This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi friends, it's Annie Grace. Sorry, I was not answering questions for a few days. I was very under the weather lost my voice, so but I'm feeling much better now.

Anyway, so I'm the author of this naked mind and I am answering questions so keep them coming. I have a few left and then I'm probably out.

So if you have questions, message me, put them in the comments below, send me an email at helloatthisnakedmind.com and I will put them on the list.

Now today's question is from Missy and Missy says, Annie, did you already talk about transference in one of your videos? I've been mostly alcohol free for a year, but I've noticed a marked increase in my ice cream and Netflix consumption during that time. Any thoughts.

So transference, it definitely happens and while I'm certainly not an expert, I feel there's two areas to explore with this particular topic.

And one is transference of habit and one is transference of compulsive behavior. So experts such as Charles Duhig, he's the author of Power of Habit and he has a theory and it's a very popular theory among psychologists that actually when something becomes habitual,

you can't actually eliminate the habit because those unconscious thoughts and loop is so ingrained in your mind, but what you can do is you can replace the reward of the habit, which is the drink, if you will, with a better, healthier habit.

So for instance, this theory seems to be proven true and you can replace a mid afternoon sugary snack break with a mid afternoon walk around the block and basically have the same sort of result. So this means if you're not necessarily happy with your Netflix and ice cream.

And if you're not happy with your Netflix and ice cream, you can replace it with a good amount of time. So if you're not happy with your Netflix and ice cream, you can replace it with a good amount of time.

So I think it's really interesting, but often with addiction and with alcohol, you know, it's a bit more than a habit. We're not just doing something habitually, we are in fact self-medicating.

And I think that is what addiction often is and that's when it becomes a compulsive behavior. And when that compulsive behavior transfers to something else, then, you know, you may have a bigger sort of concern that you want to address.

So there was a study in 2007 and it was a gastric bypass patients. And so these patients went through gastric bypass and what gastric bypass does is it actually staples your stomach or shrinks your stomach so that you are physically unable to eat as much as you were eating.

And there was a certain percentage of these patients who after that happened became addicted to alcohol or started smoking cigarettes and it became a big concern.

And so it launched into the study of what's going on and what they found is that that percentage of patients were not just using food sort of quote innocently, but we're actually using food to self-medicate from something deeper and something underlying that they hadn't addressed.

And so as soon as the option to use food was gone, they pretty quickly transferred that to alcohol to cigarettes and to other behaviors that were actually, you know, just as unhealthy as the overeating was.

So according to David Sack, he's a medical doctor and he's a board certified in addiction psychiatry.

He basically says that transference is where one compulsive behavior morphs into the next.

And it's also called cross addiction and the psycho continues because we aren't addressing the underlying issues of why we were drinking in the first place.

So in my personal experience, you know, I started drinking for very habitual reasons and that wasn't a problem.

In when I had my second son, I experienced pretty severe postpartum depression and I definitely increased my drinking significantly to deal with that depression and that depression didn't go away.

...