Symptoms and Dangers of Sudden Alcohol Withdrawal

Alcohol withdrawal or alcohol withdrawal syndrome (AWS) is when you drink alcohol or “hard drinks” (hence the term “soft drinks” for soda) for many years, months, or even weeks then suddenly stop, thus, getting symptoms of psychological and physiological problems from the abrupt act.

This condition can also happen when you seriously cut back on the amount of alcohol you’re consuming but not outright stop drinking in an attempt to wean yourself from consuming so much alcoholic beverages. The symptoms of alcohol withdrawal can range from mild and bearable to serious and fatal.

A Brief Overview of Alcohol Withdrawal

Here’s the nitty-gritty when it comes to AWS facts to remember.

• AWS Definition: Alcohol withdrawal syndrome is the collective name for withdrawal symptoms that happen to those who are heavy drinkers or suffer from alcohol addiction when they suddenly stop drinking. This also applies to significant alcohol intake reduction, not just total abstinence.
• Period of AWS: AWS can happen from 6 hours to a couple of days after you’ve had your last drink. The most severe AWS type is known as delirium tremens (DTs), which will be covered in-depth below. It’s characterized by symptoms like seizures, fever, and hallucinations.
• AWS Causes: When a heavy drinker suddenly stops drinking, he’ll get symptoms like headaches and nausea. This is his brain telling him to keep on drinking or else. Aside from physical symptoms, you can also suffer from emotional ones related to how your brain is reacting to the lack of drinks in your system.
• Is AWS Life-Threatening? Yes. AWS is actually life-threatening once it goes into DTs symptoms like extreme confusion, high fever, and vivid hallucinations. This is an emergency situation and you or others in the household should call for an ambulance so that you can be treated immediately before it’s too late.

When Does Alcohol Withdrawal Happen?

Drinking once a while or moderately from the start ensures that AWS never happens to you when you stop drinking or at least remains an unlikely consequence of your actions.

However, if you’ve gone through AWS once because of the sheer amount of alcohol you’ve consumed, then you’re likely to go through it again every time you call it quits. So there are two triggers towards alcohol withdrawal. One is excessive alcohol intake and the other is experiencing AWS in the first place, so you become more susceptible to it once you’ve experienced it.

What Causes Alcohol Withdrawal?

Here are the things to remember when it comes to what causes AWS:

• Drinking in Moderation Equals Easy Abstinence: Alcohol consumption in moderation allows your body to completely remove it from your system by excreting it through your pores and by urination. This allows you to become a less likely victim of alcohol withdrawal symptoms.
• Alcohol Is Poison and Allergy-Causing: Excretion of alcohol is also important because alcohol is actually poison and some of your body’s reactions to it (i.e., the reddening of your face, migraines, and puking) can be considered as an allergic reaction to the substance.
• Alcohol’s Depressive Brain Effects: On top of that, doctors claim that alcohol has a depressive effect on your body. It actually dulls or slows down the function of your brain, hence heavy drinkers referring to drinking as a way to kill your brain cells. It also changes the way your nerves send messages to the brain and vice-versa.
• Don’t Let Your Central Nervous System Acclimate to Alcohol: Once your central nervous system acclimates or gets used to drinking alcohol, you will feel sick when you stop. That’s because drinking alcohol has become the new normal for your body after acclimatization.
• The State of Perpetual Inebriation: Having alcohol in your system all the time makes your brain adjust to this state of perpetual inebriation. Afterwards, even if you simply reduce the amount of liquor you drink, your body and brain will notice the difference and make you feel sick over it via AWS.
• Your Body Is Hard at Work When You’re Drunk: Your body works hard to keep your brain in an awakened state and your nerves communicating when you’re constantly drunk. Being in this state constantly results in changes in your brain, particularly in terms of how it handles sobriety and how dependent it becomes with alcohol.
• The New Normal: Adapting to circumstances by getting used to them is what the human body does best. It gets used to most any circumstance after dealing with it for an extended period of time. Even bad habits like alcoholism or alcohol addiction can be considered the body’s “normal” after getting used to it for an extended period of time.
• Nervous System Effects: Your nervous system is excited and irritated at the same time by excessive drinking. Over time, it will have an impact on the way your brain reacts to your drunkenness and excessive consumption. Daily drinking makes your body become alcohol dependent over a period of time.
• Your Body Can’t Take Being Sober: Once you’ve consumed enough drinks over a period of time, your central nervous system will have problems over being sober. It won’t adapt as easily to the lack of alcohol because it’s so used to you being filled with alcohol, leading to its overreaction over you not drinking after 6 hours or so.

