“The happiness in your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
It’s 3am I’m awake knowing I’m having a busy day before me, but my mind is lace. Last night I had some drinks and I know this is why I’m waking up at this profane hour. “Why did I drink when I realized I had to work today? You’re an idiot. You’re weak. You’re useless.”
This is how I was talking to myself most mornings, perhaps in a ripe language, and when I had to stand up and face the day, the process repeats itself.
I wasn’t like a bottle of liquor per day, but I knew that even a beer and glass of wine with dinner would ruin my sleep and leave me looking good. And it all added over the week to the consumption levels I knew would have long-term health effects.
Then 6 o’clock rolled and I spoke myself to drink again. I felt stressed and needed to relax. Incidentally, I deserved it, I wasn’t, such a busy day?
This is a cycle in which many of us are trapped in our drinking habits. That negative self-talk is a manifestation of internal conflicts happening in our minds, what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance arises when we encounter situations where we have conflicting beliefs and attitudes, or when we exhibit behaviors that contradict those beliefs and attitudes.
When you experience cognitive dissonance, you feel uncomfortable and stressed, and try to find ways to reduce it. Our choice is to come up with stories that change our behavior, change our beliefs and attitudes, paper in a crack, and hide dissent in our minds.
As someone who drank all of my adult life, I was afraid to change my behavior. I was caught up in the bindings that most regular drinkers face. The barrier to change seemed very high due to how many times I tried and tried moderate, but even worse, I didn’t even want to be a non-dlinker! I thought life was boring, socialization is impossible, I am miserable.
When I write this, six years after my last alcoholic drink, this idea seems strange, confusing and illogical. As LP Hartley wrote, “The past is a different country. They do different things there.” My life is now endlessly rewarding and less stressful, so I miss out on even a little bit of alcohol. Not that, but my past self would have never believed it!
Habitual drinkers know that changing behavior is difficult, but most of them don’t know why or denies it. The reason for difficulty is that alcohol is an addictive substance, and if we’ve been drinking it long enough, the reward pathway of the brain is to get the stimulation the brain has learned to long for. It puts pressure on us.
Therefore, not only does we suffer from craving, but when we drink, alcohol passes through the barriers of the blood-brain and suppresses the prefrontal cortex, which is a part of the long-term brain. And before you go to work the next day, you need to sleep good night. So the effect of alcohol on our brains makes a single drink that we promised to turn ourselves into some.
For this reason, problematic drinkers find it difficult to change their behavior and must find another way to resolve cognitive dissonance by telling their own stories.
I read an article saying that a glass of wine in a day is good for you (conveniently ignored the fact that I was way beyond wine in a day and downplayed my risks So I was downplaying health risks. A relationship caused by drunken debates. After all, alcohol helps our bond, right?
Another story I tell myself was that drinking was less of two evils. Living without alcohol is boring and stressful, so it’s better to endure all the drawbacks of being a liquor hound.
The problem is that at some level, we are constantly feeling the stress of cognitive dissonance because we know that this is BS. Of course, there’s a simple fix to this. This is to drink a drink. It quickly injures the itching of cravings, and soon alcohol has a sedative effect and suppresses conflict in our minds. Rinse and repeat the next day.
Another thing I found was that this negative self-talk not only kept me drinking, but it seriously hurt my self-esteem.
Immediately after I was alcohol free, I went to a yoga and fitness retreat. There were some great workshops I enjoyed, but every time someone mentioned “self-love” I started to feel uncomfortable.
Not only did I not love myself, I also didn’t particularly like myself. Calling all your names yourself in the sun and beating yourself every day, I believed in my inner voice. I was worthless, weak and pathetic.
If this sounds familiar to you, and if it may be because of a habit other than drinking, then you will benefit from what I have learned about modifying the way we talk to ourselves. You might get it.
1. Treat with compassion.
The first step is to place the weapon of responsibility and shame that we have used against ourselves. They have not worked in the past and will not work in the future. Because if they’re working, you’ve ever been in control of this.
The first step is to treat yourself with compassion and understanding. There’s a problem. We may wish we didn’t, but that’s not the world we live in. We have been preyed by addictive substances, just like millions of people from every culture and every course of life. We are responsible for solving this problem, but we are not going to continue to blame ourselves for being in this predicament.
Think about how you talk to yourself. If your best friend talks to you like that, will you become friends with them? Would you like to talk to your friends like that? I hope I don’t!
If you realize how to speak to yourself, try catching yourself when you are unkind and replacing what you said with a more positive frame. For example, if you drank last night and want to beat yourself for it, then say, “OK, I drank last night. I said I wasn’t going, but that’s fine. I realized there’s a problem We’re doing something about it. There are some bumps on the road.”
2. Be honest with yourself.
Once you realize how you speak to yourself, you will also notice the stories you are making, as mentioned before, that alcohol is not bad for my health or my relationship with my wife. When we do this, we realize that we are lying to ourselves.
Deep down, we know these stories that we created to justify drinking is a complete bs, so we can also openly admit it. By doing this, we begin to untie the knot of cognitive dissonance that unites ourselves, and the stress begins to unravel.
One of the most powerful things I did when deciding whether I wanted to stop drinking was to make two lists. It can be said that the first list was much shorter than the second list.
We also challenged the benefits listed to see if we were 100% certain. For example, I said I need alcohol to get social. It was true that I used it often for that purpose, but I thought about the time when I enjoyed other people’s companies without alcohol. It was also undeniable that some people had relationships and social lives without drinking.
I found myself trying or at least qualified to do anything of the advantage. For example, I realized that I liked the topics I got from drinking, but the next time I took a drink I noticed that I enjoyed the topics in the first 30 minutes or so. But then I just chased that high with more alcohol, making me vague and farther from the world.
3. Tackling the fundamental issues.
Once I saw my story and understood the harm I was doing to myself, I knew the answer was clear. I had to stop. But I found this to be the only way forward, but it seemed difficult to face forever without a drink.
My experience was that I quit a few weeks. Then there’s a moment of wobbling, like you go to a gig and try to calm down, and you go back to drinking. I did this three times over a period of several months until I was stuck at the end.
I would recommend doing something a little different from mine here. This is about getting support. It depends on how much you are drinking, how long you are drinking, and what works for you. If you have been a heavy drinker for a long time, you should take medical advice as withdrawing from alcohol can be very dangerous.
Besides getting support, I would recommend giving it a defined period without alcohol rather than saying it is forever. Take a month or two to see what you feel. However, please note that the complete benefit of alcohol-free content can take months to become apparent.
For example, I found out that if you stop drinking, it takes extra time. It took me a few months to find a way to fill that time. Now I am very pleased with my hobby of fitness and music making and rarely get bored, but in the first few months it wasn’t.
Recognizing how I speak to myself was seriously life-changing for me. I now have far better self-esteem. And the relief from removing all cognitive dissonance towards drinking is immeasurable. So be kind to yourself – it may change your life.
About Paul Buxton
Paul Buxton is certified through his business, Stoic Scientist, as this naked mind coach who works with clients who want to change their habits, especially around alcohol. Once a management coach working with some of the world’s largest companies, he used his experiences to help people change their lives, coupled with insights from neuroscience and stoicism. Masu.
