If you notice THIS, you're an alcoholic

. When you think of an alcoholic , what comes to your mind ? Well , I'll tell you what comes to my mind . I think of maybe somebody homeless , somebody unshaven , somebody with long hair , dirty clothes , somebody that's drinking super cheap cider that's like $2 a bottle , someone that's begging on the street just to get their next drink . But is that really the case ?

Would you picture a successful businessman with 100 employees ? Would you picture an athlete ? Would you picture a loving parent that has an amazing family and goes to church ? Well , more often than not , we wouldn't picture somebody like that . But the typical idea that we have of what an alcoholic is is very , almost far-fetched .

What we're really looking at is like this bottom 1% of alcoholics , the people who have gone so far that there's no question about it . But how can you tell if you're an alcoholic ? How can you tell if you're an alcoholic for real ? Today , I'm going to show you my journey of discovering what it meant to be an alcoholic .

If I am an alcoholic , how I fixed my drinking problem , and I'm also going to show you how you can test if you're one as well . But this isn't going to be like an AA test or anything like that . So the first thing I want to do oh , actually , I can't go in the sun . That is hot . I need to stay in the shade . So a little bit of backstory is

I'm 32 years of age . I've not drank for almost seven years . I stopped drinking when I was like 25 because alcohol was just destroying my life . Now , when I first wanted to get off drinking , stop drugs , I didn't know what to do , right , I mean , there were no videos like Sober Leon videos back then . There were . I don't know if there were any books .

I couldn't find any books . I didn't know what to do . So I asked my family . I said , mum , I want to stop drinking , I want to stop smoking weed , I want to stop doing all this stupid stuff . What do I do Now ? My mum , at this point , had been to AA . She's now been for way over 20 years .

At this point it might've been going for 18 years or something like that . And because of drinking , because of drugs . I actually left home at 17 years of age and pretty tragic , but that's the kind of stuff that happened to me when I was drinking . And I remember , you know , life had just got really bad .

And I don't I don't want to share the stories , I just hate sharing the story but I went . I basically I'm not going to name it because it's not really fair , but I went to live with a family member and when I live with this family member I drank more than ever . You know , they gave me my first line of cocaine . I mean it was pretty tragic .

And I remember , you know I hadn't been , I hadn't had like the best relationship with my mum and my stepdad . And I remember calling my mum up and I was like I want to come home , like , and I want to stop this lifestyle , I've had enough . And she said , if you go to meetings and you get sober , you can stay at home again .

And to me , when I was maybe 18 or 19 , I was like , oh my God , yes . So I did it right . And my mum's found success with Alcoholics Anonymous . My mum is an alcoholic in her mind . She does a 12-step program and she's not drank for 20 plus years Program saved her life .

As a result of that , my upbringing was fantastic , up until about 17 , right , but I had a very nice house , lived in a really good neighborhood , it was very safe , so I did have a pretty privileged upbringing .

So Alcoholics Anonymous to me has had so much impact on my life probably more so than the people that stopped drinking with it , because I've been the almost like the consequence of somebody who stopped drinking with alcoholics and all this right . So I am not here to slade that program , but we'll get to my problems with it in a second .

You'll see where this is going . But she encouraged me to go to these meetings right , and you know I did smoke a lot of weed back then and I was also like sniffing drugs as well and , right , I almost felt like the drugs and stuff was like a phase that I went through when I was a teenager .

But then when it came to alcohol , that's when things got really bad and that's when I'd drink and then sometimes take drugs as well , but it was always alcohol that was a problem . So I don't really talk too much about this , but for this video I'll tell you about it . So she said go to these meetings , right .

So I remember I go to my very first meeting and I go to this meeting and there was maybe seven or eight people there . It was a narcotics anonymous meeting , so this was for drug addicts , right .

And I go there and I remember the guy who he did this thing called a main share , and the main share is where basically , somebody tells you their story of how bad things used to be , and then in the second half of the meeting then everybody starts introducing themselves . They'll be like , you know , my name's Gary , I'm an addict , and blah , blah , blah .

And then in Alcoholics Anonymous , I'm John and I'm an alcoholic , blah , blah , blah . And I went to some NA meetings and then I started reading this book and then I started listening to all these people and everybody's got the same story right , they're all there because they drank too much or took too many drugs , or to varying different degrees .

But I kept hearing these stories and I thought , well , hang on , I must be one as well . I must be one as well , I must be one of these people as well , and you don't want to feel left out . So I started giving myself this label . I started saying , okay , I'm an addict , I'm an alcoholic .

That's what I am , and I carried this label for 90 days and I think that's how long I got my first big sober stretch , and that's a great thing . That was the first time I stopped drinking for 90 days . So I found some success in that program not here to slate it but then I did find

some problems . Later on I knew a few people that died through relapses in that program and then I started doing a little bit of research into AA and this word alcoholic , and I've done a lot more research in it now . But what I started realizing is that words are powerful , they're freaking powerful .

