without even thinking about alcohol. You can ring in the New Year with ginger ale. You can save your relationships. You can change your life.
Want to know the secret?
It’s all about awareness. If you’re struggling because you’re unaware of your subconscious beliefs, then the solution is to become aware of them. Shine a light deep into the nooks and crannies of your mind and figure out what beliefs are holding you back. What beliefs are in conflict with your desire to drink less or stop drinking?
I’ve developed a proven, scientifically based process to do exactly that. The process is based on a technique called Liminal Thinking, created by the bestselling author Dave Gray, and The Work, by author Byron Katie. The liminal space is the area between your conscious and your subconscious, or subliminal, mind. The technique I’ve developed is called ACT: Awareness, Clarity, and Turnaround. You’re going to become aware of your belief by naming and putting language to it. Next, you clarify the belief, where it came from and how it feels inside you. Finally, you will turn around the belief coming up with a few reasons why the opposite of your long-held belief may be truer or as true as the original belief. As with many of the most profound tools for change, it is a simple process of deconstructing your beliefs by asking yourself questions like these:
What do I believe?
Is it true?
How does it make me feel?
Is it helpful?
Remember when I said sometimes our beliefs just aren’t true? Well, that’s how you untangle this mess—by discovering the truth. Does alcohol truly relax you? Or do you just think it does? Do you really enjoy sex more when you’re drunk? Or does it become a sloppy, embarrassing mess you can barely remember?
I’m not going to suggest the answer is one or the other. I can’t make you believe something you don’t want to believe. Your subconscious beliefs remain deeply entrenched until you become aware of them and decide to change them by questioning their validity. Every few days during this 30-day experiment, you’ll see bonus ACT chapters. You can read them as they come up, or you can read them first if you like. These special chapters present you with some facts regarding certain common beliefs about alcohol. All I ask is for you to keep an open mind and carefully consider what you’re reading. It might take a few days or weeks of mulling it over before you decide one way or another. You might need to test out some theories. That’s okay. Take as much time as you need. This is your experiment. Here’s a preview of how the ACT technique works:
1. AWARENESS. Name your belief. In the context of alcohol, this is your conscious reason for drinking, simply put it into words:
Alcohol relaxes me.
2. CLARITY. Discover why you believe it and where it originated. You do this by asking questions—both of yourself and of the external evidence—and uncovering truths about your belief.
What have I observed that supports this belief?
Happy hour. And the idea that everyone unwinds with a cocktail after a stressful day at work.
Every time I talk to my friends about my struggles, either with my kids or husband, they always say something like, “Oh, no! Don’t worry, I know just the thing—you need some wine immediately!”
What are my experiences with alcohol and relaxation?
I’ve felt the relaxing effects of alcohol myself. After a stressful day at work, a drink seems to calm my nerves and allows me to transition from the hard workday to a relaxing evening.
Then it’s time to do some detective work and compare this belief with both your internal and external realities. Internally, you will ask yourself questions like these:
What do I mean by “relax”?
How do I feel when I’m not relaxed?
How do I feel when I am relaxed?
Does anything else make me feel the same way?
How do I feel while I’m drinking? Is that the same feeling as “relaxed”?
How do I feel the next day? Is that relaxed?
Is it true, scientifically? Does alcohol relax human beings?
Externally, you will examine the evidence. Does research support this belief? What do external sources say about this belief? Do they support or contradict it? And don’t worry, you won’t have to do a bunch of research—throughout the 30 days of the experiment I’ll be supplying the studies and data.
3. TURNAROUND. This is where you allow your subconscious to let go of the belief, deciding if after exploration it is indeed true for you. There are two steps here.
First, you turn the initial belief around and find as many ways as you can that the opposite of your initial belief is true. For example, if your belief is “alcohol relaxes me” the opposite becomes “alcohol does not relax me” or “alcohol stresses me out.”
Now that you’ve stated the opposite, come up with as many reasons as you can that the opposite is as true as or truer than the original belief. Examples might include
• Alcohol stresses my body out; a hangover is evidence of that.
• Alcohol prevents me from taking the action necessary to truly relieve my stress, so in that case it does not relax me.
• When I drink, I am more likely to get in an argument with my spouse, and fighting is stressful.
• When I drink, I beat myself up about it the next day, and that is stressful.
Once you’ve done that, the final step is simply to decide if this belief still holds true for you and if it is serving you or if you would be better off letting it go.
ACT: Awareness. Clarity. Turnaround. It’s an effective, scientific way to shine a light into your subconscious and figure out what’s actually causing your behavior. And you can find a guided worksheet in the back of this book to apply this process to any belief that comes up about alcohol, or about anything else in your life.
The important thing to remember is that there is no wrong answer! You are not messing up if you go through this process and still feel the belief is true for you. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but trust me on this—this process is about presenting your subconscious mind with information, facts, and logic. It’s about shifting your mind-set. And while that can often happen quickly by simply reading through the ACT chapters, it can also happen more slowly over time. Again, there are no wrong answers.
Now you know there’s something deeper at work here, and there’s something you can do about it, I hope you’re excited about this experiment! My ACT technique works. You can use it to enact change in so many areas of your life. It’s so empowering. You can use it to lose weight, start exercising, stop procrastinating, and be a better parent. For now, though, let’s focus on your drinking.
Often we don’t think about how much we drink or why we drink—like we’re doing in this experiment—until drinking is no longer an option. We don’t know if we drink because there’s chaos in our lives, or if there’s chaos because we drink. Suddenly, when the option to escape through drinking isn’t there, we’re forced to take a look at what’s going on in our lives and what might be triggering us. What are we trying to distract ourselves from? Sometimes the answer is obvious. Work is stressful. The boss yelled again. But other times there doesn’t seem to be an obvious trigger. Sometimes we drink to avoid anything unpleasant or stressful. This experiment offers us the option to switch from seeing stress as a reason to drink to seeing it as an opportunity