The main stages of this phase include:

Relaxation and release feelings

Usually, a person starts drinking at social events. However, a normal person continuous to drink at different social occasions while the future alcoholic tends (consciously or not) to drink more in order to feel relaxed. An alcoholic might feel the life's stress worse than those around him/her or his/her stress copying skills are poor.

Searching for new opportunities

Initially, the drinker considers that the friends company or cheerful atmosphere is responsible for their good mood and not the booze. This believe will make the future alcoholic to seek for more similar situations where he can drink.

The daily refuge

The body gets used with any regular substance consumption. It reacts less and less to the intial dozes, and needs higher amounts of substance to achieve the desired psychological effect. In time, a drinker needs more and more alcohol to feel relaxed, but in the same time becomes more proud that he can headle more alcohol than at the begining. This phenomenon is called an increased alcohol tolerance. A future acloholic alcohol craves more for alcohol, but even if he/she drinks a lot won't get drunk. That's the reason why many of the delta type alcoholics do not understand that they become addicts (they do not feel any serious effect after drinking booze). A delta type alcoholic consider that alcoholics are only those that degraded and lost everything.

A permanent consumption to relax

If at the beginning the a drinker tries to relaxe or to be occasional stimulated by the alcohol, in time his/her capacity to cope with everyday stress decreases. This pushes the drinker to seek relaxation and lack of tension. Alcohol consumption pattern develops differently over few months to two years from case to case evolving from the the occasional relaxation stage to the permanant relaxation seek stage. However, this behavioral change is not noticed by the drinker or those around him.