Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast , where we help you make stopping drinking a simple , logical and easy decision . We help you with tips , tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol free . If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching , then head over to wwwsoberclearcom .
If you're looking for actionable steps to take to help you quit drinking alcohol within the next 48 hours , then this is the video for you . If you apply everything that I'm going to tell you to do in this video , in 48 hours , your life could be on a completely new trajectory .
You could be going towards the best version of yourself , when you're in the best shape you've ever been . You're feeling better than you felt , than you did in your 20s . If you follow what I'm talking about in this video today , that is possible for you . So definitely grab a pen and paper for this one , because there will be some work , but just wait .
But now let's get into the video .
So the very first thing that you're going to want to do is get yourself a pen and paper , and at the very top of paper is write down the word pain , and what I want you to do is I want you to start writing down a list of all the ways that alcohol causes pain in your life , and I think coming up with 10 things could be good , but for me , when I
was drinking , I could have done 50 , maybe 100 . I mean , some of the stuff on that list is going to be very personal . You don't really need to share it with anybody , but go as deep as you can . There are things there that I mean I don't even want to tell you what I wrote on that list .
It's so embarrassing , but write down the ways alcohol causes pain . Maybe for you it's the hangovers , right ? The lethargy , the lack of clarity in your thought . Maybe for you it's that you're not setting an example to your kids . Maybe you're afraid of cirrhosis of the liver , of cancer , major health consequences .
Maybe for you , your relationship isn't the way you want it to be . You need to get real with yourself and see the way that alcohol is causing damage in your life , and this is so important because it's hard to do this right . I'm not saying this is going to be easy .
You might need to just take a few minutes , go somewhere , get to a private place , go and drive your car and park up where no one can see you and really go deep on this , really get real with yourself and really just ask yourself how is alcohol damaging my life ?
Don't be that person that says , oh , it's all okay , it's not that bad , I'm a functioning alcoholic , or whatever people say . Stop lying to yourself and get real with yourself and sit with this pain . It's so important for you to do this because if there's no pain , then there's no motivation to change . We need an element of pain . That's what spurs action .
So this is the first step . Now , if I was just to say stop there , then guess what ? Writing down that list of pain can actually sometimes be enough to get you to just say F this , I'm stopping drinking . See , I've done this . Where I've had something really bad just happen , where you know I've had it .
Where I've thrown up blood on a computer , I've , you know , just done ridiculous things . Where I'm like whoa , I can't keep doing this and that pain would get me going . I might stop drinking after experiencing something bad . But the other two steps are what are going to keep you on this path long term , because pain is not enough .
Just pain , I'm telling you , is not enough . So the next thing I want you to do is write down the word pleasure . Now , I've spoken about this before writing a plain pleasure list , but there's a third step that I never told you about that I'm going to break down for you after .
But the next thing you want to do is write down the word pleasure and start writing about specific areas of your life that would be more pleasurable if you didn't drink and listen . This might take you some time to get your head around .
It might be a bit weird at first , but I want you , for the sake of this exercise , to imagine that alcohol just disappeared from your life and you never thought about it again . You had no desire to drink . What would life look like now If you didn't drink for a year ? What would be reflected back to you in the mirror ?
Would it be somebody athletic , strong , ripped ? How would your bank look ? How would your business look ? What about the relationships with your family , your friends ? What example are you setting to people around you ? What about feeling peace of mind and not worrying about the health consequences ?
What about the clarity , the ideas that start coming back to you , the self-confidence , the self-belief ? Start writing about the amazing things that can happen in your life if you got rid of alcohol and , like I said , you might need to get a bit creative here .
It might seem out of reach right now but , like I said , for the sake of the exercise , imagine that there was a switch in your brain and alcohol just disappeared . You never thought about it again . Now this list is super powerful . Seeing the pain and seeing the pleasure I mean that is just pure motivation right there .
For some people , like I said , you know , that can be enough to get you going for a pretty damn long time . The reason why I say this is so powerful is because I've done this , but I didn't have a process right . I've done it where I experienced an intense amount of pain in my life and then the next day I started writing about .
You know who I could be if I stuck on this path , and actually this led me into starting my first personal training business and being self-employed for the first time in my life . I created this vision of how life could look if I didn't drink . I created this ideal , this place I wanted to go towards , and that got me sober .
I think I stopped for seven , eight , nine months I can't remember the exact amount of time , but it got me going for a long time . But there was a third thing missing , a third thing that I didn't do , and it's something that I did six years ago that has made me stop drinking permanently .
The third thing that you need to do is you need to ask yourself a question , and you can write this question down on the same piece of paper . But ask yourself what beliefs are holding you back ?
What beliefs are holding you back from getting rid of alcohol from your life , removing all that pain from your life , and only going towards this new , pleasurable ideal ? Because there is something holding you back . Because , logically , it makes no sense how you could continue drinking after seeing this list . It makes no sense , right ?
So this third step is so important , and it's what I call using first principles , thinking right . It's breaking the problem down into all of its component parts and being able to analyze each of the component parts and then giving yourself a new paradigm , a new worldview . But ask yourself what beliefs have you got about alcohol specifically ?
What do you see in alcohol that's maybe stopping you from making a decision to stop drinking ? What beliefs do you have about sobriety ? Is there some kind of fear that you're not going to enjoy certain social occasions without alcohol ? Is there fear that you're not going to be able to de-stress ? Is there just this fear that life's not going to be as good ?
What beliefs do you have about addiction ?
Do you believe that you've got some disease that's going to keep pulling you back , that you're an alcoholic , that you're born this way and you really need to start looking at your beliefs and analysing them right and asking yourself are these beliefs true or is there a more empowering alternative worldview that I could adopt that's going to help me stop drinking ?
And here's the problem 99% of the adult population have got incorrect beliefs around alcohol , around addiction and around sobriety and not drinking . See , people think that stopping drinking is hard , that it's difficult . Not true . I'm telling you it's not true , because that's not my belief . That's not my reality .
People have incorrect beliefs about sobriety and they think that life's going to be worse off . That's not my reality . People have incorrect beliefs about sobriety and they think that life's going to be worse off . Again , completely false . You can change that belief . And they think that they're the problem , that they've got a disease , that they're an alcoholic .
And again , I don't believe this one bit . It's not true at all . My belief is that alcohol is ethanol , it's poison . It's nothing more than a highly addictive drug that adds nothing to my life , so not drinking is just the most logical choice I could make . That pain pleasure list is just yeah duh .
Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking podcast by Sober Clear . If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly , then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom .