 Today we are going to be talking about alcohol withdrawal which is extremely dangerous and it's one of the clear indicators that you or someone you know has a problem with alcohol. So stick around in this video as I share my experience, explain some of the science behind it and some of the solutions. Stay tuned. What's up everybody? It's Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution. Today is December 16th so in seven days if I stay sober I will be five and a half years 100% sober from both drugs and alcohol. By the way anybody out there watching this and if you're just watching this and you're struggling with alcohol or even drugs like if you think it's impossible like welcome to the club. If you would have told me five and a half years ago that I'd be even alive today I would have called you crazy. So a lot of my channel what I do here is to not only give those of you who are struggling with addiction some hope but I also do a lot of videos on how to improve your mental health if you struggle with anxiety depression or anything like that. But anyways I made another video about opiate withdrawal. My primary substance of choice that I started out with was actually alcohol. I am the son of an alcoholic mom. I swore I was never going to drink and clearly that didn't work out too well. Alcohol is the most dangerous substance out there and it's also the most legal substance out there. I don't think that as many people get help for alcoholism as they need to because it's so widely accepted around the world and because of that it's hard for people to really distinguish when they've crossed this invisible line and developed a problem. So for me personally my alcoholism progressed pretty quick. There was a lot of hard drinking and then it got to a point where I couldn't stop. For me it really progressed when I received a few promotions and arrays and I got promoted to a very high level position at a very young age and I wasn't ready for all of the stress and everything that came along with it. So while I was you know 20 years old 19 or 20 years old when I got this big big big promotion I had just been doing like the partying drinking you know I was drinking with my friends drinking with people who you know college age frat boys type stuff you know that's just what I did. But my drinking really started to progress when I was bringing home the stress from work and what ended up happening was like I had to start picking up a tall can on the way home just to go get blackout drunk and then it got so bad that I had to drink in the morning just to prepare myself for the day at work. So my drinking got really really really bad. So alcohol withdrawal for me it to be honest like I I was so ignorant and that's one of the reasons I do these videos I was so ignorant to what was even happening to my body. So the first real side of like alcohol dependency that I had was I was throwing up a lot and randomly and you know like some of the stuff is disgusting but this is just the reality of what some of these withdrawal symptoms are like. Like I was driving around because I worked at a car dealership I'd be driving around in cars like still drunk from the night before which is terrible right in customers cars so just let you know what's going on sometimes but anyways I'd be driving in a car and it would just come up in my mouth just these little small like kind of throw-ups and I would just open up the door and just puke out the car and like that's the kind of insanity that we get in when we're in active addiction whether it's alcohol or drugs like to me that was just like oh something weird's happening with my body and I was just randomly throwing up throughout the day and it was disgusting and it was terrible and yeah it was just it was it was a bad place. Now as this continued what I started to realize was was even when I was drinking in the morning around halfway through the day my hand would start shaking this is what we call like body tremors like this is one of the key indications of alcohol dependency so if you're experiencing body tremors when you're not drinking this is one of the clear signs me being so ignorant about what was happening to my body I just started going to the bar at lunch I would convince my friend like hey let's go shoot some pool but I was sneaking over the bar to get a drink because I started realizing like okay I was I was literally shaking so bad that I couldn't even eat at lunch my hand was shaking I remember one winter I was trying to eat soup and it just wasn't even working I couldn't write I couldn't do anything but when I had more to drink that went away so I wasn't thinking that maybe this is a problem I was thinking oh my body just needs alcohol like I was just completely ignorant to what was actually happening with my body so there were all these signs and my addiction was just getting worse and one of the other symptoms of alcohol withdrawal that is very bad and very dangerous is the hallucinations I remember driving from Las Vegas to California to help a friend move who lived in Los Angeles and as I'm driving there you know being Mr. Safety I wasn't drinking while I was driving you know to another state but I was hallucinating because my body needed alcohol I was legitimately seeing like demons and stuff in the sky and it was scaring the hell out of me but again I didn't know what was going on as my drinking continued and progressed and you know five and a half years ago when I finally got sober I was admitted to the hospital because I was having heart issues but in that hospital I hadn't had anything to drink and that's when the withdrawal hit me from alcohol not opiates but alcohol because they were still giving me pain medication so the opiate withdrawal was kind of being like at bay but I was hallucinating so bad I was coming in and out of these fogs and like I would start hallucinating and I was I was trying to fight the nursing staff and everything and it was I can't even imagine what these