What To Expect During Alcohol Detox: Alcohol Withdrawal Symptoms

If you think you have an alcohol problem and you're considering stopping, hey, that is wonderful. I am so excited for you. There's a ton of resources on this channel all about that. But before you go and just cold turkey the alcohol, please watch this entire video because alcohol can be dangerous to stop cold turkey. And I want you to understand how this process works. Now, there are 10 main symptoms of alcohol withdrawal that can vary from mild to severe. I'm going to go through each one of those symptoms, explain to you why those symptoms are happening, and how to gauge whether a symptom is on the milder end or on the more severe end. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth. I'm a master addiction counselor, and I've been helping people and families overcome addiction for more than 20 years now. This channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life and your family back on track. And over here at Put the Shell down, we are all about empowerment. We think you do have power in the situation, whether it's for yourself or for your loved one. And we want to empower you with all the knowledge you need to take your life and family back. So today's video is going to lean a little heavier on the science. We're going to be talking about alcohol detox. Specifically. I'm going to go through the top 10 alcohol withdrawal symptoms that you're likely to experience if you're trying to detox yourself. Now, this is not meant to be a replacement from seeking medical advice. This is actually intended to encourage you to seek medical advice so that you can come off of alcohol safely. First, I want to start out by explaining sort of the big picture issue, and then we're going to narrow down into those 10 symptoms we talked about. So you probably already know, most people already know that alcohol is a depressant. So when you drink alcohol, it depresses your central nervous system. Well, when you're drinking alcohol regularly, what happens is your brain starts to try to counteract all of that central nervous system depressant by producing more excitatory central nervous system chemicals trying to get you back into balance. Because if you just kept depressing the central nervous system, you might get to the point where your heart rate or your breathing got too depressed. So your brain is constantly trying to get you back in balance. It's a scientific concept you probably learned back in biology or psychology called homing. Homeostasis means trying to keep you in the levels after a while, if you're drinking regularly, your brain just gets on autopilot, producing these additional excitatory neurochemicals, trying to rebalance you. In fact, it doesn't even necessarily wait until you start drinking. If you're drinking pretty continuously, it will be continuously producing this counteracting brain chemical. Or if you're used to drinking at certain times of day, your brain kind of gets like a muscle memory and it will start producing these excitatory chemicals at that time of day. It's that biological clock at work. The big concept here you need to understand is if all of a sudden you stop pouring in the central nervous system depressant, your brain doesn't necessarily get that message right away, and it continues to produce those excitatory central nervous system brain chemicals. There's one in particular called glutamate that's really important in this formula. So if you think of it like a balance beam or like a seesaw, and all of a sudden you remove one end off of that seesaw, what happens? You a kid and been on seesaw and somebody jumps off, bam, you're going to hit the ground fast because there's nothing over here to balance it out. It takes several days for your brain to restabilize and reduce those excitatory neurochemicals that are being released. It is that imbalance, that flooding of excitatory chemicals and that like cold turkey of anything to balance it out that creates almost all of these alcohol withdrawal symptoms. And it is also because of that that alcohol withdrawal and detox can be life threatening. It's actually one of the more serious and severe drugs to withdraw from. I'm not saying necessarily that it's that much harder, but medically it can be more serious. Once we go through these signs and symptoms, I think you're going to understand why that is even more so. One of the most common alcohol detox symptoms that you're likely to run across is nausea and vomiting. And that can range from mild to constant vomiting and even constant dry heaving. And the reason this is happening, happening is because over the course of time, the alcohol has eroded your stomach lining. And so your stomach doesn't handle food or nutrition very well anymore. And for a lot of people, when they get stuck in this cycle, they continue to drink to alleviate that stomach discomfort. Because initially in the short term, alcohol will sort of coat the stomach lining and you'll feel initially a lot better. That's why you experience this symptom more in the withdrawal state. Now, the rest of these symptoms that we're about to talk about have a little bit more to do with that over excited nervous system. The second symptom is actually very common. You probably know what it is, it is tremor and this has a big range with it. Sometimes someone can have a tremor that you can't really even see but if you touch their hand you might could feel it. It can go from that all the way up to the entire hand arm, everything shaking and that's very, very visible. And again this comes from those over excited brain chemicals. Everything is just on Supercharged hyper overdrive, 100 miles an hour because there's no brakes. It's like the alcohol is gone and that was our braking system. Now eventually this will rebalance itself but it takes several days to get back medically stable. The next really common alcohol withdrawal detox symptom is having the sweats. Now the fancy word, hopefully I'm saying this right, proximal sweats, which is basically just fancy for what most people call like night sweats or maybe even cold sweats. Now you may think that this is your body just trying to sort of detox and get rid of the alcohol. And yeah, that's a little bit of it, like it's trying to get out of your body. But mostly the reason why this happens is again because of that overexcited nervous system. Your heart's beating faster, you know, your blood is just pumping hardcore and just like if you were to be exercising and that is what's causing these sweats. Now it's, it can be mild, like maybe someone's palm is just a little damp all the way to like full out drenched in sweat. If you see these symptoms more on the severe end, please pay attention to these because they can be dangerous. Now those first three are very common, you probably even knew about those. These next symptoms might be a little surprising to you and honestly these can be the very dangerous ones. So please pay attention. Number four is anxiety. We when you stop drinking your anxiety is going