The Easy Way to Control Alcohol (Allen Carr's Easyway)

by Allen Carr

There was the life and soul of the party; and this miserable tyrant, who came home every evening reeking of stale beer, and spent the rest of the evening shouting at his wife, his children and me. There was only one Auntie Mabel, and it didn’t take me long to work out why she was the most miserable person in the world.

Some morons actually boast that they can drink 16 pints. Is that really something to brag about? Just imagine a bucketful of beer swilling around inside your body. Could anything be more gross?

The difference between choosing and conditioning is a subtle one. But let us assume for a moment that you did choose to drink and for many years were genuinely in control and exercising your free will. You were still being conned. What you paid for was a pleasure and/or crutch called ‘exhilaration’. What you actually received was a deadly poison called ‘devastation’.

The point is that if you bought a bottle of champagne and discovered that it was water, you probably wouldn’t drink it. If you discovered that the water was poisoned, no way would you drink it. Yet we’ll pay £50/$80 for a bottle that we know contains poison, and drink it; and describe ourselves as intelligent, civilized people.

The past is the past and there is nothing we can do about it. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether we were conditioned or made a free choice.

Can you remember when you last woke completely rested after six hours’ sleep, bursting with energy, feeling that you haven’t got a care in the world, looking forward to another exciting day on this planet? Can you remember when it happened on a Monday morning?

Would you find it easier to believe that as far back as I can remember, before I escaped from the drugs trap, I would wake up feeling tired and miserable every morning, even after ten hours’ sleep, and lie there as long as I could before I managed to drag myself out of bed to face the rigours of another day?

What a terrible state to get into! Is that what life is all about? The high point of my week was not the debauchery on Saturday night, but the lay-in on Sunday morning. Even though my throat felt like it was lined with sand-paper and a wheel-tapper seemed to be testing the inside of my skull for cracks. And what would I be lying there thinking about? “Oh God, tomorrow’s Monday. How can I face another week?”

From birth we are brainwashed to believe that we are somehow defective: that we are feeble and fragile, and that it is natural for an adult of the species to feel permanently tired and ill.

Hospital patients have to lie in bed, and they do it for exactly the same reason that I did, because they are ill and feel lethargic.

In fact, to my amazement, the biggest gains were in courage, confidence, self-respect and energy. And the biggest of all was just feeling great to be alive!

Old age started in my early twenties. It was an effort to struggle out of bed each morning, and no matter how much sleep I had, I felt permanently tired.

Where’s the great stress in answering the phone? It won’t bite you or blow up. Why do we confuse responsibility with stress? We take on responsibility because we thrive on it and would find a more mundane job boring and therefore stressful. Why did I regard the mortgage and bills as such a hassle? I had a good job and could afford to pay them. I had a lovely wife, four healthy children, a nice car and a comfortable home. In fact I was a very lucky man and had a lot going for me. So why did I find life such a bind? Because when you feel physically and mentally low, molehills become mountains, slight set-backs seem like disasters, and the smallest problem tends to be the final straw to break the camel’s back.

The minor set-backs that we all suffer won’t even appear to be problems but merely part of the exciting challenge of life.

When I consider that I spent a third of a century systematically and progressively poisoning my body, I find it a miracle that I actually survived the self-inflicted punishment for so long. The fact that I did set me thinking about what an incredibly powerful and sophisticated machine the human body is.

Every natural instinctive function we possess is designed to ensure that we survive, whether we like it or not. Anyone who is stupid enough to contradict three billion years of proven intelligence has no right to describe themselves as intelligent.

The alcohol trap is identical today as it was when you and I first fell into it. It consists of three separate pieces of brainwashing. The first is that the human mind and body are physically weak and deficient and need outside help in order to enjoy life and to cope with stress. This creates the belief that we need outside chemicals to compensate for the deficiencies. The second piece of brainwashing is that alcohol will compensate for the illusory weakness and deficiency. Ironically, it actually creates weakness and deficiencies. The third is that we have been brainwashed to believe that we are more intelligent than the intelligence that created us. That is indeed arrogance!

It is the belief that we are weak and incomplete that creates our desire for alcohol, and the illusion that alcohol compensates for that makes us feel dependent on it.

In the case of alcoholism, both the need and the solution are illusory.

But if we don’t remove the need, the void will remain – it’s the difference between cure and recovery.

Perhaps the worst effect of the progressive poisoning of our bodies is not on the liver but the immune system, which can no longer function properly.

need. To interfere with our own senses and instincts is to court disaster and misery: it is about as sensible as the pilot altering the calibration of his instruments.

Our senses are the instruments on which we are completely dependent. To consume chemicals that affect the accurate functioning of any of our senses is foolish. To do so with addictive poisons is abject stupidity.

Early childhood is generally more stressful than adolescence. But we survive it without the need to resort to drugs.

We’ve also been brainwashed from birth to believe that we are weak and fragile and dependent on pills, and that alcohol will provide us with both a pleasure and a crutch. As youngsters, why on earth should we even question the brainwashing? It must be true. Why else would the rest of the population be taking pills for their nerves, or to relax, or sleep; and why would 90 percent of them be drinking if it didn’t help? OK, they might also tell us the dangers of drinking alcohol. So what: they tell us that motorbikes are dangerous but does that stop us from riding them?

