Addiction is a shortcut to feelings of success. Drugs and alcohol are addictive because success feels good. But instead of working hard, achieving milestones, and getting the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well-done, alcohol just slips in those effervescent good feelings without having to do a lick of work. It’s a cheat to make your brain think you’ve succeeded, but you haven’t done a thing.

After a lifetime of addiction, my neural pathways were pretty convinced alcohol was what I needed. As an addict, I looked forward to drinking more than anything. That had the effect of making everything that wasn’t food, cigarettes or alcohol totally uninteresting. In sobriety, I’ve had to learn to look closer. And it turns out that there are all kinds of interesting things to pay attention to. Trees. The contents of my mind. Outer space. My cat. 

In AA circles, they say, “I’m a wrong-thinking person. My first thought is usually wrong.” That is, as an addict, I can’t trust that my brain is going to lead me to the right conclusion. This is the same brain that led me to drink, over and over, until the problems were unavoidable. This is the same brain that drove me to attempt suicide – talk about a fatal flaw. This is the brain that convinced me that life was not worth living unless I was drunk as often as possible.

I was somewhat candid with medical professionals about my drinking. I was certainly up-front about my crippling depression. They would gently advise me that alcohol is a depressant, and was certainly making my mental health worse. My wrong-thinking brain would guffaw and snort. How on earth can alcohol be a depressant when it makes me so happy? The only time I feel good is when I drink. If I didn’t drink, I’d have no relief from depression at all. 

I reached a point where drinking had nothing new to offer me. Well, the new things had potential to be really bad things – things like work problems, legal problems, money problems. I had had all the benders, including some genuinely good times with people I still love. I had experienced plenty of fallout, and it was clearly getting worse. What I didn’t know was what sobriety had to offer me. It wasn’t obvious at first; it felt like the main offering was deprivation for the first few weeks. 

But before too long, I started doing things with that time that I had never imagined myself doing. A few months after I quit, I, as a person with zero handy skills, single-handedly refinished my floors and painted two rooms in my house. Had you asked my miserable, newly sober self in August why I got sober, I would not have said, “So I can refinish my floors.” But by December, that’s what I was doing. I couldn’t have envisioned what I would want to accomplish as a sober person – I had to quit to find out. Within only a few months, I was charging hard on a new and deeply satisfying career, and within a couple of years, I was writing this blog.

In getting sober, there’s definitely some pain involved. It is not easy to deny your poor wrong-thinking brain the thing it loves most in the world. The gains you get over the long term are impossible to see after only a short time without drinking, but they’re there. Finding out takes time. For myself, as I’ve said before, I did not know how much alcohol was standing in my way until it wasn’t any more. My life had gotten so small, and was so devoid of actual success, that drinking was the only thing that made me feel good any more. Here’s a correlation/causation conundrum for you: My depression was already improving by the time I quit drinking. But after I quit, it went away altogether. Was it contributing to my depression all along? I’d have to say yes. Can you believe it, the people who finished medical school and had practiced medicine for decades were actually right?  

In The Sober Diaries, Clare Pooley offers the most cogent description I have seen of the effects of alcohol on brain chemistry for the drinker: “Dopamine is the brain’s feel-good chemical, a natural high. Over time, the [drinker’s] brain susses out that it’s producing far too much of the stuff, so it compensates by kicking into reverse gear and actively decreases our level of dopamine. That’s why, gradually, drinkers feel more and more depressed, and start to believe that only alcohol will make us feel better. We’re not actually wrong.”

I didn’t have to lose everything to hit bottom. I still had my family, house, wealth, health, job, friends – they call that a “high-bottom drunk.” But I had lost my ability to live a life. I had lost the ability to choose to do something other than drink. There were things I didn’t know I had lost, because I didn’t know they were there to find. Self-efficacy. Self-respect. A sense of accomplishment. A new relationship with my mind and thoughts. More AA wisdom: You’ve hit bottom once you stop digging. There was still farther down to go, and I didn’t want to know what was down there. 

Alcohol is a poor substitute for success. When I turned my life over to the custody of alcohol, it was small, and full of pain and shame. I quit drinking because I was afraid. And rightly so. But what no one told me was that there was a whole huge and beautiful world waiting for me to shake off my alcohol-induced myopia and see it there, shining and glorious and full of experiences that are better than anything I enjoyed in my drinking life. If I hadn’t quit drinking, I would have never known. If you are wondering if your alcohol use is keeping you from experiencing what life has to offer, you are not likely to know until you give sobriety a good long try. What you find can be miles better than a cheap shortcut to happiness.