And if I'm to call myself an alcoholic and I do drink again am I going to drink two drinks or am I going to remind myself of all the stuff I got told in AA and am I going to go insane ? Am I going to drink a bottle of vodka ? Well , to me , I think I'm going to go on the bottle of vodka route , because it's almost like I've got this excuse .

It's almost like now I believe that I truly have a problem . Does that make sense ? So after I started having these realizations and these moments of like wait a minute I just stopped going and you know I stopped going . I did drink and and party again , I'm not gonna lie .

But then I remember I did like have this day where I just I wanted to go back to a meeting I can't remember why , probably some massive hangover and I just remember walking out of a meeting and this guy chased me out of the meeting it was actually a really nice guy until I decided to leave and he chased me me down and he was like Leon , you got a

fucking disease . If you go back out there you're going to die , jeez . Okay , well , that was completely incorrect . Actually , I'm absolutely fine . I've not drank for seven years and I'm living the life of my dreams . Anyway , not here to prove him wrong or anything like that .

I'm sure he had the best intentions , I'm sure his heart was pure , I'm sure he genuinely wanted to help me . But where am I even going with this ? I speak to a lot of people and they say to me a lot of the times like , oh , I'm a functioning alcoholic and we never really questioned this term and I think it gets misused a lot .

I had a drinking problem and , being somebody who is an alcoholic , if I have a drinking problem , right , that's a problem I can fix If I'm an alcoholic . I can never fix that because you have it for the rest of your life . So to be clear here , the word alcoholic is a made up term . It's a self-help term that comes from AA , alcoholics Anonymous .

No doctor will ever call you an alcoholic . If you actually go on the website and do the criteria to find out whether or not you're an alcoholic , I mean , probably most drinkers , probably 80% of drinkers , are going to go through that and they'll be told you might be an alcoholic .

So the criteria is very loose and no doctor will ever give you this medical diagnosis

. There's actually a book , I think it's the NACSM , where they give you like 11 questions and if you have that then there's a high likelihood that you have a certain level of severity of alcohol use disorder . So do you see ?

The difference here is I had a drinking problem but I wasn't the problem , because if I was , the problem I can never be fixed and technically the only fix to being an alcoholic is to go to alcoholics and on this meetings that's what they say . You've got no known cure .

The only solution is the 12 steps You've got to go to these meetings for the best of your life and recruit new members , which is a little bit cult-like as well , I'm not going to lie , it's a little bit cult-like . But hey , I'm not here to criticize that program .

If that program works for you , I am so happy for you because maybe you go and build a great life for your family and I'm so blessed to have AA in my mom's life , right ? So , going back to this thing of are you an alcoholic ? Well , I've got a better question for you who gives a ? Who gives shit ?

If you are and I'm not being mean , I'm not trying to be rude or anything like that but like , what are we trying to do here ? Like a lot of people when they say , you know , I'm a functioning alcoholic or you know , I hear it a lot as well . I've probably spoke to like 2,500 people , by the way , who have got a drinking problem .

I've had in-depth conversations with them , plus the hundreds of videos I've made and the tens of thousands of messages and emails . I hear it a lot of the times like , well , you know , leon , I'm not an alcoholic and I'm like , what are we doing here ? What are we trying to justify ? Well , I'm not as bad as him , I'm not as bad as her .

It's not like I can't hold down a job . It's not like I don't . You know , I'm a very fit and healthy . This is another one here . I'm not a very , I'm a very . I mean , what are we doing here ? Are we just trying to compare ourselves to everybody else ? And it's pointless , right ?

It's just a pointless question to ask yourself whether or not you're an alcoholic , because what you're trying to say is it's almost like when I'm that bad , then I'll stop drinking . All you need to do is ask yourself this is alcohol causing problems in your life and do you want to change ? That's all that matters .

And what we need to do is we need to separate the identity that we're the problem with the problem itself . Because once we can distinguish the two and we can attack the drinking problem , we can attack alcohol . Then it becomes a fixable problem like any other problem .

We don't see people who have stopped smoking call themselves nicotineaholics for the rest of their life , do we ? We don't see . I don't know people who have got gluten intolerance call themselves gluten-aholics for the rest of their lives , do we ?

They don't walk past croissants and beg God to help them and have to go and do a 12-step program and make amendments to people so they don't eat a freaking croissant . See , we need to stop asking ourselves whether or not we think we're an alcoholic . But we do need to get real with ourselves and ask ourselves do we have a drinking problem

? And the likelihood is no offense . But if you've watched this video this far and these stories are resonating and you're thinking , oh , maybe this guy's making sense , maybe you do have a problem . But that's not for me to say . Right , that's for you to say . But I want to say this 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 .