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Alcoholism is a progressive decease and the physical symptoms of alcoholism are also progressive. The more I drank the more side effects I had to get used to due to hangovers. Here are three of my early symptoms I want to talk about.   1. Problem sleeping   2. Increased nerves   3. Hands shaking.   These can become very hard to deal with and will sometimes drive you nuts.

1.  Problem sleeping

Starting with my big problem with sleeping, I always felt that I had to drink in order for me to go to sleep.  This was an ongoing and progressive problem for me.  I always had to drink my self to sleep every night, the more I did this the more I got used to drinking before going to sleep.

This started early in my drinking career and drinking was a must every night.  To make sure I could sleep I had to make sure I always had alcohol, so where ever I was and what ever I was doing I always made sure that I was stocked at least for the night. 

If I was home great, but if I was going out I made sure to leave alcohol, beer, wine, whatever, at home for when I got back.  If I went out and I didn’t have alcohol waiting for me at home for when I got back, I made sure that I made it to a market before they closed to buy some beer and take it home. 

This is what’s called dependency and it had me by the balls.  I became really good at not running out of booze and making sure that I passed out every night instead of going to sleep like normal people. Adjusting to this was hard because I drank every night and woke up with a hangover every day. Also as I mentioned before I became a alcohol stocking freak, even though I had a stock, it didn’t last long.  Dealing with the almost daily activity of shopping for beer and liquor taking it home, putting it in my fridge and throwing out yesterday’s empty bottles was a never ending chore that with time I grew to hate. Sometimes I wished I had a large commercial dumpster in my house to make my job of getting rid of bottles easier. 

• What did you drink to sleep?

In the beginning to fall asleep was easy, 3 or 4 beers would do the job.  As my tolerance grew so did my consumption, later it was more like a 12 pack and this went on-and-on to ridiculous quantities.  I tough about medications to sleep but, alcohol was my drug of choice and worked for me better than anything else. 

• Did you get sick from this?

I really never got sick from this because like I said before my tolerance grew and I was used to drinking. As a drinker I started getting used to drinking more and more, the way I could tell I needed to drink more was, I craved it. At first 3 beers got me buzzed, then I needed a 6 pack to get the same buzz and with time this went to 8 then I eventually I had to drink a 12 pack to get the same buzz.  The more tolerance I had, the less I would get sick from drinking. 

• Did you overcome having to pass out instead of going to sleep?

No, I never found a way to fall asleep without drinking my self to sleep. I’m sure there are many other drugs but, my goal was to sleep like normal people and that I could not do.

2.   Increased nerves

It seems that as my drinking got worse, so did my nerves.  It was like a dog chasing his tale.  I drank because I wanted to relax and after the alcohol left my body I was more irritable than before, so I drank again to relive myself from this nervous feeling.  This went on from the time I started drinking to the time I quit.  My nerves just kept getting worse with my drinking. 

• Did you find anything to remedies for your nerves?

I though I was self medicating by drinking  when I felt extremely irritable, but it was just a temporary fix and if I drank to much, I would have to deal with the same, if not worse irritableness the next day.  One thing I found that helped is exercise, walking or jogging seemed to reduce my stress level.  Also saunas or steam rooms are great because I felt much better by sweating and getting rid of some toxins in my body.  When I did this I always drank a lot of water and Gatorade to keep hydrated. 

• Did people notice your irritableness?

Yes, people did notice I was sometimes very irritable, it was a feeling I could not hide. it got to the point that if I was not feeling good enough to meet people I would have a few drinks before to get normal.  People normally do this to take the edge off and that’s what I pretended I was doing.  The only problem is that I usually drank too much and instead of taking the edge off, I drank too much and got stupid.

• Is there a way to stop the irritableness caused by drinking?

Yes, what I learned was if I needed to relieve myself from this non stop tension naturally, I would cut back my drinking little by little and start drinking a lot of water and Gatorade. I did this for 2 or 3 days until I felt much better.  This flushed out the toxins in my body that gave me this tension and naturally relieved me from the stress I was feeling due to hangovers. 

3.  Hands shaking

Another symptom of drinking was that my hands were starting to shake when I had a hangover.  How I noticed this was, when I wrote something on a piece of paper my writing was getting really messy.  Also when holding up a glass of water I could tell it was shaking. This got worse as my drinking progressed and became embarrassing when I was around people. 

