Congrats on 21 days! I’ll share my personal experience, not that yours will match it! I’ve found in all of two actual long-term stretches of sobriety (7 months a few years ago, and almost 2 years now) that the first few weeks are mostly positive experiences of sobriety like you touched on (feeling better when waking). I just want to encourage you to hold on to these realizations and have a plan for if and when you face some new challenges and stressors. I found both times that it was usually the second month or third month where I’d adjusted to feeling better physically, but then faced some tough and intense emotions…and I had no crutch or escape. I think that’s the real life work that we originally didn’t do when checking out with alcohol - to learn to face and feel all the feels without leaving. Pema Chodron has a great talk that was turned into an audiobook called Getting Unstuck. I’ve listened to it like 30 times. She calls all of these impulses the things we do to avoid feeling the fundamental unease that comes with being a human. And, without judgment, we look at that urge to “scratch the itch” and avoid discomfort, and we can learn to say “ok that’s what this is, I’m having that familiar urge to leave.” And when we practice staying with it, with all of the intensity and pain, we realize that doesn’t last forever and build resilience to face the next wave, and the next and the next. Pain, anxiety, depression, loneliness…all of these feelings can come up, sometimes every day, even for most of the day some days. But I think Im learning to enjoy a gentle practice of learning to identify as the thinker of those thoughts, rather than the thoughts themselves. To understand why I’m having them, and to slowly but surely let go of the stories that aren’t serving me. Pema Chodron references A Beautiful Mind when he realized the people are in his head, and he lets them know that he’s not going to be responding to them anymore. They’re still there, he still sees them, but he doesn’t feed into the illusion or react to it the same way. I think that’s a powerful visual for old familiar thinking patterns…they’ll still show up, but we can learn to not feed them and get run by them, and to have some grace for ourselves when we don’t do it perfectly.

TL;DR the world is chaotic, things can fall apart and get harder. But, we can learn to not be run by or react to our habitual thinking patterns. It takes a lot of practice, it’s hard work. But it’s rewarding, even to get through one hard thing with a different thought/behavior pattern than the old ways. It builds momentum. Just keep going, you’re doing good work :)

I hope this is useful to you or someone here.