Stop Drinking

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This is a place to motivate each other to control or stop drinking. It is also a place for non drinkers to discuss and share.

We welcome anyone who wishes to join in by asking for advice, sharing our experiences and stories, or just encouraging someone who is trying to quit or cut down.

Please post only when sober; you’re welcome to read in the meanwhile.

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Are gradual, but significant, personality changes normal after muti-year sobriety? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by remotelove@lemmy.ca to c/stopdrinking@lemmy.world

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So, yeah. It's been a few years sober now, so that is nice.

One thing I have noticed about myself is the actual existence of a personality. It wasn't a change that happened within the first few months of being sober, but over the following years.

Strangely enough, a bizarre trait is that if given the chance, I can talk about just about anything for hours. My saving grace is that I was always a repository for massive amounts of random information, but now, I can string all of that data together into coherent sentences then easily pivot into all related sub-topics and associated information on top of that.

I make a ton more off-the-cuff jokes now and I don't even know where they come from. It seems I have the ability to make people laugh, which I never thought possible.

Overall, my personality has become extremely broad these days and the above is just a couple of examples. One might say that I am a pleasant person to be around? (That is a very strange feeling, BTW.)

Has anyone else seen themselves or others go through massive personality shifts like I describe? I am not understating "massive". I surprise myself nearly every day with how intense I can get.

FWIW, I was an extremely heavy drinker when I quit and was about a year into serious dependency.

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[–] very_well_lost@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I wouldn't describe my personality shift as "massive", but there have definitely been some noticeable changes in the 7 or so years since I stopped drinking.

I think it really just comes down to the fact that alcohol addiction (or any chemical addiction, really) stunts personal growth. When we get deep into our addiction, it becomes our primary form of entertainment (or it did for me, at least) so there's no longer any motivation to branch out and do new things. We just sort of stagnate, because any need we'd otherwise feel to work on ourselves has been blunted by alcohol.

The biggest long-term change that I noticed after quitting is that I was suddenly getting bored again. For like 10 years I had completely self-medicated that feeling away so when it came back, it came back with a vengeance and suddenly I felt incredibly motivated to start trying new things and expanding my horizons.

Maybe your change in personality is just that? Your body and mind are finding new ways to entertain themselves now that the reward center in your brain has had time to return to normal, and your life has opened up new opportunities now that it's no longer structured entirely around drinking.

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

The boredom and accompanying loneliness sucks ass. The boredom was the first thing that hit me and our situations seem nearly 1:1.

And yeah, the boredom is probably a key factor in my personality change and I didn't make that connection. The loneliness absolutely is too. ie: All my drinking buddies seem to have disappeared and I wasn't quite prepared for that, TBH. (I knew it was a thing already though.)