Online Alcoholism & Addiction Counselling

According to figures released today by the NHS:

• 1 in 4 adults are drinking at hazardous levels,
• 1 in 10 men are on the verge of alcoholism,
• 1 in 6 women drink at levels sufficient to damage their liver or lead to depression,
• 1 in 10 men and 1 in 25 women are approaching alcohol dependence (admittedly rather vague terminology).

We have to ask ourselves why people in the UK seem to be developing more problems with alcohol, and what can be done about it. The cost to the health service alone is staggering - presently some £2.7 billion. That’s before we even consider the personal and social costs involved.

Although it may seem like ‘just a habit’, you are making a choice to have a drink each and every time. That choice involves many components - your beliefs about alcohol and yourself, your thoughts (your inner dialogue), your feelings and your behaviour.

Your wish to not drink so much (because you can recognize the negative consequences) will translate into action depending on your motivations. Partly you are motivated to have a drink because its pleasurable, it helps you relax etc, and at the same time you’re motivated not to drink because you know about all those negative consequences. So you’re in a dilemma. The strength of your different motivations will determine how easy you find it to choose not to have a drink.

Lets take an example to illustrate this - there is something happening at work which you find very stressful, so you get home feeling frustrated and edgy. You believe the stress at work is not going away soon, and perhaps you also blame yourself for some aspect of the situation. You have a belief that you can’t handle this stress well normally, and you believe that alcohol removes it very effectively. So you want a drink. But of course you know you shouldn’t, because you’ll be hungover again tomorrow, and that will leave you feeling worse. So your inner dialogue, your thoughts, might be something like - “well I haven’t had a drink for a couple of days, so I deserve it.”, or - “I just don’t want to feel stressed like this, I want this feeling to stop NOW”.

However, emotional pain and difficult feelings are a part of life, there’s no escaping them, but alcohol deals with them so effectively, that its easy to develop a reliance on it to take away all your painful feelings. In order to cut down or stop drinking therefore, you have to accept that painful feelings must be dealt with sober, just as you are. You can deal with life, but you are choosing not to experience discomfort, because it can so easily be tranquillised with alcohol.

Its a common thing to drink because you feel “I can’t cope” - but what does that actually mean? Whatever is happening in our lives, however painful it is - we get through it, we survive, and that is coping. So the belief that we can’t cope makes us give up trying, give up hope. And again, alcohol is there to take away that hopeless feeling, to take us to that dream-world where things are fluffy and safe.

To get through life being generally sober, we have to accept that painful feelings can be handled naturally. Not rubbed out, but acknowledged, truly felt. You’re stressed? So see how it feels for it to just subside naturally with time. You feel bored? So just sit with that and examine what it really means to you. What could you actually do to remedy that feeling? Again, explore it and see what needs or thoughts are associated with the feeling. Then you might realise a different solution or two, whatever they might be.

Or perhaps you just don’t think you’re a particularly valuable person? Any mistake, any difficult situation can be attributed to your own failure or lack of some quality. Again, alcohol makes you feel good about yourself, temporarily anyway. And then it bites back with a vengeance. So to an extent, the solution might also be about healing that relationship with yourself. Your beliefs about yourself can often be a sort of self-constructed fiction. That constant inner commentator is so detached from the world, in many ways. So you may believe yourself to be inadequate because that’s how you’ve been affected by life, but of course its a subjective opinion, its not a fact, just a viewpoint.

The point here is to make yourself aware of the various elements that make up your drinking habits, then you can try to solve each part, rather than just relying on will power to not drink, which as you’ve probably discovered by now, isn’t that effective.

Do you need to give up drinking completely if you have a problem with alcohol? There are conflicting opinions on this. The AA approach says that abstinence is the only way that works for sure.

But being abstinent is no guarantee against a relapse, and some would say that it is just avoiding the problem, not dealing with it. So how about learning some new habits around alcohol instead - because you have learnt how you behave towards alcohol already, so surely those habits can be changed?

Giving up for a while could be a useful exercise though - it doesn’t have to be forever. In fact the thought of it being a lifetime commitment prevents some people from even contemplating a period of sobriety. Why not try a month of no drinking at all, just to see how it feels? Then if you can manage that ok, you can decide whether to keep going with it, or not, the choice is yours.

The difficulty with cutting down of course is that all your best intentions tend to dissolve after the first few drinks - so a self-imposed limit is easily ignored with a slightly inebriated justification (’oh I’ll do it tomorrow instead’, ‘I had a really hard day today, I deserve another one’, ‘oh he’s opened another bottle, it would be rude of me to refuse’ etc.)

