I was in a yoga class recently and softly, in the background, there was some Indian music playing. I don’t know much about Indian music so I can’t tell you the genre, but it had a lot of drums playing and a lovely female vocal and I found myself thinking, “Ooooh, I really fancy a curry!”. My brain was making an association between music I have often heard in Indian restaurants and the pleasant experience of eating Indian food and so decided to give me a little nudge in that direction.
This is a small example of how our prior experiences influence our behaviour, but this gives a clue to a fundamental truth that holds the key to escaping from problem drinking.
Although this example may seem trivial, it is just the tip of the iceberg. The truth is that nearly all our behaviour is heavily influenced by our prior experience.
Now there’s a rabbit hole here that I am not going to take you into, which is the whole issue of whether free will exists. I have spent more time thinking about this than is probably helpful; philosophers have been arguing about this for centuries and will probably continue to do so forever, so I’m unlikely to solve this on my own! However, whichever side of the fence they fall, what they can agree on is that at least the majority of our behaviour is determined by our prior experience.
This may feel counterintuitive, after all, we have a sense of free will, but let me give you an example that I hope will help you understand why this must be true.
Let’s say you decide to re-decorate your living room. You might have a firm idea of what you want it to look like before you start, or you may look for inspiration in magazines or online interior design sites. Eventually, you will pick out the colour scheme, order the furnishings, wall coverings and, perhaps, other accessories and get to work doing it or pay a decorator to do it for you.
All the way through this process it will feel like you are making the decisions that will determine how the room looks, but if you think about it, all of those decisions will be heavily influenced by your previous experience such as your culture, rooms you have seen that you liked, what you think is on trend, what kind of environments make you comfortable, and so on.
These preferences are not set in stone – they are constantly evolving. In the 1980s, my wife and I decorated the flat in which we were living in some extremely vibrant colours, no doubt influenced by Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen and the Changing Rooms TV programme. I would certainly not enjoy that colour scheme now; my preferences have changed.
The relevance of this to our drinking habits is that we have a set of assumptions and beliefs about alcohol which keep us drinking. For example, we think that we need alcohol to relax, to celebrate, to socialise or to accompany food. And this is the key—just as my preferences about interior design have changed, so have my preferences about alcohol. When I challenged my hidden beliefs about alcohol, I found that none of them were true. And once I changed my hidden beliefs, it became easy to change my behaviour and stop drinking.
So how do you change your beliefs?
One way is through coaching. Your coach will work with you to expose the beliefs you have about alcohol and then help you critically examine them. We do this by referencing internal experience by asking our clients to carefully reflect on their own experience, and external resources, such as the latest scientific understanding of the neuroscience and physiology of addiction. Many of these beliefs are held in our subconscious and the coaching sessions help to bring them to the conscious mind and then replace them with new beliefs.
Once we have done this, change becomes more and more effortless and the absolute gold in this approach is that once you have changed your beliefs, you no longer need to rely on willpower.
If you don’t do this, even if you manage to abstain from drinking, you are always going to feel like you are missing out. That’s why many people who quit need to keep going to meetings – they need to constantly exert willpower because they think they are missing out on something they want and the meetings provide support for that effort and accountability to the group.
I can honestly say that I never feel like I am missing out on anything. It’s like if I went to a dinner party and people were eating blue cheese (which I strongly dislike). I wouldn’t feel envy, I would just eat something else and be happy to do so.
If you would like to find out more about this, then I’ve put together a free webinar – I will drop the link below. You will learn:
A way of changing your relationship with alcohol that will completely eliminate any stress you may be feeling about wanting to change
How to break the cycle of trying to moderate only to find yourself back to square one in a few days or weeks
How to make sure you never have a hangover or regrets about the previous night again
How you will be able to enjoy social situations and cope with the daily stresses of life without using alcohol
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