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 at this naked mind and I am answering readers questions.

Today I have a question from Carl and Carl Arles says, okay I want to stop drinking but I absolutely love the taste of Bud Light.

And it's Bud Light, it's something about this specific beer. I just can't, there's nothing I've tried all sorts of other beers including alcohol free and I just can't replace it.

What do you recommend?

And so I find this to be a really interesting question because I think that sometimes we can actually use this but I just love the taste as a rationalization when the truth that is underneath it is a bit deeper and a bit less psychological and more almost physiological.

So Carl, first I guess the first thing I would tell you to do is to do a blind taste test. You know, get some Bud Light, get some Cours Light, get a few other beers, then get a few Nana alcoholic beers and you know you're drinking beer anyway.

So just have somebody help you to get really pure and do a completely blind taste test of it, at least five to six beers and let us know.

Like I want to know if you can really actually truly distinguish Bud Light in a taste test and if you can I'll be interested to know that too.

But I think consider Carl that this might be a rationalization to kind of keep you drinking.

So you know the taste of something it's sticky and you can hold on to it. And if you have an affinity for a brand and a specific taste, you know we definitely like to believe that we are in control and that we know when we're drinking.

We know when we really like something and we've developed kind of this emotion around it. And so we believe pretty certainly that yeah this this taste is so important to me.

But as truth that might be just maybe consider the alternative and the alternative is that there's a possibility that you know you're just unconsciously rationalizing this taste because you have a bit of a physical psychological or emotional dependence on the alcohol itself.

And it's much easier to say okay well I just love the taste I never drink anything else I'd never have a glass of wine and only have a Bud Light and it's just the Bud Light.

But by the way I drink you know ten of them a night it's much easier to say well it's just for the taste than it is to kind of take a harder look at the alternative that it might be that something else is going on and something that has much more to do with the fact that alcohol is addictive to human beings.

Then the fact that you know it's it's just that you want the taste so I tell this sometimes but if you think of the cycle of kind of ingesting something and then having it leave your system and withdraw from it often it's because of that withdrawal that we want the next thing.

So this is very very clear in you know a drug addict or a smoker for example like if somebody's taking heroin repeatedly and then all of a sudden the heroin's leaving a heroin addict system and you're watching them go through withdrawals and detox.

You know you don't necessarily think oh gee heroin is really good for like shakes and really good for you know the heroin's going to solve that but the truth is that that next dose of heroin does in fact solve those shakes so you could argue that it is the heroin that's solving the problem there you know if you think of it with the cigarette smoker nicotine actually leaves your system really quickly so within 10 minutes it starts to leave your system and I believe within an hour it's totally out of your system and so so that's really good.

And so smokers start to have that craving that itch for the next cigarette really pretty quickly and then chain smoking can become a thing really pretty quickly because what's happening is as the nicotine is leaving your system you are creating withdrawal and that withdrawal is needing more nicotine to kind of satisfy it.

The more withdrawals you create the more tolerance you build the more you need the more nicotine and then eventually your change smoking you know with alcohol it's not this apparent because alcohol in fact takes so long to leave our systems so you know it can take up to 10 days in some cases and and actually it takes you know just definitely the physical alcohol leaving our system takes a long time so that physical craving isn't what we normally look at when we're looking at alcohol but the truth is is that it's not a good thing.

It's there you know you come off of a drinking thing and the next day as the alcohol is purging itself from your system you start to get this feeling and it's this annoyance and it's this unease and to sort of a sense of something missing that you need something to make this moment or this day complete and it happens when you're accustomed to drinking so if you're accustomed to drinking at 5 p.m. if you're accustomed to drinking after work you have this itch this sense that something is missing this sense of not being quite comfortable in your system.

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