Binge drinking is a serious problem that often goes unrecognized. Without help, your habit can be deadly. Click here and find out how to stop binge drinking.

Binge drinking is a serious problem that often goes unrecognized. Without help, your habit can be deadly. If you have a problem with binge drinking and you’re tired of dealing with the issues it can cause, read on. If half-measures have availed you nothing, use this guide to learn how to stop binge drinking.

What is Binge Drinking?

Binge drinking is typically defined as consuming large quantities of alcohol in a short amount of time. This typically means four drinks for a woman or five for a man over a span of 2 hours or less. Chances are, if you’re a binge drinker, you don’t need this defined for you. Binge drinking can cause wreak havoc on your relationships and career. Binge drinking contributes to poor choices that can ruin a marriage, destroy your health, and even end lives.

How to Stop Binge Drinking

Often the only way to curb a binge drinking habit is by stopping entirely. Binge drinkers often find it difficult to say no after only one or two drinks. Binge drinking by nature doesn’t always happen at the most convenient times.

The options presented here are meant only to be suggestive, however, they have been studied and recommended by doctors and the most knowledgeable experts in the field.

Detox

Medical detox can be a necessary step for those who are looking to quit their binge drinking habit. Medical detox is important because of health hazards that can occur when a person who is addicted to alcohol shuts off the body’s supply.

Finding an in-patient medical detox or rehabilitation clinic is easy and is often covered by insurance. This is the easiest way to receive treatment, learn about your condition, and take yourself out of familiar surroundings. Removing yourself from situations and surroundings that encourage your binge drinking is always a good idea.

Finding a rehab that uses the 12 step method is important, like this Acton Rehab. 12 step success has been well documented. Because of this success, the steps originally used to treat alcoholics have been used to cure a variety of issues. Issues that use the 12-step method treatment method range from over-eating to over-spending.

Find a Meeting

If you are unable to afford medical detox and don’t know how to stop binge drinking, you aren’t out of luck. 12 Step Meetings are free. The best part about 12 step meetings is that they are EVERYWHERE. You’ll be surprised to see just how many are active in your local area. Meetings happen many times a day, there are meeting held early in the morning and meetings occurring late into the night.

Finding a meeting is easy. Meeting locators and apps are great resources for those who want to figure out how to stop drinking.

Meetings typically start with a reading of the code of ethics, which is followed by a speaker. (There are meetings that break with the speaker format, but this is an example of what can typically be expected) The speaker will not tell you how to stop binge drinking, but they will give a short summary of their experience, strength, and hope. They will share what worked for them and how they did it.

At the end of the meeting, there will often be a show of hands. These people are recovering alcoholics who are currently sponsoring and are willing to help you on a day to day basis. This is no small offering. This means that these people are willing to set aside time every week to work with a spondee and take them through the Twelve Steps.

What Are the Twelve Steps?

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are a powerful tool for changing your relationship with the world around you as you venture into sobriety. These steps come with a detailed work plan that helps binge drinkers repair the underlying issues. These issues are often the underlying reason binge drinkers began to struggle with alcohol in the first place.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Working the Steps

If you want to know how to stop binge drinking, the secret is in the work. Finding a sponsor at meeting will set you on a path to changing your life forever.

Your sponsor will typically be someone of your same gender who has already made it through the twelve steps. As you work these steps, your sponsor will help you figure out major keys to understanding. This includes unpacking the wrongs that have been done to you and the wrongs you have done to others.

These steps require absolute honesty and willingness. They require a willingness to admit your faults, repair what can be repaired, and actively work to keep “your side of the street clean”.

The Twelve Traditions

So how does all of this stuff work without falling apart? It’s estimated that 114,000 meetings now exist in over 170 countries. How can so many meetings stand on their own but still present the consistency needed to offer the same tools to alcoholics? These groups hold these twelve traditions as the basis of their meetings:

1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon AA unity.
2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority – a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.
3. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
4. The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.
5. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole.
6. Each group has but one primary purpose-to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
7. An AA group ought never endorse, finance or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
8. Every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.
9. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
10. AA, as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve
11. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.
12. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.
13. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

Some meetings may appeal to you more so than others. Once you find a group that you feel most comfortable with, you can choose to make that your home group.

You can take a commitment at that meeting to stay involved. Commitments range from being the person who makes the coffee, to the person who stacks chairs after the meeting.

It doesn’t cost money to go to meetings. Membership is free. At the end of meetings they often take donations (typically around $1) but it is not required. You are not looked down upon if you don’t have a dollar to throw in the basket. However, if you want to give back, taking a commitment is a great way to contribute to the group with your time.

Maintaining your Sobriety

Using these tools, your sponsor or rehab counselor will help you make a plan for success. This may include changing your “playmates and play places” for a while.

It is important to remember that no one person is your god. Sponsors, counselors, and meeting goers are not perfect people. However, they are all working toward becoming better versions of themselves and free from the chains of alcohol.

The words ‘God’ and ‘higher power’ come up a lot in the AA literature, however, you do not need to become religious. It just means acknowledging that there is something else bigger than you.

That can mean picking the AA group as a whole to be your higher power or whatever else you deem to be something bigger than you.

You’ve tried to do it yourself, but it can be difficult or impossible to conquer binge drinking alone.

Think about it this way: You’ve made alcohol your higher power. It showed you how powerful it is by running your life. It just means shifting that power away to something else. Something that isn’t ruining your life.

You should call the shots in your own life. Not alcohol. You’ll be surprised at how amazing life can be when you no longer have to worry about covering up for the mistakes you’ve made while under the influence of alcohol.