Step

45

Don’t believe you can be a fun-loving non-drinker

Let’s look at a small sample of the typical jokes in greeting cards you can buy for a woman on just one well-known website:

• •“Now she had reached 50 and recalling her doctor’s advice to eat more fruit, Jennie popped some cherries in her gin.”
• •“Angela only had one glass of Prosecco for health benefits (the rest are for witty remarks and amazing dance moves).”
• •“Life is always fun when Sue and Carol are off their tits.”
• •“Because no good birthday started with water.”

Have you ever stopped to think that the person getting that card might already be worried about how much they drink?

Next we have a small sample of things that might have been said to you if you’re on a break, stopped drinking or refused a drink:

• •“Stop being such a girl’s blouse.”
• •“How boring.”
• •“Drink your beer like a man.”
• •“Don’t bother coming if you’re not drinking.”
• •“I don’t trust people who don’t drink.”
• •“I can’t believe you’re still not drinking.”
• •“Surely you’re going to have a drink at Christmas?”
• •“I don’t think I’ll like the non-drinking version of you.”

My first question is: “What do you think all the above, not to mention, the many other cultural references and social pressures you are bombarded with on a daily basis, say about our relationship and beliefs surrounding why we drink alcohol?”

While that slowly penetrates your unconscious mind, let me ask you another question:

“How’s your drinking career progressing?”

Here’s a short version of mine. I had an advantageous start by being born in the North of England and into a heavy drinking culture. You didn’t wait until you were 18, the legal age to start drinking. Nope, you got seriously stuck into the cider and sherry from around 14. This was pretty easy to do because a friendly local shop would sell it to you. Then you’d be off to the park with your mates to get smashed. Next step would be to get served under age in the many pubs that would turn a blind eye. Drink of choice – a pint of mixed. That’s half a mild and half a bitter, and cheap. Mind you, the sophisticated girls were on the lager and black. Or possibly Cinzano Martini (not James Bond standard).

I then spent four years at university wall-to-wall boozing with my mates. Drink of choice – Jägerbombs. Then I joined the world of work. The world of advertising. Now if you’ve seen the TV series Mad Men, we were the documentary version. Alcohol played a central part in everything from meetings to very long client liquid lunches. Now I get to drink both with my mates and colleagues.

Every year we would do ‘Dry January’¹ and of course arrive positively gagging for a drink on 1 February when we would ‘make up’ for lost drinking time with twice as much as before we stopped. By now as a Creative Director who earned a considerable amount, I had moved onto only the finest wines, spirits and every advertising agency’s celebratory drink of choice – Champagne. Nor did we need the excuse of an account win to order more of the fizz.

And so, it went on for years and years and years. My wife also drank quite heavily for a woman. And we always had booze in the house. I never suffered any real bad hangovers or really worried about my level of drinking. Nor did I ever question why I drank. Or what it gave or did for me. Or took away. Nor should you.

The longest time I was ever alcohol free in my entire drinking career was two months. But for most of those sixty days I suffered from cravings, couldn’t be around other drinkers or in a bar and had massive FOMO – fear of missing out. You’ll discover how helpful alcohol was by the time I’d reached 60 years of age in step 46.

I think I enjoyed the vast majority of my drinking career. The bits I can remember, that is. And you might be enjoying yours. I don’t like to be told how to live my life or preached at. We are all grown-ups here and free to make our own individual choices. Give me the information and let me decide thanks. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to take a break or stop drinking and consider your current relationship with booze. You might choose only to read on if you’re a tiny bit interested in how it affects others. If not, that’s fine by me too.

Still here? The next bit is only for those people who might fall into, or somewhere between, the following career categories:

• •I like the occasional drink but wonder what it might be like to have a break.
• •I wonder what would happen if I decided to stop drinking for the rest of my life.

I can only speak from personal experience but here are three possible ways you can approach it:

One. By relying on willpower and motivation.

Both of these are finite. They will run out. Even if you succeed and stay on the wagon for 30 days. Or even 30 years. The whole time you will be miserable and a miserable bugger to be around because way down deep you are still convinced you are missing out and wish you could drink. But you can’t. And you will be counting the days until you can drink again. Or counting the days since you stopped and hoping to get through the next day without a drink by staying strong and avoiding temptation. A moment won’t go by without you thinking about drinking and the devil will sit on your shoulder, or if you prefer the wine witch, whispering in your ear tormenting you with words like “one drink won’t hurt”. You will avoid all social occasions and friends that involve drinking. You will definitely have to avoid telling people, especially the ring leaders among some of your drinking buddies because they might force or embarrass you into starting again. You won’t dare visit the pub because it will be a big fat reminder of what great fun you are missing. I guarantee you will, sooner or later, fuck up. Because all the time you’ve been trying very hard to not do something you very much want to do. Attempting to quit this way will be a horrible experience.

