Paul Garrigan's Blog, page 25

Nobody Cares Why You Cannot Stop Being an Alcoholic

In this video and podcast, I discuss the pointlessness of focusing on the reasons for not being able to break away from addiction. There can be a million reasons not to do anything in life – the magic happens when we focus on what can work. Press play to watch the video – you will find the podcast of this episode below.

Press play to listen to the podcast of this episode:

Master Plan for Achieving My Financial Goals

I’m going to be financially secure by age 50 (in less than six years). I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make this happen. Last month I created my master plan for achieving this goal, and I’m going to share it here:

Goal

I Will Be Financially Secure By Age Fifty

Start – 01 September 2013

Finish – 20 August 2019

Motive

I will be able to protect my family and enjoy the benefits of financial stability.

My definition of Financial Stability

I will be earning €30,000 (US $39,000) per year, and this will come from my own writing (not writing for clients). I will have no debts, and I will have bought my own house.

How Will I Achieve This Goal

• Reaching financial security before age fifty is now my main priority in life. I can’t care for my wife and son properly while our finances are so unpredictable. I will do whatever it takes to make this a reality.

• I will be self-disciplined enough to do what needs to be done. I will not stop until I reach this goal.

• I will be willing to work long hours, without complaint, to reach my goal.

• I’m going to be grateful for what I have in my life right now.

• I’m going to enjoy the process of achieving my goal.

• I’m going to celebrate my small victories because this is going to keep me motivated

• I will do something every day to bring me closer to achieving my goal

• I will stop listening to the negative bullshit inside of my head – I’m going to make this happen.

• I will gain the knowledge I need to make my goal a reality.

• I will meditate for one hour every day to keep myself in good mental shape.

• I will eat well and keep and work on my physical fitness.

• I will learn from my failures.

• I will be accountable by monitoring my progress closely – daily progress tracking and weekly progress tracking.

• I will keep on asking myself if what I am doing is helping me achieve my goal – if not, is it worth doing at the moment?

• I’m going to eliminate anything from my life that is holding me back

I’ve been using this plan for one month so far, and it is working to keep me focused. I’ve also developed a ritual where I visualize achieving my goal, and I do this ritual at least twice a day. I’m not performing this visualization to magically fool the universe into manifesting my desires (I’m not convinced this works), but to keep me motivated – this is also working really well.

Achieving these goals does mean getting out of my comfort zone, but it is definitely within my ability. I’ve already made significant progress. I’m so glad to have such a clear goal for my life. I feel strong, positive, and excited about the future – basically I feel unstoppable.

Juice Fasting or 5:2 Intermittent Fasting

5:2 intermittent fasting or juice fasting can be an excellent way for you to regain control over your diet, lose weight, and enjoy improvements to your physical and mental health. There are pros and cons to each of these approaches, and this is what I’m going to be talking about here.

The Pros and Cons of Juice Fasting

I completed a 15 day juice fast last month. I greatly enjoyed this experience, and I expect to repeat this type of fasting in the future. The pros of this approach when compared to 5:2 intermittent fasting would include:

• Hunger isn’t really a problem with juice fasting because you are consuming calories from the juices.

• You only need to juice fast for about three days to notice the health improvements.

• Some of the juices are delicious – it can feel more like juice feasting than Juice fasting

• You should lose about one pound (0.45 kg) in weight per day on a juice fast.

The cons of juice fasting would include:

• You need to buy a juicer – I spent 3,600 THB (85 Euro or US $115) for a juicer here in Thailand

• It can be expensive to purchase all the vegetables and fruit you need for your juices

• If you drink coffee, you are going to need to stop this for the duration of the fast (I cheated by drinking green tea).

• If your juices contain too much sugary fruit, you could have high blood sugar levels for the duration of the fast – I made this mistake the first time I tried juice fasting.

• You don’t really get hungry on a juice fast, but you are likely to really miss solid food.

• You can’t juice fast forever

The Pros and Cons of 5:2 Intermittent Fasting

The pros of the 5:2 fasting diet would include:

• You only need to go without food for two days of the week – you can eat normally for the rest of the week.

• You can eat 500 calories first thing on your fast day – you then go for 24 hours after this without food.

• I don’t usually feel hungry until the last few hours of the fast (the trick is to eat a high protein meal before you start).

• Some people find that it is easier to be good for just two days of the week.

• It is probably feasible to commit to 5:2 fasting for the rest of your life – I wouldn’t want to do this.

The cons of the 5:2 fasting diet include:

• You have a 24-hour period with no food – you are going to experience a bit of hunger.

• The benefits of 5:2 fasting are not so obvious because the fasting days are so spread out.