Delaying the time you allow yourself to start drinking is one way to make cutting down easier. If you have less time for drinking, then perhaps you’ll drink less quantity (that’s the theory). A drinking diary can also help you keep track of how much you’ve actually had over the week.

How much you drink also tends to be a product of how much alcohol you purchase. So one obvious step is to not buy quite so much. Make sure you don’t keep any drink in the house - just buy it as you need it. That way the choice to drink has to be a conscious decision. Don’t forget, for this to really work you’ll need your partner to agree on the plan, so they don’t buy any either, unless you both decide to.

There’s a third option too - a combination of cutting down and giving up - just staying sober for a day or two at a time every week. It’s better than nothing, and you’re getting used to dealing with life without drinking. Try and plan which days you’re going to do it in advance, and plan to do something else incompatible with drinking perhaps. But be careful of the trap of rewarding yourself for your two days of sobriety with, you guessed it, a binge!

The Department of Health has released research where they have identified nine different types of person who drinks alcohol to excess (their definition of excess being double the recommended weekly amount or more).

It might be useful to see if you can recognise which type you are. The types they defined are -

• Depressed drinker
• De-stress drinker
• Re-bonding drinker
• Conformist drinker
• Community drinker
• Boredom drinker
• Macho drinker
• Hedonistic drinker
• Borderline dependent

It’s a fairly comprehensive list, but if you’re not sure which category you might fit into, have a look at the list of criteria for each type of drinker on the BBC

Of course it would seem to suggest that people who drink fall into one type or another, whereas experience would suggest that the same person could be defined under many of the categories, depending on what is going on for them that day.

As you’re reading this website, then you might be thinking that you need to change your habits around alcohol. This means you’re in a stage called ‘contemplation’.

The Stages of Change model is a well established and useful way of considering different people’s levels of motivation to change their behaviour. This is how it applies to alcoholism:

Stage 1: Pre-contemplation -

Someone who drinks alcohol but doesn’t consider that they have a problem with it, or that they need to do anything about it. Other people around them might disagree however. Occasionally they might regret drinking too much, have an accident perhaps, but they still don’t feel their drinking needs to change.

Stage 2: Contemplation -

Possibly where you are now - you might have realised that your drinking is causing more problems than it’s worth, and that you’re probably drinking too much. You’ve noticed your health is suffering, or your closest relationships have been affected. Maybe your work is not up to scratch because you’re always hungover. But then on occasion you switch back to thinking it’s not such a problem after all, and you get drunk again.

Stage 3: Decision -

You realise that you do need to do something about this, so you decide to seek help, or talk to someone professionally, join a support group, maybe check out AA, or start looking online for some possible tips to cut down your drinking.

Stage 4: Action -

You start to reduce your alcohol consumption, you set yourself limits and you achieve them. You start talking about the problems in your life that might be causing your drinking, maybe to a counsellor or another mental health professional. You might well announce your decision to cut down or quit drinking to your partner or family members.

Stage 5: Maintenance or Relapse -

Your new pattern of drinking is becoming a habit, your alcohol consumption is back to acceptable, healthy levels again. Or maybe you haven’t had a drink for a couple of months, and you’re feeling comfortable with your sobriety. You can feel the benefits of not drinking so much - you’re healthier, happier and functioning better.

There is always a possibility that future circumstances might take a turn for the worse, and you end up drinking again. Maybe you go right back to stage 1, or one of the other stages instead. The important thing is to learn from this process, not to blame yourself for it. If you see this set-back as a ‘failure’, then you’ll just feel more depressed about it. You’ve made a mistake and had a relapse, that’s all, but you can get back to where you were again.

If you think you’re ready to take action about your drink problems, contact us to arrange an online live chat with a professional alcohol counsellor.

Everyone has their own little hangover cure don’t they. There must be thousands of them out there, but how many actually work? The truth is different people probably need different things to help them, depending on their individual constitution.

However there are a few reliable cures that seem to work for everyone. One of the main causes of a hangover is dehydration (largely responsible for your headache), so clearly the best thing to prevent or cure them is rehydration - plenty of water or fruit juice (as that often contains anti-oxidants too).

Sugar filled soft drinks like cola are NOT a good idea, because although they’ll make you feel good temporarily by boosting your blood sugar, you’ll very quickly feel even worse again as you suffer from the insulin crash afterwards.

Having said that, caffeine can often help with a headache and get you feeling sharper again, it depends on your preference. Unfortunately most caffeinated drinks are also diuretic, meaning they will dehydrate you even more. Part of your rehydration might perhaps include essential electrolytes too (Calcium, Potassium, Sodium, Magnesium etc).

