Sobriety is a process that can involve a lifetime of hard work and careful self-examination. Some days it may be easy to feel like going back to a life of mindlessly giving into cravings. The good news is that starting and enduring in the process can improve your life in immeasurable ways. Here are just a few of the ways sobriety can make your life better.

1. You’ll Feel Better
Alcohol is a depressant, which means it can disrupt your brain chemistry to intensify feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress. While the buzz may make you feel better temporarily, in the long-run it can cause unwanted feelings to come back stronger than ever. Sobriety allows you to approach things with a clear head, and a gentle mindfulness that can help you have more control over your emotions.

2. Your Health
Over the long-term, habitual or heavy drinking can do great damage to the body. Heavy drinkers are at dire risk for liver damage, heart disease, and cancer. Alcohol is a toxin that can damage almost every organ system in the body. If you get sober, and start working on a program to take health and nutrition more seriously, you will enjoy higher levels of energy and get sick far less often.

3. Care For The People You Love
Under the influence of alcohol, you may sometimes lose control over your actions, in ways that can wreck havoc on those around you. This can do great damage to the very people you care about the most, your spouse, children, or close friends. Sobriety allows you to act in ways that benefit them, and work to heal these damaged relationships.

4. Be Present and Aware
Alcohol abuse dulls your senses and makes it harder to focus on the world outside of your own head. Sobriety can teach you how to be awake and focused on things in the world around you. Every day, there are little moments of beauty and pleasure all around you. Being sober will help you notice them.

5. Avoiding Embarrassment
Alcohol affects the brain in ways that suppress your ability to think through the consequences of decisions, which can make you act in impulsive or emotional ways you otherwise wouldn’t. If you drink to the point of blacking out, you won’t remember what happened. Sobriety can help you gain control of your actions, and have real freedom in your actions.

6. Learn Who You Really Are
Your “drunk self” is a mask. Many people use alcohol out of discomfort, to try to fit in or become someone they are not. The process of sobriety can help you get in touch with who you really are, and help you become confident in your own skin. Nothing is more attractive to others than a person who embraces the truth about who they are.

7. Improve Your Finances
Addiction is expensive. When satisfying a craving becomes the most important thing in your mind, you end up spending all your money on drinking, that you can’t get back after it fades. Drunkenness and recovering also makes it more difficult to hold down a job or demonstrate responsibility with managing your life. Sobriety is going give you extra money in your pocket.

8. Discover True Friends
Addiction makes it difficult for anyone else to truly connect with you. When your own life is so unpredictable and out of control, no one else can trust or communicate with you in a way that builds a lasting relationship. In the recovery process, you will get practice being vulnerable and revealing your true self. This will lead you to people capable of extending compassion to you, and you will be able to extend compassion and understanding to them. That is what a real supportive relationship looks like.

9. Get in Touch with Your Own Strength
In the process of getting sober, you will encounter challenges and be able to overcome them. Committing to sober living will prove to yourself how much strength you really have. Every day of sobriety is something to celebrate, and it can show you that you are capable of doing other things too. Your painful past can become a source of empowerment, because you changed it, and are now a responsible person capable of anything.

10. Be Able to Help Others
The recovery journey allows you to be present to the needs of others. Even if it is just being a little nicer to people around you, your sober self is capable of making the world a better place. You may also have a special ability to help other people work through their own issues with addiction. Being there to help others can give your life a purpose, which can be a great source of meaning and joy for you.