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Comparing Your Discomfort Before and After You Stop Drinking Alcohol

by | Stop Drinking Alcohol | 2 comments

Let’s talk a little bit more about getting outside our comfort zone.

Making some comparisons between the discomfort that you’re feeling right now and the discomfort that you’ll feel after you stop drinking.

Today, I wanted to do a video on comparisons between the discomfort that you’re feeling right now right before you stop drinking, while you’re going through whatever it is you’re going through and what you’re going to feel after you stop drinking, or we’ll look at the discomfort that you feel in the long term if you don’t quit drinking.

First, think of all the shit going on in your life right now because of your drinking behaviour.

You can use this for anything else, any other habit that you want to get rid of, that’s causing you problems.

Think about the discomfort that you’re being caused through the habit.

The hangovers, the money it’s costing, how much is coming out of your bank account every single day.

Myself and a friend of mine, we reckoned that we were putting a grand across a pool counter. A grand between us every single week.

It was ridiculous.

We were spending an awful amount of money on booze, and the food that we were buying as well.

We had a talk between my friend and I in the pub room, while we were grumpy about something that was happening in the pub and the way we were being treated.

We worked out that we were paying thousands and thousands across the pub counter every single year, I can’t remember the exact figure now.

But, it was a lot of money and it was all because of the habitual behaviour, this is what I did during the day and this is what I did at night.

Think about all the time that you spend on the alcohol, on drinking the alcohol, on thinking about the alcohol, on planning and drinking, and the consequences of the drinking a day, a week, a month after, the long term consequences.

Time is a big thing.

When you ask someone how many hours that they think they’ve got in their lives, most people come up with a ridiculous amount, like half a million or something like that.

When you say to someone how many days do you think you’ve got? They come up with ridiculous figures.

100,000 days or a quarter or half a million.

You’ve got 27,000 days in the average lifespan.

When you figure 75 years as the average, it’s around 27.something thousand.

Look at it from that perspective.

Every hour ticking by is just bringing you closer to the inevitable.

That should put the fucking figure out that time is precious.

The amount of time we waste on drinking alcohol is just unbelievable.

And for me, and I’m still trying to get out of this, my old lifestyle – this is what I’ve always said, the alcohol is just one part of the problem.

There’s a whole lifestyle that the drink is just one little part of, and you take out that part and you’ve got to fill in the gaps for that.

But it starts to uncover other areas of your life that you’ve got to deal with that are not conducive to where you want to go in life.

I’ve got a lot of those things.

I watch too much TV and that’s something that I don’t want to do anymore.

I love doing it, don’t get me wrong.

But, I used to love drinking.

And when you think about things from that time frame, it always brings me back to aspects in my own life when I think about it and say ‘27, 000 days and I’ve probably gone through 15,000 of those.’

It’s diminishing all the time.

So, big time suck you know, alcohol is.

And then you add the internal and psychological stuff to this.

You start losing respect for yourself especially when you realise what you’re doing to yourself.

You come to the conclusion that this is bad for you and you start to doubt your own respect for yourself.

You chip away at that every single time you think about quitting and you don’t, and you know that quitting is the best outcome for you and will deliver you the most gain in your life and you don’t quit.

Self-respect is a big thing.

Respect of others and trust are other things.

Think about the areas in your life that cause you discomfort right now at this moment, and switch your attention to afterwards and where your life is going to be if you do quit drinking.

Where that person, who that person is going to be.

That person is going to be different to who you are right now.

Every cell in your life changes every 7 years, I think.

Physically you’re not the same person as you were 7 years ago.

But mentally, psychologically, you’re definitely going to be a different person when you step across that line and you make that decision to stop drinking.

You push yourself down a different pathway.

Once you refuse to go back to that, you’re not being held back.

If you hold out hope that you will go back to drinking – a lot of people do this, they get to 2 or 3 months down the road, I’ve heard 5 years and they start entertaining the notion that maybe they can moderate now, take a sip, maybe 1 glass of champagne won’t make a difference.

I agree, it’s not about the champagne, it’s about the mentality of the person drinking the champagne.

It’s about you.

If you think in that way that you’re going to allow this poison to come back into your life even if it’s only in that small way, what does that say about you?

Let’s look at what it’s like if you don’t quit drinking.

