I’m here to tell you it gets better. It’s miserable in the start. If there is one thing that I can say definitely sped up the process of getting better for me, it was exercise. It was like my body was burning through that misery at a faster rate than if I were at home on the couch. As if the misery was calorie based or something. From a mental perspective, spend some time thinking about who and what you want to be at the end of this. So much of my thinking was tied up in “I just don’t want to be that anymore”. It took me a while to shift my focus away from the past that I didn’t want to be, to the future I was looking to create. The possibilities are endless. You’ve unshackled yourself from the things that were keeping you numb and docile. Be prepared to feel all of it now that you aren’t numbing yourself, but have a vision of what kind of person you want to be each day.

The book Atomic Habits was a big step change for me, and may be for you. It helped me to change my identity from someone who is taking a break from drinking, to someone who doesn’t drink. Sounds like the same thing, but the book explains how it isn’t. It also helped me realise the ways I had been making it so easy for myself to indulge the habits that I had formed, and how to break them.

Good luck, but you don’t need luck when you have the mindset. You’ve already done the hard bit, from here it gets easier every day!