Getting past the cravings

A while ago someone asked ‘How do you get past the bad cravings?’

and I looked back and found these notes I made. Maybe these ideas will help you. Let us know!

The physical cravings pass in about 72 hours. Those are mostly related to blood sugar and your change in your daily cycles, both physical and mental. Your body is still making large quantities of the enzyme for digesting alcohol, and suddenly it isn’t there. Your body expects a steady flow of sugar. And your brain is expecting a river of dopamine to flood your synapses, and it isn’t there.

The longer term desire for alcohol doesn’t seem to me to be accurately described by the term ‘cravings’ because they are more theoretical in nature. What seems like an intense ‘need’ is really a very, very strong ‘want.’ Those wants result from some core beliefs that you have created and now hold and even cherish: that you must have alcohol because.....[you fill in the blanks here].

If you haven’t specifically articulated to yourself why you LIKE to drink, this is the time to do so.

A cost-benefit analysis can be a useful way to do this if you are the kind of person who likes to make lists. I found it useful to go sit under a big tree and talk about it to myself (or the tree; it’s a good listener). It was important to me to state clearly that I liked alcohol. I liked what it did to my brain—relieving stress and anxiety, and calming the niggling part of the brain that keeps us juggling the many facets of our busy lives.

But I didn’t like the other things it did, and I had to realize that I probably couldn’t drink just enough to accomplish what I liked about it and then stop. So it was time to try to find other ways of accomplishing what I liked about alcohol. More important, it was time to stop using it.

All of this is great in theory, but when you are walking past those bottles in the store there’s a great temptation to just reach out and put one or two in the cart. So I created a short-cut through the long process of reasoning with myself. In my case I reminded myself that I had made a promise to my kids. ‘No, you told the kids you wouldn’t’ was a simple thing to say to myself.

Of course, there are plenty of times that I could buy it and they wouldn’t know. So the next reminder was ‘if you don’t buy it, you can’t drink it.’ And if I thought ‘you could just buy one’ I’d remind myself ‘but you’d enjoy more than one. Next time you’ll want to buy two. If you don’t buy it, you can’t drink it.’

The point of this long discussion (can’t you just see me, standing in the grocery store, talking to myself? Clerks looking at me...’uh, sir, can I help you find something?’ ‘Yeah, my mind. It seems to have wandered off.’) is that I made myself some simple mantras and quick arguments to cut through the clutter and make the seemingly spontaneous decision TO buy turn into a conscious decision NOT to buy.

Then, when you have more time, you can ponder the irrational beliefs that led you to think that drinking was going to make something better. Which leads to another of my favorite mantras: ‘there’s nothing bad that drinking doesn’t make worse.’

Pretty soon drinking isn’t something you think about several times a day. Maybe once or twice a day. And if you don’t do it, those thoughts will continue to diminish. That’s very important to remember! If you DON’T DO IT, the thoughts will diminish! I guarantee, if you DO drink, the thoughts will increase.

And I promise you that eventually you have whole days where you don’t even think about drinking, or if you do it’s in a sort of amused,

“I used to do that”, frame of mind. You just don’t do it anymore, or particularly care about it.

It does help to keep yourself busy by developing an interest that you’ve had in the past—now that you have more clear-headed time to make use of. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic.

Please feel free to share your irrational beliefs with us. You’ll be surprised how many of them we’ve had ourselves.