to get jacked up, it's going to go through the roof. It's going to feel almost like a physical anxiety. It can also be accompanied with worried stressful thoughts. But it's like that in your body type of anxiety because your nervous system is all agitated. If it's on the mild end you might just feel mildly anxious. If it is on the severe end it could feel like a full out panic attack. In fact, a lot of people who have drinking problems experience this at night. Not even when they're trying to detox from alcohol. But if you're drinking alcohol to go to sleep at night. Eventually your liver filters all that alcohol out and then you're going into withdrawal in your sleep. You may wake up with your head going 100 miles an hour feeling very anxious, can't sleep, restless. You're actually in the withdrawal state when that is happening. A lot of people have this every night or sometimes like in the wee early morning hours, however long it takes your liver to get all that alcohol out of your system. Now the next thing that goes along with that is agitation. And agitation, yes, this can be like psychological. You can be irritable. Obviously if you've got all this going on, you're gonna be irritable and grumpy. But here I really mean like a psychomotor agitation, like a fidgetiness, a moving, that tremor we talked about. It can go from just slight agitation all the way up to constant pacing. And in severe cases, like thrashing around. The next one is called tactile disturbance. Now that might sound a little fancy, but it's not as fancy as it sounds. Tactile just means feeling. So when you're in alcohol draw, all your senses are going to be hyped up. We're going to talk about several of them. This first one is the senses. Like on your skin, it can feel like something's touching you. When you have tactile disturbance, it can feel like everything is overly sensitive, like the air is brushing on you wrong. If someone. You know how it is when you have the flu and someone touches you, it almost feels like it hurts, kind of like that. On the mild end, it can feel like itchiness or tingling or numbing, maybe even like pins and needles. But on the severe end, it can be full out tactile hallucinations. But there's actually such thing as tactile hallucinations. And that's when you feel things that aren't there. For example, it might feel like bugs crawling on your skin or something that's moving on your skin. That's called a tactile hallucination. You may also have auditory hallucinations, and that is the same thing, but involves your hearing. And it's very similar to the tactile disturbance, but it's auditory disturbance. On the mild end of it, it feels like your ears are just really sensitive. Sounds may feel very irritating to you. Kind of like someone turned the volume up way too loud. You may feel like you're sort of like hyper aware of sounds. You may even feel like the sounds sort of frighten you or make you jump or you might feel like you have that like startle response to sound. And this can range all the way up to auditory hallucinations and that is hearing things that are not there. Now anytime someone has hallucinations or delusions, there's a good chance that those can be paranoid. In nature. When you're having auditory hallucinations, tactile hallucinations, and you feel paranoid, it can be very, very scary and, and even dangerous. Now just like you can have the tactile disturbance and the auditory disturbance, you can have visual disturbance on the mild end. Again, it feels like the lights are just too bright, it hurts your eyes. It may feel like the lights are like different colors and normal basic lights can feel like it's just really painful or hurts your eyes. That's the mild end. And that can range all the way up to the severe end. Again where you're seeing things that are not there. Another symptom that you probably are going to have is a headache. It can feel like a fullness in the head or like there's a band squeezing on your head or maybe even you just feel like really light headed, almost like you're not getting enough air or something. And then there's disorientation. And this again can be very dangerous. If you've got alcohol withdrawal severe, it can get to the point where you're no longer aware of who you are, where you are, why you're there. Like you can get completely disoriented. As you can imagine that's a very scary symptom. When your central nervous system gets over stimulated, you run the risk of having a full out seizure. Now the seizure end is part of it, but there's also when you're having hallucinations and psychosis and if it's paranoid and you're thinking all these crazy things are happening. People can make impulsive and scary and unsafe decisions when they're in that state of mind. It's because of these reasons that we always recommend getting a medical evaluation before you just cold turkey it. If it's been a long time since you've stayed more than a couple of days sober, then just at least talk to your doctor about it. I'm not saying that you necessarily have to go into medical detox, but I do want you to be informed with the right information to make these decisions. Typically you're looking at somewhere between five and seven days for acute alcohol detox and withdrawal symptoms. Now I'm going to put a link in the description for you so you can download a clinical alcohol Withdrawal scale. I don't want you to use this instead of going to see the doctor, but I do want you to have it so you can be aware of what the symptoms are, what the range is. So that if you or a loved one sees that you're getting into that dangerous level, then please seek some medical help. There are plenty of ways that you can be medically detox. Basically what they do is they give you some sort of medication, usually some sort of like anti seizure medicine and maybe a central nervous system depressant of some sort. And they taper it down each day so that it's not like someone jumped off the end of your seesaw. So you have that gradual comedown. Now you might be thinking to yourself, well, can't you just do that with alcohol? And you're right. In theory you could do that. In theory you could drink a little less each day. And I'm sure it's been done, but I gotta tell you, I haven't really seen it get done that way. That's the nature of an alcohol problem. Plus on top of that, when you drink alcohol, it basically turns off your off button. So if you're trying to drink less every day, but you're turning off your off button, then you lose the capacity to be able to make those good choices, to drink less and less and less. It's one of those things that sounds good in theory, but doesn't always work that way in reality. I hope this has been helpful for you. Be sure to download that alcohol withdrawal scale. It's totally free. And if you want more information on how to overcome an alcohol problem for yourself or a loved one, subscribe to this channel. Because alcoholism is for sure something that you can beat. And despite this scary video, it doesn't even have to be a horrible process.