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 answering questions and I am the author of this naked mind and I am just answering readers questions.

And actually I'm coming sort of to the end of my list of questions.

If you have a question, post it below, message me, email me at helloatthesnakedmind.com and I will answer them.

If I don't get more questions, I'm going to keep doing the live videos but I'm going to just take a different tact of just kind of starting with the book and going through it and bringing out interesting things from the book as we go along.

So but equally, you know, I want these to be as useful as possible. So please do ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

Today's question comes from Heather and Heather says, did you have any experience with the kind of lull after the initial euphoria of stopping drinking and finding your freedom more off?

And during that lull, did you find yourself frustrated with God, the universe, spirit, with the narrative of, come on, I finally did the right thing and I'm being so good. So where's my reward?

And those sorts of things running in your mind, I'm just so curious. I know it's kind of an ego trip and I'm well aware of that and it might even be my subtle attempt itself sabotage as in, oh yeah, see, there's, there's no real reward in this after all.

But I'm curious what your experience was.

And I will definitely tell about my experience, but also Heather, I think this is such a good question and I feel like, you know, everybody watching, if you have an experience that you want to share here in the comments, like, please do because I think that this idea of we have this massive amount of euphoria.

And then it does go away as a really common theme. And if you don't feel comfortable sharing on Facebook, I have a private free community. It's this naked mind community.com.

And it's, you know, all sorts of these sorts of questions get debated all the time. And so I think this would be a really good one. And would you post on there lots of people respond and it's really cool because you can join under any name you want, you can hold your anonymity, etc.

So definitely feel free to do that. But my experience was that how I saw it, I guess, was that there was two ways you could quit drinking. And one was kind of what I saw my friend do. And that was really sort of say, okay, I'm making this decision and her decision came from a place of pain in her life.

She had a lot of negative experiences with drinking. She and she finally got to a place where she it was enough pain that I motivated her to quit. And then it was a period of mourning, mourning her old way of life, mourning the fact that she couldn't drink anymore.

And so she started off with this deep sense of loss and change and came eventually over a few years time to a period of kind of rejoicing and really being happy and euphoric in the decision.

But it took living alcohol free and really experiencing the benefits of that over years for her to stop mourning alcohol. And that was her experience. And my experience was just markedly different because when I knew I was free,

it was not because I was going to deprive myself of a drink or I was going to I was like drinking and wanted to do it, but wasn't going to let myself anymore. It was because I actually changed my feelings about it. And you know, your feelings, your desires, your emotions, they come mostly from your unconscious mind. I mean, you don't consciously choose who to fall in love with. You don't consciously choose your mood.

And so of course, they're built on unconscious factors, but ultimately your feelings are really emotions spring from your unconscious. So when I had changed my unconscious beliefs around alcohol, I no longer desired to drink.

So the feeling and I'm sure you've heard me say this before was much more like, I never have to do that again. I never have to feel that way again. I never have to wonder about what I said. I never have to, you know,

have those extra, you know, that feeling of just drinking too much. I never have to do that again. It wasn't that I never get to do it again. It was very different. And with that feeling, it was an extreme sense of euphoria that lasted probably 30 days, maybe a month and a half.

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