To help you know if you are drinking too much and be happy without needing alcohol
It can be difficult to determine the difference between developing an unhealthy alcohol habit and suffering from an addiction, but distinguishing between the two is important to enable you to get the right treatment.
So how can you tell the difference?
One noticeable difference between habit and substance abuse addiction is the amount of effort and time required to change the behaviour. When altering a habit it takes less time, attention and effort. Addiction however, often demands an integrative, long-term plan to treat negative physical symptoms like withdrawal as well as the emotional disconnect between body and behaviour.
There are links; positive habits can even become tools of survival, but sometimes, habitual behaviours take a dark turn and develop into addictions. Recovery requires that you honestly assess your behaviour and how it is affecting your health, relationships, job, spirituality, and life to understand the difference between habit and addiction. Only then can you become empowered and make take positive steps towards freedom from the bind of your habit or addiction.
Websites Offering Support:
The Mix
is the UK’s leading support service for young people. They are here to help you take on any challenge you’re facing – from mental health to money, from homelessness to finding a job, from break-ups to drugs. Talk to them 24 hours a day via online, social or our free, confidential helpline.
alcoHELP
is a charity that seeks to prevent alcohol abuse in children and young people through giving you an understanding the consequential effects of alcohol, and the dangers of alcohol abuse. These include: its impact on the brain and the resulting effects on judgement, emotions, memory, balance, speech and anger levels.
Books on this subject:
Your Beautiful Mind: Control Alcohol and Love Life More: Discover Freedom, Find Happiness & Change Your Life
Are you worried you’re drinking too much? Has alcohol become a major part of your life? Do you fear it’s affecting your health? Your relationships? Your career?
Millions of people are dependent on alcohol to self-medicate trauma, stress, depression, or succumbing to peer pressure to drink more than they want. They’d love to cut-back but fear loosing the buzz they associate with alcohol, and mistakenly believe that a sober life will doom them to a life of loss, boredom, pain, and misery.
Integrating groundbreaking research, neuroscience, cognitive therapy, proven tools, and teachings, in this deeply personal book, Cassandra talks candidly about her own challenges with controlling alcohol. Drawing on Eastern and Western approaches to help people suffering from alcohol dependence and addiction, Cassandra shows us how to cut back or quit drinking entirely without becoming a hermit, being ostracized, or cutting back on an enjoyable social life.
Not everyone wants or needs to join a support group to deal with their drinking problems. Many of these easy to implement strategies can be mastered in the privacy of your own home, office party or hip location.
Whatever your pain, whatever your motivation, Your Beautiful Mind: Control Alcohol will help you achieve your goals-whether that’s getting sober or just cutting back-and create positive, permanent transformational change in your life.
Teenagers, Alcohol and Drugs: What your kids really want and need to know about alcohol and drugs
has been written in response to the stories Paul Dillon has heard over 25 years in drug and alcohol education. It provides answers to the questions he has been asked by both young people and their parents and also includes solutions to the many scenarios he has heard about from anxious teenagers who haven’t known what to do when things went bad. It will help them understand the issues teens are facing, and shows how to negotiate a minefield of misinformation and social pressure to tell them what they really want and need to know about alcohol and drugs.