• The claim that you can eat what you want on your non-fast days doesn’t seem to be valid (at least not for me). I stopped losing weight during my first attempt at 10-weeks of 5:2 fasting because I was eating too much on my normal days.

Juice Fasting and Intermittent Fasting

It is possible to combine juice fasting and intermittent fasting. This means you would drink juices on your fast days. It is a good compromise if you want to enjoy some of the benefits of fasting without having to deal too much with hunger. I’m thinking about doing one day of juice fasting every week once I reach the end of my ten weeks of 5:2 intermittent fasting.

How to Avoid Destroying Your Dream Life in Thailand with Alcohol

Thailand is an Alcoholic’s Disneyland. In a location like Pattaya, there have hundreds of bars to choose from, and you can get drunk for a fraction of the amount of money you would pay in the west. If you have a habit of picking up red-cards when you get drunk, it’s not going to be a problem – there is always another pub ready to welcome you. Best of all, nobody is going to give a shit if you are slurring your words before breakfast.

How Expats Poison Their Thailand Dream with Alcohol

It’s hard to say how many expats in Thailand would fall into the category of alcoholic. In a post on here last month, I talked about the growing number of westerners who are now homeless in Thailand. I doubt many of these guys ended up like this from sipping the pineapple juice. Drinking too much alcohol is a recipe for disaster – Thailand is a dangerous place to be out of control.

It is usually the expats who choose to open a bar in Thailand who have the most dramatic downfalls. These are usually guys whose only experience of running a pub is paying their bar-tab. There can be a morbid fascination in observing these people fall apart – it can be like watching a disaster movie in slow motion.

Alcohol is a perfect drug for dreamers because it makes almost any old bullshit appear plausible. It encourages a level of risk-taking that even the adventurers who want to climb Mount Everest without oxygen would find a bit reckless. Alcoholics don’t need business school – all it takes is a few bottles of Beer Chang and enough life-savings to invest in a bar. These people don’t have to worry too much about not having customers because there is no risk of their stock going to waste.

I’ve known guys who came to Thailand with the intention of drinking themselves to death – one of them was me. I’d given up all hope of breaking away from my addiction, and it felt glamorous to spend my last days on the planet sipping my beers on the beach of an exotic island. Of course, it isn’t that easy. It turns out that drinking yourself to death is a long and painful process – it doesn’t matter if you are lying on a tropical beach in Thailand or sitting in a bus shelter in Detroit.

Broken Dreams in Thailand

I’m sure most individuals who end up struggling with alcoholism in Thailand did not come here with any type of death wish. These are just people who arrived on holiday and fell in love with the place. I’ve heard from dreamers who’ve spent years working in jobs they hate just to save enough money to make their dream of living in Thailand a reality.

Thailand can be a great place to begin a new life but the majority of people who move here don’t last more than a couple of years. Of course, alcohol abuse isn’t the only reason a person might change their mind about living in Thailand, but in a significant number of cases it is what turns the dream into a nightmare.

Don’t Come to Thailand If You Have an Alcohol Problem

It is a bad idea to move to Thailand if you have an alcohol problem. Coming here is not going to cure you – it is more likely to kill you. I’m not saying you can’t build a life here later on, but you need to sort out your drinking problem first of all.

There is a Thai parable that sums up the situation really well. If you visit a temple in Thailand, you are likely to see stray dogs wandering around the grounds. They will sit down at a new location but then start to scratch furiously. After a few minutes they will get up and move to somewhere else. They do this all day long because they don’t understand they are bringing the flies with them. If you come to Thailand with an alcohol problem, you are going to be taking your flies along for the ride.

5:2 Fasting Diet as a Bridge to Healthy Living

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the results of my attempt at the 5:2 fasting diet last year. I starved myself for 14 days (over a seven week period), but I didn’t really have much to show for it at the end. I did lose about 4kg (about 9 pounds), but I put this all back on within a few weeks of the end of the fast. I didn’t feel good at the end of that period of fasting – I actually felt like a bit of a failure because I’d originally planned to go for 10 weeks.

Some Benefits of 5:2 Fasting Diet Are Only Temporary

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just commit to clean living for a few weeks and then look forward to a lifetime of good health. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. It takes a constant effort to keep the body in good condition – especially if you are over 40.

Like most things in the universe, our health is subject to decay – this is just the natural tendency for things to move from a state of order to disorder. We have been fighting the forces of entropy since the moment we were born. It’s a battle we can’t win, but we can delay our defeat by constantly working hard to stay as healthy as we can.

