Well you mentioned that you quit drinking. With no context. How heavy and how long and when did you quit? A lot of very heavy drinkers who drink for a long time feel a rather extended period of anxiety after they quit. For some people it lasts a year. For some people it lasts 10 years.

Frankly, I’ve seen this happen to occasional drinkers who were still alcoholics and needed to quit. You can be an alcoholic and barely drink if it has some kind of control in your life, if you’re hiding it from a spouse, if it leads to embarrassing behaviors, and you just can’t put it down permanently even if you desperately wanted to. You don’t need to be a heavy every day drinker to be an alcoholic.

I knew guys who were able to control it to once a week, or once every two weeks, but every time they drank they regretted it. But then guess what? Two weeks later, they pick up again. Did they made the same regrettable mistakes over and over again, many of them driving that way in a dangerous themselves and others and promising never to do it again and doing it again two weeks later, one week later, whenever.

If you quit because you “needed“ to, I would honestly seek counseling to deal with it. There are plenty of resources out there, sometimes having someone to talk to, trust me, can be very important. Even if you’re not struggling with it anymore, it is like losing a friend or cutting off a limb. It can be traumatic, and that’s not hyperbole, to cut something out of your life that meant so much to you. I don’t know if that was your situation or not, I’m just guessing since you brought it up. Hell, I know people who quit smoking that, years later, still had anxiety. There are parts of your brain that don’t know the difference from giving up a substance to losing a friend or a loved one. Your brain just can’t process that it’s a different thing it shouldn’t matter as much. It just knows that whatever it relied on was gone.