Preparing to Easily Stop Drinking Alcohol

What is a habit? How a habit is constructed or de-constructed? How does this all relate to your stopping drinking alcohol?

What are your real needs? Do you need to relax, socialize, and have fun, or are there much deeper needs that you need to fulfill?

This tutorial will give you a better understanding of how so many areas of our lives are affected by achieving or not achieving our most basic needs.

Maslow’s theory on needs gives us a pretty good benchmark for figuring out not only why we drink, but why we do most anything in this life. Understanding these things lets us see where we might have gone wrong, and more importantly, where we might start working to put things right.

Abraham Maslow said, "I suppose it’s tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything like it’s a nail.” Using alcohol to sleep, relax, socialize, whatever the benefit you’re aiming at, is like using a hammer to knock a screw into a piece of wood. You seem to have achieved a shortcut but in end all you've done is ruin the screw and the wood. 

Who are you as an alcohol user? Who do you want to be once you stop using? How you view yourself is massive, it’s huge, it’s the deal maker or the deal breaker. What you believe about yourself, plays a much bigger part in who you are than what you do. What you believe directs all your thinking. Your thinking directs all your action.

How much control you have? What is your locus of control and how does that determine how you deal with your habitual behavior? The hierarchy of control is an important concept for you to understand. The more you understand about your own control, where that control is, the better chance you have of dealing with change. There's no point in chasing after things, trying to alter things, where you have little or no control. You will only be spinning in circles. Concentrate your efforts where you have the most control. I'm also going to be talking about your personal alcohol timeline, which is another important concept.

The majority of your control is in your mind. Not only does it reside there, it is shaped and consolidated there. That shaping has been happening since the day you were born. Ultimately, that shaping is yours to manipulate. Thinking about things from a positive or negative perspective is down to you. You are the only one who can ultimately control your life, your destiny. You can choose to believe that your life is being directed by forces outside of your control or you can self-direct yourself to the life you really want. In this tutorial, I wanted to take a further look at the concept of learned helplessness along with an ancient way of viewing the emotional and logical parts of your mind respectively as the elephant and the rider.

The next video in the series looks at your levels of personal control. This is another area whereby understanding the how, who, and what you control. More importantly, it's crucial to understand if you have control. If you don't have control over a situation, environment, or person, what's the point in focusing on it? You are much better to focus your attention and effort where you have full or even partial control.

The sustainability of any realistic habit change in your life is contingent on where you put your focus. Your focus determines your reality.

The focus that you put on the alcohol also determines other people's reality. What I mean by that is if you tell your family and friends that you are quitting drinking alcohol, you become a part of a specific picture in their minds, their way of looking at you. You become an "problem drinker", perhaps an "alcoholic". 

However, if you focus their attention onto the fact that you want to get healthy, lose weight, quit smoking, quit drinking, and get more exercise, they can no longer focus on the quit drinking part only. Now they see you as somebody who is trying to improve themselves. Some people may see you as a bit of a "health nut" or a "health freak", but I think that's more preferable, and certainly more beneficial, than people thinking of you as "alcoholic". More importantly, it's closer to the truth.

But it's far more important where you put your focus. Where you focus your mind will dictate what pathways you take, how you get there, how long it's going to take you, your thought processes, the language you use, and so on and so forth… 

Always remember that your mind is going to focus where you point it.

It's quite normal to think about skills as something that you might do within your job. For instance, learning how to type, learning how to use a particular machine, or learning how to negotiate. We also think of skills in terms of hobbies or interests. For instance, playing a musical instrument, learning a foreign language, or learning how to ski. But did you know that habit change also requires skills acquisition? 

If you want to quit drinking alcohol, the process is actually very logical and simple, you don't put any alcohol into your mouth. If you do that, you have quit drinking. It's as simple as that. There are no real skills you need to be able to achieve this end result. 

However, changing a habit that you may have acquired and practised over many years means that you've got to change many parts and aspects of your behaviour and your life. This requires learning new skills. 

In this video, you will learn the two essential parts of any skill acquisition, learning and practice.

This is a recap of the main points in this section.

Understanding what is good preparation, is essential before you begin your process. Some things you can prepare for, other things you can't. You need to understand the difference. Most of your preparation is going to happen before you quit. This is where you will start to minimise the initial negative feedback from being without alcohol. But the preparation process continues after you have stepped across that line. Some of your preparation will not be ideal because you are virtually aiming blind, you don't really know what's going to happen. So, you have to be able to change your plans as you move. In this clip, were going to go over what is preparation and what isn't.

What's the point in preparing? Shouldn't we dive straight in, head first. We are trying to stop doing something which is poisonous to our bodies, our minds, and our lives. Why would you tell us to delay? Surely, the sooner we stop putting the alcohol in, the better we are, and the sooner we can recover? Abraham Lincoln sums this up beautifully. He said "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." Time spent in preparation is not lost. Much better that you prepare yourself fully and multiply your chances of success, then jump straight in and for the first obstacle.

