4 Stages of Alcoholism

has started a shopping trip.

“I recommend shopping trip to the first day.”

And the platform makes me no problem. I have a lot of problems, but the platform is not one of them. I have the feeling that shopping trip is related to the content. Everything is super integrated and balanced. And the time and the money that I can't invest in there.

For all of you in the waiting room. Now, let's go to the last test of Shopify.com. Hey everybody, welcome to the Addiction Unlimited podcast where you get to learn everything you want to know about addiction and recovery. I'm your host, Angela Pew, co-founder of Kansas City Recovery, Life Coach, and Recovery

in Alcoholic.

“To learn more about me, you can listen to episode 0 on your podcast app or find us on”

the web at AddictionUnlimited.com. Alcoholism or alcohol use disorder is a brain disorder that impairs your ability to stop or control your drinking.

Hello my friend, and welcome to our first 30 days to fast track your recovery series,

where each week for the next 30 days, I'm dropping an extra episode to answer some of the most confusing questions about this crazy monster we're dealing with, and to help you get clarity on yourself and your habits so that you can stop screwing around and get the support you want. I'm your coach, Angela Pew, and today we're talking about the stages of alcoholism.

Alcoholism develops gradually and symptoms range from mild to severe depending on what stage you're in. If you're asking yourself what the heck is happening to me, do I have to quit forever or can I moderate, then you're in the right place because we're going to talk about the different stages of drinking, how it works, the symptoms, and when you cross the line where attempts to moderate your drinking are going to be a waste of

time and energy.

“It's important to know the signs so that you can accurately gauge where you are in the”

process and hopefully it will help you out of some of the denial that's keeping you from getting help and getting in recovery. Once you're showing signs or symptoms of alcoholism, know that it won't go away on its own. Their brain is changing and without help, the consequences do continue to get worse. That's why we have this spectrum.

The consequences always continue to get worse.

I'm going to give you a startling statistic that I came across when researching this episode. Hang on, let me find it here. Here we go. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, an estimated 88,000 people die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause

of death in the United States. I don't know about you, but the word preventable is what really got me when I read this, because what that means is we have all the power in this. We can do it differently. We can do better, treat ourselves better, get the help we need to live happier, longer lives

with our kids and families. You don't ever have to drink again. You can start right this second becoming the new version of yourself who is a non-drinker, and you can get all the support and guidance you need starting today.

You're always only one decision away from a totally different life, and I really want you

to hear that, because we build this thing up in our heads and we blow it out of proportion and we make it seem unattainable, and that is just not the truth. If that were the truth, millions and millions of people wouldn't be living happy sober lives. You just know you are always only one decision away from a totally different life.

Not being said, let's jump into these four stages of alcoholism, and we start with the pre-alcoholic stage, and understand you that you will find, like if you Google this, you will find different terminology for these stages, and some people say out of fifth stage, which is recovery, so know that the terminology is not always going to be exactly the same. Like, I say alcoholic, you might like alcohol use disorder or alcohol free or whatever.

my favorite terms for these stages are experimentation, use misuse abuse. Those are my favorite words for these stages.

But we're going to go through it, how it's classified clinically, and the first stage is

the pre-alcoholic stage. The primary symptom here is developing tolerance, and you're going to hear that throughout these stages, right? As your tolerance increases, that is the biggest sign that you are moving from one stage into the next.

And in the pre-alcoholic stage, this is one that is really hard to notice, even for you

“as the person misusing alcohol, because it is very subtle, right?”

This is when you start drinking in social settings. You start using alcohol for stress relief. You start drinking to cope with sadness or loneliness or stress at work, relationship issues. You're using it to dull emotional pain, right?

And you can stay in this pre-alcoholic stage for many, many years.

But eventually, you will start showing, like I said, consequences continue to get worse. You will start showing more unhealthy behaviors. Looking back, I can see all of these stages in my journey, and I was in pre-alcoholic stage, I would say probably a good two to three years, probably. I was hardly drinking, but I definitely wasn't doing it right, so to speak.

I just didn't have a lot of drinks in one sitting. So stage two is early stage alcoholism. Again, increasing tolerance is the primary sign here. During early stage, you're becoming more dependent on alcohol. You're relying on it more, right?

So maybe you think about drinking a lot, or you're talking about drinking a lot. You're bringing it up in conversations. Maybe you're drinking by yourself sometimes, or you have trouble deciding not to drink. Maybe you have trouble limiting how many drinks you have, right? We all love to get caught up in this moderation game.

