5 Key Benefits of Alcohol Detox

Alcohol abuse can negatively affect your life and your body in a multitude of ways. Even if you’re not a chronic alcohol abuser but are finding yourself drinking excessively more often, you may start suffering from these effects. The good news is that alcohol detox can reduce or even reverse some of the issues caused by alcohol.

Benefits of Alcohol Detox

Understanding 5 key benefits of alcohol detox may help to motivate you to abstain or to seek help.

1. Improved Physical Health

It’s well known that excessive alcohol use can damage your liver and lead to fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, and cirrhosis. While there is a point when liver damage is permanent, detoxing from alcohol before that occurs can allow the liver to heal and regenerate.

Many people don’t know, however, that heavy alcohol use can damage your gut in many other ways. It can cause inflammation of your stomach and intestines, disrupt your gut microbiome, and increase the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome such as bloating, diarrhea, or constipation. The good news is that after a period of abstinence, this type of damage can heal.

It’s also a lesser-known reality that alcohol can lead to many serious heart issues, including arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, heart attacks, cardiomyopathy, and heart failure. It can also lead to sudden cardiac death.

Additionally, alcohol increases the risk of many other health conditions, including:

• Cancer
• Pancreatitis
• Stroke
• High blood pressure
• Dementia

Alcohol can even weaken the immune system, leading to more frequent illnesses, but alcohol detox can help to restore your immune system to normal.

Essentially, alcohol detox can decrease the health risks of alcohol, and simply make you feel better physically overall. You’ll have more energy and be able to live a fuller life, not encumbered by the health problems caused by alcohol use.

2. Better Mental Health

Alcohol can affect your mental health in several ways. First of all, many people who turn to alcohol do so to self-medicate a preexisting mental health condition such as depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder. While alcohol may make you feel better temporarily, it will likely increase the symptoms of your mental health disorder as you drink more.

For these people, alcohol detox can lead to reduced symptoms and make treatment for the underlying disorder more effective.

Alcohol also often also leads to symptoms of mental disorders for people who have not been previously diagnosed with a disorder. For these people, after a period of abstinence, the symptoms go away.

Additionally, alcohol can affect the brain structurally, leading to decreased clarity of thinking and memory loss. Alcohol detox and long-term abstinence are the only ways to allow the brain to recover.

Overall, better mental health achieved after alcohol detox can help to improve your overall quality of life.

3. Better Sleep

While alcohol’s sedating effect can help you get to sleep initially, it will then affect your sleep cycles and lead to frequent waking during the night. For some people, it can cause insomnia. In either case, it leads to daytime sleepiness and other effects of sleep deprivation.

Additionally, alcohol can affect your breathing at night, leading to snoring or even sleep apnea.

Alcohol detox removes these sleep disturbances and improves your quality of sleep overall.

4. Weight Loss and Nutrition

Alcohol is empty calories. If you are a heavy drinker who consumes ten or more drinks a day, that can really add up. When you drink alcohol, you’re also more likely to be hungry and impulsive, which can lead you to eat fried or other unhealthy foods.

Removing all those calories from your diet through alcohol detox is likely going to lead to weight loss, which may be significant over time.

Additionally, alcohol depletes your body of nutrients, which keeps your metabolism from functioning properly. It also negatively affects your digestive system, which can impact your absorption of nutrients. These combined effects can lead to malnutrition.

Alcohol detox, combined with a healthy diet, can help to restore the balance of nutrients in your body and make you feel better overall.

5. Safety

Alcohol can impair your thinking and your motor skills and decrease your inhibitions and judgment, which can lead you into unsafe situations and actions. It’s well known that alcohol leads to many of the auto accidents in the U.S., but it also plays a role in drownings, injuries such as burns, homicides, suicides, and falls that cause injury.

By getting sober, your judgment will be restored, and you’ll significantly reduce your chances of traumatic injury or even death.

Signs of an Alcohol Use Disorder

If you think you may have an alcohol use disorder, consider whether you have these common signs.

• Intense cravings for alcohol
• Increased tolerance to alcohol, meaning you need more to get the desired effects
• Always thinking about when you can have your next drink
• Neglecting your work and personal responsibilities
• Hangovers or blackouts
• Problems due to alcohol use, including legal, health, and relationship problems

If you have these signs, you should seek help from a professional.

Medically Supervised Detox

Chronic alcohol abuse, when stopped suddenly, can lead to uncomfortable and even life-threatening withdrawal symptoms. Alcohol detox is often not something you should do on your own.

In an inpatient medically supervised detox program, you’ll be given medications to reduce your withdrawal symptoms and be monitored by medical professionals who can intervene if severe withdrawal symptoms, such as elevated blood pressure or seizures, occur.

Alcohol detox should be taken very seriously, and not be a DIY project. Your life could depend on a medically supervised period of abstinence.

It’s important to fully understand, however, that detox is only the first step in treating an alcohol use disorder. Treatment should involve both individual and group therapy that can help you to learn better coping skills and improve your mental health. Inpatient alcohol treatment programs can provide this care, but it’s more effective if followed by a partial hospitalization program (PHP), an intensive outpatient program (IOP), continued individual therapy, and support group participation.

Help Is Available

It’s critical for you to know that help is available, and while the treatment and recovery process may seem quite daunting, it can also be very enlightening and educational. Most importantly, it will help you reap the benefits of sobriety on your physical health, mental health, and safety, and lead you to a more fulfilling life.

For those who don’t have an alcohol abuse disorder but frequently use alcohol, detoxing can still improve your overall well-being. If you don’t think you can do it on your own, help is available for you too.