Why quitting alcohol can feel so hard

When we are young we are carefree, have minimal stresses in our lives and when we start to explore the world of drinking alcohol we often don’t think or care about it, we are fitting in with our friends and having a good time (so we think), yet the reality is that we are slowly killing ourselves – we just ignore it, we are in ignorant bliss.

This was what my life was like in my twenties and thirties, I drank daily without guilt, shame or worry. I was having fun, I didn’t care and I certainly didn’t stop to think about the consequences to myself or the other people in life. I describe this phase as ‘ignorant bliss’, we are totally ignorant of the damage we are causing and we think that our life is bliss because we falsely believe we are having a great time and living our best life.

As the years went by I began to have the odd moment of concern about my drinking behaviour but I would always put my mind at ease by comparing myself to heavier drinkers and ease my worries by confirming that I wasn’t as bad as they were. There were occasions in my forties where I would search on Google for things like ‘am I an alcoholic?’ or ‘how much alcohol is too much?’.

As time went by I would avoid anything negative in the media or on social channels about the dangers of drinking, I would make sure I would quickly move past it. Yet anything positive that reinforced the benefits of boozing would get my attention as it allowed me to confirm to myself that there was no real problem with my drinking and I was fine to carry on as I was. I loved seeing these articles, they would scream at me ‘Wine is good for the heart’ or ‘A glass of wine a day reduces the risk of cancer’, it was just what I wanted to hear, I would pour over these stories for hours and allow them to confirm that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my drinking, everything was fine – I wasn’t one of those awful ‘alcoholics’.

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Of course, this was all an illusion, I would never take the time to check the source of the information I was reading and believing. Often these articles are funded by alcohol manufacturers and when you dig deep into the details, they have often surveyed only a very small pool of people. The data these opinions are formed upon is usually incredibly sketchy, to the point that drawing conclusions and making huge statements based on them seems about as reliable as a prediction from an amateur fortune teller with a crystal ball.

At some point we all run into a trigger. When this happens all of the feelings and emotions that we have ignored for years make themselves visible, they come out into the light and despite us not wanting to see them, we have no choice but to look. This is our first painful taste of the reality of our drinking behaviour and the damage we have been causing to our lives.

For me, the trigger was noticing my hands shaking in the morning after drinking, along with an article on the TV news about the dangers of regular alcohol use. I would usually have ignored anything talking about the risks of booze, but for some reason this caught my attention and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. There was an expert sharing information about the damage that drinking causes to our mental health and it caused me to reflect on the state of my own anxiety and low moods, I began to wonder if alcohol was contributing to the problems.

I tried to soothe myself and push the thoughts and fears away, but the worries had begun. From this moment onwards, the war in my head started. My conscious mind was telling me to quit drinking and that I would end up killing myself if I carried on, it wanted to protect me and ensure I stayed safe. Yet my subconscious was telling me that I should carry on with the same old habits and there wasn’t really anything wrong with my drinking, it wanted the comfort that comes with routine and habitual behaviour – this stage is called cognitive dissonance.

So here is the thing…when this war in our mind erupts, we begin to act like a crazy military dictator. But worse than that, this dictator can’t make his mind up on which sides he wants to support, he keeps switching between them. One day we support the ‘conscious’ army and do all we can to quit, when we do this our subconscious becomes louder and starts to make us feel discomfort. Because it feels painful, we give in, change sides and start drinking, not long after the same happens again, this time our conscious mind is creating havoc and causing us to suffer.

I spent around five years in this stage which I call the ‘Drunken Dictator’ and it was so painful, once we are in that place we will continue to flip and flop from one side to the other and inflict suffering upon ourselves. One minute we want to quit and firmly support the belief to become alcohol-free that is in our conscious mind, but before long we have found ourselves joining the enemy and end up convinced that drinking is fine because we don’t really have a problem, we tell ourselves that the fears and worries that our conscious mind is expressing are an overreaction and that nothing is really wrong.

Each time that we shift from side to side, things get much worse. We start to drink again, so we choose to support our subconscious mind as a result our conscious mind becomes upset that we are ignoring the advice it has provided to quit alcohol, so it starts to shout much louder and make life really uncomfortable in our heads. It gets so loud that we can’t ignore it, it is painful and we can’t stop thinking about the damage we are inflicting on ourselves.

