Do a drinking inventory for the last 30 days. Where do you usually drink? Who do you drink with? Why do you drink? Is it boredom, loneliness, stress, for fun, because you feel you have to - e.g. with colleagues especially senior colleagues etc.

What will you do for the next 30 days instead of drinking? If you typically go out on Friday nights with your friends make a plan to do something else. Go bowling or on a trip or meet other friends elsewhere where there is no booze. The important thing is to make a plan and stick with it.

What are you going to do instead? Variety is essential. Take the 30 days to work on your fitness - dance, exercise or go for a run instead of drinking. Perhaps you have been thinking of taking some classes but drinking took up too much of your time. Or visit family members you haven?t seen in a while or spend time with your children or grandchildren if you have them.

What about physical cravings? If it gets too tough see your doctor as he or she might advise medication or a gradual reduction rather than quitting cold turkey. You can also use things like EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique www.emofree.com). One of the best things is to distract your mind, either through exercise or something else. If you can do more things you have never done before your mind will be too busy to worry about alcohol.

Best of all is to start working on the reasons you drank too much in the first place - especially focusing on your negative thoughts.

Once you do all of these steps, you will really start to make a change and hopefully reach 30 days without drinking. Once you do that you can decide whether or not you want to continue.

Have you reached the point in your life when enough is enough with alcohol? Perhaps you have been drinking too much for years or are only now recognizing that you are starting to drink to excess. Whatever the reasons, the most important choice you can make is the one to stop drinking.

This can often be the most difficult decision to make. How can you possibly decide to stop doing something that seems impossible to live without? Won?t life become boring? Won?t your friends think you are weird and leave you? Won?t you become stressed and unable to relax?

Unfortunately this kind of thinking is what will undoubtedly find you reaching for another drink! Instead of looking at a lifetime without alcohol how about looking at quitting for the next 30 days? Can you do a month without drinking? Although it is a challenge, giving it a time frame will help you cope with the choice you have made.

The first step is to decide to go 30 days without drinking. Now you now need to plan how you are going to achieve this goal and what are you going to do instead?

My position is that you need flexibility and an assortment of other strategies, preferably healthier strategies, to help you to relax.

Drinking is often more stressful if you are drinking in noisy environments, which itself causes stress, with people who are getting you to drink up, etc. You must also factor in the damage from the toxins, the stress on your liver, body, mind, etc.

The best option, if you have a lot of stress in your life, is to deal with it as soon as you can. Delaying relaxing can create serious health problems.

What can you do instead of drinking? The tried and true remedies are often the best: meditation, yoga, deep breathing exercises,reading, going for walks in the park, spending time in silence,with your family, massages etc….

Most bars and taverns are at their fullest during the hours of 3-8; basically, after work. It?s a proven fact that many people use alcohol as a way of unwinding after a long day.

When I first quit drinking many of my friends were in disbelief. I was often asked ?How can you relax without alcohol??

It surprised me that people couldn?t conceive of enjoying themselves without the involvement of alcohol.

It?s a common misconception that there is only one way to achieve a particular desired effect. For example if you want to get fit and healthy, how many different ways are there of achieving this goal?

Think of a few - yoga, jogging, weight training, aerobics, martial arts, rollerblading, soccer, gymnastics, hockey, etc.

There are a variety of options available and you undoubtedly will need a combination of these to achieve the desired goal. Still, for the sake of argument, let?s say you relied on only one way of getting fit e.g. jogging.

If jogging was your only way to become fit what would you do if you were injured, if you got bored of it, or it becomes too cold?

Once you begin it will be very important to drink an ample amount of water. You should always be sure to drink water but even more so during the detox, 6-8 glasses of water per day is recommended.

You also will want to try to figure out where and when you normally drink and, in addition to that, why you drink. Once you have figured out why you drink you need to do something different when these circumstances occur. E.g. if you usually go out with everyone from work on a certain night, don?t.

Try new activities instead of drinking. Endeavor to try some physical exercise or even dancing? do something different. Get together with friends you haven?t seen in a while or meet new people in an environment where there isn?t much alcohol.

A great idea is to put something on the wall by your bed. Make sure you put it somewhere so you can see it each morning which will remind you to have a fantastic day. You can come up with whatever has meaning for you and will get you into a good state - rather than worrying how to survive work or cope without alcohol etc.

A final idea is to reward yourself! What can you do for yourself that will cause you to look forward to it once your detox is over ? something that is not alcohol related?

