Will I Ever be Free of Cravings?

Summary

A common question for those going alcohol free is, “Will I ever be free of the cravings?”. My answer is a qualified “yes”; they may still arise as a form of nostalgia, but they lose their power if you apply the correct framing, and they become fleeting and occur less frequently over time.

I was in a coaching session with one of my clients. He was doing really well; he hadn’t drunk alcohol for several months and wasn’t finding it particularly difficult. He couldn’t see himself starting up again and was feeling much happier and more at peace. The conversation paused, and after a while, he said:

“You know, I still miss it a little bit. Having a glass of wine when I’m cooking – I miss that. Will that ever go away?”

It seems like a simple question, but human beings are not simple animals, and the answer isn’t simple either. As Henry Louis Mencken said:

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." [emphasis added]

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011) is one of the most influential psychology books of the past few decades. Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics (2002), summarises decades of his research on how humans actually think and make decisions — and how far that deviates from the "rational actor" model assumed in classical economics.

Kahneman divides the mind into two metaphorical "systems" (not literal brain structures, but ways of processing information):

System 1 — Fast thinking

This is automatic, intuitive, effortless, unconscious, and emotional. It handles most of daily life: detecting hostility in a voice, reading, driving on an empty road, 2+2=4, completing "bread and …", jumping at a sudden sound, for example.

It operates via associations, heuristics (mental shortcuts), and pattern matching. It feels fluent and produces quick impressions/judgments — most of what you believe and feel originates here.

System 2 — Slow thinking

This is deliberate, effortful, logical, conscious,  and rule-following.

It’s activated for complex problems: multiplying 17×24, finding a person in a crowd, maintaining composure in traffic, comparing two washing machines, filling out tax forms, for example.

It monitors and overrides System 1 when needed — but is lazy and often endorses System 1 suggestions without much scrutiny.

Addiction often stems from System 1 dominating: automatic, emotional cravings for alcohol that provide quick relief from stress, pain, or boredom. These impulses override System 2's slower, logical reasoning about long-term consequences, like health damage or relationship issues.

Relapse happens when System 1 "wins" because System 2 is weak or overwhelmed. The approach we take at This Naked  Mind is to counter this weakness by helping our clients build a repertoire of tactics to prevent System 2 from being overwhelmed and to strengthen the power of System 2 by building and consolidating truthful beliefs about the impact of alcohol on our lives.

But what happens when the client has a few months or years of being alcohol-free behind them? Does System 1 admit defeat and shut up?

For me, with seven years AF, the answer is overwhelmingly, yes. I can be in a bar or pub, and it doesn’t even enter my mind that I could have an alcoholic drink. I never sit around ruminating about how I am missing out, and I don’t have any desire to drink. That being said, I will be completely transparent here and say that I do have the occasional and fleeting moment of nostalgia for alcohol. Perhaps I pass a pub garden in the summer or an airport bar, and I have a brief pang of feeling that I am missing out on something. However, I have learned that I need to remind myself of why I stopped and move on. The whole process lasts just a few seconds.

I believe this is what my client was referring to. Here’s what I can say about these thoughts.

Firstly, I have found that they are less and less common as my years alcohol-free mount up. I rarely have them now. Secondly, I am very much aware of the tricks the mind plays on us about the past. Daniel Kahneman also wrote about this and has some important insights.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman dedicates the final section (Part 5: Two Selves) to a profound distinction that challenges how we think about happiness, well-being, and what really matters in life. He argues that we possess two selves that experience and evaluate life in fundamentally different ways — and they often disagree about what constitutes a "good" life.

The Experiencing Self

This is the "you" that lives in the present moment. It feels pleasure, pain, joy, boredom, or discomfort right now. Its happiness is measured by the sum (or average) of moment-to-moment feelings over time — basically, how good or bad your moments actually feel as they happen. Each moment lasts roughly 3 seconds, and most vanish forever unless captured in memory.

Kahneman calls this experienced well-being (or experienced utility) — the total amount of positive vs. negative affect accumulated over time.

