It’s a hot muggy South Florida night. You can’t get to sleep…again. You’ve got work in the morning, your boss has been complaining about how tired you look in the morning, and you need to sleep, but no matter how long you lie there, sleep doesn’t come. So, you do what you’ve done time and time again and open up the bottle to drink yourself. This may work in the short term, but self-medicating with alcohol isn’t a solution. If you don’t address the root of the problem you can end up with more issues than you began with.
Alcohol as a Sleep Aid
In one-off situations, using sleeping pills or even alcohol as a sedative can accomplish your goals. But when there’s a chronic problem, you’re just pushing the problem to another day. Alcohol is a very addictive drug and it’s easy to become dependent on it. Before too long, you may feel that you can’t get to sleep without drinking and so not only does your original problem remain, you are now addicted.
Finding the Source
If you are not able to get to sleep for an extended period of time, it is a problem. You need to find professional help for it instead of self medicating. Maybe it’s a sign of a medical problem and you need to see a doctor. Maybe it’s something you need to work through with talk therapy. But whatever it is, too much missed or bad sleep can really interfere with your life. You deserve a real solution, and self medicating with alcohol will not solve it.
If you worry that you’ve become dependent on alcohol as a result of insomnia, call our rehab center at (833) 596-3502 so we can help you create a personalized recovery plan that helps you find and manage your problem.