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.

So this is Annie and I am answering readers questions and I have a pretty simple but very

simply worded but very in-depth question today and the question is how do you deal with

mental cravings?

So the reality of alcohol use disorder, alcohol abuse, alcohol addiction, whatever you want

to call it is that there's a physical aspect and mental aspect.

And the physical aspect is pretty straightforward, I would say, in terms of you drink alcohol,

your body compensates for alcohol by triggering certain things to happen and then when you

take the alcohol away, your body has to rebalance and the body is super smart so it can anticipate

so if you're drinking every single day, it will overcompensate for the presence of alcohol

on a regular basis and when you yank the alcohol away, it takes a little while for those

processes to go back to normal and for your body to rebalance.

So just like if you're eating a ton of sugar and so your body is compensating for the presence

of a ton of sugar and it's pre-compensating, then when you take that sugar away, you're

going to feel a crash or caffeine.

It's another good example.

If you're drinking caffeine every single day and you're relying on it to make you feel

better and of course you need more and more of all of these things to feel the same.

That's what tolerance is because your body adapts to it and then you take the caffeine away,

you could have headaches, you could have tiredness, stuff like that.

Now the reality is that physically alcohol leaves the system, I think the max time is within

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