Having The Urge To Drink

Welcome back to Thinking about Drinking Thursday, where we discuss tools to help you drink less. If you are a highly functioning gal who has decided to just cut back on your drinking - this is for you. If you have been saying you want to drink less, but haven't been successful I want to help by sharing some tools with you.

Last week we discussed desire, and why we like to drink. Desire is a learned behavior that most of us have become really good at. We plan to meet our girlfriends for example, which triggers the thought - I want to have a glass of wine, we feel desire, and reward it with a glass of wine. When you have this thought, and reward at the end you will continue to do it because the brain loves to seek pleasure. So how do you unlearn this?

In order to unlearn this desire pattern you need to interrupt the model. You need to stop rewarding the thought with a glass of wine and once you stop rewarding the thought, the desire will go away. Recall Pavlov’s dogs - to keep it simple, it is much like that. In the past you may have tried willpower or resistance, which typically does not work. In fact, if you say you are not going to have the drink, and actually do, it is deepens the neural pathway to seek the reward. Instead I encourage you to begin accumulating unanswered urges. How do you do that?

The next time you have an urge I don’t want you to resist and/or react to it. Begin working on the skill of allowing an urge. An urge is really not that unpleasant until you start trying to resist it. So one way to allow an urge is to take a moment and describe how it feels in your body - maybe a little tight, uncomfortable, thoughts twirling around in your head. Write it down on purpose to become more aware. The second way to allow an urge is to just watch it. Separate yourself from the emotion, recognize you are having a thought that causes the feeling. Understand that you are not literally that thought and that feeling. The third way to allow an urge is to become accepting of it. Recognize that it creates some tension, and just be present with it. Think about a beach ball in a pool for example - when you try to push it under and push it under you struggle. Instead - when you let the beach ball float on top of the water there is no struggle - do that with your urges.

I want you to focus on accumulating 100 unanswered urges. You have 100 urges, and don’t reward with a drink. Instead take a moment to purposefully write down what it felt like, what you were thinking, and how you managed it. It’s just like ringing the bell 100 times and not giving that dog food - the drool dries up. Now - this will be challenging to begin with. It is most likely unlike anything you have done before, and that is ok - you totally got this!