Alcohol Explained

by William Porter

If God, in whatever shape or form he or she may exist, allows innocent children to die painful and degrading deaths, why on earth should he save me, a middle-aged city lawyer, from his own greed for alcohol? I am not debating the existence of God; I just struggled to understand why he or she would get so directly involved in this area and not others.

All we need to know is that the relaxing effect of a drink is soon replaced by a corresponding feeling of anxiety.

Firstly, the subconscious is extremely powerful and it takes a conscious effort to override it. Secondly, it is based on trial and error: the more something happens with the same or similar result, the more deeply ingrained this becomes in our subconscious. Finally, it is impossible to know the actual reasons behind the subconscious trigger, nor is it possible to analyse the reasons logically.

Many people believe that the drinker who tries to stop and cannot is already fully addicted to alcohol; the attempt and subsequent failure to stop is simply evidence of this. In fact, the process of attempting to stop actually takes the already existing addiction to a new level. It is when we try to stop that the spiral of craving starts, and from then on the lesson being absorbed by the subconscious is not that alcohol provides a neat remedy to anxiety and depression, but that if we want a drink and cannot have one we literally cannot function as a human being.

the spiral of craving is the backbone of any addiction. The subconscious triggers themselves are brief; they are literally just knee-jerk reactions to a given situation. They trigger the thought of an alcoholic drink, no more than that. However, these subconscious triggers often start us thinking very consciously about having a drink, and our thought process is

You need to get this straight in your mind: alcohol ruins sleep.

You also need to bear in mind that the ill effects of sleep deprivation are accumulative.

When you are experiencing negative emotions you should let your feelings happen and allow yourself to experience them without trying to control or change them.

Don’t just let the thought of having a drink float there unattended: pin it down and be realistic, see the whole picture and not just part of it.

So although it can take years for the subconscious triggers to become fully imbedded, they can be reversed in a fraction of the time if, every time you receive a trigger, you stop, and you counter it as fully and as thoroughly as you can, taking as long as you need to. Don’t just let it float by: take the opportunity to force the lesson on your subconscious, to make a large impact on the subconscious and thus make the process of reversing the subconscious triggers even quicker.

Like most things in life, making effort at the start actually means we have to make less effort overall.