• Did you find any remedies for my hands shaking?

No, not any permanent ones anyway. For a temporary remedy I had a couple of drinks and this did fix it for a while. But after the alcohol leaves your body the shakes come back.  Actually when I quit drinking for good, it took me about 120 days to get rid of the problem of hands shaking. 

• Was it hard hiding this from people?

It was hard to hide, especially at work. Also writing in front of someone was embarrassing because of my hands shaking.  A couple of drinks would have solved the problem for a while, but sometimes I couldn’t have alcohol on my breath. So yes, it was hard to hide my hands shaking. 

• Does this get worse as your drinking increases?

Yes, absolutely. As my drinking continued, the quantity I drank increased.  This caused my symptoms to get worse. Towards the end of my drinking career the shaking of my hands got so bad that I could not hold up a glass of water anymore without spilling it.  I had to drink with a straw, and even this had to be done without me touching the glass or I would spill it.

These are all annoying things that just made it so hard to function correctly in my day-to-day life.  Going to work, meeting people and having to hide al this was hard.  Most of the time I fixed these problems temporarily by drinking, this made it possible for me to get normal and function normally.  I was always trying to keep a balance between drinking enough so that I could function and not drink too much that I got sloppy drunk.  This was my way of life for years.

When I used to drink I was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I was one person when I was sober and another when I drank. It was this mood altering obsession that turned into a laboratory experiment gone wrong! I thought I had found a secret magic potion, when in reality I found a mind altering poison.

• The devastation alcohol has caused me was enough to eventually scare me sober!

Towards the end of my drinking career my life was like a warewolf movie. The morning after I drank I never had a clue of what I did, where I was, or if I had hurt anybody. It was a non-stop nightmare. Since I couldn’t stop drinking, I thought the best solution to my problem was to shoot myself and finally end it.

• My drinking had escaladed almost to the point of no return

I started being afraid of my own shadow; it was like living in a Sci-Fi horror flick. After drinking hard for many years the effects of alcohol were more intense than in the beginning, they got so bad that I started hallucinating.

One night I was home alone watching TV in my living room and I remember not feeling my self that day, something felt not right. I had been drinking a lot that week and not eating right, so that night I figured I’ll only drink beer to cut back. As I was watching my movie, I started getting an uneasy feeling all around me, as if something was in the living room with me. I took a glance around and saw nothing; I thought I was being paranoid so I just got back to the movie. As I was sitting there watching the movie, this thing jumped on my shoulder and ran across my chest, I freaking out! By the time I reacted, it jumped behind the couch and disappeared. If I had to describe It, I would say it looked like some kind of little creature with a long tail. I suddenly jumped up and pushed the couch aside to see what it was, when I hear a noise coming from my bedroom. By this time I’m shaking and don’t know what to think. I run towards my room to see if I can hear where this noise is coming from. When all of a sudden from the corner of my eye, I see this things tail moving behind some books. All I can remember is my heart stopping and having chills run up and down my spine. At this point I was crazy enough to try and get this thing before it got me. So I charged at it and after wrecking my whole room and not finding a thing That night I eventually ended up scared drunk from the bad trip and ended up passed out on the floor.

• I didn’t now what was happening to me

It took me a long time to tell the difference between going crazy and a hallucination. At first I thought these hallucinations were some kind of strange phenomena happening to me. Even after I finally figured out that I was probably hallucinating, it was very frightening for me to know that if I over drank I was going to be teleported to another dimension. Let me add that going over board with my drinking happened all the time with me. My Hallucinations continued and I kept being just as freaked out about them.

• Even this was not enough to deter me from drinking

Even though I started telling the difference between real and not real, there were times that I went through some bone chilling experiences. No one needs to get to the stage of drinking I was at. Since I am an alcoholic this wasn’t a choice for me, drinking just got me there. Alcoholic hallucinations come at a later stage of alcoholism that can be life threatening and are very dangerous. They are definitely the side of drinking no one wants to meet. So, if you know you’re not an alcoholic, I can safely say, If you drink, please drink responsibly. But if you are, don’t drink at all!