So maybe you're having trouble moderating. You might be binge drinking or blacking out. You might be hiding your drinking behaviors, right? Getting secretive. This is a big one for me, that one of the things that I notice.

You will skip events that don't have alcohol, right? You don't want to go to things that aren't sort of alcohol related, or you will sneak in your own alcoholic beverages. Now also, I want you to pay attention when we're going through these. These signs of symptoms are not going to be exact for everybody, right?

Like this talks about drinking by yourself and blacking out. Those were things that weren't necessarily true in my experience, and certainly by the end, I was a chronic hardcore daily drinker, and you can count on one hand how many times I blacked out my whole drinking career, like it just wasn't a part of my story. So don't hear one thing that doesn't fit you and think, oh, that doesn't apply to me.

This isn't me, because that's not the case, right?

“Know that, these things are going to be different, and that's why I say maybe, you know,”

maybe you're having trouble moderating, maybe you're drinking by yourself because it's not going to be exact for every single one of us. We're all going to have different things. So stage three, middle stage alcoholism. Again, your tolerance is increasing.

Now you're starting to have some physical symptoms, right? And it's becoming more obvious to people around you. And it's starting to interfere with daily life at this point. And that interference with daily life is going to look different for everybody too. So at this point, you are definitely in the alcohol use disorder category, right?

Alcoholism, whatever you want to call it. People stage alcoholics might start drinking during work hours or at work or at other inappropriate times or inappropriate functions. You might have, you're going to have a lot more hangovers, so you're probably drinking a lot more, right?

You're making alcohol a priority over other things. And I think things like this can be a little bit tricky to understand because you're

like why I would never make alcohol the priority.

But this is very subtle in the ways that we do this, right? This is like when you walk into the amusement park with your family, the first thought you have is where do I get a drink? When you are going on the camping trip, you're not thinking about all the fun you're going to have with your kids or whatever, all you're thinking about is I can't wait

to crack open that first beer at the campfire.

“That's how it becomes a priority, right?”

Or you're not really working the last hour of your day because you're obsessing about

Those are the ways that it takes precedence over other things, right? You may need to drink more. This is your tolerance building, right? You may need to drink more to achieve the same effect. There's a certain number of drinks that got me really happy.

That number continued to increase over my drinking career. You might be passing out from excessive alcohol use.

I never went to sleep when I was a drunk right, and I passed out every day I passed out.

You also, in middle stage stage three here, you might get irritated, irritable when you're not drinking, right? Like the hangover or even after you're feeling better physically, you might just be a little bit irritated. And again, this is when physical symptoms start developing that are usually obvious to the

people around you, you know, your family and friends, co-workers maybe, and a lot of those physical symptoms can be like weight gain or weight loss. It can go either way because it just depends on your habits, like I didn't hardly eat. So of course, I was skinnier, but like my best girlfriend, she was a hit the drive through on the way home every time she drank, so she gained stomach bloating, like general sluggishness,

“shaking or tremors, sweating, your skin changes, your face gets red and puffy, right?”

The alcoholic face, those are some of the physical symptoms.

And lastly, we have stage four, end stage alcoholism. The primary symptom in end stage alcoholism is all consuming alcohol use, right? Health problems, this is when you're going to have dangerous withdrawal symptoms, like a true detox that's going to take a few days, this also known as late stage alcoholism, and this is the most severe, right?

These are people that they say like drink all day, but I didn't drink all day, you know, again, that didn't make me less of an alcoholic, by the way, just because I didn't black out, I didn't drink all day, I didn't drink alone, that didn't make me less of an alcoholic. It just meant that my habits were a little bit different, that's all. But just so don't take this so literal like you're drinking all day, I will tell you that

I definitely drank more hours that I was awake than I didn't, right?

But I was a bartender, I slept most of the day, and the first few hours when I would

get up, like I couldn't eat or drink or do anything because my hangover was so severe, a hangover, by the way, is just withdrawal, right? That's the physical symptoms of alcohol leaving your body and your brain getting agitated because the alcohol's leaving your brain your body. But it doesn't mean drink all day, like you're waking up in the morning and taking

a swing. Some people do that, some people wake up in the middle of the night and have to have a drink. But if that's not you, don't try to remove yourself from this because you don't have that one particular habit. It also says late stage are unable to keep steady jobs.

