The neurological changes that occur in your brain as a result of alcohol compound this unconscious desire. Thad A. Polk, neuroscientist, professor, and author of The Addictive Brain (a 2015 course on the newest science of addiction), says viewing addiction through the eyes of neuroscience allows us to “look beyond the seemingly bizarre behavior of addicts and see what is going on inside their brain.”5 In my early days on this journey, the undermining of my desire to drink less by a strange desire to drink more seemed nothing if not bizarre.
The mind, specifically the unconscious mind, is a powerful force in controlling our behavior. Information suggesting the benefits of alcohol surrounds us, yet we rarely become conscious of it. According to the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) communication model, we are assaulted with over two million bits of data every second, but we are only consciously aware of seven bits of that information.6 Television, movies, advertising, and social gatherings all influence our beliefs. From childhood we’ve observed, with few exceptions, our parents, friends, and acquaintances appearing to enjoy moderate, “responsible” drinking. These images teach our unconscious minds that alcohol is pleasurable, relaxing, and sophisticated.
Your opinions about alcohol and your desire to drink spring from the lifelong mental conditioning of your unconscious mind. This desire has likely been compounded by specific neurological changes in the brain. The goal of This Naked Mind is to reverse the conditioning in your unconscious mind by educating your conscious mind. By changing your unconscious mind, we eliminate your desire to drink. Without desire, there is no temptation. Without temptation, there is no addiction.
Like most things that have been ingrained in us since childhood, we believe in alcohol without question, like we believe the sky is blue. Through this book, you will think critically about your deeply-held beliefs about alcohol and strip away those that are false. This will convince the all-powerful unconscious mind and allow harmony and agreement between your conscious and unconscious minds.
When the Brain Causes Pain
I cannot overstate the importance of your unconscious mind. I learned this lesson from Dr. John Sarno, a renowned physician who investigates the connection between physical pain and emotions. A Forbes article calls Dr. Sarno “America’s Best Doctor,”7 and his methodology has successfully healed all sorts of people, including controversial radio personality Howard Stern. Sarno coined the term The Mindbody Syndrome, the theory that your mind, below your conscious awareness, rather than any physical injury or ailment, may be responsible for your pain. After the birth of my second son, I experienced crippling back pain. Incapacitated for weeks at a time, I spent thousands of dollars on treatment. I tried chiropractic care, acupuncture, traditional doctors, muscle relaxants, and painkillers. I attended weekly physical therapy, including traction and massage. For three years I was unable to pick up my kids, and no type of treatment helped.
Through Sarno’s work I learned the true source of my affliction, and through reading his book I was cured. I know this is hard to believe. Yet here I sit—I’ve remained pain-free for years. Many thousands of people have been forever cured of chronic pain through Dr. Sarno’s work. There is even a website set up by individuals Dr. Sarno has cured. The purpose? To provide a place for people to write thankyou letters to Dr. Sarno to express their gratitude for giving them their lives back. It’s truly amazing and can be found at thankyoudrsarno.org. Dr. Sarno’s approach of targeting and speaking to your unconscious mind is the same approach I employ for regaining control over alcohol.
Dr. Sarno methodically proved to me that the back pain I felt—pain that no medical professional could diagnose—was related to suppressed stress and anger.8 How do we accumulate all this suppressed stress and anger? Imagine a young father. His wife (who no longer has time for him) hands him their screaming baby. She is exhausted and needs a break. He takes the child and tries everything to comfort him. Forty minutes later the baby is still screaming. The father is frustrated and angry. How can he not be? His needs are not being met, the baby’s actions are illogical, and he feels useless. In his mind, it is unacceptable to feel angry at a helpless baby, so these emotions remain buried in his subconscious, or as psychiatrist Carl Jung calls it, “the shadow.”9
We hide emotions that we feel to be abhorrent in “the shadow.” We are unwilling to accept this part of us. So, we assert, “I am a good person; there is no way I want to harm this helpless baby,” and we unconsciously repress our negative emotions. In order to deeply bury reprehensible emotions, your brain can cause physical pain to distract you. The pain is real. Laboratory tests demonstrate that the pain is caused when your brain cuts off oxygen to the afflicted area. Epidemiologists call this transfer of symptoms amplification.10 Amplification prevents unacceptable ideas from surfacing.
Your Unconscious Mind at Work
“Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.”
—Eckhart Tolle
Why am I telling you all this? Drinking and back pain seem like two very different problems. So what do “the shadow” and amplification have to do with drinking? It’s hard to believe that reading a book cured my back pain, but perhaps you can see how physical pain could originate in your emotions. Your conscious mind may now be willing to entertain this theory. But if I only needed to consciously accept the fact that the pain stemmed from my emotions rather than a physical injury, the cure would have been instant. Simply hearing the theory and accepting it consciously would have been enough to heal my back. But while my consciousness could grasp the concepts relatively easily, the pain remained. This is because it was my unconscious, rather than conscious, mind that needed to understand, to grasp the reality of the situation. And that process, the process of Dr. Sarno speaking to my unconscious mind, took me reading a 300-page book.
The unconscious mind is not logical; it’s all about feelings. It is the source of love, desire, fear, jealousy, sadness, joy, anger, and more. The unconscious mind drives your emotions and desires. When you make a conscious decision to quit or cut back on alcohol, your unconscious desires remain unchanged. You have unknowingly created an internal conflict. You want to cut back or quit, but you still desire a drink and feel deprived when you do not allow yourself one.
Also, the unconscious mind often works without the knowledge or control of the conscious mind.11 Studies from as far back as 1970 prove our brains actually prepare for action 1/3 of a second before we consciously decide to act. This means that even when we think we are making conscious decisions, our unconscious mind actually makes the decision for us.12
You can easily test this and reveal the extent to which your unconscious mind controls your conscious decisions. Remember a day when you were in a bad mood for no reason. You couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong; you just felt grumpy. If your conscious mind controlled your emotions, you could simply think, “I am going to be happy,” and your mood would change from grumpy to sunny. Have you tried that? Did it work?
When I am in a bad mood, a conscious thought to try to be happier—or, worse, someone telling me to just be happy—does nothing to improve my mood. It does the opposite. Why? Because your conscious mind doesn’t control your emotions. Granted, you can train your conscious mind in more positive or negative thought patterns, which ultimately alters how you feel. These repeated conscious thoughts eventually influence your unconscious and therefore your feelings.
So how does your unconscious mind feel about alcohol? Today’s society has conditioned your unconscious mind to believe alcohol provides pleasure, enjoyment, and support—that it is vital to social situations and stressful situations alike. This book reverses that conditioning by stripping away your false beliefs about alcohol. We will do this with the help of Liminal Thinking, a method developed by author Dave Gray. Liminal Thinking defines how, through the conscious exploration and acceptance of new ideas and truths, you can influence your unconscious mind. This gives you back your ability to make rational and logical decisions about alcohol, no longer influenced by illogical, emotional, or irrational desires. It will give you control and freedom by changing your understanding