nurses were going through they were trying to help me I was trying to fight them and then they would leave my room and then I would kind of snap out of it and they'd come back in and I would apologize to them like I don't know what's wrong with me or why I'm acting like a lunatic they would leave they would come back and I would start trying to fight them again and it was just all bad so these are some of the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal that I dealt with but there are a lot more so nausea is very common anxiety is very common insomnia depression the the tremors that I talked about there's also delirium tremens alcohol is very dangerous too because it's one of the only substances where when you're actually withdrawing you can have a grandma seizure which can be fatal aside from that too when your body is trying to regain this equilibrium and figure out what the hell is going on your heart is under an immense amount of stress so on one hand you have long-term drinking which is damaging and weakening your heart and now when you're coming down from alcohol and withdrawing your heart is working even harder so a lot of people who are coming off of alcohol they can experience heart failure I actually knew somebody who passed away from a heart attack just because of alcohol withdrawal I have a video that I did when I first started this YouTube channel about Nelson Ellis from True Blood he died while withdrawing from alcohol so if you are somebody who is struggling with alcoholism if what I'm talking to you about is resonating and you're like dang I'm dependent on alcohol I need some help or if you're somebody and you know somebody who is showing these symptoms and they need help you have to have to have to have to get medical attention you should never detox from alcohol alone it is literally the most dangerous substance that you can withdraw from so you have to have medical attention even if you don't want the withdrawal medications they give you you need a nursing staff and doctors around to make sure that your heart does not explode you need you know the staff around you to make sure that you're taking care of if you happen to have a seizure like a lot of people try to do this thing on their own to prove something and they die as a result so how do they treat alcohol withdrawal when you go in there first they're going to do a whole full assessment both mentally and physically and see what's going on you they're going to check your blood pressure my blood pressure was through the roof when I went to a detox center they they legitimately thought that their um their their machine was broken they were like with your blood pressure the way it is right now like you should be dead so typically they're going to give you medications that are going to um lower your blood pressure lower your heart rate um they'll also typically give you some anti-seizure medications now some of the medications alcohol is a lot different than um opiates so typically what they're going to give you to help with the symptoms of withdrawal are medications like sometimes like lithium which um will help calm down the brain i just freaking out trying to figure out what's going on with alcohol well like without your withdrawal symptoms so um in other cases they might give you um clonopin um they'll give you like these very mild benzodiazepines so they're not going to give you xanax but they give you very very low dose uh benzodiazepines because what those are they're tranquilizers and they help bring you down as your mind and your body are freaking out all right so when you go there and typically alcohol withdrawal symptoms they can last anywhere from a week to two weeks depending on your own personal um physiology but this is why you keep following up with doctors if you go to an inpatient treatment center that has an on-site detox facility or even if they don't like sometimes you'll go to a detox and then you'll transition over to an inpatient rehab but it's good to have a nursing staff with you at all times when you're in the first two three weeks of your recovery because some of these symptoms come and go um you know they might give you medications to help with your insomnia your anxiety your depression and things like that just to kind of help balance you out um it's going to take your body a little bit of time to balance itself out so that's where the medications really really help so i hope um if if you just happen to stumble across this video i hope this helps you understand why people keep drinking sometimes these symptoms of withdrawal are so brutal that people keep drinking but if you know somebody like this i'm not telling you to pity them or or have all this sympathy for them but understand what they're going through and how dangerous it is and if you can share this video and potentially help them understand that this is something that they need help with get them some medical attention i have other videos on on this channel about how to get help you can also contact me personally i will put my instagram link right here again so if you want to DM me you can also email me at therewiredsoul at gmail.com i work for a national drug and alcohol treatment center so if you need help in that aspect like i can help you too i'm always more than happy to talk to any of the people watching these videos one of the ways that i stay sober and i say stay mentally fit is just by helping people i've helped a lot of very random strangers from all over the world and i'm more than happy to help you out too so anyways if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and if you are new here and you haven't yet click the little round subscribe button right below this box i'm always making videos about addiction recovery um overcoming mental illness so be sure that you subscribe and you can also click or tap on one of those thumbnails right there check out some of the other videos on this channel thanks so much for watching i'll see you next time