I remember when I first read This Naked Mind, Annie Grace’s bestselling book, about six years ago, I knew there was something different about it; something that made it stand out from anything else I had read about alcohol.
As I listened my way through the audiobook, I felt something shift in me and I knew that I would never be the same person again when it came to alcohol. I found myself questioning some of my fundamental assumptions and beliefs about alcohol. Was alcohol really de-stressing me at the end of the day? Was it actually necessary to have alcohol to enjoy a social occasion? Did I even enjoy the taste of wine and beer?
Of course, I had no idea at the time that not only would it change my relationship with alcohol, but I would leave a career in the corporate world to become a personal coach, certified by the Institute!
Since its publication in 2015, This Naked Mind has sold over a million copies worldwide and Annie’s podcast has been downloaded 15 million times. 400,000 people have now been through The Alcohol Experiment, a free online course that helps people redefine their relationship with alcohol and Annie wrote a second book to accompany the course.
There’s a This Naked Mind website offering a variety of events and programmes to help people with alcohol-related issues and Annie has recently co-authored This Naked Mind Nicotine with William Porter, author of Alcohol Explained. Annie also founded the This Naked Mind Institute, which trains coaches to work with people individually or in groups to help them make alcohol a small and irrelevant part of their lives, and to help them build increasingly meaningful and rewarding lives.
Clearly, the project has resonated with people in a way that other programmes have failed to do. I am sure that this is at least partly because it did not come from anything like the traditional sources of advice and help on alcohol.
Before writing This Naked Mind, Annie was a senior marketing executive with a global company. Successful, and happily married with young children, Annie found that the pressures of her job and a hectic international travel schedule, added to the challenges of motherhood, led to her drinking more and more until she decided that something had to change. She couldn’t work out why she was able to control other aspects of her life but found it difficult to cut back on her drinking. She spent a year researching the science behind drinking and compiled her research into a PDF that she shared with some friends and colleagues. It went viral, and after thousands of people downloaded it, she was swamped with messages telling her how much the book had helped them, so she decided to publish it so it could reach a wider audience.
There are many important insights in This Naked Mind, but one of the most important is the realisation that people who want to stop drinking or cut back have a raging inner conflict in their minds. That conflict is the war between the part of the brain that wants to keep drinking and the part that wants to stop. The part of the brain that wants to keep drinking isn’t evil, it isn’t trying to harm us, but it has been fooled into desiring alcohol because its reward systems have been conned into seeing alcohol as critical for survival. These dopamine reward pathways are there because they have an evolutionary purpose; they are there from our times as hunter-gatherers who needed to be rewarded to help them find the things we needed as a species to survive—food, water and a mate. The dopamine pathways are incredibly effective at rewarding us, not for just finding the thing we are looking for, but also when we are getting close to it. Alcohol provides a very short-term and intense reward, so those reward systems of the brain create a craving for alcohol in regular drinkers.
So on the one hand you have these dopamine pathways making us crave alcohol, particularly when we are triggered by situations where we like to drink (pubs, airport lounges, weddings etc.) and on the other hand you have the rational part of the brain which can see that our alcohol use is harming us. It’s giving us hangovers, it’s damaging our health, it’s costing us a fortune, it might be damaging our relationships, our progress in our careers and might even be getting us into legal trouble.
This war is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, which is the stress of trying to hold two contradictory ideas or motivations together in one mind. As humans, we absolutely hate cognitive dissonance, so we will do almost anything to resolve it, and the easiest way is to have a drink, which will subdue the pre-frontal cortex (the bit of the brain trying to be sensible) and give us the short-term dopamine hit which will make everything feel OK. For a while. Then we wake up at 3.00 am, full of regrets, and start the cycle again.
So this is the bind that we find ourselves in when we try to change our behaviour around drinking. As more time without a drink elapses, the war intensifies, and we end up suffering and feeling deprived. Now some people manage to power through this and become sober, perhaps with the help of frequent attendance at meetings for moral support. However, the process is painful for many and it’s not uncommon to hear of people attending meetings for 20 years and still craving alcohol and, sadly, people often return to drinking. This often carries a burden of shame and regret which only adds to the cognitive dissonance they are experiencing, making it even harder to change.
The This Naked Mind approach is radically different because it tackles the root cause of the cognitive dissonance before we try to change behaviour.
The approach is to re-wire your subconscious beliefs about alcohol so that you no longer desire it.
This is possible because of a process that happens in the brain called neuroplasticity. This is the process by which new neural pathways are created and reinforced by changing our mental processes. This is summed up by the so-called Hebb’s rule (named after neuroscientist Donald Hebb), “Cells that fire together, wire together”. This amazing process means that the brain never stops learning and if we intentionally work to create new patterns of thought, belief and emotion, the brain will reinforce them by strengthening neural pathways.
This is not achieved by hypnotism or any tricks, but by following three simple steps:
Knowledge – understanding what alcohol does to our bodies and understanding its place in society and the roles it has come to play in our lives.
Emotion – changing your emotions concerning alcohol by examining and changing our subconscious beliefs. This is done by reflection and journalling and can be greatly accelerated and embedded by coaching.
