People hands toasting multicolored fancy drinks - Young friends having fun together drinking cocktails at happy hour - Social gathering party time concept on warm vivid filter
Why do we drink alcohol and “Dry January”
Annie Grace stopped and explains what she found
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Scott LaMar
People hands toasting multicolored fancy drinks - Young friends having fun together drinking cocktails at happy hour - Social gathering party time concept on warm vivid filter
Aired; January 2nd, 2024.
Many of us made New Year’s Resolutions. One may have been to reduce or stop drinking alcohol.
It can be a challenge for those who drink on a regular basis — either on social occasions or as part of their lives.
“Dry January” may be or may not be the path to that resolution, but it is how some people stop drinking alcohol for a month to sample sobriety and possibly stop drinking permanent.
Annie Grace explored alcohol use, the psychological reasons we drink and how we are influenced to drink in her book – This Naked Mind. The book became a movement.
Grace was on The Spark Tuesday and said Dry January sounds simple, but it’s more than just taking a break from drinking,”It really depends kind of where your psychology is at. And it’s funny that I say psychology and not physiology, not your body, because actually if you look at the body just the first day or two, even the first week that your body’s going to be re-balanced, rebooted, but the whole 30 days it becomes much more of a mental challenge. And I believe that that’s true because we have so much influence in programing that alcohol is the thing to do. It’s necessary for everything we can imagine from going out to dinner to relaxing in front of the game to enjoying the celebrations, all of these sorts of things. So we have this huge psychological nudge in our minds saying, hey, drink, drink, drink. And that’s what makes it complicated. It’s not really the physiological aspects. Most people who drink are not alcoholics. They’re not chemically dependent. In fact, according to the CDC, only 10% of excessive drinkers are chemically dependent. So, a tiny fraction of the population. But for a lot of us, it’s just because we believe we want to drink. And so that’s what makes it complicated.”
Grace said her own experience with alcohol led her to stop drinking, but she did it in a way that many would consider unique,” I approached alcohol and my relationship with alcohol with an okay, I’m starting to have repercussions. This is becoming a problem. I had been drinking for about a decade. I was drinking up to two bottles of wine most nights and I was feeling hung over. I was regretting things I said and did, and I was like, Oh, this is a problem. And I kept asking myself the same question Am I an alcoholic? Is this a problem? And then I’d take breaks, I’d take a 30-day break or I’d take a week long break. Every single time I’d take a break, I’d feel deprived, I’d feel miserable, and I’d actually drink more when I went back to drinking. And that was the cycle I was on for years. And then one day I actually approached it with a completely different approach. I said, Well, why am I drinking? So I stopped asking myself the questions, Am I the problem? Am I an alcoholic? And I said, Why? Why did I used to not need it? I remember being a kid. I didn’t need alcohol to relax at those birthday parties. I remember being I didn’t drink a lot in college. I remember not needing it to de-stress before finals. Why do I need it now? And I actually went on this very systematic research of, well, does it actually chemically relax you in the brain? What is it doing to our neurons, to our brain function? Does it actually make us feel better? And what I discovered is that a lot of that stuff is just totally not true. There are two things that alcohol actually does. It will numb you to the point of being unconscious like they used to use it in surgeries, and it will make it for the first 20 minutes after you have a drink, you feel that euphoric feeling, but you trade that for 2 to 3 hours for that same drink of kind of a downer feeling when the alcohol starts to leave your body. And as I started to do this research, my mind was blown. I couldn’t shut up about it, to be honest, because I was like, wow, all of these reasons that my mindset had told me I should be drinking actually aren’t chemically true in my body. It’s not relaxing me. It’s making my stress anxiety worse. It’s not making things more fun chemically in the body. Alcohol actually robs you of your ability to feel joy from things that don’t involve alcohol. So I’m feeling less happy over time. And as I realize all this stuff, my mindset shifted and I didn’t want to drink. And one of the key foundations of how I look at anyone’s relationship with alcohol is that without desire, there’s no temptation. So if you shift your desire, which is buried in your mindset, in often your subconscious mindset, you’re no longer tempted to drink.”
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