Many times sufferers of anxiety seek the “treatment” from alcohol as a temporary solution to anxiety. This is unwise and the worst solution to a usual problem that a person can seek. Many people believe, correctly so, that minor stress, not like anxiety disorder, can be lived without medical treatment.

Stress is just a part of everyday life and so coping with occasional bouts of mental highs and lows can be learned. However, anxiety sufferers soon find that living with the stress is more difficult than it seems, so they seek out a temporary fix. A six pack of beer, a bottle of wine, several glasses of Tequilas…it’s cheap, fun treatment and it does seem to ease the pain.

Alcohol is a powerful depressant and so can take away some feelings of anxiety. However, alcohol can also be addictive and can result in dangerous physical side effects if a person consistently becomes drunk. Studies have also shown that consuming too much alcohol can lead to an irregular heartbeat and a lowering of blood sugar which will actually increase the symptoms of anxiety.

Worse yet, a person who self-treats their anxiety with alcohol will start to become dependent on this form of pseudo-medication. If you buy alcohol to temporarily escape your anxiety, then you are basically buying a prescription-a large dosage prescription without doctor authorization that could prove harmful.

One problem with this kind of solace in alcohol and with any kind of addictive temporary fixes like self-cutting, smoking and OTC pain relievers is that none of them really treat the problem of anxiety itself. Same can be said of Valium and Xanas whcih are prescription medicines. These are all quick fixes and used to escape the real source of anxiety at the risk of injury to themselves.

Sigmund Freud, father of psychotherapy, and many other psychotherapists believe that we have anxiety in our lives because of previous traumas. Then, when we experience something in the present that reminds us of past traumas we tend to have anxious feelings.

Avoiding the anxiety by depressing or stimulating the mind with drugs, alcohol or other forms of addictive behavior teaches us only how to deaden the pain, not to confront and resolve the source of anxiety.

With alcohol especially - as many people drink wine and beer casually - not to escape anything particular, but for pleasure, they are many times unaware that they are actually feeding an addiction and their primary reason for drinking is anxiety, although it can be a very mild form of anxiety.

In the case of alcoholics we can clearly see the addiction really manifest, but many times with people who drink to quieten the pain and who don’t get really drunk most of the time, the real truth about alcohol can surface only years later.

One of the best ways to test, if you believe you may suffer from anxiety and alcohol addiction in addition to that, is to see how many days you can go without a drink.

If there are withdrawal symptoms and your possible anxiety raises to abnormal levels, then you probably should seek professional help overcoming the addiction and start to treat the anxiety disorder instead of avoiding it.