It's the Benthamite view of happiness: maximise pleasure and minimise pain in real time.

The Remembering Self

This is the "you" that keeps score after the fact.

It constructs stories and memories of episodes (perhaps a vacation, a job, or a relationship). It evaluates how good or bad something "was" based on a few key features — not the full duration or total moments.

Two major rules dominate how the remembering self-judges episodes:

Peak-end rule: Memories are heavily shaped by the most intense moment (the peak) and how things end (the end), rather than the average experience or how long it lasted.

Duration neglect: The length of an experience has surprisingly little impact on how we remember it. A 2-week amazing vacation and a 1-week amazing vacation can leave almost identical remembered satisfaction if the peaks and endings are similar.

Kahneman calls this remembered well-being — it's what we think about when we say "that was a great year" or "I hated that job."

Kahneman's research in Thinking, Fast and Slow—particularly the distinction between the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self—offers a fascinating lens for understanding nostalgia in long-term alcohol-free individuals reflecting on their drinking days. This nostalgia often feels warm and inviting, but Kahneman's insights reveal it as a cognitive illusion driven by how our brains construct and evaluate memories. Below, I'll break down the key implications, focusing on why this happens and how it can affect recovery.

The Remembering Self Dominates Nostalgia

The Remembering Self doesn't recall experiences as a neutral, moment-by-moment replay; instead, it builds selective "stories" that emphasise peaks (intense highs) and ends (how episodes concluded), while largely ignoring duration and average feelings. For former drinkers, nostalgia might fixate on euphoric "peak" moments—like the buzz of a great party, laughter with friends, or the thrill of a night out—while downplaying or erasing the lows, such as blackouts, arguments, or morning-after misery.

Years after quitting, the brain's narrative bias can make past drinking seem disproportionately positive. This isn't accurate recall; it's a curated highlight reel. People might think, "Those were the good old days," forgetting that the Experiencing Self endured far more neutral or negative moments overall. This can create a false sense of loss, amplifying regret or longing for a romanticised version of the past that never fully existed.

Duration Neglect Amplifies Idealisation

Kahneman shows we tend to neglect how long experiences lasted when forming memories. A decade of drinking might be compressed into a few vivid anecdotes, with extended periods of routine hangovers, health issues, or emotional numbness fading into irrelevance.

For those sober for several years, nostalgia often overlooks the cumulative toll of alcohol—the "long tail" of dependency that eroded well-being. This can lead to distorted self-assessment, where the Remembering Self judges the drinking era as "fun and carefree" based on short bursts of pleasure, ignoring years of subtle damage. Recognising this helps reframe nostalgia as unreliable, encouraging a more balanced view: "Sure, there were highs, but the overall experience wasn't worth it."

In essence, Kahneman illuminates why nostalgia for drinking can feel so potent years later: it's the Remembering Self's storytelling at work, not a faithful record. By understanding this, former drinkers can enjoy fond memories without letting them erode hard-won progress, leading to greater alignment between past reflections and present well-being.

Whenever I get those fleeting moments of nostalgia about drinking, I just remember all of the negatives that went with it. As Morrissy memorably put it:

“I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour, but heaven knows I’m miserable now”.

I remember the buzz of drinking in the afternoon in the sun, but then I recall the early evening hangover that I would often drink through with the inevitable consequence of a bad night’s sleep and a horrible hangover the next day. And perhaps an argument with my wife. I certainly don’t miss any of that.

I also use a framing that comes from my spiritual beliefs. I’ll talk more about them in a future blog, but one aspect of them is that I believe, as the saying goes,

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."[i]

So I put my drinking days in a box with other things that will never happen again. I’ll never hold my newborn baby again, or push my child on the swings, or fall in love for the first time, or hug my parents again. Of course, there’s a tinge of sadness to these realisations, but I chose to see that I am so lucky to have had all of these experiences and letting go of them is part of the warp and weft of life as a human being. I have other things that bring me joy now, and I am lucky to be able to say that too.

[i] Usually attributed to Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955)