How to make boredom work for you

Co-occurring mental health disorders are the rule, not the exception, and self-medication of depression symptoms is exceptionally common. When you’re depressed, loneliness, stress, and boredom can feel like your default state. And while alcohol may not fix these issues, it can distract you from them. For people with an alcohol use disorder, feeling bored can become intolerable – particularly when alcohol is available as a solution. The human brain is a pattern-matching machine, and connecting the experience of boredom with the behavior of drinking can quickly become entrenched in your subconscious.

If, for example, you know you get bored between 2-5 pm, then schedule an enjoyable activity to do during those times. If you have stopped drinking, and you leave your days up to chance, it can be detrimental. Apologies for the slight tangent, https://ecosoberhouse.com/ but it’s important to understand that drinking again will do absolutely nothing to relieve your boredom. That being said, if you are able to start your sober journey with a feeling of happiness, these challenges can be easily overcome.

Reward yourself for not drinking when bored.

It’s at this point where a lot of people realize they’ve veered into risky gray area drinking or even alcohol use disorder. This is what happened to me towards the end of my drinking days, I didn’t want to do anything that didn’t involve getting drunk. That would just get in the way of being able to drink as much as I wanted. If our body perceives a harmless situation as dangerous, we start to experience increased levels of stress and anxiety. This can lead to drinking more and more, potentially developing into harmful patterns or alcohol use disorder. Eventually, this leads to an unhealthy pattern of emotional drinking that is much harder to quit.

But the thing is, drinking out of boredom is a type of drinking that can quickly spiral out of control if you aren’t careful. Feeling bored is a natural part of life, but how you choose drinking out of boredom to cope with it can have a major impact on your well-being. There are healthy ways to deal with boredom and then there are the other options – the things we do to escape it entirely.

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By now you might be feeling great in the mornings, have less alcohol-related anxiety, experience more mental clarity, and feel a deeper sense of appreciation for waking up without hangxiety or shame. Any of these activities are natural mood lifters and a much better option than drinking to pass the time. The problem is when you start creating habit loops that have you reaching for alcohol as a way to cope with boredom (or any uncomfortable emotion for that matter).

Surround yourself with people that support you and help you in whatever
you’re going through in the present moment. It can be your friends,
colleagues, or family who know you for ideas of things you can do to fill
your time differently. Meet and connect with such people regularly and let
them know when you are feeling down or lonely. This is according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Will eating salads and drinking water make your boredom go away?

Harvard Health Publishing

When you’re drinking out of boredom, that easy ‘high’ can feel like an effective solution to the dullness or lack of stimulation that’s bothering you. Emotional hunger, on the other hand, is an unhealthy response to stress that causes cravings for various types of food. This kind of hunger isn’t as easy to stop and leads to over-eating, which usually makes you feel guilty. Download our Quick Start Preparation course as our FREE gift to help you stop drinking alcohol and get the best start to your new life. The activity of drinking is not a fun, exciting, or interesting activity.