That discomfort that you feel now is going to be nothing compared to the discomfort that you’ll feel.

You have to quit.

This is something that is going to get worse and worse, this is not something that is going to go away.

This is an increasing discomfort that you’re going to feel.

It’s been said that people who die from alcoholism don’t just die. They’re not 1 minute healthy and the next they’re dead. This is declining health. Decreasing quality of life over years. It doesn’t happen overnight.

So are you willing to put your body through long term horror, misery just because you don’t want to go through a little bit of discomfort now and you want to have that little bit of instant gratification?

Just because you can’t get away from this?

The hospitals are full of people, 85% of the people in hospitals are there because they caused this to themselves, because they couldn’t stop what they were doing to themselves.

All these overweight people, it’s because they’re eating badly, because they’re putting stuff in their mouths one minute after another and they’re willing to keep putting on the pounds or maintaining the weight and putting up with the discomfort that it’s going to cause them.

Same as alcohol, smoking.

I’ve heard of smokers who kid themselves into saying ‘it’s my choice. I’m going to do what I want to do. It’s my life.’

It is your life.

But do you think that little about your life that you’re willing to push yourself through all these?

You have to make these comparisons.

Think about where you are now, all the consequences right now and think about the things that will happen once you carry on down this path.

There is no other way around this.

If you don’t stop drinking, if you carry on down this pathway, where do you expect it to turn out?

Do you hope in the back of your mind that this is never going to happen to you?

It’s just not the way life works.

Forget about thinking about it like the wine you drink every night or the beer or whatever it is that you’re drinking.

Forget it because that’s not what you’re doing.

That’s just the sheep’s pelt over the thing.

Underneath it is the wolf.

This is the thing that’s going to kill you.

This is not like the wolf that will just grab you and kill you.

This is the wine and the beer, just cover for the nastiness underneath.

Think about it like a poison.

Every time you pick up the bottle, this is poison.

Years ago there was a big scare going around, around Halloween.

There was a guy who was putting poison or ground up glass into the sweets that they were giving out.

It was a myth and no one was really doing that, but it made people scared and they kept their children in.

It’s the same thing.

You have to look at the reality.

The wine is not what it’s made out to be on the label.

That’s marketing.

It’s to get you to drink it.

Underneath it all is the poison.

That’s what you have to get this down to.

Are you willing to keep on poisoning yourself and keeping up with the effects of that poison which is diminishing health and self-respect.

These things are going to keep diminishing until who is going to be left?

I keep saying you’re going to change no matter what.

You’re not going to be the same person you were five years ago, five years down the line, but you’ve got the choice.

You can carry on or stop, it’s always up to you.

Addiction is about personal choice.

The alcohol cannot make you addicted, it’s you that makes you addicted because it’s you that has to keep putting it in.

You can help yourself.

It’s your thoughts. Everything is a thought.

You reaching down for that bottle of beer, it’s your choice.

You have to have the intention of doing that.

You have to do it yourself.

No one can force you.

So, what is is you want to do?

Compare the discomfort of actually quitting drinking and what it’s going to take you to go through.

I always say a month or 2 months at most to put up with the discomfort.

By that time, the habit is gone.

The habit is still there, a little, but it’s changed because the habit is embedded in the framework of your life.

Once you change your life, you change your habit.

The memories are still there, and you still might be thinking ‘I want to have a drink’, but it’s not the same thing at all.

2 months and you’re changed, and the discomfort of those 2 months is not consistent.

It goes down, so it’s gradual diminishing.

The other way is gradually increasing if you don’t stop.

So, which is the best option?

The most intelligent option to take?

The gradual diminishing or the gradual increasing option.

Sit down and think about this stuff.

Go through this in your own head.

I can only ever go through it and talk about it from my own personal perspective, and some of it you might get, some you might not.

The only way you’re going to truly understand it is by thinking about it in your own perspective.

Hearing me say it to you now and tomorrow you’d have forgotten about it.

I love when I can see people going through certain things.

That’s why I’m doing this videos every day for a year because you see consistency of me not drinking.

It might help you but it’s difficult.

This is consistency over a year and a half.

Next year I’d love to do something different.

Any ideas about that? I’d love to hear them.

