Suffer from Anxiety? Alcohol Will Always Make it Worse
By: Kitiara Pascoe
Tags: Anxiety, Addiction, Alcohol, Sobriety, Mental Health

Alcohol has long been sold to us as something to help us relax, make evenings more fun and kick off the weekend. I don’t know why you started drinking, but Teenage Me at no point thought, ‘man, school was tough this week, I just need a little tipple to kick back with in front of a film to really relax’.

Yeah. No.

I, like plenty of other people, started drinking because it quashed the teenage anxiety for a moment and allowed me to be someone cooler. Or, at least, that’s how it felt, which is all I was going on.

Some anxiety is normal for a teenager; it’s a time when you don’t know who the hell you’re allowed to be let alone who you actually are. You care far more about what other people think (or what you think they think) than you do about what you think of yourself. You have no idea how you’re supposed to become an adult in this very confusing world.

Instead of riding this out with curiosity and building up resilience, grit and integrity, we take what looks like a sweet shortcut. We don’t do the hard work, we just drink.

And so begins the anxiety spiral

If you suffer with anxiety, here’s a fact: alcohol will make it worse.

You probably already know this. You are probably already painfully aware of the gut-wrenching sense of shame and doom and world-ending anxiety that hangovers bring. Perhaps not even hangovers, perhaps it seeps in while you’re still drunk.

Alcohol doesn’t rid you of anxiety. It’s more like the time just before a tsunami hits, when all the water recedes. It looks like the sea has gone but actually, it’s about to come rushing at the beach with full force.

You swear you’ll never drink again, hell, maybe you’ll never see those friends again you were out with last night, maybe today is a good day to pack it all up and move city. Maybe even country.

Then, a few days later, you’re back out and reaching for a drink to deal with whatever anxiety you’re feeling. It’s an unending, pointless rollercoaster that brings you absolutely nothing. Less than nothing; it robs you of health, wealth and happiness.

Photo by Elvis Bekmanis on Unsplash

Alcohol is not a truth serum

I don’t know who needs to hear this but alcohol does not bring out the ‘real you’. For some reason, a lot of people believe it does.

Sure, it might temporarily give you the confidence to tell someone you’re in love with that being friends just isn’t enough but, by and large, the ‘real you’ is not some wild, raucous dancer who shouts at strangers and craves kebab meat.

Instead, the substance strips the real you away, leaving nothing of your sense of self, your identity, your rational brain or anything that actually makes you, you.

So, while anxiety already makes life that one step harder, when you add alcohol into the mix you’re essentially giving someone else, someone who never learnt anything about social interactions, a free pass to inhabit your body for an evening. And what, you’re expecting that to help?

I wrote a little about how my life changed when I gave up, almost three years ago now:

Anxiety without alcohol

I started drinking and generally choosing masochistic behaviours to manage my anxiety in the latter half of my teenage years. At a time when I should’ve been learning to manage this myself, I instead deadened it with alcohol.

Anxiety itself wasn’t talked about then as the mental health issue it is today. I’d never even heard of it used in that context. Perhaps if I had, then I would’ve looked up the resources that could’ve helped me. Who knows. All I know is that I thought I was a terrible, crazy person and alcohol would be the thing that hushed the intolerable mental chatter.

Of course, it didn’t. It only made it one hundred times worse. But I didn’t blame the alcohol, I just blamed myself.

How could I blame the alcohol? Plenty of my friends could drink and not spin wildly off the rails. If I couldn’t, it was because of me, surely?

Here’s a really easy way to test that theory: stop drinking. I’m not talking cutting down. I’m talking quitting entirely.

Looking back over the last three years of sobriety, I marvel at how much my anxiety has changed. Or rather, how the way I’ve managed it has changed. In fact, how much my entire life has changed.

I’ve slept better in the last three years than I did in the previous ten. I don’t feel continually on edge or stressed, even though my life has plenty of stressful situations in it. Anxiety had a habit of making me feel stressed constantly, something I thought was normal until I quit drinking. Slowly but surely, the stressed ebbed away. When stressful situations cropped up, my anxiety didn’t peak with them, instead, I just looked at the circumstances with a clear head and worked out a solution. I’m not afraid anymore.

I’ve realised that alcohol doesn’t give you control over anxiety, it gives control to anxiety. Shedding the need to drink — be it for celebration, commiseration or relaxation — has returned the control of my life to me. And that is the most stress-relieving result in the world.

When you use positive things to achieve relaxation or stress management instead of alcohol, there are no downsides. I get no hangovers, I don’t spend money on the stuff, I have more energy, a lighter mood and I’m more alert. I feel no shame — something which ruled my life before.

My anxiety has diminished ten-fold. Even though there are parts of my life in the past three years which have brought about new and difficult challenges, the anxiety doesn’t rise, it fades. When it does rock up wearing full war regalia, I recognise it without reacting to it. Where before I was feeding it with alcohol, now it gets bored and wanders off.

Alcohol doesn’t reduce anxiety in any way. It’s a lie. You don’t need it. And when you realise you don’t need it, everything changes.