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How to Change Your Alcohol Addiction | What Does Habit Change Involve?
http://alcoholmastery.com/how-to-change-your-alcohol-addiction-what-does-habit-change-involve/
Today, I just want to talk about ‘what does change involve? What does change involve when you’re moving from being a drinker to being a non-drinker?’
To me, change comes in two different parts.
First part is the immediate change, those immediate changes that you have to make in order to get yourself across that starting point, in order to go from where you are now, being a drinker to being a non-drinker.
To actually go ‘this is my first day without a drink, this is my second day without a drink, this is my third day without a drink…’ those short term changes.
The second part of this that you have to do is to change the long-term view of yourself, how you look at yourself, how you label yourself, what it is that you think, who do you think you are. We all have a core of ourselves, we’ve got this identity that is the centre of everything that we do. It’s that identity that you have to change.
You’ve also, as a third part, got to change all the parts of your lifestyle that used to be involved with alcohol, that used to surround alcohol; that core of alcohol is the centre of all this behaviour.
You have to change that.
When you take alcohol out of your life, I’ve spoken about this a few times, the alcohol leaves a behavioural vacuum, and you can’t have a behavioural vacuum, it’s just impossible to have that.
So, once you take the alcohol out, the parts of your life that’s left, you have to fill those.
What are you going to fill them with?
That’s the second part, it’s deciding, hopefully in advance of anything else, what’s going to replace the alcohol.
Most of your life is filled up with behavioural sequences, habits, things that you get up in the morning, you do a certain thing, then you do another thing, and then you follow these sequences throughout your day.
Most of us are very upset and feel like crap when something unexpected happens, and the reason why we feel like crap is because it takes us out of these sequences, and we all of a sudden have to think about what we’re doing.
And all that thinking is tiring. Your brain uses a lot of energy to think.
It’s a lot more efficient for your brain to go ‘’you do this often, you do this all the time, so I’m going to make this into a habitual behaviour.
We’re going to make this automatic so you can do it like a robot, just follow the sequence, you don’t have to think about it. You go from a to b to c’’.
This happens throughout your day, throughout your life.
And, most of the times that you drink, most of the occasions that you drink, most of the thoughts about alcohol are related to these sequences.
So, they’re automated sequences triggered by day to day events.
You might come home from work and it triggers a desire to drink alcohol.
Now most of these day to day triggers, because they happen so frequently in your life, these are going to disappear or change very rapidly, because you do them every day.
You come home from work every day, and that same trigger is going to go off every day and it’s not going to be reciprocated by an action.
So, the trigger will fire off if you don’t take a drink. That means that every time you don’t drink, the trigger gets weakened.
So, after 30 days of this, you’ll start to notice the difference.
The trigger won’t be firing off after 60 days.
Some habits, I think they say between 18 and 254 days, that’s when the reckon the behavioural plateau is, so it’s very difficult at the beginning to get up to the top of this bell curve, but then once you get to the top it’s like…you know you get up really slowly for the first 3,4 weeks and then when you get to the top, it sort of levels out and then starts eventually to go down.
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