Why it’s a false choice to believe that you have only two options around alcohol: submit to a life of deprivation or continue to drink When I was questioning my drinking, I felt like I didn’t fit in, in part because of that one friend who’d become sober herself but deemed me not an alcoholic. And I wasn’t really ready to admit my own problem either. I felt very alone in it, although as soon as I wrote the book [ This Naked Mind], people started coming out of the woodwork. Thousands upon thousands of people who were saying, “This is what I struggled with, too.” Challenge your thinking, find clarity, and form new habits with a 30-day alcohol-free experiment from the author of This Naked Mind . During research, I had been drinking less and less, without even consciously realizing. And one night in December 2014, I told my husband that I wasn't going to drink anymore. Annie’s goal is to help you decide that alcohol is a substance that isn’t making your life better so that you’re able to walk away from alcohol painlessly, genuinely feeling that you no longer want or need to drink.

Pure alcohol doesn't taste good. So, consider having a sweetened drink instead, since it's mostly sugars and sweeteners that you're tasting when you drink. For people who are drinkers and who may come across your books or this article, is there like a single sentence or thought that you want people to know about alcohol? If you go into sobriety without changing any of your thinking about alcohol, thinking, “Okay, but drinking is still awesome, everybody still loves it, and I’m the only one who doesn’t get to do it, poor me,” then sometimes you have to have, like, a decade of sober fun experiences to convince yourself otherwise. A decade of, “Oh, this concert is actually fun,” “Oh, this vacation is actually fun,” “Oh, this is actually good.”I think, on one hand, the term “alcoholic” can be very empowering. I have a very good friend, she’s sober with AA, and she came to the realization that she was an alcoholic. That realization for her was incredibly empowering, because then she knew she could not drink again in safety, and it gave her the entire foundation for her to build her sober life upon. And it’s a thing that she’s very tied to — that term, because she considers the fact that she can say, “I am an alcoholic,” one of the cornerstones that saved her life. And so it’s very important and powerful for her. About a decade later, after multiple promotions, I was global Head of Marketing for this company, traveling in and out of the U.K. and often staying there for six months at a time. I was drinking at least two bottles of wine every night. I think for people to just have a more mindful approach. And maybe we take baby steps. Obviously it would be amazing if we looked at alcohol the way we look at cigarettes, where we’re aware of the negative health implications before we’re told it’s fun — sort of like how the first thought we have now about cigarettes, now, is that they’re not healthy. That would be amazing, but I think that’s a little too long term, realistically. And so often we’ll just keep drinking until something really bad happens. But I think a goal would be for us, culturally, to be able to ask a simple question: Would I be happier drinking a bit less alcohol? And to be able to ask it at any point, without any judgment, without inner judgement, without the inner fear, and certainly without any cultural or societal judgment. The purpose of the author writing The Alcohol Experiment book is to help people change their relationship with alcohol and develop a healthier lifestyle.

Why life without alcohol is a journey towards finding more peace in yourself and choosing to live awake If you cannot resist that, then there’s something wrong with you, you are not the responsible one. And for that, to be allowed for that to be the only warning that we have on something that in 1988 was confirmed, that is a carcinogen like alcohol causes cancer doesn’t matter if it’s beer or wine or hard alcohol, it was confirmed in 1988, that alcohol is carcinogenic. And for the majority of people on the street, if you were to survey them, the majority would not know that alcohol was carcinogenic. The majority would also not realize that alcohol is addictive. Because when we draw this line between Oh yeah, you can get addicted to nicotine or you can get addicted to heroin, but only if you’re an alcoholic only if there’s something wrong with you human. Will you ever have a problem with this substance? We have totally obscured the fact that the substance itself is not only addictive, but according to a study that was done about five or six years ago called the margin of exposure approach. It was definitively named the most harmful drug on the planet. And they did a whole spectrum of harm. And they measured it based on harm on to the individual harm to society. It’s addictive nature, all sorts of stuff.Hi there. This is a very special episode for me, not only because my guest is Annie Grace, who I am a huge fan of and her book, this naked mind came out four months before I quit drinking. So, it was something that I know I listened to and learned a ton from in early sobriety. But also, because this is my 100th episode.