In reality, most people would rather keep doing what they’re doing, putting up with the discomfort of doing what they’re doing instead of the discomfort of getting outside of their comfort zone.

There’s no such thing as fear in the outside world.

It’s all in your head.

You fear the unknown, it’s all thoughts.

control your thoughts at the end of the day.

You control how you think.

You control how you do.

If I show you something, I really like to show people things, that’s why I’m doing this.

I don’t want to go back and show you what it’s like to quit drinking, I’ve already done that.

You can watch my videos from the beginning and you can see week after week.

I wish I’d done daily videos back hen but I didn’t.

But you can see the progress.

Go back and look at my videos from 3 1/2 years ago and look at my videos now and look at the different person that I am.

I couldn’t give a shit about alcohol anymore, except teaching you how easy and simple it is to quit drinking.

It’s not something fucking hard to do.

It’s difficult in the moment because you’re having to go through it in the moment, but the only way you’re going to learn how to do this is to actually go through it.

There’s no other way.

No other possibility.

Regardless of what program you’re going to, you can go to a rehab for a month, you can go for a year, you can go through the magical cure of Dr. Wonderful, but you still have to do it in your head.

Only you can do this.

You have to do this.

I hope I’m making a difference in your mind.

I hope I’m getting through to you every video.

I hope you’re getting something out of these videos.

That’s my hope for doing them.

That’s why I want to do them every day because I think if I’ve got a year’s videos, that you can see my journey in a year and see my thoughts and processes as they’re developing and hopefully one thing gets into your head and moves you towards quitting drinking.

Hopefully at the end of the year, you’ve got all this knowledge in your head that you understand that it’s not the alcohol that’s the problem, it’s you that’s the problem.

It’s your thoughts and behaviours.

Alcohol is just an illusion, a way of you escaping reality.

Once you get that through your head and you start to build on this, then you will never go back to drinking because you’re taking away from yourself then, like chopping your own leg off.

You wouldn’t do that.

You build yourself up to a point where you say ‘this is the new me’.

You’ve got a choice of whether going through to the new you which is doing the same thing as the old you did, which is bringing you down a very horrible, fucking miserable path.

One that is only going to lead you further and further into this alcohol, as a drug addict.

You can choose to stop doing this, to take any drug out of your life and to start building a life for yourself which involves you thinking about things and planning things out and building up new habits that will give you a lot of pleasure.

Long term happiness.

Not just instant gratification.

If you have any comments at all, leave them down below.

Come on over to the website, sign up there, there’s a free course on ways to relax after you’ve stopped drinking.

Just a lot of tongue in cheek thing.

Stay safe.

Keep the alcohol out of your brain.

Keep yourself focused on where you want to go, don’t focus on what’s gone before.

At the end of the day, put up with the discomfort.

WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE QUITTING, THINK ABOUT WHY YOU STARTED.

Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!

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2 Comments

  1. Linda

    Dear Kevin,

    Thank you so much for your posts–they keep me going! I tried AA, but it was a disaster. I’m in the U.S. and some counties in my state (New York) have mandatory AA attendance for those caught driving drunk. I was not one of those people, as I have never been caught driving drunk (although I have done that, of course). I am a professional woman who hides her alcoholism basically by drinking alone. I turned to AA for help, thinking I would find compassion. Instead, I was told I was a “poser” because I hadn’t been forced to go to AA. When I tried to talk about the guilt and shame of being a woman with a good job who was an alcoholic, men in the AA group told me they were never ashamed of their drinking. I finally stopped attending AA meetings because I felt I could not get anything from them. I am so glad I found your website!!!

    Many thanks!

    Reply
  2. John Swisshelm

    One of your best Videos Kevin,its been one month now of no booze,where i’m feeling the best is mentally. I can feel myself everyday feeling stronger, the peace of mind i feel now is so awesome. i really felt i was going to do something awful to myself.
    It was not like that for a long time, it was just that physical discomfort, then it started effecting me mentally, i mean real weird thoughts. I guess Kevin whatever it took to stop,and that is what it took, for it to start fucking with my mind,i was in such deep despair. I don’t care for AA so sometimes i fell it’s me and your videos against the world, i surely can’t tell my drunk friends how i feel.

    God Bless you Kevin and Thank You for your dedication
    John

    Reply

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