This Naked Mind

These beliefs can include statements like:

• Alcohol provides enjoyment.

• Alcohol provides relief.

• Alcohol is the key to social situations.

• A party can’t really be a party without booze.

• Alcohol makes us funnier or more creative.

• Alcohol can relieve our stress or boredom.

• For some it can be hard, if not impossible, to stop drinking.

• The very definition of alcoholic and alcoholism.

These beliefs can be particularly difficult to change for several reasons. One reason is that we unconsciously self-seal them by seeking out things that are congruent with them. This is called confirmation bias, the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. We can find confirmation for our preconceptions about alcohol in many forms, including the media, the people we drink with, and our internal rationalizations. Adages about drinking found hanging in so many households illustrate a confirmation bias. Some of my favorites are:

• It’s not drinking alone if the kids are home.

• We have too much wine, said no one ever.

• It’s not a hangover; it’s wine flu.

• I cook with wine; sometimes I even put it in the food.

• Wine! Because no great story started with someone eating a salad.

The kicker is that these beliefs have become so ingrained in our minds and our society, and so repeatedly self-sealed, that they are programmed into our unconscious. And our unconscious controls our emotions and our desires.

By definition the unconscious is not readily accessible or easily changed.

We need a specific process to dive into the foundation of our beliefs, examine them, and change our perceived reality.

So what happens when your experiences with alcohol start to contradict your bubble of self-sealing belief? Perhaps your experiences are no longer wholly positive, and you start to question your drinking. Or maybe you hear new information about the dangers of drinking.

Gray says that one of the ways we make sense of these new ideas that don’t fit with our current beliefs is to look for external validity. Can we take the new information and test it out to prove its merit? However, especially with alcohol, we often don’t make it that far. This is because the new information doesn’t have internal coherence— it doesn’t fit with what you “know” to be true. And because it is lacking in internal coherence, you will unconsciously reject it before you have a chance to consciously consider it. This happens all the time. We both consciously and unconsciously disregard information we don’t want to hear. And when we do this, we never have a chance to see if this new information is indeed true; we never move to test it against reality.

Why does this happen? Because we like certainty; it feels safe. Gray explains this unconscious behavior helps us deal with the realities of life, many of which are uncomfortable. It allows us to outsource some of the fear that attacks us when we confront certain truths. Reality is uncertain, and uncertainty causes fear. We try to protect ourselves from this fear by staying inside our bubble of belief until something happens that we cannot ignore. At that point we are forced to confront reality.

For me, it was one hangover too many, leaving me unable to function during the day as a result of my heavy drinking at night. I reached a point where I could no longer ignore the fact that alcohol was affecting my career and my relationships. This forced me to confront new information that said wine was not the joy juice I believed it to be.

But at this stage, attempting to drink less felt practically impossible. Why? I lived with a huge bubble of self-sealing belief around my drinking. I believed alcohol enhanced my creativity, made me funnier and more outgoing, allowed me to enjoy social situations, relieved my stress at the end of a long day, and comforted me when something went wrong. Giving up drinking felt like an incredible sacrifice, like the loss of a close friend. These were beliefs I had never previously questioned that had been built up over a lifetime of experiences, observations, assumptions, and conclusions.

I knew these beliefs to be true. I felt I would never be able to relax without a glass of wine. I honestly believed social situations would be boring and even depressing without alcohol. Even when I realized these beliefs were illogical, they still felt true because they were embedded in my unconscious and were much stronger than my logical, conscious reasoning. As Gray says, “construction of belief is not something we do consciously, it’s something we do unconsciously.”

In the illustration below you can see how everything shaded in below the line of our beliefs represents the things we are not consciously aware of.

So what can we do? How can we explore reality and change our unconscious belief that alcohol is the “elixir of life” to fit with our conscious desire to drink less? It’s relatively simple. We need to bring unconscious experiences, observations, assumptions, and conclusions into conscious thought. This allows your unconscious to change. The concept is scientifically proven—scientists now realize that the brain is able to change and adapt in response to new experiences, in a process called neuroplasticity.

The process of illuminating your unconscious foundation of belief will influence your unconscious mind. To do this, I will logically and critically provide you with information about alcohol and addiction. I will expose your beliefs, assumptions, and conclusions by presenting you with methodical, factual, and rational arguments for you to question and evaluate. You’ll be completely in control: I will strip away misinformation and present new concepts you have not yet critically considered. I will give you the tools to discover your own truth, your own reality, to understand that the rope you think you are holding might really be the tail of an elephant. Let’s get started.

Alcohol: The “Elixir of Life”?

Alcohol is addictive. This fact has been proven over and over again. It is the nature of the substance, and it doesn’t matter who you are or how in control you believe yourself to be. Your physical response when you drink alcohol is to want more. Alcohol hooks you through its addictive and dehydrating nature. Again, this is a physiological fact. Before you drank alcohol, you didn’t miss it; you didn’t think about it. You were happy and free.