That was in my story either. Now, again, I was a bartender, right? I didn't have to go to work until very late at night and my job was to drink, so, you know, I wouldn't have been able to make it to a morning job for sure, or maybe I would have because my habits would have been different, I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball.

But here's more signs of late stage alcoholism.

“You're losing relationships with friends and family because of your drinking, right?”

They can't handle it, they're like, dude, this is too much, I can't do it. You're lying, which also will cause your relationships with friends and family to suffer because you're lying and sometimes people get violent, right? Obviously, that's going to cause problems in relationships. You might experience paranoia, depression, loneliness in that paranoia that might sound

kind of weird, but let me give you a basic paranoia that I see in my client and that I had. I didn't have it with drinking, but like one time I smoked pot with one of my friends and I'm not a pot smoker, it's just not my thing, but I smoked pot and I had this paranoia. Like I'm in the elevator going home and people get in the elevator and I'm just saying

they're like, fuck, they probably know, they know I'm high, this is so embarrassing. Like that's paranoia. You might have those thoughts of like people know that I'm drinking too much or they're

“talking about me behind my back, like paranoia isn't a big, dramatic thing, right?”

They are some simple thoughts, so don't blow that out of proportion, but we definitely have those thoughts, like do they know how bad I am, do they know my habits, do they know that I'm lying, do they know I'm hiding, like that's paranoia. You can also start experiencing some serious health problems in late-stage alcoholism. You might drive drunk, you might have memory problems, I have a hard time remembering things.

Like I definitely found myself in the hospital for various reasons here and there, which

was weird, I'm not a hospital person, I'm not a sick person, but you just, you know, when you're drinking, you have these events. And you also, in late-stage alcoholism, is those severe, serious withdrawal symptoms when you don't drink.

“And the way you'd be clear to that, obviously I think we're all aware of the health effects,”

right, that there are severe health effects that come with drinking, and you don't have to be late-stage alcoholic to have health effects from drinking, be clear about that too. You can have health effects way earlier in the game, but some of the medical problems,

I think everybody is pretty familiar with cirrhosis of the liver, right, alcoholic hepatitis,

cancer, there are several cancers linked to drinking alcohol, pneumonia, damage to your throat, your esophagus, esophageal cancer, is one of the cancers with this, infosema, heart failure, chronic bronchitis, I didn't know that. I had bronchitis all the time when I was a drinker, and I had no idea that there was some link to alcoholism and chronic bronchitis, liver disease and failure, of course, brain damage,

pancreatitis, there's all kinds of things. So with the 30 days to fast track, your recovery, part of what I'm doing to this additional episode each week, and then I've created a page of resources for you. So every week, when I do this extra episode, there are going to be resources posted on this page, and if you want that resource library that accompanies these additional episodes,

I'm going to be adding resources every week. I'm going to add things to there.

“So if you want to be a part of that, you can sign up at addictiononlimited.com/fasttrack.”

All the extra podcast episodes for the 30 days to fast track your recovery will be in the resource page, along with everything else I come up with that I just want to share with you that I want you to have. And the reason we're doing this is I want you to understand what you're experiencing. I want you to really get it, where you can really figure out where you are in this thing,

so that you can get help, so that you know the right kind of help to go for.

And part of getting help is first getting really honest about where you are in the game,

and that's why I wanted to start the first episode with the four stages of alcoholism. Okay, again, they are pre-alcoholic, early stage alcoholism, middle stage alcoholism, and end stage alcoholism. And as I said earlier, my favorite terms of how I learned this in school was use misuse abuse addiction, so those are kind of my favorite terms because they make more sense

“to me because you can see that in those phases, right?”

Like I understand early on, I was just using alcohol, and then I can see where I was misusing alcohol, and then I was really using alcohol, and then I was at the point of no return in full blown and stage alcoholism addicted. I hope you love this information and got so much value out of this. Don't forget to go sign up to get all those resources I'm going to be sharing.

You'll get emails to a company, the resources, so you know, exactly where to find things, when I add things and what to do, you can get there at addiction unlimited.com/fasttrack, and I will link that in the show notes so you can get there right from your favorite podcast app. I hope you're having a fantastic day, I'll see you next week. You've reached the end of another great episode of the Addiction Unlimited Podcast,

candid and honest conversation about addiction and recovery. Be sure to visit us at AddictionUnlimited.com to join the conversation, and access show notes and links to everything we talked about. Love this episode, please take 30 seconds to subscribe, rate, and review on iTunes to help us improve and give you the information you want.

Thanks for listening, see you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]