Sometimes boredom in sobriety looks like not wanting to be around anyone. On the one hand, you have no idea what you’re supposed to do with yourself. A lot of people don’t feel good when they first get sober, so it’s totally understandable if your feelings are all over the place.
Sometimes being sober is boring because your life revolves around alcohol.
I’ll be exploring that in a future piece, but for now, let’s stay focused on the more everyday boredom that drinking out of boredom shows up during chores, traffic, and those painfully slow moments of life. And take a closer look at if reaching for the bottle is really the answer we want. Alcohol feels like the easy fix for boredom because we’ve been trained—by culture, media, and marketing—to see it that way. From sitcoms to beer ads, we’ve absorbed the message that a drink can turn dull moments into enjoyable ones.
Reasons You Might Feel Bored in Sobriety
There is a strong relationship between boredom, stress, and drug or alcohol use. It’s therefore no surprise that during the pandemic, the rate of alcohol consumption increased among people that reported COVID-19 related stress. The pandemic has been here and, at the time of this writing, is continuing to keep our world in a state of flux. This puts those who have formed an attachment to alcohol in a very vulnerable position.
- We go around on auto-pilot when it comes to certain patterns or behaviors.
- Bars are more frequently providing alcohol-free beverages to help encourage safe drinking habits and reduce risks of accidents caused by driving while intoxicated.
- And boredom can become the empty space where that question echoes the loudest.
- It’s even harder if your loved ones don’t support your sobriety.
- Since then, she has worked across various settings including outpatient, inpatient, and community corrections programs.
How journaling helps beyond boredom.
Whatever the reason for your boredom, drinking can create a negative cycle around it. So whether you are an absent-minded drinker or a lonely or anxious one, what can you do to prevent drinking out of boredom? Here are 5 tips to help you make changes to your drinking habits that could help you feel better, for good. Drinking because of boredom happens because home is where we feel safe, unjudged – it’s where we can relax.
Boredom is a key reason people give for drinking too much and drinking out of boredom like this can become almost a subconscious activity, something that you do whilst doing something else. Outside AspenRidge, Jordan enjoys rock climbing, snowboarding, and playing volleyball and soccer. She believes she was probably a rodeo queen in another life and recharges by spending time with friends and family. An estimated 15 million people throughout the U.S. struggle with alcohol use disorder, but only 10% receive treatment.
Stay Physically Active
In Psychology (Clinical Counseling) and a master’s in Addiction Counseling Psychology at Colorado State University. She is an LACC working toward her LAC, with plans to pursue the LPC. In Criminal Justice/Psychology from Columbia University (2009) and a B.S.
This will include healthy eating, movement, meditation, mindfulness and spirituality. Outside of work, she’s a devotee of Krishna, and her friends call her Karunya Shakti, which means compassionate energy. She enjoys singing and dancing in kirtan and reading ancient Vedic literature like the Bhagavad Gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam. If she weren’t so damn good at her job, she says she would probably be an electrical engineer.
Problems Caused by Drinking Out of Boredom
Boredom and isolation are known relapse triggers for people with substance use disorders. An important way to safeguard your sobriety is to be aware of this and take steps to mitigate it. For other people, drinking alcohol out of boredom is a much more active choice – they drink to cope with negative feelings like anxiety or loneliness.
She brings 11 years of experience as a mental-health and substance-use nurse and is currently in the Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program at Chamberlain (expected December 2026). Her clinical style is calm, collaborative, and evidence-informed, focused on supporting clients and care teams. If you have been using alcohol to cope with boredom for a while, you may even find yourself starting to drink preemptively before boredom hits. Over time, it can dramatically diminish our tolerance to boredom, and our brain starts needing that loop to get through anything tedious at all. Surround yourself with people that support you and help you in whatever you’re going through in the present moment. It can be your friends, colleagues, or family who know you for ideas of things you can do to fill your time differently.
- It’s important to understand that achieving sobriety is possible.
- The good news is that your brain can adjust and restore balance to your internal world.
- When I drank alcohol, I could (and did) sit and do nothing for hours.
- Before AspenRidge, she spent six years in substance-use and mental-health roles.
- Every month, we launch fun challenges, like Dry/Damp January, Mental Health May, and Outdoorsy June.
Whether it’s your partner, friends or colleagues, ask those who know you for ideas of things you can experiment with to fill your time differently. Don’t assume people are too busy to see you, all they need is to know that you would like to meet up. Everyone reacts to boredom differently, but the way we react is vital to our health and well-being.
So many people quit drinking and end up walking around in a dopamine deficit state, struggling to find joy in anything. Now that you know the chemical reason for your boredom, let’s explore additional factors that might be contributing to these feelings. When you use alcohol (or any substance) to artificially boost serotonin and dopamine levels in your brain, you create an imbalance in the brain.
Serotonin depletion can cause major mood swings and feelings of sadness, anxiety, and irritability. To unpack some of the underlying reasons you feel bored right now, it helps to understand what alcohol does to your brain. It’s pretty normal to reduce the entire experience of boredom in sobriety to missing alcohol and believing that getting drunk is the primary way you (and everyone else) have fun. The Reframe app equips you with the knowledge and skills you need to not only survive drinking less, but to thrive while you navigate the journey.
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