Why Do I Crave Alcohol?

Understanding Alcohol Cravings

Understanding alcohol cravings means understanding how alcohol changes your brain. Alcohol hijacks your brain’s reward system, increasing dopamine and serotonin levels, but over time decreases your brain’s ability to produce them. These are the main pleasure neurotransmitters. Over time, less natural control over the regulation of these neurotransmitters means you need to drink more to get the same effects as before.

Alcohol also lowers your natural GABA levels, which helps regulate mood and anxiety, leading to feeling like you need alcohol to relax and feel good.

Eventually, your brain learns to associate alcohol with relief, routine and reward. This creates a habit loop – you experience a cue (a trigger that tells your brain to start the behaviour), you go into the routine (drink), you get the reward (pleasure, distraction).

Your brain has rewired itself, and cravings trigger the loop again, unless you find ways to overcome them.

Common Triggers for Cravings

No matter how close or far you are from initial sobriety, triggers could have the potential to set you back.

Knowing this can seem disheartening, but it is important to be aware of the types of things that could trip you up in the future.

Being prepared with knowledge and ways to combat triggers will lessen the risk of cravings taking over.

Common Psychological Triggers Include:

• Stress
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Boredom
• Loneliness

Common Social Triggers Include:

• Parties
• Peer pressure
• Anniversaries
• Setbacks in life

Environmental Triggers Include:

• Bars
• Music
• Previous routines (end of the week, after work)
• Seeing alcohol

Physiological Triggers Include:

• Nutrient depletion (omega-3, thiamine, magnesium)
• Blood sugar drops
• Poor sleep

It would be impossible to avoid all triggers, so it’s important to understand more about the brain chemistry around cravings and learn early sobriety tools that can help.

The Role of Brain Chemistry

When you stop drinking and go into withdrawal, you experience a dip in dopamine and serotonin, leading to a crash of sorts. This brings on the physical and emotional symptoms of withdrawal, such as fatigue, low mood and disrupted sleep.

NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is a coenzyme crucial to near-endless cellular processes in the body. Depleted levels of NAD+ are linked to low mood and energy because it is involved in serotonin production, your metabolism and mitochondrial function.

Beyond all the science and brain chemistry, cravings are normal, fuelled by something deeper. Cravings are disguising the need for something else, such as energy, a feeling of calm, wanting pleasure, being hungry and feeling bored or stressed.

If you learn to manage those issues, you will become better at dealing with cravings.

Why Cravings Don’t Mean Failure

Why do I crave alcohol? This is the question that many sober people ask themselves. There are never any easy answers, you just have to accept that it is a part of the recovery journey. What is most important is that cravings are not a relapse.

A craving is just an unintended desire for something that has the potential to overwhelm you. A relapse is when you succumb to the cravings and re-engage with your addiction once more.

Cravings are inevitable, and you will have to ride them out. There are many ways you can reduce alcohol cravings naturally, including:

• Mindfulness – Practising ground techniques, meditation and breathing exercises that can keep you in the present and help you alleviate stress and anxiety can help you manage alcohol cravings.

• Distraction – Boredom is a huge trigger. Finding a way to distract yourself constructively (call a friend, try a new hobby) can help you.

• Movement – Get up and about. Exercise releases endorphins and will help you feel time and give you a sense of accomplishment, filling that space with something positive.

• Hydration – Staying hydrated helps your bodily functions operate to their maximum level. It can also help with mood, your energy and cognitive function.

• Supplements – Supplements for cravings, such as Sober Relief, can help restore balance in your body and reduce symptoms that exacerbate cravings.

How Sober Relief Helps Reduce Cravings

Our Sober Relief supplements are scienced-backed and nutritional, able to support your body during cravings by helping with brain function and restoring balance. This is because of the natural ingredients in our formula, which include:

• Bacopa Monnieri – This is a natural herb, and studies have shown it improves cognitive function, including memory skills and learning. It can help with brain fog and reduce stress and anxiety.

• MCT – This stands for medium-chain triglycerides. These are healthy fats that are converted into ketones, which the brain uses for energy. This faster and cleaner energy can help with quicker rebalancing in your body.

These ingredients will aid in NAD+ production in your body, increasing the efficiency of your bodily functions. This can lead to more energy, better sleep and better mood regulation.

Reducing the feelings of anxiety, brain fog and fatigue lowers the desire to self-medicate these issues with alcohol.

When it comes to supplements, it’s important to remember that they must be one part of your healthy lifestyle. Alone, they will not be enough, so combining them with exercise and eating well will help boost their positive effects.

Long-Term Craving Management

When looking for quit drinking support, there are a lot of answers and no clear ones. Stopping cravings and knowing how to do it is more about long-term management. Eventually, cravings may go but could suddenly come up again years down the line.

There are things you can do to manage cravings for the foreseeable future.

Build Habits

Research has found that building or changing habits can lead to better self-control. You want to replace your drinking routine with more positive habits that give your life more structure. This means sleeping well, getting good nutrition, regular exercise, going to therapy and attending support groups.

Track Triggers

Identifying triggers and tracking them will make them easier to avoid in the future. Once you understand your triggers, you become better at anticipating and managing them – even if you get into a situation where you know you might face one.

Preparation

Much later in your journey, you may feel ready for situations such as parties or places where you know alcohol will be. Preparing for these situations (having an escape plan if needed, getting in a positive mindset, taking a sober friend) will help you feel more confident, less nervous and even look forward to what could’ve been a scary event.

Ongoing Support

Using NAD+ for addiction recovery with Sober Relief supplements can help you maintain momentum in your sobriety, as your body works more optimally, reducing cravings. Both emotional and physical ongoing support is needed to stay true – so talk to people, be healthy and stay sober.

Check out our FAQs to get some quick info on how Sober Relief can help you.