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 and I am answering questions. Again, Annie Grace, I'm author of this naked mind.

And today the question I'm answering is, is drinking alcohol truly just a habit?

And it's a reason tons of people get for drinking. It's a reason I get for drinking. I was just in the habit of drinking.

And habits are interesting things. And in order to dig into this question, this is the first time in a live video I'm going to be talking about kind of the crux of my book.

And it's liminal thinking and liminal points. So liminal thinking is a book that was written by Dave Gray.

And it is a really interesting aspect because there's so many experts, there's this huge body of evidence that agrees that we do a lot of things because of these ingrained beliefs that we have.

And these beliefs come from different experiences. So if you are growing up in one culture and someone was growing up in a separate culture, you would have separate sets of beliefs.

But you would believe these things very viscerally, very emotionally. Like you just believe it without necessarily understanding or being able to justify why.

So these beliefs are we put we have experiences in our life and we filter those experiences through a filter that is relevant to us because obviously there's too much in life to experience everything.

And then we take those experiences and we make observations based again on relevance.

And then from those observations, we make assumptions, we draw conclusions and these form our beliefs.

And most of this work is actually done unconsciously. So it's just kind of done naturally in the society we grow up in in the family we grow up in in the media and the information we're exposed to.

And these beliefs become really because it's all done unconsciously, they become really ingrained. And we believe certain things like we believe this guy is blue.

And so Dave Gray with liminal thinking he says as many experts say the way to really undo some of these very deeply ingrained yet unjustifiable in some regard beliefs is to go down through those experiences observations assumptions and conclusions and determine what's really true.

So we're going to do that today with is drinking a habit.

And so you know you experience that you regularly drink you get home from where you pop open up here and you also observe habitual drinking all the time everywhere around you.

So it's very easy to assume because of how frequently drinking occurs not only in your own life, but in the lives of those around you that drinking clearly must be habitual.

It's a very easy assumption. And it's much more palatable than the assumption that you and those around you drink regularly because you may have become addicted or dependent even emotionally or psychologically dependent on our life.

And so logically dependent on alcohol I mean that idea is somewhat terrifying so it's it habit doesn't feel threatening.

So the easy conclusion is that because you drink regularly and you're afraid to look for a more sinister reason and you don't even want to consciously do that.

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