Changing My Default Setting

What's the most challenging thing you have ever done?

I have done a lot of things I consider challenging - marathons, half marathons, pregnancy, childbirth, new jobs, break-ups, marriage, buying a house, etc. The list goes on and on. But I think the most challenging thing I have done to date is when I decided to question my alcohol intake..and do something about it.

Why is this sooooo challenging? I mean, is it really more challenging than running a marathon?

Well, yeah, it is. Because while training for and running a marathon is physically challenging, questioning everything I believe and know to be true about a substance I have been abusing since I was in college causes a great deal of mental strife. Asking myself why I drink and if I should continue to do so has kicked up a lot of emotional dust that I wasn't expecting. And we all know dealing with the emotional stuff can be the greatest challenge of all.

Since I was 19 years old I have used alcohol as a crutch to get through awkward social encounters, boring lulls in life, and stressful situations. I have leaned on booze to numb any pain I didn't want to feel and to avoid any problems I didn't want to deal with. Having fun and want to celebrate? Crack open a beer! Feeling stressed or sad about something? Crack open a beer! How did this become my default setting?

I was a quiet, introverted kid growing up and when I went to college I made a decision to overcome my "shyness", and sadly alcohol played a big role in my "personality change". Freshman year of college was my chance to become the opposite of who everyone in high school thought I was (if they even thought of me at all). I didn't drink at all in high school and I was actually okay with that. Never one to feel the need to fit in or succumb to "peer pressure", I wasn't interested in imbibing at parties or while hanging out with friends. I'd sometimes be the only person at a party not drinking, yet I still had fun. But it was fun in my own quiet, reserved way.

Why I felt the need to become the opposite of myself in college I don't really know - I think I just got tired of always coloring inside the lines. We all do sometimes.

It started as a method for me to loosen up and have fun, but as the years went on, alcohol became more important than it should have. In the last couple of years I started questioning if I had a "problem", since it seemed that even though I consciously wanted to cut booze out of my life for various health reasons, I still somehow felt deep down like I needed it.

And then I came across a book that changed my life: This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. When I read the summary of the book I admit I was skeptical: it promised to help recondition my thinking and provide me with the tools to gain control over my consumption of alcohol. How could a book do that? But I gave it a chance - I downloaded the audio version of the book and it only took me 2 days to get through all 7 hours and 28 minutes of it. I couldn't stop listening.

It's taken some time for me to come around to understanding this, but I now realize that my desire to drink alcohol is a result of years of conscious and unconscious conditioning. I have spent most of my life believing alcohol was the solution to my problems - it made me funnier, easier to talk to, more lively at parties, more relaxed in life, etc. I learned this from experiences I had in my life, from watching people around me, and of course, from the genius marketing and advertising campaigns of the alcohol industry.

The truth is that alcohol never did me any favors, all it did was deteriorate my health. Alcohol is made from ethanol, which is essentially poison. It does bad things to your body, most especially your first line of defense: your liver. Alcohol consumption, even a little bit, increases a person's risk for cancer - and ladies, drinking booze raises your risk for breast cancer: "Compared to women who don't drink at all, women who have three alcoholic drinks per week have a 15% higher risk of breast cancer. Experts estimate that the risk of breast cancer goes up another 10% for each additional drink women regularly have each day." (source: https://www.breastcancer.org/risk/factors/alcohol)

 Alcohol is not the solution, it's the problem.

If I am not having fun at a party, maybe that means it's time for me to leave, not numb myself to the situation by drinking. If I am bored, I need to fill my time doing something fun - like writing, painting, running, or hanging out with my kids - not pour myself a cocktail. If I am anxious or depressed, self-medicating with booze is definitely not the answer...I need to work on dealing with the source of my anxiety and becoming more mentally healthy, as alcohol only heightens anxiety and exacerbates depression over time. Instead of numbing myself to deal with situations, how about I actually...deal with them? Because as it turns out, when you numb out the bad stuff, you also numb out all the good stuff too. I want to feel all the feelings, good and bad, from now on. Isn't that what it means to be human?

And let me just circle back to something I mentioned earlier when I said I was wondering if I had a "problem" when I decided I wanted to cut back on my drinking. We live in a very "us-them" culture when it comes to alcohol dependence. We tend to think there are some people who are born "alcoholics" and then there's the rest of us who can control our drinking, as if there is some DNA embedded in some people that make them drunks while everyone else is immune to the addiction. This is very dangerous thinking. The truth of the matter is that alcohol is a highly addictive substance and any person can become dependent on it, physically and/or mentally, at any time. I am not saying every person who drinks will become an alcoholic, I am saying that every person who drinks CAN become an alcoholic. But we pretend this isn't true because it makes us feel better to believe that it can't happen to us.

Ah, but it can.

I have never tried heroin, but this doesn't mean that if I did try it I wouldn't become addicted to it. It's a highly addictive substance. But I'm not going to walk around pretending like I am somehow better than a heroin addict, because in reality the only difference between the two of us is that he tried it and I didn't.

Chances are you know someone who is or was addicted to nicotine. I tried smoking cigarettes in college - another attempt to be the opposite of me - but I never became physically or mentally dependent on it. It just wasn't for me, so it was an easy thing to give up when I realized what a foolish thing it was to do. But if I had continued smoking, exposing myself to nicotine regularly, I am sure over time I would have become addicted to it. Because, like alcohol, it's an addictive substance.

So you see, there is no "us-them" - it's all us, we're all in this together. We need to stop telling ourselves that alcohol dependence can never happen to us, because if we're drinking, it can, and for some of us, it has probably already happened. And it doesn't make us bad people, it just means we have been exposed repeatedly to a highly addictive substance. We're only human after all.

This is not a plea for you to give up drinking, this is just me sharing the truths that I have learned. I think it's important that we remove the stigma of addiction, and to do that, we need to acknowledge that addiction can happen to anyone. Even you. Or me.

So, the million dollar question is: have I given up drinking completely? The short answer is: I'm on the road to doing that. It's a slow process, because I have 20 years of conditioning that I am working on undoing. In the last 21 days, I have consumed alcohol only 4 times - each time I did so mindfully, consciously choosing a drink (instead of letting it unconsciously choose me). And I will confess this: the few times I did have an alcoholic drink over the last 3 weeks, I didn't enjoy it like I used to. Now that I am consciously aware that booze doesn't actually enhance any of my experiences, it doesn't take away my anxiety, and it doesn't make me funnier or sexier - it just doesn't feel as good to indulge in a drink anymore. Especially knowing what the health risks are every time you consume alcohol, it makes it hard to justify ordering a cocktail. Not impossible, but hard.

The most important thing in this journey is that I am getting back to me. I spent a long time trying to get away from who I really am - an introverted, somewhat anxious person, who loves to laugh, and prefers small groups over large crowds. Now I am learning to embrace who I am and allow myself to feel everything, even the not so good feelings - like boredom, anger, sadness, and anxiety. This is all part of the human experience and just as I was tired of "always coloring inside the lines" as a 19 year old, now as a 40 year old I am tired of pretending to be something I'm not. If people don't like me as I am, that's on them. I have been afraid for a long time to be me, but I actually think people will like the real me. I just need to let them.

Who knows if I will ever get to a point where I decide to abstain from alcohol completely, but I do know that I am no longer going to hide behind a bottle anymore. If I do drink, it will be my conscious choice and not my default setting. As I said before, alcohol isn't doing me any favors, so I am learning to let it go. And I am ready to feel all the feelings. All of them.