If you’re having problems with alcohol, you’ve already realized alcohol is not a miracle elixir. You know it’s costing you money, health, friendships, and maybe even your marriage. Your conscious mind knows all of this. The problem is that your unconscious is continuously assaulted with messages about the “joy” it brings and the stress it relieves. These messages come from external sources, friends, family, and of course, advertising. These messages are confirmed by internal sources—your past experiences with alcohol. This book will address both.

Over the next day, notice how many messages you are exposed to about the “pleasures” and “benefits” of alcohol. Look around—from your friends to what you watch on television, almost everything in our society tells you, both consciously and unconsciously, that alcohol is the “elixir of life,” and without it your life would be missing a key ingredient.

The Twelfth Juror

“Truth rests with the minority . . . because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.” —Søren Kierkegaard

Alcoholism appears complex because it is misunderstood, not only by drinkers and their families but also by experts. We must see through these illusions. In short, we need to become detectives and lay bare the information, evaluate it, and discover the truth.

You may wonder, if common knowledge about alcohol and addiction is false, why do we believe it? How do we, as a society, accept untrue propositions as fact? Great questions. To answer them, let’s look at a jury deliberating in a trial. It’s a large jury with twelve jurors. Eleven of them are convinced of the defendant’s guilt and one believes in his innocence. Do we believe the eleven jurors or the one? For the single juror to detain an exhausted jury (the decision must be unanimous), he must be absolutely sure of his position. In fact, you could argue that he is more certain than the eleven. Going against the grain is not easy. He must see something the rest do not. Suppose the eleven are experts? How much firmer in his stance must that single juror be? It appears the one juror is considering a perspective the eleven are not.

One of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, famously said, “We must be able, at any time, to accept the fact that we could all be absolutely and utterly wrong.” It can be difficult to accept that the majority might be wrong, but it is a possibility we must entertain. It’s amazing how drinkers can be incredibly open-minded about many things, yet close-minded when it comes to alcohol. This is because of the compartmentalization that happens within the mind of any substance-addicted person. So keep your mind open.

Visualize Success!

You are now ready to suspend judgment. To explore your unconscious desire to drink, to understand the reasons why you drink. This is great, and if you are willing to be honest with yourself and look deep into your belief system, you will find success.

This Naked Mind will help you explore your unconscious—and therefore influence it—as you work through the book. This type of book encourages your mind to consider the information when you are not actually reading and even when you sleep. That being said, you can take certain steps to ensure success. You may notice repetition throughout the book. You’re a busy person and want me to cut to the chase. Rest assured, it is repetitive for a reason. For most of your life you have been repeatedly exposed to media, peer pressure, and many other influences. Repetition is vital to undoing a lifetime of ingrained beliefs. Despite the repetition, I’ve tried to make the content as interesting as possible.

Emotions and images—not necessarily images you see but images in your mind—comprise the language of your unconscious mind. When you experience emotions related to the content, you will speak more directly to your unconscious. Importantly, you should feel hopeful when reading this book. The theory is sound, and I’ve included the most up-to-date scientific, medical, and psychological information. It works. It will work for you. Concentrate on that, and be hopeful.

Visualizing success always helps. A growing body of research suggests our unconscious minds cannot actually tell the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined fake experience.

So visualize success—like being incredibly happy, laughing, and having a great time out with friends while drinking lemonade. You can even spend a few minutes each morning and night imagining the life you want while feeling positive emotions. This inspires success.

Get excited about what the future holds. Cultivate feelings of success even before you are successful. You hold all the tools you need to regain control of your drinking. Begin to think about the power of your mind and the strength of your body. This is exciting! In fact regaining control of my life through This Naked Mind is one of the most exciting and life-affirming things that has happened to me. It can be the same for you.

Don’t dwell on past experiences. Your past is in the past. You have been caught, and through this book you will see that your alcohol problem is not your fault. Forgive yourself. You are the hero of this story. There is no reason to dwell on the negativity of the past and every reason to forgive yourself. Look forward to an incredible future.

Finally, relax! Let go of expectations, remain positive, and just let it happen. In Shawn Achor’s book The Happiness Advantage, he states, “positive emotions broaden our scope of cognition and behavior . . . they dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly . . . and see new ways of doing things.”

Do what you can to put yourself in a positive frame of mind while reading. There is so much to look forward to! Trust the approach, and more importantly, trust your unconscious to do the right thing for you. You can’t control or micromanage your unconscious. Worry and stress are conscious activities—don’t bother with them.

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THE DRINKER OR THE DRINK? PART 1: THE DRINKER (#ulink_2b974abc-b791-5fa2-8c6b-7d3283f215c1)

“The world we have created is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

—Albert Einstein