If You Want to Quit Drinking Change Your Mindset

The quicker you accept where you are in your drinking career, the better chance you’ll have of changing it and building a better sober life.

Accepting that you’ve been drinking too much or for too long doesn’t mean you’re ok with it. It just means you see the situation clearly and you want to do something about it before it’s too late.

When you accept this is where I’m at in my drinking career, I don’t want to be here and I have to change it. You can start to think differently about alcohol and your drinking habits.

You can recognise alcohol for the poison it is and understand more about how it works as a virus infecting your brain. Alcohol has hacked your brain and is making it work against you and not for you.

We live in a cause-and-effect world, so if you want to change your results, you have to change the way you think about alcohol, the way you behave when you are around it and what you do to fight it.

The good news is, you can change your drinking habits and quit drinking.

Take a look around you at all the celebrities who have quit drinking. Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Robert Downy Junior, to name a select few.

“If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self.”

― Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

If you want to get sober and stay sober, you will need a massive mindset shift.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. Let’s face it you’ve been doing “easy” for the whole of your drinking career, and look where that’s got you.

It is so easy to say, “I’m stressed, give me a beer,” or “I’m bored. Let’s have a drink.” Stop taking the easy way.

Choose a different path based on wisdom and not emotion. Choose not to be a victim of the big booze companies and make better, more informed choices. Start by shifting your thinking.

Give Up Useless Ways of Thinking

In addition to your addiction to drink, you also have an addiction to negative, destructive thought patterns. The kicker is you probably don’t realise it.

For example, “I had a bad day, I need a drink,” is a negative thought pattern because you are lying to yourself and finding excuses to drink. After all, the drama is over so why do you need a drink?

If you rephrased the sentence to reflect reality, you would be forced to say,

“I’ve had a bad day and even though the drama has finished, I’m going to drink poison, which will damage my internal organs and make me depressed because alcohol is the only thing that makes me happy.”

If you were honest about the reality of drinking alcohol, would you still want to drink it or would you maybe think twice and look for a smarter solution?

So what can you do to break the cycle? Or, as Dr Joe Dispenza would say, “Break the habit of being yourself.”

Firstly, stop thinking of alcohol as your friend and saviour. It isn’t.

It is a poison that kills. It is a toxic substance we all need to rethink. It causes over 200 serious diseases in your body. This includes throat, bowel stomach and lung cancer, not to mention brain and liver damage. Then there’s the mental health issues that alcohol causes, depression, suicidal thoughts, self harm, etc. etc.

You probably know all of this already, and some of you are going to do exactly what I did, which is bury the truth and keep on drinking until you can no longer ignore the effects such as the days when you are just too tired to get up or when your gut constantly hurts and your hands shake.

Alcohol serves no positive purpose.

It is not your friend, but it is your enemy. By making this switch in language, your brain is going to get different signals which is important to help you break your old habits.

Remember the Serenity Prayer

The serenity prayer encourages us to accept the things we cannot change.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference” -Serenity prayer

We all have things we’d like to go back in time and change, especially when it comes to drinking. Maybe you want to forget about that one-night stand, or completely delete relationships forged in alcoholic binges. We can’t change any of it.

You’re better off accepting it, drawing a line under it and moving on.

Instead of focusing on baggage from the past, shine the torch on it. Ask yourself some important questions, like;

What can I learn from this?

Who do I have to become so that it doesn’t happen again?

The next step is to work on yourself and to train yourself to stop having the “if only” mindset. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the one in which we replay events in our lives and start saying, if only….

If only I hadn’t gotten drunk at the Christmas party, I would still have my job.

If only I had quit drinking three years ago, I wouldn’t have an ulcer now.

This type of thinking isn’t going to help you and it keeps you locked in the past instead of where you need to be — in the present.

When we live in our painful past or imagine ourselves in a stressful future, we create unnecessary suffering in the now.

It’s a pattern of behaviour that needs to be changed. Here’s one way to reframe it.

There is nobody on this planet who hasn’t experienced some form of pain and suffering. Accept pain as a normal part of being human.

What makes some successful and others not is how we choose to react to that pain. Do we nurse it, nurture it and let it grow? Or do we say, “stuff it. I’m going to live a bloody good life and I won’t let my past pain dictate my future.”

Until you get honest and clear about your drinking, you won’t change it. You’ll just keep doing the same things you’ve always done until your body gives up or your relationships end.

Break the Negative Cycle and Create a New Loop

Start to break the drinking cycle by giving yourself a few easy wins like these:

Start by dumping the belief that your past dictates your future. Just because you couldn’t quit in the past doesn’t mean you will never quit.

Rename alcohol as a poison and start to focus on healthy eating.

Exercise a little more to help eliminate the toxins.

Then sit down and start to really think about your relationship with alcohol.

What lies are you telling yourself about alcohol? What help and resources do you need to quit?

Then plan your next move based on where you are now. Make being sober a priority. Live in the moment and be sober and fully present right now.

Don’t let the big booze companies keep you locked into alcohol. You can live a healthy sober life. So start now and don’t look back.

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