I’m now almost at the end of my third week of the 5:2 fasting diet (today is my sixth 24-hour fast). I’ve definitely lost some weight, but I’ve no idea how much because I’ve decided not to weigh myself until the end. I don’t want to get too focused on my weight because it would be all too easy for me to put it all back on again.

5:2 Intermittent Fasting as a Bridge to Healthy Living

I see this 10 weeks of 5:2 intermittent fasting (and the fifteen days of juice fasting that came before it) as a bridge to healthy living. I’m taking this massive action because I want to get completely out of my comfort zone. I’m disrupting all my old eating habits, so I can begin to introduce some new healthier habits.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be adding healthier food choices into my diet. This means that at the end of the fasting period, my diet will have completely transformed without me hardly noticing. After my fast days I’m happy to eat anything so this is the best time to introduce something new. I’m also continuing to slowly increase my exercise regime so this is solidly in place by the end of the 10 weeks.

Change Yourself to Change Your Life

Sitting around waiting for your life to improve is the strategy of a fool. I know because I tried it long enough. Waiting for the universe to shower us with goodies is incredibly lazy – worst of all it doesn’t work. If we want out life to be different, we have to become a different person.

Have You Ever Considered the Possibility You Might be a Bit of a Gobshite?

I remember years ago sitting in a pub and complaining to one of the other barflies about my bad luck with women and friends. I kept on meeting the wrong type of person, and it all seemed so unfair. My drinking associate listened patiently enough, but when I stopped talking he had this to say – “did you every consider the possibility you might be a bit of a gobhite?”

I felt so angry with this guy for suggesting I might be full of shit. I’d opened my heart to him in the hope of a bit of encouragement, but he’d used my hard luck story as an opportunity to insult me. If I hadn’t been such a coward, I probably would have hit him. The thing that stung me the most was the knowledge he did have a bit of a point.

I also remember this friend of mine in London who kept on getting beaten up. He seemed to be incredibly unlucky until I began spending more time with him. It turned out these attacks had nothing to do with him being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real cause of this string of bad luck was his habit of insulting complete strangers for no reason.

I’m not going to pretend there is no unfairness in the world – bad things do happen to good people. Overall, I’d say we mostly get back what we put into our life. It is unrealistic to expect to be able to stay in our comfort zone yet keep getting more and more. If we remain the same, we can expect life to keep serving up similar experiences.

You Don’t Have to Become a Different Person Overnight

There are plenty of wise old saying but ‘a leopard doesn’t change its spots’ isn’t one of them. If this were true, millions of us would be better of going for a long walk on a short pier. You can create dramatic changes in your life, and it can all begin by just making some minor tweaks.

The truth is we are all changing all the time anyway. The problem is that this tends to happen in a linear fashion – sort of like same shit, different day. It’s like when I moved here to Thailand back in 2002. I completely changed my environment, but my life still involved all the fun and games associated with being a drunk.

I’m not suggesting you change your life by getting a new job or moving to a different country. If you do this without changing who you are, the chances are you are still going to attract the same shit into your new life. Real change involves becoming the kind of person who gets the type of things you want.

If you enjoy the benefits of being a successful entrepreneur (as an example), you have to begin modelling the behaviour of a successful entrepreneur. This is not as simple as just acting like them, you have to be willing to do what they do and think like they think. You need to do your research and make becoming this type of person your number one priority in life.

Stop Drinking Alcohol to Become Rich and Famous

In this video I discuss some of the amazing things you can get to enjoy if you walk away from alcohol abuse. The potential inside of you can help you achieve far more than you ever imagined, but it will not be possible for you to blossom unless you quit drinking. Press play to watch the video:

How to Train Your Brain to Focus on the Positive

If you are an excessive worrier, like me, it means you are highly skilled at spotting potential threats in your environment. This ability could keep you alive if you lived in the middle of a warzone, but under normal conditions it prevents you from getting the most out of life. The good news is you can train your brain to focus on the positive.

The Amazing Results of Training My Brain to Focus on the Positive

My tendency to focus on the negative has prevented me from reaching my potential. This is why for the last few weeks, I’ve been taking concrete steps to retrain my brain. I’m already enjoying some real benefits from this effort including:

• I’m dealing much better with problems – I take action instead of just worrying.

• My sense of humor is returning because I’m not worried all the time.

• I feel far more creative

• I’m getting more work done – I’ve increased my productivity by about fifty per cent.

• I feel great because I’m achieving so much instead of complaining about my lack of opportunities.

• I’m far less self-absorbed – this means I’m not ignoring my wife and son.

• I appreciate my life like I’ve never done in the past

• It is such a great relief to feel back on the right path again

• I’m no longer worried about depression descending like a black cloud and swallowing me up.

