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, this is Annie Grace, the author of this naked mind creator of the alcohol experiment.

And I am answering questions and today I have a question from Charlotte.

She says, I would find it really helpful if you could do a video about the challenges of staying sober in the warmer weather.

And it feels like everyone else is sitting out in Beard Gardens chilling and drinking.

It's getting warm here in the UK and despite all the work I've done, depicting the myths around my reasons for drinking, I still feel like there's some cognitive dissonance when it comes to hot weather as it's been a huge trigger for me to drink in the past.

I'm only two weeks sober and I have no intention of giving in but it's difficult as my boyfriend drinks every night and things that's what everyone does when it's hot.

Any thoughts advice and how to keep my head straight against conditioning so I can remain sober during the warmer weather and not feel like I'm missing out would be great.

This is such a great question. So first of all, let's talk a little bit about just triggers in general.

So triggers happen because of a dopamine spike mostly and you can think about it like this.

Dopamine is a molecule that is in our brains and it's released and we used to think, you know, everybody thought, okay, dopamine is associated with pleasure because generally dopamine releases when there's something pleasurable is happening.

But we since learned that dopamine is actually in addition to this pleasure, it is really responsible for learning.

So it's now known even in some circles as the learning molecule and how dopamine works is it triggers when our brains are told okay, that thing you just did, we need you to do it again.

And so for instance, you could look back at to when we were cavemen and living in caves and looking for say food and so say you were searching for a raspberry bush and you were going out and searching and searching and searching and searching and all of a sudden,

you found a raspberry bush, you would have a huge dopamine spike and what that dopamine would do is not only tell your brain, okay, this thing we just said we need to do this again.

And that's the way that it would help you survive evolutionarily, but it would also say imprint the things that happened just before you got you found the raspberries.

And this was so that over time you could find raspberries easier. So your brain would imprint on okay, and this is also consciously, but it would be like how rocky is it, is it sunny, is it shady, you know, is there water around what sort of factors and environmental factors are around that we found these raspberries.

And so over time you start being able to find raspberries easier, you don't really understand how you just get better at it, but it has a lot to do with the fact that dopamine has imprinted the things that happened right previous to that dopamine spike of finding raspberries.

And so how does this relate to alcohol alcohol artificially trigly triggers dopamine release. So artificially high levels and skyrocket dopamine release and that's all addictive addictive substances they do the same thing.

And so your brain learns addiction it learns okay, that thing you did it had this artificially high spike dopamine we want to do that again.

And so it imprints the things that happen before that drink. And so those things can be oh, it's nice outside. Oh, somebody is you know we're reaching for the bottle opener or driving by a liquor store or pulling the glasses out of the cabinet.

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