Another cause of hangover is acetaldehyde, the toxic chemical produced when alcohol dehydrogenase breaks down alcohol in the liver. This is what causes the ‘poisoned’ feeling. There are a couple of things which work quite well to mop this up - the first is an enzyme called cysteine, which is found in large quantities in eggs. So that’s breakfast sorted out. You can also buy N-acetyl cysteine as a supplement in health food shops. The second thing which mops up acetaldehyde quite well is probiotics - the healthy bacteria found in yoghurt. However perhaps the best way to take this is in capsule form where it’s far more concentrated. A few of these before bedtime can really help you.

Most alcoholic drinks will leave you with low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) by morning, so its important to get that back up again in a slow, stable way. Which means complex carbohydrates as opposed to simple ones. What I mean is whole grains, like wholemeal bread or muesli, vegetables and fruit (particularly bananas to boost your potassium levels again). Carbs like simple sugars, white pasta or potatoes will not help.

The nausea can be eased very effectively with ginger or peppermint tea, and again with those rehydration salts (or electrolytes).

Painkillers are obviously quite tempting, but paracetamol causes further toxic strain on the liver and kidneys, and ibuprofen can irritate the stomach. So aspirin is probably the safest analgesic for a hangover.

Finally you might well benefit from some B vitamin supplements - to calm your central nervous system (responsible for the tremors, sweats and anxiety), but these will tend to have a more long term effect rather than being a short term cure.

No doubt you’ve got plenty of suggestions for your own hangover cures too, so lets hear what works for you in the comments…

This week the BBC monitored the drinking diaries of two typical professional people in their late twenties - both considered themselves to be health conscious and fit.

What emerged was a picture of what many people might consider ‘normal’ patterns of drinking in our culture. However, when their level of alcohol consumption was broken down into units it became apparent that both of them were drinking way in excess of recommended guidelines - 37 units for the woman and 112 units for the man.

They also demonstrated a significant level of ignorance about their drinking, and about the implications for their health. One of them actually said - “I don’t like getting drunk…” yet had consumed over 15 units per session on five days that week, and 25 units (as far as he could remember) on the Saturday! That’s about 8 pints of strong lager or nearly 3 bottles of wine. But he doesn’t like getting drunk - yeah, right!

However, a survey by YouGov also found that many people have no idea what the recommended safe alcohol consumption levels actually are (14 units per week for women and 21 for men), and very few were aware of the units of alcohol present in common drinks. [Here's a very handy units of alcohol calculator]

The thing which strikes you when you read the two diaries is that there are many people around drinking exactly the same amounts, yet believing that they don’t have a problem with alcohol.

Are you an alcoholic?

Focussing on negative thoughts as opposed to positive ones leaves you feeling depressed and unmotivated.

If you concentrate on how many mistakes you’ve made, or how you haven’t managed to stop drinking like you wanted to, maybe how you’ve ‘failed’ yourself and those around you, then of course you won’t feel good about yourself. Notice when you’re thinking these thoughts, and take control of them. Here’s where you need to make a choice to -

Concentrate on positive thoughts instead :

• What will improve in your life when you’ve cut down or stopped drinking?
• How much better will you feel?
• What improvements have you already made?
• Have you managed some slight reductions already?
• If so, what benefits have you started to notice because of that?
• Are you still essentially a good person, even though you’ve made mistakes?

The theory of ‘negative suggestion’ warns that if you focus on NOT doing something, it’s more likely that you’ll end up doing it, than if you were focussing on something else entirely. So if you find yourself thinking, “I must not drink, I must not drink” it’s a warning sign that you need to start concentrating on something else instead - distract yourself with another task, something absorbing. Just telling yourself “I mustn’t think about not drinking” is clearly still in that loop.

Likewise if you need to quit for a while, but you’re thinking, “Oh no, I’ll never be able to drink again“, then that will undoubtedly keep you focussed on the negative. Maybe you can drink again in the future; you don’t need to decide that now, focus on the present moment, and how good you feel about not drinking today.

Oh dear, the BBC reported today that UK police crime figures have shown a 50% increase in arrests of women for being drunk and disorderly over the past five years.

In certain areas of the country this rate was even higher - a 1200% increase in the West Midlands, and a 700% increase in South Wales.

Some people are blaming this on cheap alco-pops, while others suggest the opened up licensing laws. It seems to be more to do with our culture, women drink as much as men do now.

Where is this trend going, and what effect is it having on the health of the women in this generation?

There is no doubt that the most popular self help book for people with alcohol problems is this one by Allen Carr.

He achieved his deserved reputation with his initial book about stopping smoking, and such was its success that he’s now written two books dedicated to drinking. This one is for those who want to regain control, but don’t want to stop completely.

