The Four Major Symptoms of Alcoholism

It’s far too easy to pretend their isn’t really a problem or justify why drinking is creating the negative consequences it is, but if you recognise these symptoms you really need to be taking action before it becomes potentially too late.

1) Craving for Alcohol

One symptom of alcoholism is having a strong need or urge to drink. You don’t necessarily have it all the time, but that craving when it does come on can be overwhelming and all-consuming. The more advanced your alcoholism, the more intense and often the craving.

2) Loss of Control

This means you can’t stop drinking once you’ve begun. What separates a ‘normal’ drinker from someone who has a problem? The normal drinker can quite easily stop after having a couple without giving it a second thought. As an alcoholic, the saying goes, ‘one is too many and a thousand never enough.’ Once you start, control flies out the window.

3) Dependance

The third major symptom of alcoholism is dependence. It comes in two parts: Physical and Emotional. Physical dependence shows itself as things like anxiety, the shakes and nausea manifesting once you stop drinking. Emotional dependence comes about when you increasingly begin relying on alcohol to help you deal with certain events, which could be social, work, relationship, and eventually in severe cases you need alcohol to ‘help’ you with pretty much everything.

4) Tolerance

You start needing to drink and more to get the same effects or reach your ‘high.’ The more you drink, the more your tolerance increases and so the vicious cycle soon begins to take hold. The bottom line is, people who become problem drinkers tend to have high tolerance levels .

Can You be an Alcoholic by Only Being a Binge Drinker?

Absolutely. All the signs described above can apply to someone who doesn’t necessarily drink ever day, but rather binges on a fairly regular basis. That’s why I often say being alcoholic isn’t necessarily a function of how much you drink or how often you drink – but rather the negative consequences it’s beginning to cause you and how it makes you feel.

Someone without a problem would be able to stop without much trouble if they felt things we getting out of hand, whereas as much as we might try, us alcoholics simply can’t.

So if you’ve found this information to be helpful, do yourself a favour and also trying taking this alcoholism test which is quite a powerful diagnostic tool to determine alcoholism – and then also take a look at a bunch of signs of alcoholism, that will give you a number of other signs to look out for.