would have saved 1920 calories at this point, and 2160 if you’d stopped drinking around six pints of lager.
Week Three
Drinking too much alcohol can cause your blood pressure to rise over time. After 3-4 weeks of not drinking, your blood pressure will start to reduce. Reducing your blood pressure can be crucial as it can help to lessen the risk of health problems occurring in the future.
As the calories in alcohol can cause you to gain weight, giving up alcohol can also help you to reduce your blood pressure as a result of the weight you can potentially lose. By this point, if you’d previously been drinking six 175ml glasses of wine a week, you would have lost 2880 calories over three weeks. And if you’d been drinking six pints of lager a week, you would have lost 3240 calories.
Week Four
Giving up alcohol will have a positive impact on your skin due to you having better levels of hydration. As more water will have been absorbed rather than wasted, you are likely to have more hydrated-looking skin, as well as reduced dandruff and eczema.
Removing alcohol from your diet for four weeks can also help to improve your liver function as your liver will start to shed excess fat. If your liver function is not too badly affected by alcohol, it can recover within 4-8 weeks.
With the liver playing a part in over 500 vital processes, you also give your body a better chance of removing contaminants, converting food nutrients, storing minerals and vitamins.
Summary
Across the month, your body is likely to have benefitted greatly from giving up alcohol. Better hydration and improved sleep will have increased your productivity and daily wellbeing. Your liver, stomach and skin will also have benefitted from not dealing with alcohol. You will also have reduced your calorie intake by 3840 for the month, if you used to drink six glasses of 175ml wine a week, or 4320 calories over the month if you used to drink six pints of lager a week.
If you are struggling with alcohol and are finding it hard to quit, you may want to think about getting support. We understand that embarking on recovery from alcohol addiction can be an emotionally difficult time.
Over 5 years ago I set this blog up to help me gather my thoughts together on the journey I started back in 2006, in which I stopped drinking alcohol completely. The blog has grown since mainly from the people that are kind enough to leave comments. Over 150,000 visitors in total have passed through. The comments helped build up a huge resource that I’m proud to have been able to nurture.
Many comments are inspirational and help me as well as you. After writing the first couple of posts, I found out that I wasn’t alone. In fact, I’m amazed by how many people are in the same boat. Either there is a realisation that alcohol has played its part in our lives and we want to move on, or else a realisation that alcohol and society has a big hold over us and we want to regain some sort of control.
Help is here
I’ve reorganised things here to try to make it easier to find posts written either by me or guests that have kindly taken time out to help support this blog with their own work. For this, I am very grateful as managing a blog takes some dedication. But if this is your first visit here and you’re looking to give up, you’re in the right place. Many who posted comments come back later to report how they are getting on, creating a community feel here. I think that this helps people realise that they aren’t alone on this journey.
Take it a step at a time
Like all journeys, especially long and difficult ones, the best way to focus is to break it down and take it a step at a time. I found in my own recovery, that writing really helped. I found it useful to read back over old posts and realise how far I’d moved forward. I always recommend this to any of you who are just starting out, to do the same.
If in doubt, ask
Read through my posts, read the guest posts and then take a look at the 5 steps I took that I believe finally helped me give up drink. Step 5 is the most popular page on this blog, with over 800 comments on it alone. For those wishing to be totally inspired, it is recommended reading. If you want to contact me, or want my advice, just post a comment and I’ll reply to you.
Last, but not least
I set up a Book Corner – with the titles that help me, even to this day. There are a couple of stand out books including Susan Jeffers and Carol Dweck, well recommended and will help you zero in on the focus you need to help you reach your goal. Buying books through the Amazon affiliate links really helps with the blog running costs. It won’t cost you a penny, but I do get a few pennies in return, which all helps.
Enjoy.
James