Action – putting on our metaphorical white coast and getting really curious about our drinking; finding out what it does for us, what it doesn’t do, and what it is like to stop for a while. Here too, coaching can help us to reflect and understand our own experiences with drinking, or not drinking.
While people are working through this, we encourage them NOT to stop drinking. That sounds counterintuitive, but the idea is that people do not learn if they are struggling with cognitive dissonance (if they have already stopped then there is no need to start again!).
So how did this work for me? My relationship with alcohol had plenty of ups and downs over the years. As soon as I could get away with going to pubs, I started drinking—I would have been about 15 years old. Going to university, I naturally sought out other drinkers to hang with and very drunken nights were common. I drank heavily throughout my 20s but then after my 30th birthday, I had a horrific hangover and woke up with a heavily bruised elbow, having fallen badly, and decided to take a break from drinking. That lasted six months, and I felt much better, but then I had the thought that if I just stuck to small bottles of beer, I would be fine. You can probably guess how that went.
My drinking slowed down when our daughter was born, but a few years later I was offered a job that would require me to be away from home during the week. Staying in hotels, I found I was now drinking every day, partly through boredom (staying in hotels gets old very quickly) and partly because I could, with no parental responsibilities. I would come home for the weekend and often go for lunch with my family, which would involve a few drinks and, feeling slightly hungover in the afternoon, I would invariably drink in the evening to take the edge off.
I could see very clearly that this was damaging my health, and my relationship with my wife was suffering, but I just could not contemplate life without alcohol. That is why Annie’s book seemed like a lifeline—she was offering a way to not only enjoy life without alcohol but even suggesting that my life would massively improve. Above all, she was offering hope, and that was something in pretty short supply at the time.
So I finished the book and decided to try life without alcohol. My process was not linear, and I have subsequently come to understand that it rarely is, but by the end of that year, I stopped completely and have not had a drink since.
The improvement in my quality of life has been extraordinary. I immediately began to feel healthier and my sleep was amazing. I still find it miraculous waking up in the morning feeling refreshed and alert. I never considered myself to be a morning person (I wonder why!) but now I get up early, meditate, have some breakfast and spend an hour working on a music project before I start work. My relationship with my family improved immensely, but as you can imagine, this didn’t happen overnight.
I started a yoga practice and learned how to make dance music. I never really considered myself to be a creative person but I have surprised myself and made tunes that people like and download. I have become interested in spirituality, particularly Eastern philosophies such as Advaita Vedanta and I feel this has enriched my experience of life and my ability to live in gratitude and be more in the present moment.
Perhaps the biggest benefit though has been that I don’t have the disgust and self-loathing that I felt when I was drinking too much. I would make promises to myself that I wasn’t going to drink tonight, or if I was going to a social event I would keep my drinking to just a few, only to break the promises and wake up angry and disgusted with myself. I can’t stress enough how insidious this was, undermining my confidence in myself and limiting myself. It feels like I have shaken off the shackles now and can live to my full potential.
The last chapter in This Naked Mind is titled, “Pay it Forward”. Five years ago it had not really occurred to me how I could do this, but when I saw that there was a This Naked Mind Institute recruiting new coaches, I started to wonder if this could be a path for me. I sat with this for a couple of years until I decided that this was an opportunity for me to pass on the wonderful gift that I had received. It wasn’t an easy choice, as you can imagine, but it’s one that I have never regretted for a moment since I made it. Annie wrote:
“One day, in the very near future, and you feel at peace and whole, perhaps your gratitude will overflow. There is incredible power in giving someone else the gift you have been given, in helping someone to become free. It is an amazing and life-affirming thing to help another person.”
If you are unfamiliar with the coaching process, let me give you an idea of what is involved. The sporting coach role is similar in some ways. Let’s say you were a golfer and found that you started slicing your drives. If you went to a coach, they would watch you swing and strike the ball and observe what is happening. They would probably spot something that was affecting your drive—perhaps your stance needed correcting, or your grip, or something else (I don’t play golf so I am just guessing here!). The point is that they would notice by observing you closely something about which you were probably unaware. You would be unaware of it because you have executed thousands of golf swings and it has become automatic—you have learned to hit the ball using your unconscious mind to guide your hands.
The coaching role is similar in that we help our clients expose their subconscious thoughts and feelings. Once they are discovered, then we can help the client find new beliefs and emotions that serve them better. They can correct their swing.
The amazing thing about this process is that alcohol is just the start. Once you start to become aware of your thoughts and limiting beliefs, then there is no end to the emotions that can be shifted, and behaviours that can be modified, so you can start to live to your full potential. To find happiness, equanimity, creativity, productivity, service to others and an infinitely more fulfilling life. Now, of course, I don’t float through life in a cloud of bliss. Nobody does. When I am trying to get my printer to work I feel like the cat in this video. But I have learned to become aware of my moods, emotions and thoughts and be able to shift my perspective to change them so I don’t stay in a bad place for long.
I hope that I can help you—either by you having read something I have written that resonates with you and helps you to make a change in your life, or by coaching you if that’s something you would like. However you wish to travel, I wish you every success and happiness in your journey.
Paul
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