{"id":2667,"date":"2021-05-26T17:09:33","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T17:09:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thealcoholcoach.com\/?p=2667"},"modified":"2022-09-02T15:05:46","modified_gmt":"2022-09-02T15:05:46","slug":"the-science-of-alcohol-willpower-stress-and-cravings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thealcoholcoach.com\/the-science-of-alcohol-willpower-stress-and-cravings\/","title":{"rendered":"The Science Of Alcohol: Willpower, Stress and Cravings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Our conscious mind accounts for approximately 5% of the whole mind, with our subconscious mind accounting for a staggering 95%. That makes our subconscious mind a powerhouse, and it is the ruler of everything that we have ever learned and everything that we have learned to believe. All our conditioning and the majority of what we do on a daily basis is driven by our subconscious mind. This includes all the things that we haven\u2019t learnt to do well, based on inaccurate assumptions or conclusions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are too many things that we do regularly for us to be able to keep everything in our conscious mind. It is just not possible. Our conscious mind is very good at making decisions and deciding strategy, but the rest of our mind is where all the work gets done on a daily basis. The conscious mind is like the board room, and the subconscious mind is the rest of the staff in the organisation beneath. To enable everything to function smoothly once something has been learned (correctly or incorrectly), and usually after much repetition, all activities, beliefs, and capabilities get put into our subconscious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We just know how to drive a car, ride a bike, and walk once we have learned how to do it, and whether we are good at it or not, we settle into our learned way of doing things unless something wakes us up to a need, and we learn something new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without feedback our learning essentially becomes frozen in time, and if we have learned things incorrectly, we settle into being an unconscious incompetent. Our subconscious mind contains every thought, every feeling, and every behavioural pattern from our past, and you may find it surprising to learn that every decision we make today is largely based on what we\u2019ve done, learned or concluded in the past. And that means that our subconscious is making decisions for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The purpose of the subconscious mind in this context is to help us by making us happy and protecting us from harm. In this job our subconscious is very efficient. We have evolved to survive, and it is our ability to survive that has bought us to where we are today as a species. But what happens when our subconscious mind is conned? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our subconscious is not always right. Alcohol hijacks our natural biology by short-circuiting our reward and learning cycles, as we will discover later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The key point here is that we have learned by clever manipulation to become addicted to alcohol in our subconscious mind, and addiction to alcohol is 90% psychological. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we wake up in the morning deciding to not drink that day, week, or ever again, we make the decision in our conscious mind, but our subconscious mind is the ruler of addiction. This starts a battle of wills between our small conscious mind, and our powerhouse of a subconscious mind. Our natural biological response will always seek homeostasis, or balance, and this disagreement between a decision not to drink and our subconscious learning which says we should drink, causes something called cognitive dissonance. This is essentially a \u2018thinking disagreement\u2019, which sets things out of balance. It\u2019s also stressful in itself, and who wants an argument raging in their head? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our natural biological reaction is to want balance, and to have warring thoughts of not drinking and wanting to drink is stressful. All of my clients at The Alcohol Coach tell me that at different times they drink to alleviate stress, and to feel relaxed. We are therefore more likely to drink when we\u2019re stressed, and so it is easy to understand that our preconditioned learning and beliefs will win, and we\u2019ll retract our decision to not drink. We give up, cave in, reach for the bottle, and feel like a failure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then when we have the drink, the relief we feel from the withdrawal and the end of dissonance is interpreted by our subconscious as being beneficial, and our belief that alcohol is both necessary and pleasurable is once more reinforced. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The childhood game that my brother and I played by the sea took a lot of willpower too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the water advanced with the incoming tide, a slow trickle would begin to break through the walls of our sand castle defences. At first the trickle was so slight that we left it, but then we would notice that the barrier that we had erected was eroding as the water continued to push its way through. We would build up our sand wall again, determined and hopeful that we would keep the water back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The effort and determination we put into our defences was enormous. And as you know our efforts were in vain. If King Canute couldn\u2019t hold back the tide, me and my eight-year-old brother weren\u2019t likely to! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the water advanced, we would get our buckets and be ankle-deep in the water inside our castle walls as we threw bucketful after bucketful of water out, shouting instructions to each other and as we ran faster and faster trying to keep the tide out. We would be bucketing faster and faster and losing ground quicker and quicker. It was hard work! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what happens when we try to control alcohol using the wrong method. When we use the wrong method, try as we might, we find ourselves failing, and then we start to tell ourselves that we\u2019re not strong willed enough, and that we didn\u2019t try hard enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thinking and feeling that way is self-defeating. Playing on those feelings, we will learn later, is one of the masterful plays of the alcohol con artist. But, have no fear, because we are outsmarting it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Were we, as children, weak because we didn\u2019t build our defences better? Did we have a character defect? Or did the tide advance because that\u2019s what the tide always does? The only way that we could have beaten the tide was to not be there in the first place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem with alcohol is alcohol. And you and I never stood a chance. The nature of addiction is that we have to consume more of it more often in order to stem the tide, and even then it is only temporary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every time alcohol is used to fill the void that the previous alcoholic drink filled, the void becomes slightly bigger and more alcohol is needed to fill it the next time. The results being that the void is never filled, and drinker is never at the same level that they were before they started drinking. Just like our wonderful fortress was never as magnificent as it was before the tide started advancing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This book is not about being helpless in the face on an incoming tide, or being a victim and powerless to alcohol. It is the opposite, and it is about changing the way you think and feel about alcohol so that you can get your power back and take control. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You have now learned that willpower is not the way to outsmart alcohol<\/a>. If alcohol is to lose its hold over us, we need to literally change our minds about it. That is what you are learning here. Everything that you are reading is part of the process in changing the way you think and feel about alcohol. <\/p>\n\n\n\nDrinking Alcohol is Stressful<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n