Decisions decisions ...

 

"Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience ... whenever the conditions are right, you can draw on this memory and automatically apply the same solutions ... habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks." [source : Atomic Habits, James Clear, Random House Business Book, 2018]

Consuming alcohol has become a habit. It is a mental shortcut learned from experience. When we are tired, or angry, or anxious, or happy we learned that alcohol delivered something that made us feel better (however we individually defined that). So we learned to drink without thinking about it. 

When you want to change your alcohol consumption there are two reasons why it can be hard: 

1. Alcohol is actually addictive, working in your brain just like any other (illegal) drug. It alters our brain chemicals in a way that eases our emotions, albeit temporarily. 

2. The physical habits we have built up around alcohol, whether in our own lives or at a societal level, mean that our brain recognises the situation, knows that pouring a drink helped, and our subconscious directs us to have that drink because it was the solution last time. 

Choosing an alcohol-free future means making new habits. Your brain is going to have to work harder for a bit because you're asking it to do something unfamiliar. You are going to have to find another way to deal with the anger or the exhaustion you're feeling. You'll need to explore other ways to handle social anxiety or to celebrate life events with colleagues, friends and family. 

All(!) you need to remember is that, when it's hard to change up your daily routine and your drinking choices, your brain is doing exactly what it did when you learned to tie your shoelaces, or drive a car, or play the guitar or walk from home to the train station - all of which you now do without thinking, and sometimes without even remembering phsyically doing it. 

Your brain prefers to expend its energy on the business of survival, putting as much daily work as possible onto autopilot.  So faced with the same daily situation and your commitment to an alcohol-free month, your brain chooses to

1. do what it always did, on autopilot, cos it worked before so it doesn't waste conscious mind time and energy thinking about different solutions to the situation in which it finds itself, OR  

2. face the fact that it's being asked to find a new way to resolve the situation, which will take conscious brain power and energy. 

Understanding this is important background to tomorrow's blog which will look at a whole range of  practical ways to change up your routine from the alcohol-consuming one to the alcohol-free one. We want, we need, to make the alcohol-free choice as easy for your brain to consider as possible.