You will generally die about 10 to 20 years early if you are an alcoholic and continue to drink right up until you die. If you continue to drink your chances of quitting smoking are slim to none. The fact that most alcoholics are also heavy smokers is a double whammy when it comes to mortality rates. Heavy drinking and heavy smoking kills people faster than you think.

If you quit drinking then your life will generally improve in just about every way. Not only your health, but also your ability to work, get a better job, advance in your career, improve your relationships, and so on. If you continue to abuse alcohol all of that stuff can only get steadily worse over time. You may get lucky every once in a while and make some progress, but for the most part you will go steadily downward.

This is huge. If you quit drinking then the benefit to all of your relationships in your life will be tremendous. Not only will communicate more honestly and openly with everyone, but you will be about a thousand times more helpful and useful, and the people in your life will reciprocate that back to you. Everything will be much smoother if and when you stop drinking.

If you considered yourself “spiritual” in the past, then quitting drinking will open the door on this wide open, and your life will probably be transformed from a spiritual standpoint. Even if you do not work a religious or spiritual program of recovery, the basic mechanics of recovery and of not drinking are spiritual in nature anyway. You can’t help but make progress in this area when you are sober, whether you acknowledge that growth or not.