Is life better without alcohol? That’s up to you to decide. My own experience with this experiment proved that, for me, life was absolutely better when I chose not to drink. However, your experience might be different. It’s your body. It’s your mind. It’s your choice. I’m simply inviting you to open your mind to the possibility of making a different choice and then encouraging you to see how it changes things in your daily life.
It’s 30 days, not forever . . . Many people ask me if they will have to give up drinking forever if they try the experiment. My answer is it’s up to them. My only goal is to offer you a shift in your perspective and to show you some of the neuroscience behind why you might be drinking more than you’d like to.
You might go back to your regular drinking habits after the 30 days, you might drink a bit more mindfully (and less often), or you might decide to give it another 30 days just for the heck of it. You might also decide you feel so good you never want to go back.
Whatever you decide, I’d love to hear your experience with the experiment. If you’d like to share your story, email me at [email protected].
Since you’re reading this right now, you’re probably questioning how much you drink. Maybe you know you drink too much and want to quit. Or maybe you’re just curious about what life is like with a bit less alcohol. Maybe you’re questioning whether you might be overdoing it a bit. No matter where you are on the spectrum, you’re not alone. I’ve been there. And tens of thousands of people inside the Alcohol Experiment community have been there, too. You’re probably wondering why in the world you keep drinking even though you’ve made a conscious decision to cut back or stop altogether. Why do we do things we no longer want to do?
I wondered the same thing. When I first started drinking, it seemed to be a natural, normal thing to do. I saw nothing wrong with it. I didn’t know all the negative ways alcohol could affect my health. I was a drinker, and I was proud of it. I tried hard to develop a tolerance so I could keep up with my colleagues. It was fun. It was relaxing. I had better sex when I was drunk.
. . . Or so I thought.
Eventually, I came to a point in my life when I started to question my drinking. I didn’t like waking up with a hangover. I didn’t like having to piece together conversations and wondering if I said or did anything embarrassing. I wasn’t even enjoying myself anymore. I could drink two bottles of wine and not even feel it because I had such a high tolerance. So I made a conscious decision to stop drinking. And I thought that would be it. I just wouldn’t drink. Easy-peasy.
Sound familiar?
If you’ve tried to give up or moderate your alcohol consumption in the past and failed, I want you to know it’s not your fault. There’s something going on you’re probably not aware of. And once you understand it, your eyes will be opened and you’ll be able to undergo this experiment in a meaningful way. It won’t be just another failure of willpower.
To understand what’s going on, we need to explore a concept called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive means “the way you think.” And dissonance means “disagreement.” So, cognitive dissonance is when there’s a disagreement in your thinking. Well, how can that be? You’ve got one brain, right? Actually, your brain has many parts, and they can come into conflict with one another. But what we’re really talking about here is your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind is everything you’re aware of. You’re tired of waking up with a headache. You don’t like spending your money on alcohol. Maybe your relationship is suffering, or your kids don’t even know you anymore. Because you’re aware of those things, you make a conscious decision to stop drinking.
Ahh, but there’s another powerful part of your mind: your subconscious. That’s where you’ve stored a lifetime of subconscious conditioning and beliefs that, by definition, you’re unaware of. Our subconscious mind controls our emotions and desires. And society’s attitudes about alcohol are programmed and fixed in our subconscious minds by the media, our parents, our friends, and our role models. We don’t consciously adopt these beliefs. They are imprinted on us. Take, for example, the belief that drinking helps you relax. That’s a belief you formed a long time ago after careful observation and experience. You weren’t born with this knowledge. But you watched your parents drink after a long day. You’ve seen movies and TV shows where characters drink to relax. And you’ve experienced it yourself and found it to be true. So you formed a strong belief that alcohol helps you relax.
Here’s the thing about subconscious beliefs—they’re not always true. We form our belief systems when we’re very young, and sometimes we’ll carry those beliefs our whole lives without ever questioning them. Most of the time, this is fine. The sky is blue. Ice is cold. If I fall down, it’s going to hurt. Cognitive dissonance happens when one of our subconscious beliefs disagrees with a conscious desire or decision. If I believe alcohol helps me relax, but I’ve decided not to drink after work anymore, that’s a problem! Part of me desperately wants a drink to unwind after a long day, and another part of me doesn’t want to overdo it and wake up with a hangover. There are two conflicting desires. Cognitive dissonance. To drink or not to drink, that is the question.
This is one of the reasons we continue to drink more than we want to even after we’ve decided to cut back. This is why willpower doesn’t work in the long term. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines willpower as “energetic determination.” That means it takes energy, conscious thought, and effort. This is especially true when you are trying to stop doing something that you believe provides a benefit. We don’t have to exert conscious effort and energy not to drink something we believe is bad for us if we see no benefit in it. For example, there is no effort involved in turning down a glass of motor oil.
If you believe, even subconsciously, that alcohol provides a benefit, you will be exercising willpower to cut back or avoid drinking. The problem with willpower is that since it is energy, willpower runs out. And if you use your willpower on one thing—like being patient with your kids or paying attention during a boring work event—you will have less willpower to use when you try to turn down that next drink. That is why I say we need to get out of the willpower game altogether. Until we resolve the inner conflict, we cannot hope to succeed.
Let’s pretend we’re trying to avoid sweets because we’re trying to lose weight. Yet someone at the office brings in a big plate of freshly baked cookies and we mindlessly grab one and eat it. (Okay, who are we kidding . . . we eat like three cookies.) Bam! Dissonance. Your brain doesn’t want to eat cookies, because you’re on a diet. But you did. There’s an internal conflict. Our brains immediately try to restore internal harmony in a few ways:
1. We can change our behavior. Make a vow not to eat another cookie no matter how good they look.
2. We can justify our behavior and say, “Oh, it’s okay to cheat every once in a while. We all need a little sugar now and then. I deserve it.”
3. We can add another behavior to counteract the first one. “Well, I ate the cookies, but that’s okay. I’ll go for a long run after work to burn off the extra calories.”
4. We can delude ourselves by denying or ignoring the conflicting information. “Those cookies are probably not all that bad for my diet. They seemed pretty small anyway.”
We delude ourselves all the time when it comes to alcohol or any addictive substance. We ignore the fact that alcohol isn’t doing us any favors and it’s actually harming