Why You Have A Thinking Problem, Not A Drinking Problem

All right.

So back to today's conversation and what we're talking about.

We are talking about, um, a thinking problem, not a drinking problem.

It always reminds me, if you remember the, the film Aeroplane, the comedy film, I think it was Leslie Nielsen in that, and, uh, he's got a drinking problem in that, and his drinking problem is that he just picks up a glass and throws it all over himself.

[laughs] Which just really made me laugh because it's sort of-- we don't have a drinking problem, do we? Like, the, the drink doesn't, like, jump into our mouth or, like, spill all over us.

Actually, what most of us have, and again, I'm always talking to the middle lane, right? The middle lane, we have a thinking problem.

It's a thinking trap about alcohol.

It's our beliefs that we hold about alcohol that keep us trapped, and invariably, they're just not true anymore.

And the work that I do essentially is this.

All day long, every day, I'm trying to wake people up to the truth that what was once a truth about alcohol in their life at some point is probably no longer true.

And the story is that most people never do that reflective work, so they drag around old stories from the past.

Alcohol's fun.

It helps me relax.

All that nonsense, right? That is no longer true, yet they're still saying it and still caught in that same trap.

"Oh, no, no, I drink because it's fun." But actually, just stop for a minute.

Is it really? When was the last time you really had fun? What about all the downsides [laughs] that are now coming with that? The tiredness, the can't-be-arsedness, the grumpiness, the shame, the regret, the hangovers, the anxiety.

Like, are those things fun? Have you ever stopped to do that real evaluation? Because maybe when you were 19 or in your teens or early 20s and alcohol used to bounce off you, maybe it felt like it was all fun, and you're still telling the same story 10 years, 20, 30 years later about alcohol being fun.

But if you just stop and do the reflective work, you realize, actually, it stopped being fun 20 years ago.

Yet I'm still telling the same story.

Or it's how I relax.

It's how I socialize.

But is that true still for you? And when you start to unpick your thinking, i.e.

your beliefs about alcohol, very often you see the truth that wasn't there before in that actually it's no longer doing the things that I once thought it was.

And in doing so, you transform your relationship with alcohol, not because you had a drinking problem, because you had a thinking problem.

You were carrying beliefs from the past that were no longer true.