Alcoholism and Anxiety - Will You Ever Find a Way Out?

Like depression and alcoholism - alcoholism and anxiety are undoubtedly linked.

From a Scientific Perspective - Research has shown that those of us that have lower levels of CREB, a protein involved in a variety of brain functions, could play a significant role in anxiety and alcohol drinking behaviour. Huh?

If you’re anything like me - I always find the science of these things rather difficult to understand so I’m going to try and explain the anxiety alcoholism link in a way that is simple and hopefully makes sense ...

I learned this from Bill Harris, a well-known personal-development and meditation expert, which makes so much sense and has really helped me understand why I have also suffered from anxiety and depression.

Most ‘dysfunctional’ behaviour stems from our ability to withstand ‘stress.’ And when I say stress, I refer to it in a fairly loose way as any form of stimulus that comes to us from the world. Now we all have a threshold or limit as to how much of that stress or stimulus coming to us from the world, that we can handle.

As soon as that threshold is exceeded – we deal with that by engaging in a variety of coping mechanisms, from depression to anxiety, to feeling ‘I can’t cope’, to substance abuse, to anger etc.

Now our threshold for being able to deal with what life throws at us is formed in early childhood. Now if you’ve experienced trauma in your early childhood – like having an alcoholic parent, being raised in a dysfunctional home, being abused, losing a parent – your threshold is going to be far lower than that for someone who has been brought up in a fairly stable, loving and supportive environment.

So coming back to alcoholism and anxiety – if you’re regularly being pushed above your threshold and regularly feeling anxious as a result, it’s fairly natural to want to use alcohol or drugs to help you cope.

I never really understood why I suffered from extreme anxiety, which first starting surfacing just after I became a teenager and started high school. And the above explanation just makes so much sense to me.

The way my anxiety manifests, is that I feel nervous or insecure about something, my heart rate jumps through the roof and I start to tremble and shake like a leaf. And if I’m with people, I find it so embarrassing, I often just wish the ground would swallow me on the spot.

So I naturally found alcohol a welcome relief from my anxiety because it also helped me (or so I thought) interact more confidently with people (especially the opposite sex:-)

And so the cycle starts of using alcohol (which often leads to drugs) to help you cope with your anxiety - and before you know it you’re soon totally dependent on the stuff.

How’s this for a seemingly ridiculous example ...

I often used to get drunk before I would go to get my haircut because of the intense anxiety I used to experience about having to have my hair cut. Why? I have no idea.

Anxiety is like that because there is often no rational explanation for why you feel anxious about something and before you know it totally takes over and ruins your life.

That’s why if you’re going through alcoholism and anxiety, I have a lot of sympathy for you because I know exactly how you feel. Now we both know alcohol or drugs aren’t the solution to your anxiety because even though they may offer temporary relief, long-term they lead to addiction and only make your anxiety worse.

A Possible Alcoholism and Anxiety Solution?

If you’re looking for a quick fix and immediate relief, a natural product I use that gives me immediate relief and helps relax me when I feel anxious, is calcium magnesium complex. Magnesium provides a great natural relief against anxiety, but for it to work optimally and assimilate in your body properly, it works best with calcium – hence the calcium magnesium complex.

I can’t speak highly enough of the stuff. I used to first buy it in capsule form at my local supermarket – but found I’d need to take a lot of capsule (5) to give me the desired effect. The side effect of that was that it gave me the ‘runs’ at times.

However, I once stumbled across it in powder form, through a product my sister once bought at a health shop. The brand I now use is Nature Fresh – their 350g powder. Even though I now live in the UK, I still import it from South Africa because nothing else I have tried comes close to relaxing me sufficiently.

It works brilliantly for me and if I’m feeling really anxious about something I’ll take 2 heaped teaspoons and soon it relaxes me sufficiently so that I feel like I can cope again.

But for a long-term and permanent solution to the anxiety alcoholism conundrum – and coming back to the explanation I gave you above about exceeding your ‘stress’ threshold – the answer is to raise your threshold so that you can cope far more easily with whatever life happens to throw at you.

And in doing so – because you feel more relaxed and able to cope, and things ‘get to you’ far less – your anxiety will naturally begin to diminish and all the things that make you anxious will begin doing so less and less until they just don’t bother you at all anymore.

If you’re interested in finding out about the tool I use to help me with my anxiety click on the link and take a look.

I really do believe that you won’t find anything better as a long-term solution to help you in overcoming alcoholism and anxiety.