How to stop drinking

I'm conscious that many people will be mulling over their holiday experience in the next week or two and wondering how it was that they managed to fail to enjoy it that much. It's no accident that at the turn of the year, we make resolutions to do things differently in future. In part, it's the nature of the season - that time when the little figure on the dates we write or type changes and another figure is added. 7 becomes 8. Subtly, insidiously, time is creeping on, and we are getting older.

A supervisee of mine suggested to a client that he might make a timeline of his life to date, marking the points at which things happened that seemed especially memorable or that were staging posts of various kinds. And she suggested he add a rough 'endpoint' when he expected his life to come to its end. Cunningly she did not mention to him until he had completed it what her real aim was - to get him to see for himself how much of his life he probably had left! The answer was less than the amount he had already had. So all those things he had been talking about endlessly to her, and promising himself, were going to have to be squeezed into fewer and fewer spaces ahead. If he didn't start soon, was he ever going to get down to it? Or was he all talk but no action?

I think trying to change damaging habits and addictions like drinking are somewhat like that. It is what we are sure we want to do, what we are determined to make a start on. It is what we feel sure we can do. But not right now . . . . . Well, ok, but after tonight, I'll begin drinking less. After this party, I will never drink as much again. After my daughter's wedding, I won't have any excuses for drinking for quite a while. After the works outing, I won't need to drink so much.

If you find yourself thinking in this way, you are not alone. I think the first day of the New Year is enticing for that very reason because it seems to provide us with the significant deadline we have been searching for, the one that will impress itself on us, will really count. This is because none of the others has actually worked well up to now. The First Of January will work, we tell ourselves. It's a big occasion, enough to impress even my idiot brain, and besides, I have informed everyone around me of my intentions to turn over a new leaf, so I can't disappoint them now. I shall make a fresh start, and everything else will follow.

Alcoholics Anonymous has spotted this tendency, which, if we fail, and we often do, tends to lead us into another lengthy bout of unwise behaviour, whatever habit or addiction we are struggling with. To counteract it, they suggest living one day at a time. It's not what you decided in January that matters, it's what you decide to do with today. Today is the only day we have, in an absolute sense, in which we can do - or not do - anything at all. Everything else is a mental mirage - it's either our memories of all our yesterdays or our aspirations for our tomorrows. The past is over and done with - we can do nothing about it. The future is not yet here. We can only imagine it. But today we have a chance. Today we can do something different. If we really want to.

This type of thinking brings us sharply up against the self-deception, the denials, the rationalisations, that make up our imperfect lives. Faced with actually doing something different right now - as my supervisee faced her client with a timeline - we get a sharp shock. What? You mean now? This minute? Really? Yes, but . . . . .

Whatever follows this 'but' is usually the sum of the real reasons why we have not changed this habit or addiction a long time ago. The real reasons are more complex, usually, than the various alibis we trot out at other times. With drinking, what it really boils down to is usually something like this: 'without a drink I won't be able to . . . .'  Fill in the blanks for yourself, right now, and make the list as long as it needs to be until you exhaust all your reasons for overdrinking. Then have a good long look at it. Think about it. And I can tell you without much fear of contradiction that none of these 'reasons' amounts to a hill of beans when compared with the devastation of getting drunk even once, let alone regularly, shaming yourself in public, feeling ghastly the following day (and the same day for that matter), wasting time and energy and all your limited resources, missing appointments and family events, lettings others down, and every other nasty consequence you can supply me with for overdrinking. (And these are just the beginning, trust me. The sequence of events in an alcoholic's timeline is as clear as the face of Big Ben, and they are all losses - first, loss of self-respect, second, loss of license to drive, third, loss of job, fourth, loss of partner and children, fifth, loss of home, sixth, loss of will to live. Ok, so you haven't go there yet. I believe you. Only because I know you will. If you keep on this well-trodden road. It's such a well-trodden road, in fact, that it is as predictable as death and taxes.)

None of your particular 'reasons' justifies the results of drinking - not by a very long chalk. So you feel unconfident in company without a drink? Just imagine . . . .! What a terrible thing to happen to somebody. So naturally, you decide to poison yourself regularly in order to deal with this problem? Pull the other one, it has bells on . . . .! So you can't go out with your mates and not drink. They might notice? Really? And as your Not Drinking cannot be noticed, as it is clearly unbearable, you grab another glass to make quite sure no one notices you are NOT DRINKING. We could go down the list in this way and would find that mostly your reasons for drinking are trivial in themselves. But underneath it all is a curious fact - that you drink because you cannot stop drinking. One drink leads to another drink, and then the second drink leads to a third, and the third leads to a fourth and so on. Ask the bartender. Bartenders are usually wise in the ways of drinking. They've seen it all. They know desperation when they see it. Problem drinkers drink out of desperate need. The stuff already in their system is begging for another - just one more, and one more, and one more.

So the way to stop is incredibly simple. Just don't take the first drink, and then all the others will not follow. The first drink requires a second drink, and a third, and a fourth. This is what we call addiction. What is already in your system is calling to its own, saying, come to me! Like the Sirens who sang and lured Ulysses on to the rocks, alcohol overrides so-called will power quite easily - pushes it aside, with some amazingly trivial idea that, "It's only nine o'clock" or "My partner is annoying me."  If on the other hand, you drink a glass of orange juice or sparkling water, you will find that it does not demand another drink at all. Funny thing that. You can make a glass of bitter lemon last a whole evening, without even trying. You are not controlling your drinking in the least. There is no careful self-restraint, no looking furtively at the clock, or counting up the number of drinks you've already had.  No need for any of that self-monitoring. You can drink as many as you want: only you don't tend to want a hundred! Or even ten. A couple is usually plenty. They are not addictive substances, and this is the point. Weird. Sample the difference, and you will soon see this for yourself. It isn't because you don't like bitter lemon that you choose gin! Don't kid yourself. It's because bitter lemon does not like itself so much it keeps having to ask for another!

Armed with this understanding, you can certainly stop drinking. You stop by not starting in the first place. It's that simple.

But don't be too cunning about it, as Ulysses was. Ulysses was a chancer by nature. Notice that he both wanted to hear the Sirens and also not give in to their seductive calls! If you really want to stop, you don't sail that way and then try to chain yourself up to avoid getting into trouble! How about going to the cinema instead, or to the gym or the bowling alley - anywhere people do not congregate specifically for the purpose of drinking? That would be a really good way to use today. Doing today, the only day you have, what you have wanted to do for so long, remember? Only, today, do it!