Keeping things as simple as possible is important. Keeping things simple allows you to put your focus where it is going to be best served. The simpler you can make this whole preparation process, the easier it will be for you not only to complete the process, and to go through the process of actually quitting drinking alcohol. In this video I'm going to talk about some of the best tools that you have at your disposal, your mind tools. Of course, your mind will take you to a certain level, then you have to physically take action.

I almost always recommend that the preparation process takes at least two weeks, but no more than a month. The reason why is because the more preparation you can do, the better prospects of having successful onwards journey. And that is what this is all about. What I teach at Alcohol Mastery is that the more you can focus your attention towards the goals that you want to achieve in life, the goals you really want to achieve, the more chance you have of leaving alcohol behind permanently, and laughing yourself silly about ever drinking in the first place! So, preparation is about being thorough, but keeping things as simple as you can. You have to know and understand yourself and your drinking habit. You must figure out your goals, what you are aiming for in life. And a big part of preparation is figuring out how you are going to get to those goals, step-by-step. We will dig into this a bit more in the video.

We spoke in the last video about why you should prepare. In this video I will talk about how long you should prepare. When you start out on this journey, you have a beginners mind. Sometimes this is known as the drinker's mind. Because most people start their journey from day one, they quit drinking as soon as they make the decision, they are in the drinker's mind from day one. And interval of preparation gives you a chance to exercise the beginners mind, to teach it some basic skills, thought patterns, and mindsets, so that when you step across the line and actually stop drinking alcohol, your thinking about your habit change and your behaviour is a bit more advanced. You are no longer in the framework of an absolute beginner. This makes life so much easier. You are much less likely to have cravings or other "side-effects". And you are much more likely to build and maintain strong momentum.

We've seen what preparation involves and how long it should take, now I want to focus your mind on the critical moves of affirmative and positive thinking and action. There are two parts to preparation. The first part is the process of thinking and planning. You actively examine yourself, your past behaviour and how that has affected your current standing, finding and understanding of where you are. Then, taking that information, you build a mental roadmap of your starting point, your destination, and how you are going to get there. By doing this, you not only build a how-to guide for your own future, you begin to figure out some of the things that might lie ahead, both good or bad. Understanding this means you can make adjustments and rig detours. The second part is taking action. I can give you all the information under the sun, but if you don't take action, nothing will come of it. Failure in this journey comes about because of one of two reasons: the first is that people act without thinking and the second is that they think without acting. Sometimes putting your thoughts into action is one of the hardest things parts of this journey. But once done, your journey begins to get progressively easy. And don't forget, in order to get momentum, you need to get a start.

This is a recap of the main points in this section.

Einstein said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solutions). In this section, were going to take a look at you and your alcohol drinking past, present, and future. Understanding yourself is akin to knowing where you are in your life. There's no point in building a blueprint for your life unless you understand your starting position. To give you another analogy, if you were in a big city, like London for instance, and I gave you a street map, it would be useless unless and until you know where you are starting from. Once you work that out you can quickly then figure out how to get to where you want to go. Throughout your drinking life, you will gradually lose sight of where you actually are in reality. This section of videos is about uncovering that reality, getting rid of the deceptions and the cognitive biases, and seeing where you really are underneath.

This video is about trying to understand your past alcohol drinking behaviour. Everyone's past is different. We all have one thing in common, we cannot change what has already happened. If you look at the concept of karma from a nonreligious point of view, it makes perfect sense. You are where you are because of everything that has happened before in your life. All your thoughts, choices, decisions, and actions have led you to this moment in time. So you can't blame anybody for where you are except yourself. This is not about looking back into your past with recrimination, blame, guilt, or regret. I think the only logical and sensible reason for examining your past is to learn something. It's the same with failure. Failure is not failure if it is reframed as a lesson. Once you learn something from failure, or your past, it becomes a worthwhile part of your life. I'm going to ask and answer a few questions within this video about my own drinking past. Please take the time to answer these questions for yourself. As I have already said in the last video, you need to understand where you are in the present moment in order to effectively move towards a destination. If you don't know where you're starting from, you are only going to spin in circles. Get to know your past alcohol thinking. Answer questions like:

How has alcohol affected your thinking and your physical well-being?

How has your thinking affected your drinking?

Did you like drinking when you first started?

What were your perceptions about drinking alcohol when you first started?

How often have you failed to do something that you should have done because of your drinking?

In this third video of the "Know Yourself" section, I want you to start looking at your alcohol present. Again, I'm gonna focus most of my attention on looking at my own "alcohol present" as it was at the time that I stopped drinking alcohol. Please take the time to answer these questions yourself. Again, this is an important step towards freeing yourself from the alcohol straitjacket and successfully moving forwards with your life.

Get to know your present alcohol thinking. We'll look at questions like:

What kind of behavior do you exhibit before you have been drinking?

What kind of behavior do you exhibit during your drinking?

