My sober clock is about to hit 16 days! I could never imagine being here before and for the most part I feel pretty great though I’m not going to lie and say its been easy I still think about booze every minute of of every day and still have lots of anxiety and withdrawal symptoms but mentally I think I’m getting stronger.
One thing that seems to not be getting even slightly better is the nightmares. Has anyone else ever experienced this? I’ve always had very vivid lucid dreams since I was a kid and alcohol seemed to keep that at bay most the time but now that I have quit drinking its back full force. Sometimes I will take an over the counter sleep medication because I work 60+ hours a week and have to get a good nights rest once in awhile but I don’t want to replace one habit with another so I am trying to deal with this new reemerging nightmare loop I am stuck in at the same time and trying to deal with all these withdrawal symptoms.
Has anyone dealt with this before? How long did your nightmares last for? Any tips or anything natural and not habit forming I could take until I work through all this?
Hi, congrats first of all and keep it up. I have had some successes and relapses during the last 12 months, and I do believe all lessons learned and key take aways made my last decision to have a clear head going onwards really last without any materialized risks to drink again. I’m mentioning it so it’s understood there is some real experience in my advices. Bad dreams - that was my biggest fear when deciding to quit alcohol, most afraid of. Help - training practices in book from Phil’s Stultz book called Tools. However silly some may sound, those are being adopted by current psychologists around the world these days. Food - don’t eat anything two hours before sleep, and limit fatty food. If I have bad dreams now, it’s caused in majority cases by meat - mostly red meat. That’s me. Thirdly, 20 - 30 minutes in bed before sleep dedicated to breathing exercises can be of help as well (e. g. “VOS” app in Google store). Last but not least I exercise - cycling, running whatever activity at least 280 minutes per week during which you sweat quite a lot definitely helps most. Good luck mate, it’s a work really, step by step and always focus on your objectives because sometime irrelevant emotions fuck up your journey
My “nightmare” usually consisted of me being out to party, surrounded by liquor and drinking buddies, and then waking up in a sweat just as I was about to drink in my dream.
I took that scared helpless feeling as a freebie warning that was how I would feel in real life if I picked up again. Eventually, after a few weeks, as I got more comfortable not drinking, my nightmares went away.