Have you been drinking too much and is it a problem?

Has your alcohol intake been imperceptibly creeping up? Maybe all that lock-in time during the pandemic is leading to an unhealthy habit and you want some sober time.

Here’s some information about what alcohol is and does. Also when it may become a problem, and what to do if it is.

Alcohol — a brief explanation

Alcohol is a depressant drug which slows down our vital functions and reactions. It impairs rational thinking and judgment. It decrease inhibitions, relaxes you, and removes normal filters. How much depends on the amount consumed.

It’s initially gives a relaxed buzz lasting about twenty minutes. We chase this feeling by continuing to drink after it’s gone.

Fermentation of grains, fruits, or other sugar sources produces alcohol. We have consumed alcohol for millenniums. Rice wine has been in China for 9,000 years, and for 5,000 years in India. Ancient Greeks took Mead and it’s also important in Norse mythology.

Society is saturated by alcohol exposure. After a funeral we drink at the wake. We wet the baby’s head. We toast the married couple. We drink the blood of the Jesus at Christian church communion. Alcohol is part of all important life celebrations.

We get daily positive messages about it so it seems life isn’t complete without it. We think we can’t have a good time or relax without it.

85% of adults drink and we can feel pressurised to as well. It can easily become a common habit.

Habits

A habit is just a fixed way of thinking or feeling through previous repetition of a mental experience. Often we don’t notice we are performing habits because we don’t self-analyse them. Estimations are forty percent of our daily behaviours are habits.

We build them by habit formation. 66 days is a generally accepted timeframe for a new habit to become automatic behaviour. This means we’ve created neural pathways in our subconscious. We don’t need to think about executing the habit, we just do it.

Neuroscientists estimate we are conscious for about 5 percent of our cognitive activity. We execute most decisions, emotions, and behaviour automatically. This is by the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness. Our subconscious runs most of our lives. We can’t override it and it is more powerful and faster than our conscious mind. There is no “off” button we can press for specific habits.

Brainwaves

We operate with five different levels of brainwaves. Delta is the slowest which we exhibit in deep sleep and exist in for the first year of our lives.

Next comes Theta, the next slowest. It is the state most children spend their waking hours in up to age 13, but especially to age 7 or 8. It is the state between wakefulness and sleep relating to the subconscious mind. Our minds are most open to suggestion in Theta. It is the state we exist in during sleep, meditation, and hypnosis. Theta is very important for learning and memory. In Theta young children store memories as truths in their subconscious without questioning or conscious filtering. They see and accept our behaviours as normal.

Here Children can suffer childhood emotional neglect (CEN). This is when they don’t always get needed emotional support. For example parents not listening when a child expresses their feelings. They carry this with them.

The next states are Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Alpha is a bridge between the conscious and subconscious. It is the dominant rhythm for most of us in adulthood. Beta is a faster state we exist in when alert, and processing information around us. Gamma is the fastest state we use to process information from our different brain areas.

Addiction, poison and abuse

The messages we absorb about alcohol are mostly positive. As teenagers it is the first drug most of us take. It is legal and adults take it. Underage drinking is a rite of passage through to taking your first legal drink. We socialise in bars and clubs where alcohol is always taken. We see it as a harmless social habit that everyone does.

Alcohol is addictive. It releases endorphins and dopamine in the brain and we like their effect so want more. Our brain counters their effects as it builds tolerance so we need more to get the same effect. This can lead to addiction over time, though the time this takes depends on lots of factors. As addiction increases we use alcohol to take away the withdrawal symptoms in created. Often we don’t understand it created them.

Alcohol is a poison; if we drink too much it will kill us. Our liver metabolises it into other chemicals easier to remove. One of these is Acetaldehyde, which is carcinogenic. It’s the most abundant carcinogen in tobacco smoke.

If we drink too much we vomit to expel the poison because our bodies cannot cope with digesting it. Vomiting saves us.

About one-in-ten drinkers abuse alcohol. The average Facebook user has 155 friends. If 131 (85%) of them drink about 13 of them will statistically abuse alcohol. Most of us know someone who does.

One-in-ten is 23 million US citizens, which is like everyone in Australia. In the UK it’s 4.3 million people, so everyone in New Zealand or Ireland.

Is there a problem?

Alcohol consumption can creep up imperceptibly over time until reaching problem levels. Signs of having a drink problem can be:

• Drinking multiple times a week
• Joking about having a drink problem
• Letting responsibilities slip at home and work because of drinking
• Regularly writing days off due to hangovers
• Prioritising alcohol over friends and relationships
• Drinking until getting drunk and not seeing see the point in having just a couple of drinks
• Alcohol has to be involved in most situations and you need to have access to it
• At any occasion alcohol is the central part of it, not the occasion itself
• Getting angry, shutting down and denying it when someone close references your drinking
• Using alcohol as a crutch or needing it to feel confident, relaxed, or yourself
• You cannot comprehend a weekend or a couple of days without drinking
• Drinking alone and the time of the day doesn’t matter
• Hiding alcohol and keeping it concealed so you can drink it in secret
• Alcohol becomes your dominant thought pattern
• Forgetting things you’ve said or done when drinking (black-outs)
• Having strong cravings for alcohol
• Seeing it as your significant other

Proving there’s no problem

Most who drink too much know they do and that it isn’t healthy. They start to suspect a problem but remain in denial, confident they are still in control.

