Alcohol and Stress: Discover Why Alcohol Increases StressBy Michaela

Do you find yourself drinking to alleviate feelings of stress and anxiety at the end of a busy day? You are by no means alone. It might surprise you to learn that alcohol causes stress, and it doesn’t relieve it at all! So how can that possibly be? There are several reasons for that.

So, let us start with a metaphor. I’d like you to imagine that your best friend has told you that, in order to train your new puppy that you are so delighted to own. The best thing you can possibly do is at the end of the day, to give your puppy a biscuit as a reward. And so, you take on this advice wholeheartedly, ok, I am going to train my puppy with a biscuit at the end of the day as a reward because, your best friend has told you that if you do that, your puppy will be nice and quiet and you will have a peace of mind as a new dog owner. What can be better than that?

So, you duly start giving your puppy the biscuit at the end of the day. The first few days everything seems to be brilliant. The puppy takes the biscuit, it sits beforehand and it’s well behaved afterwards. You’re feeling that everything is going brilliantly everything is perfect. After a few days you notice that the puppy is really starting to misbehave and just before that time you normally give the dog it’s biscuit it starts to bark and jump about and it’s really irritating you. So you give it it’s biscuit and everything is quiet, bliss.

The next day it’s doing the same thing again, its barking, whining and just causing you grief. So, in an attempt to just make it be quiet and give yourself some peace of mind, you give it two biscuits, all is quiet. The next day the dog starts to bark a little earlier and it’s making more noise and you are now getting really irritated by this whole thing. As time goes on, you find yourself caught in the loop! You’re absolutely caught that in order to get yourself some peace of mind you need to give the puppy some biscuits, and you are giving it more biscuits and it’s making more noise and then you’re getting the peace of mind, and it goes round and round and round.

Now the analogy here, is that giving the biscuit in the first place is causing the behaviour which is then exacerbating the behaviour which is then causing the cycle which is then giving you the belief that in order to get any kind of peace of mind here, you have to feed the puppy biscuits.

If there were no biscuits in the first place, there would be no irritation caused by the puppy demanding the biscuit and there would be no peace of mind caused by alleviating the problem.

Alcohol is the biscuit and to have a great life with the puppy, you need to break out of the understanding and belief that the biscuit is actually serving any purpose at all. It is all an illusion. And the friend giving you the advice that the biscuit is going to help, is society telling us that alcohol is of benefit. We are literally brought up with the expectation that alcohol is going to serve us in some way.

And so any temporary relief that is alluded to in this trap or the con that I call alcohol, is caused by the last drink. Or is caused by the belief that we have been fed by society and the media over decades, in fact forever of our lives. Around about five hours after consuming that last sip of alcohol, the stress and anxiety response begins. That is why a drinker will often wake up at either 3:00am or 4:00am in the morning with a racing heart full of feelings of stress and anxiety. That last drink, in fact all of the drinks consumed triggers that response. So, adrenaline and cortisol are released into the body after we have consumed alcohol. As you may know, cortisol is the hormone linked to stress and adrenaline as well with anxiety. So, our body is literally flooded with these hormones that make us feel stressed and anxious.

If you imagine a car alarm going off outside wherever you are reading this blog now, when it first starts going off, it will be just a background noise. Maybe your attention will be drawn to it, and you will be slightly irritated. As time goes on, you will be noticing that car alarm more and more. You will be thinking about it more and more, and you will become even more irritated as that car alarm is going on and on and on and on, and you become preoccupied with this noise and all you want it to do is stop…

When the car alarm stops you feel the relief of that incessant noise cutting off.

When you have that next drink, you are cutting off the car alarm. That is why it feels peaceful. That is why it feels the stress has ended. That car alarm has just stopped, brilliant. What you are doing, simultaneously, when you top that car alarm sounding. You are setting up an automatic loop that will start that car alarm in five hours’ time. As it slowly builds and builds and builds to an in incessantly annoying crescendo. Then you will have another drink, or two or three or four or a bottle and it goes off again, ready to start again in another five hours’ time, and it goes on and on and on. Day after day after day after day.

The car alarm is turned on by the drink. Without the car alarm being on at all, there is no need to relieve the stress and anxiety that the car alarm is causing. That perceived release when alcohol is consumed only exists inside that alcohol trap. Outside of the alcohol trap is peace and calm all day long.

Now there will be stresses and strains of life but if you imagine a pie called the stress pie. The normal stresses and strains of life are a tiny little pie.

When we start bringing alcohol into that pie, the pie itself grows, and now we have a massive stress pie and the slither that is life’s ups and downs is but a slither in this enormous stress pie. Alcohol becomes 97% of the stress in life because it causes an undercurrent of irritation that is subtle to the drinker. It would be like an overwhelming tidal wave to the non-drinker and that irritation, and that stress, is the stress pie called alcohol. It is the worry and anxiety about drinking itself. When the drinker realises that they are caught in a trap called alcohol. The daily anxiety the daily worry the daily stress of that whole thing occupies the mind, body, and soul, more and more and more.

My clients, when they begin working with me, they come and say they are fed up with the incessantness they are exhausted with the thinking, exhausted with the worry and stress. The way through this is to unravel all of the conundrum, so that stopping giving the puppy that biscuit is easy and removing the car alarm from the whole scene of existence, becomes the route through because, without those things’ life is naturally calm and naturally peaceful. There is no wanting alcohol, there is no craving alcohol there is no need for alcohol.

Life is elevated, life is bright, life is fun, life is adventurous, life is kick ass and life is just peaceful. What is not to love about that. Alcohol causes stress and anxiety and it is all a massive con.

You can now watch my video relating to this blog post on YouTube, simply click on the below image and it will take you there.

If you want to escape the alcohol trap, find out more by booking your free seat on my Free Masterclass.

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