Safety
If tonight is dangerous rather than difficult.
This site is for the morning after. If tonight has already become medical, or somebody is not safe, reflection is the wrong tool and this is the more useful page. Read only the part you need.
Stop reading and get emergency help if
Somebody cannot be woken. Somebody has had a seizure or a fit. There is trouble breathing, chest pain, vomiting blood, a collapse, a head injury, or severe stomach pain. Alcohol has been taken together with other drugs or with medication. You are in immediate danger, or cannot keep yourself safe tonight. Somebody in the house has made you afraid. A child is not safe.
Use your local emergency number. This site does not print telephone numbers, because the right number depends on which country you are in tonight and a wrong number is worse than none. Every country has one, and the operator will not be surprised by you.
The AI guide on this site cannot help with any of that. It cannot contact anybody, cannot monitor you, cannot sit with you, and will not try to hold a conversation that needs a person in the room.
If your body is not right after drinking again
Shaking, sweating, retching, a racing heart, seeing or hearing things that are not there, or confusion that is not ordinary drunkenness — that is withdrawal becoming medical, and it is a doctor or urgent medical care today, not a plan and not a chat window.
The danger is not smaller because you had a dry stretch first. A man who drank hard for years, stopped, and has now drunk hard for three days is in a body that has been through this before, and that is not a reason for anybody to be relaxed about it. Alcohol is one of the very few withdrawals that can kill.
So: do not stop suddenly on your own, and do not let anybody talk you into it. This site will never give you a taper, a dose, a medication, a timetable or a home detox, because that is a clinician's decision made with sight of you. It will also not tell you to keep drinking to level out. Medically managed withdrawal is routine, widely available, and in many countries free. Nobody there will be surprised by you either.
If you are having thoughts of ending your life
The hours after a slip are one of the places this shows up, and shame is at its loudest then. What you are thinking at three in the morning, drunk or hungover and certain you have ruined something, is not a reliable account of your situation.
If you are in immediate danger, your local emergency number. Otherwise a local crisis line, your doctor, or a person you trust who is nearby — in that order of speed. Free crisis lines exist in almost every country, they take calls about anything rather than only about suicide, and you do not have to explain yourself first.
If you are the person at the other end
If they are in front of you and not safe, put this page down and get emergency help first. It will be here afterwards.
If you are frightened of them, or there is a child in the house who is not safe, that is not a conversation for a chat window: your local emergency number, or a domestic abuse service where you are. You do not have to wait for something physical to happen before that is a reasonable call.
If nobody is in danger and you are simply exhausted, that is real and it is not the same emergency. The practical material written for you — what to say in the next ten minutes, what not to say in the next ten days, and the organisations that support families — is kept on the encyclopedia on sober.guide, the guide in this network for the moment before, and it is free.
What the AI guide does when any of this appears
If something on this page shows up in what you write, the guide stops the ordinary conversation, says so plainly, and points you here. It will not diagnose you, will not rate how bad the slip was, will not ask you to score anything, and will not carry on as though the conversation were about planning the week.
Safety replies are never counted against a daily allowance, never shortened, and never withheld. Nothing commercial is ever shown to somebody who is drunk, ashamed or frightened — not membership, not joining, not an allowance, not a price. That is structural on this site rather than a kindness, because this is the site people arrive at in the worst hour.
This page is general information, not medical advice, and not a crisis service. Nothing on this site is monitored by a person.