Alcohol abuse can mess up your life. It can ruin your relationships, damage your career and affect your health.
This explains why there is the need to stop taking alcohol and start on your journey to recovery. However, it is not that easy especially if you have an abuse problem. Before you start on your journey to detox from alcohol, here is what you need to know.
There Are Withdrawal Symptoms
You will experience withdrawal symptoms once you start to detox from alcohol. The symptoms can be severe if the alcohol abuse was excessive.
Some of the symptoms include anxiety, depression, irritability, insomnia, paranoia, visual hallucinations, seizures, and delirium tremens, among others. So, you could just have mild anxiety, or get life-threatening delirium tremens.
In not-so-severe cases, the withdrawal symptoms include irritability, sweating, fatigue, anxiety, vomiting, and mood swings. In severe cases of alcohol abuse, the withdrawal symptoms are delirium tremens, seizures, hand tremors, rapid heart rate, vomiting, sweating, and irritability.
Make sure you are mentally prepared to deal with these withdrawal symptoms before you start the detox process.
You can experience symptoms of withdrawal within 6 hours from when you took the drink last. They become severe after 36 hours to 72 hours and can last up to 10 days.
You Will Need Professional Help
Sometimes the withdrawal symptoms can be so severe that you may not have enough strength to deal with them on your own. No matter how mentally prepared you may feel, the symptoms can be overwhelming.
Therefore, before you detox, know that you will require professional help. Remember some withdrawal symptoms can endanger your health.
Professional help will assist you to deal with these symptoms and make your alcohol detoxification process easier and more successful.
Notably, most who try to do alcohol detox at home do not succeed. Not only does this cause physical health problems, but it can also lead to feeling inadequate, all of which may affect future attempts to detoxify.
Therefore, you should visit a medical facility to get professional help to ensure you are successful in your substance abuse recovery. This is especially important if your addiction is severe or you had tried to detox previously on your own and failed.
Detox Is Only the First Step
Detox from alcohol is the first step you take when you want to quit drinking. However, the goal is to stop drinking and aim for long-term sobriety. At this time, you will need all the help you can get. That’s why it’s recommended that you go do detoxification under medical supervision. This could be by an addiction psychiatrist, a doctor, or a nurse specializing in addiction.
After the detox, you will need ongoing support so that you can maintain sobriety in the long term. Therefore, you can opt for either inpatient or outpatient treatment. Under the inpatient treatment, you live in a facility with medical help where you get support and therapy. In outpatient treatment, you live at home and attend therapy sessions based on scheduled appointments.
Whether to go inpatient or outpatient should depend on personal preference, the severity of the addiction, and the possibility of developing life-threatening symptoms. For mild cases, you can go for outpatient treatment while severe cases of withdrawal symptoms call for inpatient treatment. Unfortunately, it is not possible to predict if you have mild or severe withdrawal symptoms. That’s why it’s recommended that you go through the detox process under the supervision of medical personnel.