How I Quit Drinking Alcohol
Alcohol is poison.
You have been tricked by modern society into thinking that it is normal (and ok) to drink alcohol, but it is not.
Alcohol will destroy your life. It will make you depressed, sap your energy, and cause illness.
The danger of alcohol is that it initially effects your life in subtle ways. You can drink it once, and your life will be the same. In fact, you can drink it every day and your life won’t crumble for ten to fifteen years. However, after this period of time it is likely you will face serious social and health issues.
If you stop drinking alcohol for an extended period of time you will realise the detrimental effect alcohol has on your life.
The issue is that nobody stops drinking because we have been conditioned to drink alcohol at every single social event. It has been so normalised that we do not even consider not drinking it.
You must also have a scepticism towards anything that our modern society accepts as normal. There is a troubling pattern emerging: our western society is pushing unhealthy habits on us.
There is No Magic Bullet
If you want to turn your life around, you must do it yourself. The only way to stop drinking alcohol is to actually stop drinking it.
You need to exercise self-control.
This might take some time. And you might fail.
For me, it has taken nine years to quit alcohol completely. This is a lot longer than some people and it has been two steps forward, one step back the entire time.
But I persisted.
Avoid Temptation
Initially, the easiest way to stop drinking is to avoid situations where people drink excessively. This means not going to parties, bars, and clubs. If you want to see friends, go to breakfast or coffee.
If you do go to a party or other situation where people are drinking, drive there and only stay for 1 hour. This gets easier with practise. Eventually, you will not be able to stay at parties after a certain amount of time because you realise that once everyone gets drunk, the party is no longer fun.
Technology is Your Friend
There are two apps that helped me tremendously: Streaks and Day One.
Streaks is an app which helps you form good habits. It allows you to track your progress towards the habits that you want to form. This is important because you can only manage what you can measure. Meaning that if you are trying to quit drinking and you are not recording the days you drink and the days you don’t, then you will not succeed.
Day One, on the other hand, is a journaling/diary app. It is a paid subscription service I have been using since 2014. I write in it almost every single day. I track my goals, feelings, thoughts, and progress.
The feature of Day One that I found most helpful for quitting drinking is the ‘on this day feature’. Each day, this feature shows you the entries you’ve written on that date in previous years. Sometimes, when I feel like I am not making progress in my life, this feature will show me an entry from 2016 and I can see just how much progress I have made. This gives me the confidence to keep going.
Vision & Destiny
In order to keep the commitments you make, you need a vision of your life that you are working towards. This is your positive vision.
You also need a negative vision. You need to extrapolate out what your life would look like if you gave in to every temptation. Foster your negative vision as much as you foster your positive vision.
Ask yourself: ‘What am I running away from?’
My negative vision is the thought of dying unknown, unimportant, and not having lived up to my potential. This thought haunts me. It wakes me up at 3am every day, compelling me to write or study. It is the reason I do not do drugs or alcohol. For me, my negative vision is a much more powerful motivator than my positive vision.
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