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.

And so the question I have is from Bex and it is when you first gave up drinking, how did you get over your cravings and or triggers?

And this is a great question and it's really complex. So I'm going to do my best to break it down in just steps.

And I say it's complex not because of the emotions, the emotions are fairly straightforward.

We want something. We're not allowing ourselves to have it and it creates a lot of angst. Complex because of what's happening in our brains kind of behind the craving and behind the trigger.

So cravings and triggers craving, I think, can be broken down into three different parts. And there's the physical craving and withdrawal symptoms. There's the psychological aspect and then there's the trigger aspect and the triggers really physical and I'll get into exactly why that is.

But the physical craving, of course, if you've been drinking alcohol for a really long time and your brain and body have changed to the point where you've become physically dependent on alcohol to the point where if you stop drinking immediately, you could go into some sort of

equilibrium, tremens or withdrawals or need to be hospitalized, need to seek medical advice. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about here is the physical discomfort that happens when you quit drinking because your body is detoxing and more than that, the psychological discomfort that happens because you believe that you're giving up something that you like and that you enjoy.

And so if we talk about physical for me personally, it was, took about 30 days to get it all kind of out of my system and over. And that was when I stopped drinking full stop. And it was headaches, anxieties, kind of weird nightmares that I pick up a drink again or I'd be halfway through a beer and freak out and then wake up and be like, oh, I didn't do that. Oh, that's good.

You know, so some of those sort of weird things. The first 10 days are probably the most intense with just, you know, the just wanting craving alcohol. But the physical part.

When I finally stopped drinking for good was I looked at it as if it was symptoms to healing a disease. And so yes, I was willing to be sick for a month physically. I was willing to have these headaches, have the anxiety, deal with this stuff in order to heal myself.

From this psychological dependence I had for alcohol and a growing physical dependence. So with that perspective, it became much easier. Now I will tell you earlier attempts to stop drinking before I had that entire perspective. Highly, thank you so much.

Before I had that entire perspective were not as successful. And I think that gets to the psychological part and the psychological craving. There's a lot going on here.

Studies done say that the only true way to reduce cravings is to eliminate access. And so these were some studies done in some universities in the United States. And basically if they take, for instance, a heroin addict and they go to prison.

In some instances, these heroin addicts no longer have access to heroin and they will not have necessarily as many physical withdrawals as you would have expected. Whereas even years after being in prison, they could come back out. They could have access again. Go back to their old haunts and scientists have observed them having really intense physical withdrawals even years after using it.

So the physical and the psychological is really intertwined. And a lot of my work in my book is based on Dr. John Sarno and his opinion that actually there's a steep underlying unconscious stuff happening that we need to address because if we don't address this unconscious stuff, we're not going to actually be able to deal with our cravings. And it looks like I have a week connection.

That's what it's telling me. So if I drop, I will come back on. But the physical and the psychological become really intertwined. And so when I stopped drinking for good, my psychological want need desire for alcohol had been eliminated.

I had eliminated it through what I call liminal thinking and I'll get into how I had done that. So when I stopped drinking, I didn't have psychological cravings. So it wasn't ever that I was planning for a drinker. I wanted to drink and I know that's hard to believe. But what I did is for the year before I really truly stopped these fits and starts. I had been doing a lot of journaling.

And when I would say, okay, I'm not going to drink tonight for whatever reason. I'm going to give myself a night off to see how it goes. And I would feel that craving, that urge that want. And I would sit in it. And I'd let myself drink on occasion because I was really just trying to learn about what was happening. Why did I want something that I didn't necessarily want anymore? Like what was going on. And so I sit there and I'd go really deep into it. Okay, what is this? And sometimes it would be that I felt like I was missing out.

Because I was with a group of friends. Other times it would be that I had a really hard day. And the reward, like I just didn't reward myself. And so I couldn't make that transition from, oh, I really put in a hard day to, oh, no, I'm relaxing at home.

Other times I would just feel like I was depriving myself of something that I thought was going to make the evening more fun. And so because I had that perspective, I would have less fun.

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