Nevertheless, they tell us that alcohol’s OK in moderation and that a little of what you fancy does you good. Have you noticed that the people who say that always indulge in a great deal of what they fancy?

But that first alcoholic drink is the most ingenious aspect of the trap: it tastes awful. A teenager tasting their first pint of bitter will secretly be thinking, “Have I really got to drink this muck? I’d much rather have lemonade!” But lemonade is for kids. Beer is for adults. And it tastes foul. Which removes the teenager’s fear that he might get hooked on the stuff.

We have been brainwashed to believe that adults drink because they enjoy the taste. Why should we dispute it? You’ve only got to ask them.

Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of alcoholism is how hard we work to get hooked. Fortunately, we can ease ourselves into it by starting off with sweeter tasting drinks like shandy, cider, port and sweet sherries. But we soon progress to beers, wines and spirits. It is not long before the beer tastes so normal that we wonder how we could have drunk kid’s stuff like lemonade. Of course we have to dilute the spirits with mixers to start with, but we soon learn to drink them neat. We feel really tough then, particularly if we can down it in a single shot, like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, and if you can do it without even shuddering you feel even tougher.

Before you know it, and without making a conscious decision for it to be this way, drinking has become a normal part of your social life. You wouldn’t dream of holding a party or going to a disco without drinking. Unless, of course, you were driving. But have you noticed how, just as you tend to favour stronger and stronger drinks, and the volume you take tends to increase, so you tend to drink at a greater variety of social occasions? Of course, it’s never we ourselves who are responsible for the progression.

Perhaps my Uncle Ted wasn’t so bad as I had pictured him. It’s quite possible, indeed probable, in fact there’s no doubt: Aunt Mabel had obviously driven him to drink.

While all this was going on, drink had of course become a normal part of so much of my life, not just social events.

My first marriage couldn’t stand the strain. Did I drink because my wife nagged me, or did she nag me because I drank?

If I’d drunk more than usual my voice might be slightly slurred, but you’d never find me paralytic or rolling on the floor. In fact, just the opposite was the case. I could drink quite a lot without it even affecting me. I hadn’t lost my job or smashed up my car.

lads. Nor does it matter whether your job is stressful or mundane, because alcohol seems to relieve both stress and boredom.

The accumulative effects of the poisoning – together with our increased consumption and the fact that we are getting older and are not as fit as we used to be – all these factors combine to bring us to what I call:

You reach the stage when you are getting hints from your family and friends that you are drinking too much.

You still can’t accept that you are an alcoholic, but you cannot deny that you are drinking too much. So now you are going to prove what you have always told your family, your friends and yourself: that you are in control? How will you prove it? By cutting down.

Up to now you have been in the habit of drinking as much as you want to and whenever you what to.

So why didn’t I just not drink when I played golf? Because I couldn’t imagine golf without drink. That would be like playing darts without a pint, or Ascot without champagne, or a party without booze.

In any event, I didn’t want to sit there worrying about how much I’d had to drink. How can you enjoy yourself if you have to do that?

Everyone knows that dieting makes food ten times more precious, not less.

Now you do see it as a problem. Problems create stress. What do we do to help relieve stress? That’s right, we have a drink.

Once the drinker recognizes that his drinking is causing him a problem, he has not one new problem but two. When he is drinking he feels guilty and miserable, and when he is not drinking he feels deprived and miserable. I call this the ‘critical point’ because at one and the same time he is drinking too much and can’t get enough to drink. I couldn’t put it better than AA: ‘It is compounded by an overwhelming craving for the very thing that can only worsen the effects of physical suffering, irrational behaviour and increasing isolation.’

In order to control his intake, he has to exercise willpower and discipline. No matter how strong-willed he is, eventually he finds himself drinking more than he did before he decided to cut down. After several failed attempts to cut down, the alcoholic comes to the conclusion that the only solution is to quit completely.

Like cutting down, the willpower method of stopping, far from achieving its objective, just helps to ingrain into our minds that we can never be cured.

When we took those first experimental drinks, there was certainly no pleasure. But for some strange reason we persisted and, surprise surprise, alcohol did indeed seem to become a pleasure and a crutch.

We’ve tried to cut down or control it like normal drinkers, but we must be abnormal because we don’t seem to be able to do that.

So there is now only one solution: to give up completely. But this isn’t a very pleasant thing to contemplate. The mere fact that we use the expression ‘give up’, as opposed to ‘quit’ or ‘stop’, implies that we are making a sacrifice. Even the word ‘abstain’ has the same effect.

So instead of starting our attempt with a feeling of elation, of excitement and challenge, we start with a feeling of doom and gloom as if we are about to attempt to scale Everest without the benefit of ropes or oxygen. And what is the first thing we reach for if we are feeling miserable? That’s right: our friend and crutch. So before we even start, we are hit with a double misfortune: because we can no longer have a drink to cheer ourselves up about the fact that we can no longer have a drink! This makes us feel even more depressed, which in turn makes the need for the drink even greater, and so it goes on.