Alcohol Cravings Should Last Seconds, Not Days

Cravings seems to be one of the thorny issues when people start now, especially

stopping drinking, stopping smoking, making any big major changes in their life.

But as you'll see from this video, I think people often get the term cravings wrong or there.

They're thinking about something different than what is actually happening.

So this one is from a camper announcer name, so we're going to call him Joe, Joe Blogs.

As normal. This may issue with Cravings. I'm fine without thinking about, I'll call each day

until about 3.30, but an hour before I get off work. And then I stop at the liquor store,

another way home from work, get four to six beers. If I can get past the Cravings,

I can beat this habit. I'm taking it that when you say you're going past the liquor store at 4.30,

you've got a few beers that this is a regular occurrence. And then you're not talking about Cravings,

you're talking about anticipation. I think a lot of the time people talk about their dopamine

levels, as in the alcohol or drinking the alcohol creates a dopamine buzz. And it's not the fact,

I mean the fact is that it's the anticipation that creates the dopamine buzz. And the more that you

drink, the less buzz you get from the actual alcohol, and the more the more you get from the

anticipation, and that applies to any drug. When Cravings come into this, when you deliberately

delay the time that you're going to drink. So you say to yourself, well, I'm not going to drink

today. Moderation, for instance, that's a delay. You say, I'm not drinking today, I'm not drinking

tomorrow. And you can start to get and feel Cravings then. Or it's when you deliberately say to yourself,

there is going to be no more alcohol. And then the Cravings will probably come in a lot worse,

or they have the possibility of coming in a lot worse. So if a lot to go on here, you've got the

the time when you start to think about the alcohol, the trigger time, that's about 330 in the

afternoon. You've got the time that you arrive at the liquor store. You've got the workplace

that you're thinking about alcohol, that the trigger fires off at 330. Then you put your car drive

where you're probably anticipating having a drink towards the liquor store. And then you've got

the liquor store itself, and then you're going obviously going into your car there and driving

wherever. I think it's probably going home, right? So this is an example of a micro routine,

or just a routine. And most habits are a collection of mini habits, routines, sequences,

just ways of doing things within a certain, within that framework of an overall alcohol habit.

Like you've got different ways of drinking at different times with different people at different

places. And once you can isolate these things, you know, for instance, that you leave, you start

thinking about the alcohol at 330, you leave work at 430 or whatever time it is, and you go to

liquor store, you go home, you crack your first beer. These are all triggers. These are all

things that are helping to think about it like Pavlov's dog. You know, when he trained the dog

when the dog was after the food, he started salivating, and then eventually he was able to get the

dog to salivate at the sound of the bell. So he'd ring the bell beforehand. The dog knew that the

food was coming, and he'd get the food, and eventually he would, the dog would salivate even without

the food. So that's what's happening here. It's kind of the same thing. It's that the dog

can be firing off. You get in the anticipation of the alcohol, and then we can work on that,

right? That's the whole point of this. So these micro habits are on the lines of, I mean,

a certain place at a certain time, these trigger fires off, then this happens, and that happens,

and this happens, and then I'm drinking my beer. So at 330, the trigger fires off, you're thinking

about alcohol from then on, you're anticipating it, you get into the car, you drive to the

off license, you buy your beers, you go home, and so on and so forth. So you say, if you can just

get past the cravings that you'll be able to beat this habit. Well, think about it from the

perspective of just being able to get past the liquor store. If you didn't, if you come out of

work, for instance, it's one of the best ways of doing this. Once you're at home and you've got your

beers there, the likelihood of you drinking, even though there's a lot more, you can still respond

there in a different way. Even if you're sat there with a beer in your hand and you cracked it

open, right? It doesn't mean to say that you have to drink it, you can make a different decision,

you can go and pour the stuff down, down the toilet, right? So the choice is always yours, you know,

the the draw on it, the urge to do one of your sat there and you can smell it and all that kind

of stuff, that's going to be a lot stronger, right? So if we reverse it back up, like I said, you don't

pass the liquor store, you go when you come out of work at 430 instead of going left the liquor store,

you drive right and you go somewhere else, and you can even reverse it back a little further

as soon as you get the trigger or even before that, you can start thinking to yourself, right?

Tomorrow at 330 when I start to think about the alcohol, I'm going to think about doing something

else and that's something else can be anything. Mostly it's just distracting, distracting your mind,

getting your mind into a different state. So the more that in the early days especially when we're

coping, the more that you can think about things from the perspective of I've got to occupy my mind,

I've got to occupy my body, do something physical, not be in that position, not be in the place that

triggers off the alcohol. Like I said, if you go home and you're sat there with the beers in

front of you, you know, that's going to be much more difficult to exercise your willpower, where

is if you get the trigger, 330, you come out of work, you go somewhere else, you go to the gym,

you go to the cinema, you go to the bowling alley, you do something where you wouldn't normally do,

even if there's alcohol around, right? Even if there's alcohol around, it can still help to be in

a different position. My thing was always walking. So as soon as I got the trigger, as soon as

there was trigger time, I got off and I'd do a long walk. At first I was just going through

audio books or just allowing the process of thinking to take place and then eventually I started

to go out with deliberate problems in my mind and think about those problems and then once I had

that solved or I was at an impasse with that, I'd solve, I'd try and solve another problem. So you

get what I mean, it's all about trying to not be in the same place, deliberately trying engineer

a different pathway for yourself, right? It's all the choice. Every time you choose to

to go out of work, turn left, go to the liquor store, buy your beers, that is a vote in confidence,

in confidence up there. It's a vote in favor of the alcohol habit and not in favor of not doing it.

So every time you don't do it, you do something else, it's a vote in favor of that. It doesn't mean

to say that you have to go to the cinema every night, do the same thing every night, you can break

it up and do different things, but it's just to get yourself into the position where you're not

fulfilling that habit. The feel of the habit is the alcohol. The feel of the habit is also going to

liquor store. The feel of the habit is allowing that anticipation to flow, right? And that you're going

to do it. It's hard in the beginning. You're going to go through some shit times, you're going to

go through some, you know, there's always a conflict there because part of you still wants to drink

and part of you doesn't want to drink. So you have to get over that one. And you know, that's the

time when you have to say to yourself, look, pull up your fucking pants, be a man. You know, do this,

you can do this, there's nothing against you doing this and think forwards, trying to think as much

forwards as you can, you know, into the things that I want to do once I stop drinking alcohol.

And then you get into a stage where you're thinking about right, alcohol is holding me back from this,

it's holding me back from that. All the time that I'm wasting the energy and wasting on this

stuff could be put into other things that are much more productive. That will make me feel happier

in myself. And once you get onto that level then, then you'll find it's planes early and then you

say to yourself, the fuck was I doing? It's the biggest emotion that I find with people who have

done six months or a year. They realized then what their trap was, that the alcohol was trapping

them there, the cravings, the trapping, the triggers, all that kind of stuff was trapping them in

that cycle at the beginning. And the biggest emotion that they have then is regret that they didn't

do it sooner. Not regret for all the drinks that they've consumed because you can't change that,

but regret that they didn't figure this out sooner, right? That they didn't sit down and I think,

what the fuck? So there you go. I hope that helps you. Take care of yourself and I'll speak to you

in the next video. I want to talk to you later. Bye now.