Then just do it! You will feel great and hopefully you will find yourself drinking less thereafter.

If you have been drinking too much during the holidays and hate the tiredness and lack of energy you are experiencing you might want consider going on an alcohol detox.

Doing an alcohol detox means you cut out or cut down on your level of alcohol consumption for a set period of time. Generally two weeks is a good period if you have been drinking more than two or three times per week. The basic idea is for you to allow your body a bit of time and space to recover.

Before you begin the detox process, however, if you have been drinking heavily and feel physical symptoms of not drinking such as shaking etc. definitely check with your doctor. You may have a physical addiction to alcohol and quite possibly will need to wean yourself off alcohol much more gradually.

However if you have none of those physical withdrawal symptoms you are ready to begin an alcohol detoxification program. The first thing you want to do is prepare. The second thing you want to do is to prepare.

Before you begin you will need to figure out what you want to accomplish during the two weeks and what you will be doing during that time you would normally have spent drinking.

A great tool available for those who desire to quit drinking is the medication Disulfram, aka ?Antabuse.? When you take the prescription drug Antabuse it hinders your body?s ability to metabolize alcohol; basically, you?ll get sick if you drink.

The effect has been described as the worst hangover of your life, which is a good way to phrase it for problem drinkers.

The idea may sound horrible and something you would never willingly do, but think about it. Antabuse makes quitting drinking easier because you only have to have willpower for 5 minutes a day, long enough to take the drug. After taking it you need no real willpower to stay dry.

his little pharmaceutical miracle can turn the arguing around. Remember that you need to be careful. While taking it you are very sensitive to alcohol. Even small amounts in shampoo or deodorant can make you ill. Consult a doctor and do your homework.

Don?t start taking it unless you?ve been alcohol free for 72 hours, and don?t drink for as much as 2 weeks after you stop taking it.

As the behavior becomes routine, the last thing that occurs to us is to pick up the telephone and get help. We are slowly drawn into the thinking that the alcoholic should be protected. We learn to cover for him, lie for him and hide the truth. We learn to keep secrets, no matter how bad the chaos and insanity all around us has become.

Few realize that by “protecting” the alcoholic with little lies and deceptions to the outside world we are in fact creating a situation that makes it easier for him to continue in his downward spiral. Rather than help the alcoholic we actually enable him to get worse.

The disease will continue to progress for the alcoholic until he is ready to reach out and get help for himself. Waiting for the alcoholic to reach out is not the family?s only choice.

Other family members can begin to recover whether the alcoholic is still drinking or not. But it can’t happen until somebody picks up the telephone and asks for help. There is hope and help out there.

A few years ago there was a story going around the 12-step rooms about a frog in the water.

The story goes like this:

If you put a frog into a pan of boiling water, it will jump out faster than the eye can see. But if you put the frog into a pan of water that is the frog’s body temperature and then slowly turn up the heat the frog will stay in the water — even to the point of boiling alive.

Why? Because the frog does not notice the gradual change in temperature.

Alcoholism works much the same way… the heat is slowly and continuously turned up but nobody notices the change. Cunning and baffling!

It?s a progressive disease. It typically begins with casually accepting unacceptable behavior. As time passes the behavior has slowly grown more and more intolerable, but it is still being accepted and becomes the “norm.”

Alcoholism is an illness that involves every member of the family; a case in point is the fact that kids who come into Alateen rooms generally report that they have more problems dealing with the non-drinking parent than they do the alcoholic.

What? I don’t have a problem! He… him… he’s the alcoholic! He’s the one who is in trouble all the time! He’s the one who causes all the problems…

This might be true, but the alcoholic is also predictable. Kids can read an alcoholic like a book. Kids know when it’s the right time to ask for extra money, or if they can go out with their friends; they also know when it’s time to make themselves scarce and get out of the way. As far as the alcoholic is concerned kids know the routine. However, they never know where the bedraggled non-drinking parent is coming from next.

One minute the non-drinking parent is screaming at the alcoholic and the next minute she may be compassionately rescuing him from the consequences of his latest episode, i.e. dutifully cleaning up his messes, making excuses for him and accepting an increasing degree of unacceptable behavior.

The truth of alcoholism affects the entire family?s life, the attitudes and thinking of everyone changes perhaps more dramatically than it does for the drinking spouse and is often hard to recognize. Why? Because it creeps up slowly.