You might say to yourself, “Life is hard”.
Life IS hard. There is no doubt about that.
Sometimes we get easy runs. Sometimes life gets a lot more difficult and complicated. But this is the same situation if you drink or if you don’t drink.
Ask yourself, what is the difference in the outcome?…
You might be able to hide from the toughness of life at the bottom of a bottle for a short period of time. But when you surface again, life has just got that little bit tougher.
On the other hand…
Take a look at the video 🙂
Today I wanted to do a quick video for people who are saying that quitting drinking is difficult. I just wanted to put things in a little bit of perspective for you and to ask – What are you comparing it with?
What is the reason why you’ve got to this stage in your life where you want to quit drinking? Why are you doing this? What are the reasons behind it? Are they:
Health reasons
Money reasons
Relationship reasons
…. whatever they may be. You have to look at what your life is like as a drinker.
All that money that you are spending on alcohol; all the time that you spend in using alcohol; all the physical and mental pain of going through the consequences of drinking alcohol, whether that’s in relationships in your life, in general, whether it’s just in the mad hangovers that you are getting that are lasting a long time.
You’ve got to look at your life – before you stop drinking– and after you stop drinking.
Take those two things, make the comparisons and ask yourself – “Which is the most difficult when looked at afterwards?”
You may hear someone say that life is hard – life is hard, life is hard in general. Life is difficult whether you quit drinking or not. Life is going to be difficult.
When you stop drinking a lot of the things that you used to hide from are going to have to be faced and that is where a lot of the difficulties lie, but when someone says life is difficult – what are they comparing it to?
There is only one thing that you can compare in this case and that is life and death. Life is difficult in comparison to death; death is easy because all you do is, well you don’t exist anymore!
But on the perspective of drinking before and drinking after, look at what is happening now to make you want to stop drinking and look at the discomfort that you are going to have to go through.
There is going to be a certain amount of change, discomfort, pain if you like, in stopping drinking or changing any habit – It is an inevitable part of it and something that you are going to have to go through.
The difference is that the pain of stopping drinking is going to gradually diminish, the discomfort is going to diminish and the difficulty of it is going to diminish.
When you not fucking yourself and your mind up with alcohol any more, then you are going to have more time, more energy, more brain power and more money to put into these areas of your life that need help. The problem areas of your life that you have been avoiding. You are going to have more of these things to put into the things that are going to lift you upwards and so life in general is going to get easier.
The difficulty of quitting drinking is going to get less and live in general.
On the opposite end of this equation if you don’t quit drinking the consequence are doing to get much more difficult, they are going to rise, this is where the consequences are going to go in an upward slope; consequences to your health, finances, relationships, the way you conduct yourself in your life, the way you think about yourself as a person, that is all going to continuously get much difficult.
Life is going to get more difficult if you continue drinking.
So make the comparisons not just now, in this moment when you are feeling the discomfort and you think to yourself, “I’ve got discomfort now in this moment, I know that if I have a drink it’s going to ease the discomfort.” Forget about that – that’s momentary and that is going to pass.
Think about what is going to happen in a months’ time, either you would have persevered in that month and you stopped drinking. You would have 30 days where you are going to have much less anxiety about it, less problems, discomfort, your life is going to be improved by a certain amount, no matter how much, but it will have improved in general. Or you didn’t stop drinking and your life will be a little bit worse than it was. You may not notice it, it might not be palpable and you may not be able to put your finger on it and say well “It’s this much worse” but it will be worse.
Look at it in five years’ time, that’s when you really start to see the big consequences of it, so just think about it from that perspective from the before and after, compare drinking to not drinking and make those comparisons, not just in that moment in time, but consider going forward a month, a year, five years and you will see some massive comparisons.
You will see where your life could have been if you stopped drinking or if you carried on drinking, that’s the way I look at my life. Four years and whatever months into this journey, I see my life and look at it and think “What would I be doing now if I hadn’t had stopped drinking?“
Maybe I wouldn’t have been here on this planet. I often thought about that during the night when I was coming out of the alcohol fug and my body and brain were feeling the consequences, the anaesthetic had worn off and I was feeling shit and sometimes I thought I was going to drop dead there and then in my sleep, because my heart was pounding that much and I felt that bad about myself.
So add another four years onto that? I don’t know where I’d be, I don’t know if I would be! Just think about that, it’s a hard lesson but you have to think about it and put yourself in that position.
Only you can do this for yourself, only I could do it for myself.
Don’t compare the momentary discomfort that you are going to feel now through quitting drinking, which is going to diminish, with the increasing levels of pain and agony you are going to go through if you don’t stop.
“To achieve your long term vision you must be willing to tolerate discomfort and delay gratification in the short term”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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