Stop Drinking Podcast by Soberclear

ALCOHOL CRAVINGS are NOT What You Think!

• Leon Sylvester

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SPEAKER_00:

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 www.soberclear.com. What if I told you that alcohol cravings aren't even real? And all you need is four seconds to eradicate alcohol cravings forever. Now, saying something like that might get me in trouble, but what I'm about to show you today is how you can defeat alcohol cravings and stopping drinking will feel like a walk in the park. The cravings will come and then they'll just immediately bounce off you. I know this works because this is what happened in my own life. After 10 years of struggling to not drink alcohol, this was the final shift that just fixed it for me. But also, this has worked for hundreds of my clients. People like John, an entrepreneur who's two and a half years sober. This has worked for him. It also worked for Gordon, who's a construction contractor who's now 16 months without a drop. And it also worked for Ramona, who said this approach has made stopping drinking the easiest thing she's ever done in her life. It's hundreds of others as well. If we've not met yet, my name is Leon Sylvester. I'm the founder of soberclear.com. We're a coaching company that helps business people and professionals get control of their drinking quickly. So the stuff that I'm gonna share with you is the stuff that I share with my clients and also the stuff I've been applying for the past seven years. So let's dive into things. When it comes to stopping drinking and alcohol cravings, society has got it backwards. Society believes that alcohol cravings are something that you battle for the rest of your life. It's a natural part of not drinking. You go through everyday life and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you see alcohol, you make a positive association with it, and then bam, you want to drink. And society and the traditional ways of stopping drinking will all have you believe that this is okay and it's normal. Think about it like this: we get told that people who are in recovery are gonna be in recovery for the rest of their life. So it's a lifelong disease with no known cure. I used to believe this, I know now that it's not true. Alcoholics Anonymous, what did they say? Well, one day at a time. Today I'm just not gonna drink. And then we use willpower, right? When we fight through the urge with willpower, we get cravings and we just blast through them. And all of these things are reinforcing the idea that cravings are gonna be there forever. And it's because we're using the wrong methods. Now, don't get me wrong, when people stop drinking alcohol, there is an element of physical withdrawal. It can last three to seven days, sometimes longer. There are people out there that do need a medical detox. And during this process, your body will crave alcohol. It's a physical response to all of these changes that are happening in your body with your neurotransmitters, with various chemicals. Everything's out of whack and you want to go back to that homeostasis that alcohol was creating, at least what you thought it was creating. Your body will have got accustomed to a drug, so then when you remove the drug, it goes crazy. But after that process is done, once the healing is finished and the brain's starting to normalize, then the cravings become psychological. And once you can fix your psychology and your worldview, you will become one of the people who's able to not drink alcohol for the rest of their life without thinking about it, rather than one of those people that's struggling, that's fighting, that's always complaining about not being able to drink. I don't want you to be one of those people. I want you to be one of those people that just knock this out of the park and move on with their life. See, but all that's happening when somebody has these psychological cravings is something will come up in the body. And what ends up happening is we see alcohol enhances that situation or that negative feeling. It can be various factors. But as long as we see alcohol as something that is going to improve some area of our life or reduce suffering in some area of our life, as long as we make that link, we will always crave alcohol. Once you can eradicate that link, that's when it's just like, why would I even want to do it? So let's unpack three of the biggest triggers and let's start formulating a new, more realistic worldview where you stop seeing alcohol as the solution to these three problems. If you've read any popular stop drinking books, these ideas, they might not be new to you, but these things need reinforcing. At the end of the day, the ideas that I share, that other people on the internet share, that books have shared, you're combating billions and billions of dollars spent on alcohol marketing and this propaganda that gets pushed on you all the time. So even if you've heard these ideas before, just stick with them. But the first thing is this idea that alcohol and relaxation have a link. We think that when we get home after a hard day, you know, when we really want to just chill out and I don't know, go on a vacation and lie by the pool, we start to make this association that somehow, if we drink alcohol, we're going to feel more relaxed. And this is very common. And a lot of people do this. They chill out because they just want to relax. But there was a time in your life when you didn't drink alcohol and you were perfectly relaxed. It might have been a long time ago now, but when you were a child, you were perfectly capable of relaxing. You never felt the need to take a drug to help you relax. So there was a time in your life where it was entirely possible for you to just relax. Now, you could say, well, I hadn't have responsibilities then. You know, I've got a career now, I've got a family, but it doesn't matter because this drug doesn't relax you at all. How can something that disrupts your sleep, your REM sleep in the second half of your night relax you? Waking up, having that terrible sleep, and just, you know, struggling to open your eyes, needing a drink of water. When I drank alcohol, it would create a lot of anxiety. The next day, cortisol spikes. How is that relaxing? See, this creates one of the most vicious cycles ever known. You end up drinking alcohol and then feeling