My new positive outlook had its first major challenge last Thursday. This turned out to be a horrible day with one thing going wrong after another – the type of day where I’d normally just give up, batten down the hatches, and wait for things to get better.

This time I didn’t give up because things weren’t going my way. I not only managed to get a lot of work done, but I also created an action plan for dealing with bad days in the future. I made time to laugh with my wife and son, and I didn’t move around the house like Mr. Misery. Instead of going to bed feeling like a loser, I felt proud of getting so much from a day that seemed to be offering so little.

How I’m Training My Brain to Focus on the Positive

In a post on here last week, I talked about my new ritual for increasing my motivation. This is something I do twice a day, and it involves thinking about all the great things in my life as well as re-living my proudest moments. I then mentally picture achieving my goals in the future.

I’ve added a new training device this week, and it is already producing some impressive results. It is similar to mindfulness but instead of just trying to focus on what’s happening right now, I focus on what’s positive right now. I’m training my mind to seek out the positive and not the negative.

I can do this positive-focus exercise anywhere. I just did it a few minutes ago when I went to pick up my son from school. There are a lot of crazy drivers here in Thailand, and I’m usually fuming by the time I get to my son’s school. Today I just kept looking for positive things as I drove (e.g. the attractive temples and people smiling). I not only kept my cool, but it made me a more careful driver.

I’ve also been experimenting with a game developed by the Baldwin Social Cognition Lab at McGill University (click on the highlighted text to try it out). I found out about this when watching the BBC Horizon documentary ‘The Truth about Personality’.

The game is very simple – you just have to pick out the smiling face from a bunch of frowning faces. The goal is to train your brain to get better at focusing on the positive. I’ve only just started experimenting with this game, but it seems like a great idea.

Can You Train Your Brain to Be Positive

I don’t agree we should just learn to live with our limitations – that’s just self-defeatist bullshit. If I followed crappy advice like that, I would have died from alcoholism years ago. Anyone who accepts excessive worry as ‘just the way I am’ is selling themselves short.

We can retrain our brains to focus on the positive – the only question is if we are willing to put in the effort to do this. The life of an excessive worrier is almost as limited as that of drunk, so I’m not going to accept this limitation – what about you?

Hunger and 5:2 Intermittent Fasting

I can go months without ever feeling hungry – it’s not something I’m proud of. I’ve developed the dangerous habit of grazing – this means I’m snacking throughout the day so my stomach never really gets empty. My desire to avoid hunger means I’ve been putting my health at risk. My 10 weeks of 5:2 intermittent fasting is to help me develop a new relationship with hunger.

Inability to Recognize Hunger

It is understandable that humans would want to avoid hunger – this is the way the body tells us we need to eat soon. If we ignore this warning for too long, we die. The problem is that most of us experience hunger so infrequently that we lose our ability to recognize it.

When I try to eat away my emotions it just makes me feel miserable. I don’t need anyone to convince me of the dangers of comfort eating. The problem is that most of the time I don’t even realize that this is what I am doing. This happens because I mistake other emotions for hunger.

It came as a real surprise to me a few years ago to find out that I frequently mistook feeling bored or feeling tired for feeling hungry. I’d experience these emotions and automatically go to the fridge. It was only when I began experimenting with mindful eating that I discovered this misperception.

The Danger of Eating to Avoid Hunger

There is a huge difference between eating because we are hungry and eating to avoid hunger. If we never get hungry, it must mean we are constantly grazing. We are eating too much so it is hardly surprising when we put on weight. It also leads to other problems like type 2 diabetes (if there is always sugar in our bloodstream, we need to be constantly producing insulin).

It is true what they say about hunger being a tasty sauce. During my twenties and thirties, I’d often skip meals because of work. Feeling hunger was almost a daily occurrence for me back then, but it never felt like a big deal – in fact, I loved going to eat on an empty stomach. I’d no worries about my weight in those days, and I’d always plenty of energy.

5:2 Intermittent Fasting to Develop a New Relationship with Hunger

I think one of the real benefits of all forms of fasting is that it teaches us to stop being a wuss around hunger. We discover we can go hours and hours without eating and nothing bad happens to us. Hunger pains come and go but they are really not that big a deal. It is not the discomfort of hunger pains that is the problem here – it is the fear of that discomfort.

I’m fasting again today (number 5), and I’m not bothered one bit at the idea of feeling hungry later on – that’s real progress for me. Friday was my last fasting day, and I didn’t feel hungry at all until the very last hour.

