Get The Motivation to Quit Drinking For Good
Dec 14, 2022Get The Motivation to Quit Drinking For Good
Quit drinking for good, sounds easy, but is it?
Human beings are motivated by two primary elements.
The need to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Unfortunately, the scales are not evenly balanced and we will do significantly more to achieve the latter than the former.
This is why misery, greed, and discontentment are rife within most of western society.
Often people are drinking to cover up a much bigger and more painful thing in their life. Alcohol use disorders are just a symptom of a larger issue at hand.
The Secret
To quit drinking for good you need to attach more pleasure to sobriety than you do to drinking, but how?
More and more people are turning to The Stop Drinking Expert online courses and live seminars.
We will often only go as far as is needed to stop the pain. Without carrying on in our endeavors to push through to the point of pleasure.
Diets fail over and over again for this very reason alone.
Example:
Jenny looks in the mirror and grabs hold of the new roll of fat that has slowly developed around her waist.
She sighs and looks forlornly at the wardrobe full of clothes that no longer fit. Her weight and body size is making her miserable. However, for the moment the pain is not enough to justify giving up the food she loves and associates with a lifestyle she believes herself worthy of.
Her current mental assessment is that living without the fine dining, chocolate, cakes and weekend takeaways will be more unpleasant that how she currently feels about her body.
The next day at work something happens that dramatically changes her opinion. As she steps out of the elevator and makes for her cubical she stops short and waits before turning the corner.
She hears her name being mentioned in conversation and cocks her head to one side, listening to what is being said.
A new intern is asking one of the sales staff who Jenny Taylor is because he has a package to leave on her desk. The salesman, who is rushing out the door on a client call. He is already ten minutes late for shouts over his shoulder ‘cubicle 17, big woman, brown hair’!
Jenny’s jaw drops open as she gets slapped around the face by the realization that people describe her as ‘the big woman’ of the office.
Threshold Moments
In my weight loss book The Blood Glucose Diet this is what I call a threshold moment. This is a point in time when the pleasure/pain balance gets dramatically shifted.
Suddenly the pain of being overweight and the associated low self-image becomes massively exaggerated and overtakes the other now insignificant pressure preventing the person from taking action.
Horrified by what she has just overheard. Jenny throws her fried chicken lunch in the garbage and the diet starts immediately
On the way home from work she stops off at the gym and signs up for a yearlong commitment to the dreaded treadmill (despite the fact that she hates the gym, but not quite enough to silence that statement ‘big woman, brown hair’).
Fitness centers tie you into fixed-term deals. They do this because they know your current good intentions are going to last six to eight weeks at best.
Then you will be banging on their door demanding that they stop debiting your account every month.
Good intentions are weak
Regular gym goers hate January. Because the treadmills and stationary bikes are clogged up with the New Years Resolution gang; thankfully by March most of them are gone.
Although chances are good that they are still paying the club fees because ending a gym membership can sometimes be harder than getting a divorce.
The rabbit food replaces the pizza and Jenny Taylor drags herself to the gym daily for a whole month.
That salesman gets at least a dozen evil looks a day as the echo of his description bounces around her wounded mind.
Diet cereal for breakfast, salad for lunch and boiled fish for dinner… until one day the jeans that were once too tight slide over her hips.
What An Amazing Moment
A delightful occasion for any dieter! The next day at work, back in her skinny clothes a few of her colleagues notice the weight loss and make pleasing noises in her direction.
The motivational scales take another swing as the pain from the threshold moment dissipates and loses its leverage.
Within a week or so Jenny is allowing herself the ‘occasional treat’ and skipping the gym on days when she feels a little tired.
Within a month she has started to resent the $70 a month the fitness center takes out of her account. It feels it is poor value for the odd time she actually makes it past the highway turnoff.
It’s not long before the pain of depriving herself of life’s luxuries far outweighs the trauma of that now distant threshold event. The weight slowly returns until the cycle starts again.
Getting The Motivation to Quit Drinking For Good
This is what we call the yo-yo diet routine and it’s why 95% people who go on a low fat, calorie restrictive diet not only put back on any weight loss but also adds on average an additional 2-5 lbs.
This universal nature of human behavior is the reason why highly intelligent and successful people continue to drink a dangerous poison in the name of being social.
All the excuses and reasons they regurgitate to defend their actions are purely a way of balancing the pleasure and pain scales in their head.
The fact is while they accept alcohol causes pain. In the form of hangovers, depression, driving offenses, financial hardship and often irreversible damage to relationships they believe the pain of living without the drug they love will cause significantly more pain.
Take action
Understanding the motivation to quit drinking for good is not a one-time event. This is part of the key to escaping the alcoholism trap.
I know this to be true because back when I was a desperately unhappy drinker I could not imagine a life without alcohol.
I incorrectly believed that booze was one of the only good things in my life; in reality, it was the cause and accelerant to virtually all of the misery.
However, if you had tried to take it off me I would have kicked your ass!
Use your pain as leverage
If you are currently in a bad place with your drinking. Perhaps you are using alcohol every night and waking up most mornings feeling terrible. Great, that's a powerful tool.
The pain you have around your drinking is not enough on its own to get you to quit drinking for good. However, it's enough to get you to take action.
One day at a time is how we deal with this devious drug. Step one is to actually do something, step two is to make sure it's not the same thing you always do.
Willpower does not work against alcohol problems. Get the tools and information to make the process easy and fun. Yes, that's right I said fun - and I mean it.
I understand the drinker's mind. If you are ready to get the motivation to quit drinking for good... Click here to get started today.