If you don’t want to buy the book, but are interested in the cognitive approach that it uses, try having a read through our articles and worksheets on relapse prevention.

While this one is written specifically for those of you who have decided you want to totally stop drinking. Again, like his other book, it concentrates on the cognitive aspects of your alcohol problems - what you are telling yourself internally about alcohol.

Sometimes the terminology used when talking about alcohol problems can be quite unhelpful.

In fact, when using the terms ‘alcoholism’ or ‘alcoholic’ (which everyone does, including this site), the emphasis can be that the problem is with the alcohol itself.

But the problem actually stems from the state of mind that the alcohol gives you, not from the chemical as such. The importance that this state of mind takes on for you, the preferability of it despite the huge costs to other parts of your life, that is actually where the problem lies.

Similarly, people often refer to alcoholism as a disease. But what actually is a disease? Well, it is

“an abnormal condition that causes discomfort, dysfunction, distress, social problems, and/or death to the person afflicted, which is associated with specific symptoms and signs”.

The symptoms of the condition ‘alcoholism’ are generally agreed on as:

• tolerance - the need to consume more in order to achieve the same effect,
• withdrawal - the experience of unpleasant physical effects upon stopping drinking,
• craving - a preoccupation or prolonged urge to have a drink,
• loss of control - the inability to stop drinking at a sensible level once you have started.

You may have periods when you experience all four of these symptoms, and therefore you could be classified as an alcoholic. There may be other times when you’re not experiencing all of them, so you merely have ‘problems with alcohol’. But do you have a disease?

A disease is something over which you would have very little choice - “I don’t want this disease any more, I’m going to make some changes” would seem slightly ridiculous. So the way you view your alcohol problems, what terminology you use - will determine what you feel you can do about them.

If you view it as a set of problems, you will be motivated to solve those problems, but if you say to yourself “I’m an alcoholic, its a disease, it can’t be cured” then what are you likely to do about it? Not that much, I would suggest. Some people seem to have more control over their alcohol problems than others, so perhaps it is not a black or white condition, but one with varying shades of grey in between.

There are many different factors involved in an alcohol dependency, from genetic predispositions, or inherited behaviour from parents, perhaps learnt behaviour from society, to our beliefs about ourselves, our coping strategies, our self worth, our levels of anxiety and the stability or instability of our moods.

Different people will have different causes for their alcohol problems. The way to solve them is therefore to make yourself more aware of what factors are involved in your personal problem. Then you can go about making some changes to those underlying issues.

The British Medical Association released a report last week that the UK is currently experiencing an alcohol epidemic. Hospital admissions due to alcohol are increasing dramatically (5% increase over a year), and alcohol related crime is going up by about 7 percent per year according to local government figures.

Why do so many people in the UK feel the need to binge drink? It’s not about increased accessibility since the change in the licensing laws or even the low cost of a drink, because they are now roughly the same here as those in Europe.

But other countries don’t have as much of a bingeing problem. And we’ve had this problem for at least the last ten years, not just since they relaxed pub opening times.

Are we just more stressed than our cousins on the continent? For many people, alcohol is the only escape they have from the stress of their lives. Perhaps its the fact that we have the highest working hours per week in the whole of Europe, and that our debt culture is spiralling?

The solution some have suggested is increased taxes or warnings such as those on cigarette packets, but has that stopped anybody smoking? No, it has just increased the revenue for the government that’s all (which at least pays for increased pressure on health services).

Maybe education might help - but this is not a case of people being ill-educated about the risks of excessive drinking; like the risks of smoking, we’re all well aware. But that is not enough to motivate people to cut down. The motivation must be internal, you can’t expect someone to change their behaviour just by telling them its bad for them. They must choose to change through seeing that the costs outweigh the benefits.

Read the full text of the BMA report in pdf format.

We’ve now opened our free support forum for anyone with alcohol problems.

There are no expectations that you must be sober, it is just a community space where you can share your experiences and hopefully get some support from other people in a similar situation to yourself, whether you want to give up drinking completely, or if you just want to cut down.

You need only provide a valid email address to join - but this will never be displayed, so you can remain completely anonymous.

Join the forum or just have a look first.

A recent survey by YouGov found that 33% of adults between 30 and 50 felt that alcohol had ruined a night out for them at least once in the past year.

They also pointed out how much more of an effect alcohol has on the body the older we get, our organs just can’t recover as quickly as they used to. So it’s no surprise that they also report that NHS admissions due to alcohol for over 35 year olds have increased by 50% in the last three years. This is all adding up to a big problem. What is going on in the UK right now?