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They’re pitch-black moments in my life, but they serve a bright purpose in the long-term. It’s because of those blood-chilling moments that I finally scraped together the wherewithal to start swimming as fast as I could for the sober shore.
‘New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.’
‘It’s not finding gratitude that matters most; it’s remembering to look in the first place. Remembering to be grateful is a form of emotional intelligence.’
A HABITUAL NEURAL PATHWAY FORMS ‘The more you drink to soothe social anxiety, the more that “drinking is the solution” gets encoded into the habit centre of the brain,’ explains Korb. ‘And the more appealing it becomes in future. Eventually becoming something that is no longer pleasurable, and is just a compulsion. It becomes a coping habit written into the brain. The brain then gets stressed when you don’t choose the drinking coping habit. So when you don’t drink, you feel stressed about the not-drinking. It’s a catch 22.’
We’re not meant to put alcohol into our bodies. It’s like putting diesel into a petrol engine. And our poor bodies have to work crazy hard to cleanse the neurotoxin out. Traditional thinking says that a hangover lasts one day, but after a big session, it actually lasts for three days. ‘If you have a binge, you are essentially creating a mini period of dependence, so you have a mini withdrawal after it. So, yes, 72 hours is the likely period of withdrawal,’ says addiction psychiatrist Dr Julia Lewis.
My best friend once told me that life is like a table, and that the table’s legs are finance, romance, family and health. And that the table can survive one leg being swiped away, but when two or more are kicked, it falls to the ground.
There’s poetry to be found in scorched-earth destruction. Sometimes seemingly great things have to fall apart, so that even better things can fall together.
The reason society wants to brush the ‘alcohol is highly addictive’ fact under the rug, is because most people are addicted to it to some degree. As we’ve already established, addiction is not a ‘normal drinkers’ versus ‘alcoholic’ division; it’s a spectrum.
Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world, by Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman.
BIRD-WATCHING I got this from Buddhify. The idea is, pretend you’re a bird-watcher. In a hide, observing the birds of your own thoughts. You ID the bird. ‘Oh, there’s the fear bird.’ Rather than grabbing it, or feeding it, or trying to scare it away, none of which a bird-watcher would ever do, you just watch it with objective curiosity. It’s not a bad bird; it just is. Then, it’ll fly away.