What Are the Symptoms and Risks of Alcohol Withdrawal?

When you mess with this new sense of “normalcy” established by excessive alcohol consumption, your rewired brain rejects your non-inebriated state after 6 hours or so and compels you to go back to go back to “normal” by drinking yet again, against your better judgment and liver health.

This compulsion towards what your body is used to leads to alcohol withdrawal if you’re a drunkard. With that said, here are the symptoms of AWS.

• A Keyed Up Condition: Whenever your alcohol level drops from the amount your body is used to, your brain remains in a keyed-up state that causes your symptoms of withdrawal. Your alcohol withdrawal symptoms can range from mild to serious depending on how much alcohol you’ve consumed and how long you’ve been drinking.
• Mild Symptoms: Mild symptoms of alcohol withdrawal typically happen about 6 hours to a couple of days after putting down or drinking your last drink. They include at least two or more symptoms of the following:

• • • Fatigue

    • Nausea

    • Anxiety

    • Tremors

    • Vomiting

    • Sweating

    • Insomnia

    • Headache

    • Irritability

    • Confusion

    • Nightmares

    • Shaky hands

    • Dehydration

    • High blood pressure

    • An increased heart rate

  These symptoms can get worse over the course of 2-3 days then persist for weeks. They’re even more noticeable when you wake up with a lower blood alcohol level. This is your brain crying out for more alcohol since its been rewired to think that having alcohol is your normal state.

• Serious Symptoms: Serious symptoms of alcohol withdrawal typically happen from 12 to 24 hours after your last drink up until 2 days since you last stopped drinking. They include:

  • Hallucinations (12-24 hours or ½-1 day)

  • Seizures (24-48 hours or 2-4 days)

  • Delirium tremens (48-72 hours or 4-6 days)

  By hallucinations, we mean the times when you hear, feel, or see things that aren’t there. This shouldn’t be confused with delirium tremens. DTs happen about 2-3 days after you’ve put down your last glass of wine or beer.

A Deeper Look into Delirium Tremens

Some allege that DTs can last for as long as 96 hours or 8 days or a whole week and a day. The “good” news for alcoholics out there is that severe symptoms like DTs and hallucination is mostly present for only 5% of people suffering from alcohol withdrawal.

DTs are characterized by the following combined symptoms (some of which are also shared as milder symptoms of AWS):

• Shaking

• Seizures

• Shivering

• Heavy sweating

• Extreme agitation

• Extreme confusion

• High blood pressure

• High body temperature or fever

• Irregular heart rate or racing heart

• Vivid tactile hallucinations and delusions (depends from person to person)

  • Phantom itching, burning and numbness

  • Visual hallucinations over nonexistent images

  • Auditory hallucinations over nonexistent sounds

If the DTs are severe enough, it can result in death due to the symptoms of seizures and high body temperature. It’s for this reason that alcohol remains one of the most dangerous substances that people should withdraw from.

It’s also for this reason that you or your loved ones should call 911 or the emergency room to get an ambulance. You’re actually suffering from a medical emergency that requires immediate attention. Don’t wait for your heart disturbances, hallucinations, and fever to get worse. Call for help immediately.

How Is Withdrawal Diagnosed?

If a doctor suspects that you have AWS, he’ll ask you several questions in regards to your drinking habits or alcohol history. From there, he’ll inquire when or how recently you’ve stopped drinking in order to line up your symptoms with the corresponding time frame (from half a day to more than a week).

From there, your doctor will review your medical history, ask you about your AWS symptoms, and then have you undergo a physical exam to see if you’re suffering from physical alcohol withdrawal signs like:

• Fever
• Dehydration
• Hand tremors
• Irregular heart rate or beat

He’ll also need to know if you’ve ever experienced withdrawal symptoms from stopping your alcohol consumption before since it’s likelier you’ll go through such symptoms if you’ve undergone them previously.

The doctor might also perform a toxicology screen to test how much alcohol remains in your body. If it’s a lot, you might then undergo medical detoxification. During the tests and examination, he’ll also search for other medical conditions that could cause or exacerbate your symptoms.

A good doctor doesn’t leave a stone unturned when it comes to finding the root cause of your symptoms, even if it leads to a dual diagnosis or more (wherein you might be diagnosed with alcohol addiction and some other coinciding disease).