Yet suspicions grow stronger so they try to prove to themselves they don’t have a problem. They try stopping drinking for short periods like weekends, but often slip. This leads to more questioning if they’ve a problem. Note it will be a problem or an issue they have. Not an addiction and they definitely aren’t alcoholics or abusing alcohol.

Stopping for short periods fails so they try to prove they aren’t addicted by stopping for a longer period. Occasions like “Stoptober” or “Dry January” are perfect cover for this. They use them as the reason for stopping covering their real reason. Otherwise people try stopping for a period of a couple of weeks, a month, one hundred days. They give reasons like detoxing, losing weight, taking medication, or a fitness drive. There is fear to going against societal norms which is why we make excuses.

The main reason though is to prove they don’t have an issue and they use will power to stop. At this stage most people still believe alcohol has benefits and they are denying themselves. They are making a sacrifice. This results in alcohol dominating their thoughts.

They realise stopping is hard and willpower runs out. But stopping for a while gives false belief there isn’t a big problem. There can’t be because they proved otherwise by stopping for some days or weeks.

Realising the problem

Yet habitual drinking patterns return along with the same conscious questions. People start accepting they may have an issue and try to stop again. They go through the same willpower cycle and discover there’s no easy “off button”. This cycle continues.

They start having lots of internal mental fights known as cognitive dissonance. They cannot understand why they cannot stop or control their intake. Despite making many promises to themselves they still drink.

The reason is because they aren’t not in control. They have built up a habit by repeated drinking and created neural pathways in their subconscious.

Remember habits run 40% of our daily actions or behaviours. The subconscious mind runs 95% of our waking activity autonomously. The person consciously wants to control their drinking. But their faster and more powerful subconscious mind is following habit.

You can’t simply say “stop” or switch it off. This can lead to fear, angst and the realisation that you’re not in control. You know alcohol is harmful but cannot stop taking it despite not wanting to.

Addressing the problem & staying stopped

Once people realise they have a problem they get scared and try to understand how to fix it. They may still not yet accept they have an addiction.

The start point of addressing a problem is accepting it. Then understanding you’re responsible. If you are the problem you are also the solution.

Understand and accept alcohol doesn’t have any benefits. It’s an addictive toxic drug. Do this consciously to get yourself commitment to stop.

Mental fights are because your conscious mind wants to stop and you don’t understand why you can’t. Accept it’s your subconscious responding to habit.

The key is closing down those subconscious neural pathways built to alcohol. You do this by updating your beliefs.

You break a habit with a habit, so practice one which will overwrite your existing beliefs. Your subconscious continues executing it’s habits until new ones exist.

This takes time.

Resources, practices, and shortcuts

There are many resources that can help you to stop or cut down drinking. There are books targeted at stopping drinking giving you the why and how. Remember information can take time to absorb and there is no magic bullet. I quit through repeat listened to such books. I did this many times to overwrite my existing beliefs and change my habits. It took time and effort.

Meditation improves your conscious awareness through practising mindfulness. Your awareness focuses on the present moment. Higher conscious awareness helps you recognise and deal with things like cravings. “This too shall pass”.

Hypnosis can shortcut overwriting your existing beliefs. It works by relaxing you into the Theta brainwave state where your mind is open to suggestions. They can go unfiltered direct into your subconsciousness to replace existing beliefs.

Accountability

Having people in our lives who hold us accountable is incredibly helpful. This helps us remain on track and keep focus. It gives us meaning.

You can find accountability through different support groups. Initially you may feel you are accountable to them, which gives you purpose. You then understand accountability is about accepting responsibility for our own actions. This gives us both meaning and purpose. Powerful!

External accountability increases your chances of success a lot. There are traditional ones like doctors, counsellors, or AA. There are also online groups like coach.me (https://www.coach.me/) or Reddit r/stopdrinking (https://www.reddit.com/r/stopdrinking/).

Staying stopped:

After achieving sobriety you’ll want to keep it. We crystallise our memories towards good and forget the bad. It’s a survival mechanism called Fading Affect Bias. The danger is remembering the good things about bad things. This makes us desire those again.

In achieving sobriety you have knowledge of how alcohol works and think you can have control. In this case knowledge isn’t power.

Many believe they can moderate their drinking. This isn’t possible. They waste valuable time and energy thinking about controlling it. They eventually end up reigniting their neurological alcohol pathways and go back to square one.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve developed a drinking habit you don’t want do yourself a favour and reset it.