What kind of behavior do you exhibit after you’ve been drinking?

What do you think about before/during/and after your drinking?

In this fourth video of the "Know Yourself" section, I want you to examine your alcohol future. Think about this in terms of "A Christmas Carol", the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future. Again, I'm going to ask myself some questions and answer them from the perspective of what I was thinking when I began my new journey and stopped drinking alcohol. Once you've watched the video, answer these questions for yourself. Examine your own future from two different timelines. The first timeline is where you don't quit drinking alcohol. What is going to happen to you? What is going to happen to the people around you? How much of your life will be spent in "real" pain? How much of your life are you sacrificing? Then, look at your life from the perspective of once you have quit drinking alcohol. How much are you adding onto your life? How much value are you adding to your own life and to those around you? How much fitter, stronger, smarter, happier are you going to be?

Get to know your future alcohol thinking. We'll look at questions like:

How do you see your future if you don't stop using alcohol?

How did I see my future if I did stop using alcohol?

Over the last three tutorials, we have looked at your alcohol behaviour from three different perspectives, the past, present, and the future. Now I want to switch and take a look at how your environment has affected your drinking and how your drinking had affected your environment.

It's a fact that if we were raised in the country where alcohol was non-existent, we wouldn't have an alcohol problem. Your environment does alter how you think about anything.

If you are raised in the country where alcohol is prevalent, you are more likely to drink alcohol.

If you are raised in a family that drinks alcohol, you are more likely to drink alcohol as well.

We are surrounded by people drinking alcohol, alcohol advertising and marketing, alcohol itself in stores of all types, restaurants, bars, and so on… It's very difficult to remove yourself from that environment.

In this video we will start to examine alcohol in your environment and begin to ask what you can do about it.

Get to know your alcohol drinking environment. We'll look at questions like:

How does your drinking affect your environment?

How does your environment affect your drinking?

In the final video of this section, I want to examine how the people in your life have affected your alcohol drinking behaviour and how your alcohol drinking behaviour has affected your relationships with the people in your life. 

Again, I'm going to speak about this from a personal perspective from when I was drinking alcohol and after.
 
You should answer these questions yourself once you have watched the video. 

It's another useful place to think about Scrooge and the three ghosts. Imagine yourself being taken into your past, your present, and your future. 

It's especially worthwhile to look at your future and see how your relationships have been affected from both perspectives: 
1. You have quit drinking alcohol. 
2. You haven't quit alcohol. What happens?

Get to know the people in your life in relation to alcohol drinking. We'll look at questions like:

How have the people in your life affected your drinking?

How has your drinking affected the people in your life?

Why is it so important to focus on building the new rather than on destroying the old?

Let's take a general look at what behaviors and habits you'd like to see in your life.

What new behaviors and habits are you going to pursue?

It's all very well talking about establishing new habits, bringing new behaviors into our lives, but how exactly do we do that? Isn't it hard to get rid of an old habit or bring in a new habit? That's where habit chaining comes in.

How can you deal with overwhelm of reaching that one big goal?

If you choose the wrong target for your goals, no matter how much you try to stay motivated and on track, you will find it very difficult once you come to roadblocks or tough parts of the journey. It makes much more sense to choose your goals wisely, to choose SMART goals.

Which areas of your life should you be planning goals for? You are re-planning your life, where can you find balance?

There’s a time thinking and there’s a time for action.

If you want to succeed, you have to put up with discomfort and uncertainty. We also have to acknowledge that there’s a possibility that we’ll get it wrong. How do you overcome this? What do you do in the face of a potential setback?

This is a recap of the Setting Your New Goals section.

Your preparation has to have a time frame. We can get so caught up in the process of preparing to stop drinking that never step over that starting line to actually doing it. Procrastination can be a big issue when you’re trying to do something that might cause you some discomfort. This is why it's so important to set a specific timeframe for your preparation.

How can you cement your commitment and increase the chances that your goal intentions are going to bear fruit? The answer is implementation intentions, otherwise known as if/then statements.

The biggest obstacle you will ever face is your own mind. Let's look at a couple of mindsets.

How do you move your focus away from alcohol in the heat of the moment?

This is one of the best inspirational tricks you can implement on your new alcohol-free journey.

Keeping track of what your thoughts are, where you're going, and what you've done is important.

Mantras and affirmations are sentences of your own choosing that you repeat to yourself over and over again. They are self-directed reprogramming of your mind.

One of the largest influences on your habit is going to be your environment, it’s one of your biggest triggers. So, you’re much more likely to change your behaviors if you change your environment.

How to prepare for the temptations or triggers that you’ll encounter in your wider environment.

You have the least control over the people in your life because they can react. Pure and simple. How do you prepare the people you love to accept the changes you're about to make? How do you make sure they give you their best support?

How to deal with everyone else, your colleagues at work, your old drinking buddies, the more distant members of your family. Do you try to get them on your side? How much do you tell them? How do you explain what you're doing?