This whole strategy is similar to the approach of Alcoholics ­Anonymous. Now I know A.A. have saved and helped so many people overcome their addiction to alcohol. They have saved lives. They could well save yours. And without them thousands of people around the world would not be with us. Good on them.

The only issue I have with this is whether telling yourself and others over and over again that you are an alcoholic, that you have an incurable disease, an addiction, that you mustn’t ever think about drinking ever again, and spending lots of time talking about this with other people who believe the same thing is a bit like saying: “I don’t want you to think of a blue elephant.” I just don’t think this is the best mindset and the most empowering beliefs to have if you want to stop drinking. It may be for you if you want to stop but still feel bad about not being able to drink.

Two. You change your mindset.

In fact, you have to go as far as changing the world your mind lives in. The best way to do that is to change your core beliefs. In an earlier step I talked about how a belief is a bit like a table. The top is the belief and the legs are the references you use to support that belief. It should come as no surprise that often at the heart of one of your long-held beliefs is actually a massive big lie you’ve always told yourself. Just look at the spelling of belief.

This could be hard to do. Mainly because you’re faced with years of social conditioning, social pressure, misinformation and lies that constantly tell us alcohol is a vital part of life. Look back to the start of this chapter. See what I mean? Messages you’re soaking in. You’ve been well and truly pickled in them. Don’t think you can easily escape.

I’ve said this before but as it is so important let’s shout it this time: YOU DON’T BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE, YOU SEE WHAT YOU BELIEVE. In other words, you interpret all your experiences of the world through the filter of your beliefs. Happy, successful people have figured out they get to choose what world they want to live in. They know they can choose the beliefs that suit them best. Helpful ones that make them act and feel the way they want to and lead to the results they want.

“You don’t believe what you see, you see what you believe.”

Here are some of the most common references or lies people use to support their beliefs about drinking that you must not destroy:

• •“It helps you relax, sleep, cope, be more sociable, less shy.”
• •“It tastes so good.”
• •”Food without a fine wine isn’t the same.”
• •“No booze equates to no fun.”
• •“You enjoy it.”
• •“Nothing beats a thirst-quenching cold pint on a hot day.”
• •“Sex is better with alcohol.”
• •“It’s impossible, too hard to stop, tried before.”

Go online and you’ll find a mountain of information that might make you question all the above. And just as much to support the ones below. If you want to fuck up on the drinking front, the message is clear – don’t arm yourself with the facts to help change your beliefs. Tribe mentality makes it easier to believe something because everyone else is saying the same thing. As does confirmation bias.² The American Association of Wine Economists did a study of more than 6,000 wine drinkers. In these blind taste tests, wine drinkers were unable to distinguish expensive wines from cheap ones. Indeed, the majority claimed to prefer the cheap ones. Keep telling yourself you are the exception to this and love something with “long legs, a smoky bottom and a slight aftertaste of angel’s tears” and no, you won’t be convinced otherwise.

Alcohol is also a poison. It’s used to fuel cars, as disinfectant, an anaesthetic and a preservative. But I’m wasting my breath because right now as Jack Nicholson would say: “You can’t handle the truth.”

Here are some reasons why you really drink:

• •Absolutely number one is social pressure. You are part of a tribe that drinks. If you don’t join in, you’re an outsider, and humans have a massive need to belong.
• •It’s a learned habit. You could add it’s also a learned taste.
• •To numb pain or feelings.
• •To deal with the symptoms rather than the cause of your problems.

Let’s say you adopt some new helpful, empowering beliefs that focus 100% on what being a non-drinker does for you and what you gain. You give no attention to what you are losing because you know you are losing nothing. You’ve become aware it’s just an ­illusion – a great big magic trick – and you can’t be fooled a moment longer. Be careful also not to start hanging out with a different tribe that shares your new mindset and supports you.³

Your biggest gain if you change your mind will be time. Where does that come from?

Firstly, you’ll start to notice you have more new-found physical and mental energy than you know what to do with. It won’t arrive instantly. After all, if you’ve had a drinking career anything like mine, you’ll have been abusing your brain and body for an awfully long time.

