Until You Do This You Won’t Quit Drinking.

No matter where you go, you will never escape you.

You can’t outrun yourself and you can’t hide from yourself. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to self-medicate or hide by throwing more alcohol down your neck and slipping down the rabbit hole into oblivion. You have to come back up for air and face reality.

At some point in your life, you just have to sit down and figure out who you are and who you want to become and then you do the hard work.

Now you can either keep trying to hide, deny or ignore this fact, or you can take the bitter pill, quit drinking and face up to reality.

If you choose the second option, you have a shot at finding a happier, more fulfilling life. Choose the booze and you will be opting in to a life of pain and a life half-lived.

Think of all the ways you are chained to alcohol right now.

- You watch the clock to see when you can take your first drink.

- You watch your budget to make sure you have enough money to buy your next drink.

- You pretend to be someone you’re not just so you can keep drinking.

- You lie to yourself about your drinking habits and break the promises you make to quit.

- You can feel the weight of all this negativity dragging you down. You are burying yourself alive with guilt and shame and destroying your body cell by cell.

Alcohol gives you a place to hide.

When you drink, you can hide from your biggest fears and failures.

What you are really running from is the fear of rejection. You drank to fit in or to gain confidence. You are scared that people won’t want you without alcohol.

Without alcohol, you have to show up and be you. The authentic you. 24/7 no hiding or escaping into oblivion. That’s a scary prospect.

When you show up as you, you face many dangers.

The danger of not liking your true self

The danger of admitting what you truly want from life and failing to get it

The danger of losing your drinking buddies

When you get sober, you have to face resistance from society and sometimes friends and family if they are also drinkers.

The big booze companies have done such a good job of brainwashing the masses into believing that alcohol is necessary and desirable. Life without alcohol is unthinkable.

Life with alcohol means success. It’s a status symbol by which to measure wealth and it’s an entry ticket into society.

Yes, it’s easier just to go along with this charade. It’s easier to say I’ll quit drinking after the barbeque, after the night out, after the party, after I’ve walked the dog.

It’s easier to lie to yourself and to tell yourself you must drink because that’s what people expect you to do.

It’s easier to go with the flow rather than swim against the tide.

It’s easier for you to re-brand your lies to yourself as a justification for you to fit in and gain acceptance.

It’s easier for you to drink like you always do because that way you can be amongst fellow drinkers who have all settled for the lies that society and the big booze companies have fed us.

But let’s just stop for a moment and talk about this giant friggin elephant in the room. The one we all know is there, but are too afraid to talk about or acknowledge. Because if we do, there’s going to be a whole lot of people crying over their sad and pathetic lives.

They won’t want to acknowledge the fact that their weekly booze shop is a necessity. They won’t want to admit that the only way they can get through life is by popping open a bottle to drown their disappointments.

Gotta shitty job? — never mind have a drink.

Overweight? — never mind have a drink.

Relationship problems — have a drink and you’ll feel better.

Can’t afford to live? Well, at least you can afford the cheap plonk.

The big booze companies and society have conditioned us to believe that if we just drink, everything will be fine. It won’t!

We are all so afraid of life without alcohol.

It may be impossible for people to think of life without alcohol.

I get this, I truly do. There was a point when I was trying and failing to quit. The problem was I couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol. I thought maybe I could just cut down or drink at the weekend.

It was bullshit.

I was lying to myself. Deep down, I didn’t want to give up alcohol. If I quit, I would have to do hard things. I would have to face up to not fitting in and finding other things to do. I would have to be a new me and deal with my crappy life. It was too hard to think about and so too hard to do.

The fact is there are huge swathes of the population that don’t drink and will never drink. They survive.

The inescapable reality is you have to be willing to change your perspective. You have to be willing to say NO to alcohol and you have to be willing to risk trying and failing to quit.

​We are all so afraid of failure. We have become rooted in our comfort zone. We settle for mediocrity when we should be reaching for the stars.

What will it take for you to stop hiding in a bottle? Do you need some motivation to climb out?

If so, start here:

Take a Long Hard Look at Your Drinking Career Up to This Point

You’re going to die soon…

Some of you will have a painful death caused by your drinking habit.

Unless you stop kidding yourself that your drinking is just fine, you are going to wake up one day and realise how much alcohol has cost you. And I don’t mean just money.

So let’s talk about what it has already cost you.

You look like crap in the morning and you don’t have enough energy to get you through the day.

Your gut hurts because it’s inflamed and can’t cope with processing more poison.

Your bathroom experience brings shame. Your shit stinks and you splatter the toilet bowl with it.

You don’t love yourself and you hate that you break your promises to quit drinking.

Be brave. Think of all the ways alcohol negatively affects your life.

Think of all the times you wanted to quit but we’re afraid to lose alcohol.

You might quit, but the universe doesn’t. Sooner or later, you are going to be forced to make choices and confront your drinking. Either you do it voluntarily or there will be some situation that makes you face it.

This could be something like getting liver damage or cancer or simply an altercation that goes too far. This is what happened to Brad Pit. His drinking led to him roughing up his wife and kids whilst on their private jet. As a result, he lost everything that was dear to him.

How about you quit lying to yourself and you do yourself a favour? Make the hard choices.

Use these tips to guide you.

Kill Your Drinking Persona and the Fantasy Version of Your Life Where You Control Alcohol

Delete the concept of drinking normally. It doesn’t exist for you.

For example, you tell yourself if I could just drink 1 a night when I’ve had a stressful day or just 2 when I’m out with friends and maybe a bottle over the weekend, I’d be fine.

This is never going to happen. If you could do this, you would already be doing it.

You have to rip the band aid off and feel the pain and then work on you to build a better version of you.

Remember, you have to learn how to be you. The you without alcohol. This is ok, you’re an adult and you get to decide. This means you have to put some thought into how you want to show up and what you want to do.

Get curious about you and let go of what the drinking society expects of you.

Stop Doing These Two Things:

1. Stop Comparing Yourself To Other Drinkers

When we drink, we try to ease our pain by lying to ourselves and making the wrong comparisons.

When we compare ourselves to other drinkers, especially bigger drinkers, we can kid ourselves that our drinking habits are not so bad. This is just rubbish. You know it is.

2. Saying You're Ok

Stop telling yourself that you’re Ok.

You’re not ok. Your drinking habit is hurting you, not helping you.

Get realistic. There are over 200 known painful diseases connected to drinking alcohol. Do yourself a favour. Quit.

You are not immune to the effects of alcohol, no one is. Your future self will love you if you quit. If you don’t quit, there may not be a future self.

Listen To Your Gut

It’s time to start listening to your intuition. The voice in the background that is trying to tell you to quit. It’s time for you to get to know the real you and to accept all of you, the good and the bad, the pathetic and the incredible. You cannot separate yin from yang so accept it and work with it.

Maybe it will be easy, maybe it will be hard. You won’t know until you start. Living a sober life is a beautiful thing. It’s the one you deserve.

Live Strong, Love & Be Sober

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