Eventually we give in, we decide that we need to quit drinking because it will end the suffering and noise in our mind. We firmly commit to giving up booze, but a day or two into our new sober life we hear noise in our head again, this time it is our subconscious mind and it is not happy. It is angry because we have ignored the messages it has given us explaining that continuing to drink is fine and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the habit we have.

The subconscious will make all the noise it can, it will ensure we suffer until we pay attention, and eventually that is exactly what we do. It becomes too much so we give in and decide drinking isn’t a problem after all.

We can end up in this loop forever if we don’t take steps to avoid it, believe me it is incredibly painful and the sooner we can move through it, the better. The good news is that you can get out of it, I wrote extensively about this specific area of the journey in my new book How to Quit Alcohol in 50 Days – which is released next month.

What you need to know is that once you have entered the stage where there is a war in your head, you can never, ever go back to the ‘ignorant bliss’ stage, it has gone forever. I can’t state this clearly enough, that place has gone, no matter how hard you try you cannot go there ever again! So each time we team up with our ‘subconscious’ army we falsely believe we will go back to the ‘ignorant bliss’ stage, for me this stage was when I was in my twenties and thirties, but it is a total illusion. All that happens when we drink is that we end up making the internal conflict worse and stoking the fires of war, it goes on and on for as long as we choose to allow it.

When I realised this, it was a lightbulb moment because it dawned on me that alcohol was not giving me what it was promising, in fact, it never had – it was simply causing more pain. When I was able to accept that ‘ignorant bliss’ was a place that no longer existed and that it was a thing of my past, I was able to make peace with myself and began to truly believe there was only one way out of the mess I had found myself in.

The way out of the internal conflict in my mind was to stop playing the Drunken Dictator and that meant I needed to switch my role to become a Peace Envoy. The goal was now to unite the two armies and get them marching to the same beat. I had two options, I could keep drinking and convince my conscious mind (the one that wanted me to stop pouring poison into myself) that everything was fine, but this was useless because I knew that it was a lie to myself because of the new information about the dangers of regular drinking that I now I had, so it would never work.

The only way out was to get my subconscious mind to understand the facts and dangers about alcohol, the more I could immerse it with information regarding the truth about alcohol, the more it would start to change perspective. So that is exactly what I did, I threw myself into learning as though I was studying for a hugely important university degree, I got motivated and excited and committed to learning every single day.

Quitting alcohol is exactly like learning a new skill, don’t expect to be perfect on your first day. Instead, start showing up everyday and putting the work into training yourself and you will find the results will come. Don’t pressure yourself, simply keep working every single day, keep a tally on a wall planner so you create a streak of your progress – your only job is to never break the streak you have created.

I trained myself using books, podcasts, sobriety blogs and online programmes like my own , see www.joinbesober.com

The subconscious mind hangs onto our long standing habits and uses them as a default that we return to without any awareness. However, it is open to learning and change, so the more we soak it with information, the quicker it starts to change. Eventually, with daily studying about the benefits of sobriety and the dangers of drinking, the war in my head began to subside and the two sides felt like they were united in their belief that being alcohol-free was the right choice.

Once this happened, the rest ws fairly easy, I worked on staying really motivated and excited and made sure I paid attention to all the powerful and positive changes that were happening to me both internally and externally as this served to ensure I felt incredibly focused and excited about what I was achieving on my journey.

This internal conflict is the reason so many people stay stuck in a loop of quitting alcohol for a while, then return to drinking before they stumble back to sobriety again, they end up going round and round as though they are stuck in a hamster wheel of pain.

There is no getting around this part of the process, we have to face up to it and go through it by getting the two sides to end the conflict that is raging in our head. Once the two sides have the same common objective they become one big, strong army and there is no need for huge amounts of willpower, we end up firmly believing in the choice we are making for ourselves and feel incredibly confident that we are doing the right thing.

The only way to get there is by throwing ourselves into learning, if we put the work in we will reap the rewards.

If you need more help quitting drinking, check out my free 7 day course – https://besober.co.uk/7-days-to-sobriety-free-course/

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