One day you will wake up really early after the best sleep ever, write a chapter of your new book, go for a six-mile run, have a coffee with your wife then go to work. Well I did. You will still go to the pub with your mates on Friday night and have a great time, but it won’t rob you of the energy to get up early the next day and join in the local park run. If you have kids, you’re free to be fully present and with them for the whole weekend rather than lying on the sofa nursing a hangover. I’ve taken part in the Christmas Day Roundhay Parkrun starting at 9.00 am for the last two years. Best fun ever.

Now there’s time for others to admire your shiny hair, clear eyes, nice skin and whole new body. To be an utter fuck-up you don’t want to lose the biggest excuse of all – that you don’t have enough time or energy to succeed at anything. Time to spend all that former booze money on some nice new Nike specially made marathon running shoes.

If you do change your mindset, be careful not to keep track and keep a record of how you now experience things through these new core beliefs, such as when you tick off all the big events like birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, New Year, one after the other, for days, weeks, months, why even years on end. And discover you had a brilliant, even better, more rewarding, fun time. All these sober experiences will help build and reinforce that taking a break is not only possible but an even better way of enjoying life.

You are still likely to ‘fall off the wagon’ if you only adopted these beliefs but did not really fully buy into them. You’ll know this if, for instance, you continue to have any form of cravings or are jealous of drinkers and what you are missing out on after about a month in. You see it only takes around that long for the alcohol to completely clear your system. The cravings and desires are coming from your mind not your body and are no longer chemically induced. Some may be coming from habit, conditioning and social pressure BUT most, in fact I would suggest all, are being created by cognitive dissonance. Simply put, you are suffering from the mental stress and discomfort that happens when you try to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. You will never be free if you continue to believe that alcohol is somehow vital to enjoying life. If you do ‘fail’ don’t go back, and reset your mindset.

Three. You make the decision to stop drinking for good. Forever.

Whoa right there Steve. FOREVER – that sounds very scary! I know it is. Don’t do it! Making the decision might prove hard. You may find yourself going back and forth while your mind has a fight with itself. Caught on the horns of a dilemma. A bit like: “Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses?”

I decided on forever. So did Candy my wife. For us the F-word means freedom. Freedom from ever having to wonder about if we’d have a drink ever again; if we did, when, or how many, what rules to have – such as only at weekends. From now on we didn’t need to expend any energy thinking about any of that.

Before I made the best, most important decision in my whole life – apart from asking Candy to marry me – I’d already decided alcohol was adding nothing but taking lots of things away. Then I committed 100% to the decision. No wriggle room. No going back. No lingering doubt. Just one massive immovable full stop. I chose to stop drinking with my whole mind. Consciously and unconsciously. I thought about it with a sense of absolute certainty. Just like I am certain the sun will rise tomorrow. There was no conflict going on inside my head caused by a desire to quit drinking and the fear of missing out. Of course, because of your current core beliefs, how could you believe me when I say I experienced, once any remains of the alcohol had left my body, almost “spontaneous sobriety”⁴. I’ve never felt any cravings or desire to drink. Neither has Candy. We both really enjoy being in a bar or on a night out usually with lifelong friends or at a family event surrounded by people who still drink. We’ve both replaced the fear of never being able to drink again with the excitement of never having to drink again. That’s why when someone says something like, “You mean you wouldn’t even have a drink at your daughter’s wedding?” I can’t even process it. I mean why would I? It no longer plays any part in my thinking. Never crosses my mind. In fact, if you asked me how many days it is since I drank alcohol, I’d have to look it up. To me it would seem as pointless as counting how many days it was since I had a drink of tea. At the time of writing it’s around three years – that’s alcohol not tea. Same for Candy. But then who’s counting?

Remember Candy and I are only a sample of two. Unless other happy, fun-loving non-drinkers exist. Good luck in finding loads of them! So just ignore everything I’ve said and get the drinks in.

¹ One in ten Britons will try ‘Dry January’. You already know what I think of ‘trying’ to do something.

² Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret and recall information in a way that affirms one’s prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

³ I’ve heard some good reports about the online groups ‘One Year No Beer’ and ‘Soberistas’.

⁴ If this intrigues you, I highly recommend This Naked Mind by Annie Grace and The 30-Day Sobriety Solution by Jack Canfield and Dave Andrews.