relaxed. I'm not gonna say that that doesn't happen. Of course it happens. But you might have heard this before. After that, what happens next? Well, the next day, you don't feel so good. Right? You feel a bit anxious, you feel a bit on edge, all because of the previous drinks that you've had are now causing a feeling of being unrelaxed. So you drink. And then, oh, I do feel relaxed again. I feel calm, I feel peaceful. And then you wake up the next morning and not feeling quite right, and then you drink again. And now I've spelled it out a bit clearer, you might start to see the problem. But you're creating a false association with a drug that makes you withdraw and relaxation. Things that truly relax you don't have a rebound effect. The next day you don't feel worse, you feel better. For example, going away for a two-day weekend with no screens, you've got a spa, you've got a pool, you're eating healthy food. When you come back home from a trip like that, you're gonna feel great. But if you go away for a weekend and you just drink all day on Saturday and Sunday, and then you get back home on Monday, trust me, you're gonna feel like it creates a permanent, unrelaxed state, and alcohol gets all the credit for relaxing you, but it doesn't. The second lie is this idea that alcohol makes our life more fun. But the act of putting a drink to your lips isn't fun at all. You do it every day, right? You do it when you have a coffee in the morning, you do it when you have a drink of water. I don't see anybody saying, oh yeah, this water's so fun. So the act of drinking is just the act of drinking, right? It's it's there's nothing fun about it. And again, I'm gonna go back to it. But there was a time in your life where you were having so much fun and you didn't drink. Yeah, you might have been a teenager, you might have even been a child. Especially if you were like me, I started drinking in my teenagers, but then you might be thinking, well, hang on, I went to this wedding and I drank and it was dead good fun, and then I went to this concert, I went to this party, and I had a great time, but I was also drinking. See, again, what is happening is alcohol is getting the credit. But if you actually think about all the times you've had a good time when you've been drinking, I don't think you were sat in a room on your own just looking in the mirror or I don't know, sat on your bed just pounding beers. No, you were probably doing something. What you didn't realize is all of these things are actually 10 times more enjoyable when you don't drink. And if they're not more enjoyable, like I don't know, maybe you think, oh, there was a party that I went to, I was around a bunch of people I didn't really like, then I drank and it was all of a sudden okay. Yeah, those things won't be better without drinking because you probably didn't even like them in the first place. But again, all that's happening is the association of alcohol making your life better is getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And then the third lie, probably the most sinister of all, is we drink because it's healthy. We've seen the studies, right? Wine drinkers are supposed to live longer, it's supposed to help our heart. You heard it right. Drinking a group one carcinogen is healthy. When it comes to this idea that alcohol somehow is a healthy thing to drink and wine is good to drink and all of this stuff, it isn't true. See, alcohol wipes decades off your life expectancy. It is ethanol, it causes seven different types of cancer, it kills millions of people every single year. However, maybe there's a small percentage of the population that somehow live longer, but then we just forget all the other data. These studies make no sense. They're not supposed to make any sense because all that happens is we cherry pick a little bit of data, then all of a sudden the news is publishing a new headline. Champagne drinkers have a lower risk of X, Y, and Z. Listen, it's absurd. I break this down in my book that I'm writing at the moment, and I'll explain more details about the book over the coming months ahead. It's a big project, it isn't finished yet, but trust me, it's taking shape and it is going to blow your mind. But alcohol is not healthy. And listen, I could go on and on and on about this. I could go through so many different beliefs, but when you can stop all of these associations, right? When you can start to just see alcohol as a drug that is doing nothing for your life, it doesn't enhance it in any way, you stop feeling this sense of missing out, and you're able to see alcohol purely for what it is as ethanol, you stop craving alcohol. Because here's how a craving works you get a thought of drinking. You, I don't know, see a friend drink, you come home after that hard day of work, you think of drinking, and that's gonna happen. That happens to me, that happens to everybody. But then the next layer is your paradigm and your worldview. If you have a paradigm that associates that thought with something positive or the reduction of suffering, you will crave alcohol. But if not, literally within a second, it's like, oh, thinking of drinking, great. And then the thought's gone. And the great thing about this approach, when you get a thought of drinking and it just bounces off you, is you actually get stronger. Whereas everybody else that stops drinking alcohol, when they fight a craving and get through the other side, they're thinking, damn, that was pretty hard. Because it is hard. The trick is to catch the craving before it develops into a craving. And that sounds difficult, but it isn't. It actually starts to just feel natural. So instead of thinking, oh, I can't drink, it's like I don't drink. And I don't really want to drink either. Because I think, well, how is alcohol gonna actually help me relax? It isn't. Is it gonna give me a fun time? No. See, alcohol is the solution to our problems, but it's not. What alcohol does is it creates problems and then appears to be the solution to the problems it creates. Never forget that because that is mission critical for you on this journey. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking podcast by SoberClear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit www.soberclear.com.

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Leon Sylvester

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