Treatment of Alcohol Withdrawal

AWS treatment with mild symptoms typically entails rehab. Either that or you should get a supportive environment to assist you throughout the whole ordeal until you’re able to survive the few days to a week of withdrawal symptoms. This includes:

• Soft lighting
• A quiet place
• Limited contact with people
• Healthy food and lots of fluids
• A positive, supportive atmosphere

The inclusion of rehab is typically called for the sake of dealing with your addiction that led to the AWS instead of the AWS symptoms themselves. Then again, a rehab center does have the sponsors, doctors, and prescriptions needed to help alleviate withdrawal.

However, if you have serious AWS symptoms or if you also have an underlying health condition that could worsen with the presence of AWS, then you should call the rehabilitation center or a hospital immediately for AWS treatment.

Inpatient care and drug addiction treatment is called for if you suffer from the above mentioned severe symptoms like seizures, hallucinations, delirium tremens, high blood pressure, rising body temperature, and quickening or erratic pulse.

The most common medications used to treat AWS include:

• Antipsychotics
• Anti-seizure medications
• Benzodiazepines (for treatment of seizures, insomnia, and anxiety)

People at Risk for Alcohol Withdrawal

It’s unsurprisingly the hard drinkers who are most likely to suffer from AWS and DTs. Anyone who drinks heavily every day and can’t cut down their consumption are at risk of rewiring their brain towards dependence, which often results in AWS when they attempt to quit or cut down on alcoholic beverages.

AWS is also more common among adults than children since minors aren’t allowed by law to drink until they’re of legal age. Then again, rule-breaking children and teenagers who are somehow able to get their hands on these adult-only substances can also experience AWS symptoms after prolonged excessive alcohol consumption.

Alcohol withdrawal is also the kind of syndrome wherein your risk of getting it increases once you’ve already gotten it in the past. Ditto if you’ve gone to rehab for alcohol addiction and have undergone medical detoxification to address your drinking problem.

What Is Heavy Drinking?

To disambiguate what’s considered as heavy drinking, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define the term as drinking more than eight alcoholic drinks every week if you’re a woman. If you’re a man, it’s drinking 15 alcoholic drinks per week.

A drink can be measured as such by the following examples:

• 5 ounces of wine
• 12 ounces of beer
• 8 ounces of malt liquor
• 1.5 ounces of distilled liquor or spirits

  • Gin

  • Rum

  • Vodka

  • Whiskey

The most common form of heavy drinking is binge drinking. This heavy drinking type involves drinking 5 or more drinks in one sitting if you’re a man. If you’re instead a woman, 4 or more drinks in one sitting is enough to be considered as binging.

High-Functioning Addicts and Alcohol Withdrawal

Addiction can happen to anyone. Keep in mind the following scenarios:

• The Downtrodden Addicts: Alcohol addiction or alcoholism can happen because you’re using the bottle as a short-term fix to your long-term problems. You could be drinking your woes away, whether they’re related to family, career, romance, and past trauma. Alcohol is never the answer when it comes to dealing with your core problems.
• High-Functioning Addicts: However, there also exist high-functioning addicts like professional wrestler Ric Flair who recently had a health scare related to his hard drinking (that almost took his life) was known for his ability to drink and party hard without affecting his ability to perform in the ring.
• The Toughness of Quitting: For these people, even though they’re somehow able to still function while drunken, alcoholism can become a severe problem to them down the line when they’re older or even before that despite their ability to cope with alcoholism and still function well in society. It’s tougher for them to quit because they don’t see immediate consequences for their actions.
• A Slippery Slope: At any rate, it’s important to remember that substance abuse by even those who can “handle it” will always remain a slippery slope towards a downward spiral of self-destruction. In other words, the best way to deal with AWS is to avoid its triggers like the plague. If you have to drink, drink socially.

Can Alcohol Withdrawal Symptoms Be Prevented?

Yes, of course. You can prevent AWS and its associated adverse effects. Just drink moderately or abstain from drinking. It takes time and excessive consumption for you to develop both addiction to alcohol and withdrawal symptoms whenever you stop or cut down on your alcohol consumption.

When talking to the doctor about relieving your symptoms related to AWS, it’s best to also discuss treatment for dependence or alcohol abuse. This is because alcohol addiction is usually intertwined with AWS more often than not. The advice, prescriptions, and contacts to rehab offered by your doctor can prove to be quite invaluable.

Remember, if you’re suffering from any serious symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, you should consult your nearest healthcare provider and facility post-haste. It’s indeed important to either abstain from alcohol consumption or limit it so that you can avoid addiction and withdrawal altogether.
Contact us today if you are looking for a luxury alcohol rehab with a progressive program.

At Lanna Rehab we provide the most comprehensive alcohol addiction treatment in the world, with a fully inclusive 5 weeks of individualized treatment program.