I’ve had people congratulate me on going 24-hours without food, but it really isn’t much of a challenge at all. I know my body can easily tolerate it, and I trust the experts who say it is doing me some good. Even if the only benefit of 5:2 intermittent fasting is changing my relationship with hunger, it will be well worth it.

Click on the highlighted text to read more about my experiences with 5:2 intermittent fasting and juice fasting

Three Important Lessons I Gained From Working as a Nurse

My six year old son has started to tell people that I used to be a doctor. I understand his confusion – the idea of a male nurse just doesn’t exist here in Thailand. If he tells people that I used to be a พยาบาล (pronounced ‘pha yaa baan’), they just laugh and say that he must mean หมอ (pronounced ‘maaw’).

Up until the age of 25, I assumed that any man who worked as a nurse had to be gay. My views changed when I started volunteering as a friend to a young guy with profound learning disabilities. I’d been a completely selfish-shit up until this point in my life, but I experience such joy doing volunteer work that I decided to become a nurse.

Entering the nursing profession turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. It changed me, and I’m a much better person because of it. I now work as a freelance writer (my dream job), but I still pay my fees every year to stay registered as a nurse. I’ll probably never get the chance to work in the profession again, and this is one of my few regrets.

My career as a nurse lasted 14 years. I only worked full-time for three years after qualifying as an RGN. For the last seven years of my nursing career I lived in Thailand but would return to Ireland for about three months of the year to work like a maniac. I’d do six 12-hour night-shifts a week as an agency nurse, and I’d earn enough to live comfortable in Thailand for the rest of the year.

I gave up nursing reluctantly because I started to feel unsafe. I knew that only working three months of the year made it hard for me to keep my skills and knowledge up-to-date. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something bad happened to a patient due to my incompetence, so I’ve had to stop practicing.

Here are just some of the most important lessons I gained from working as a nurse:

Sometimes the Best Thing You Can Do is to Listen

Until I began working as a nurse, I would feel extremely uncomfortable when talking to anyone experiencing a serious health problem. I’d just say something patronizing like ‘you’ll be fine’ or ‘we’re all dying anyway’, and I’d try to change the subject as quickly as possible. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t understand that this person probably only needed me to listen.

When I began working as an agency nurse in Ireland, I picked up a lot of work in hospices and palliative care units. I found working with the dying to be stressful but also extremely rewarding. I did the night shift, and this is when people are most likely to pass away – we could have as many as four people dying within a few hours of each other.

The night is when the terminally ill can become most fearful and eager for company. It always felt uncomfortable, but I got better at sitting there and listening to what these people were saying. It seemed to help them to talk, and I’d nothing better to offer them than my ear.

I can be a real chatter-box, and I had to learn how to listen. One of my nursing tutors from Bart’s in London (where I trained) gave me a great tip that I continue to use today. I try to count to ten after somebody has stopped talking before I say something. I can then use this time to think about what I’m going to say, so I’m not doing this while they are still talking (it is impossible to really listen while you are thinking about what you are going to say).

I think most people who are worried are looking for somebody to listen rather than to tell them what to do. It just makes things easier if we can get the shit out of our heads – sometimes the answer becomes obvious by just talking about the problem.



Trust Your Intuition

I don’t know how intuition works – I only know that it does. Nurses tend to have great intuition, and it can save lives. There were so many times when I just got a strong feeling that something wasn’t right with one of my patients. I’d check their vital signs and everything would be fine, but this feeling that they were about to ‘go off’ would persist.

Experienced doctors tend to trust the intuition of nurses. There were many times when I bleeped one of them to come and review a patient despite there being no obvious signs of anything amiss. These hunches usually turned out to be correct because the patient would start to suddenly go downhill – often while the doctor was still on their way to the ward.

I always seem to pay a heavy price for ignoring my intuitions about things. I remember when I first began working as freelance writer, a client scammed me out of a lot of money – I provided them with work they never paid for. This client came across as very charming, but I just sensed something was amiss – I ignored this feeling so I paid the price.

Never Lie to Somebody to Make Them Feel Better

When I was still a nursing student, I annoyed an orthopedic surgeon because I lied to his patient. I felt upset at the time at being told off, but he was completely right to do it. We were trying to move somebody with two broken legs onto a trolley. I told the patient ‘don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt’ – of course it turned out to be a few seconds of pure agony for the guy.

At the time, I wouldn’t have considered what I did as lying. I just wanted to help the patient calm down and feel a bit better. I didn’t realize that by doing this I’d be losing their trust – not only their trust in me but maybe all nurses.

I wouldn’t like somebody to lie to me just to make me feel better. I can work with the truth but lies are just going to get in the way. Sometimes it’s best to say nothing at all.