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Top 5 Motivational Books for Successful Quitting Drinking Alcohol

by | Stop Drinking Alcohol | 6 comments

How’re you doing? I’m Kevin O’Hara for alcoholmastery.com.

Today, I want to talk about 5 of the most motivational books I’ve read about quitting drinking alcohol.

I’m only going to talk about one book which is specifically designed for quitting drinking alcohol, and you probably know it.

Easy Way to Control Your Alcohol Drinking

 
It’s Easy Way to Control Your Alcohol Drinking by Allen Carr.

I’ve read it a few times.

I haven’t read it in a while but it’s one of the best.

If you’re looking for a book to help you to see the bullshit about alcohol, not just about the advertising and how we view alcohol, but from the perspective of our culture and how we’re brainwashed within our culture to think about alcohol in a specific way, and how the brainwashing starts from a very early age.

He talks about something called the pitcher plant theory on drinking alcohol.

I agree with this one.

He says that anyone that starts drinking alcohol, they’re already in that pitcher plant, in this downward spiral, and it’s just the degree to where they’re in it, to how deep they are, how long they’ve been drinking, how much the behaviour has taken over their lives. So, if you take it from the start of someone’s drinking, they’re obviously closer to the top of the pitcher plant than someone who has been drinking for ten years.

He also talks about not only the poisoning to our physical selves, but he also talks about it from the poisoning of our whole lives because of this one drug.

I’ve talked about this a lot, that you can take alcohol and you can set it up against any other drug that’s out there, and I think you’re better off taking some of the other drugs that are out there.

I don’t take any drugs and I wouldn’t recommend for you to take any drug because of the way it’s going to affect your life, but from this perspective, alcohol is just deadly.

Just because it takes away from our lives in general.

He goes on to talk about the prison of alcohol.

It’s a self-built prison.

He talks about the acquired taste for drinking, and just lots of different aspects of drinking that we take for granted. He doesn’t go into the bullshit.

He breaks apart the bullshit of calling yourself sober, or an alcoholic, or recovery and all those terms people use for drinkers these days.

I’m not sure if he talks about the disease concept, but you get the feel from his book that he doesn’t agree with that.

The second book I want to walk about is one from a guy called Wayne Dyer.

He just passed away a couple of years ago.

Your Erroneous Zones

 
This book is called Your Erroneous Zones.

I talk about that quitting drinking alcohol, the actual getting it out of your system is just the first part, and you have to build, rebuild, recreate yourself in many different aspects of your life once you’ve quit.

In order to stay off, you have to almost rebrand yourself.

The subtitle of the book is: bold but simple techniques of taking charge of your unhealthy behaviour patterns.

Basically, it talks about a lot of stuff like how to get rid of guilt, and how stuff like guilt, fear, anger and worry, self-rejection, living in the past, they have all of these things in the shape of a man; how all these things are just useless emotions that don’t serve you well.

We have emotions like this for a reason.

Fear of rejection goes back to when we were living in the caves.

You’re living with a lot of people and you don’t want to be rejected because if you’re rejected, you’re kicked out of the cave and you’re more likely to get eaten by some wild animal. You don’t want to do that.

But today, we’re surrounded by a lot of different ideas about what the perfect thing is, what the way to be is.

There are so many different views on how you should be as a person, what you should do, how you should conduct yourself, that it’s not such a life or death thing anymore.

It’s something that if you want to be a certain way, you can find many other people who find that same lifestyle.

You don’t have to feel guilty about any of those things.

You don’t have to fear being rejected.

No matter what you think on the other end of the scale, you’re always going to be rejected by some people.

No matter what kind of thoughts you have, or lifestyle you live, there are always going to be people who don’t agree with you.

It’s just a great book for changing your most fundamental thinking.

I think that one book…when you start out this journey, you have certain ways of thinking about alcohol in particular.

You think about alcohol in terms of the way it helps you socialise, the way it will help you sleep, relax.

We all have these reasons to drink.

If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have any problem stopping.

There’s always that one reward that we want to get at the end of the day, always that one consequence that we want to avoid.

But, books like this, especially his early books.

He’s written some fairly good books, then he started going on to Eastern philosophies a bit too deep for my likes.

Some of the stuff is good.

It’s enlightening and makes you think about different things, but I think he went over too far on the spiritual side.

A lot of it in all fairness was based on rational thinking.

Anyway, that’s another book;

Awaken the Giant Within

 

Easily one of the best for finding your true self, your destiny, building the dreams and finding that place where you can fulfil your dreams in life, and one of the best books for that is How To Awaken The Giant Within by Tony Robbins.

I’ve read that so many different times.

It’s one of the best. He did a lot of work on neurolinguistics, years and years ago.

A lot of this stuff is based around that theory.

He said that he read over a thousand books on different aspects of self-help, and he’s brought them into one book.

He talks about self-belief and how to develop it.

A lot what Dyer would say, this guy also says.

You’ll see the same types of themes repeated again and again in different books.

All these guys are all talking about changing your thinking first, in order to change what’s happening on the outside.

That’s what my whole philosophy is based around. What you focus on is what you get.

If you focus on something negative like the AA, then that’s what you get.

You’re always going to be an alcoholic.

If you think along those lines, that’s what you’re going to get. This boos is fairly thick.

There are a lot of different exercises and stuff in here.

He’s one of my top, go-to, how-to people.

He can be a bit over the top when you listen to him, but most of what he says makes perfect sense.

Learned Optimism

 
The next one is called Learned Optimism.

It’s by a guy called Martin Seligman.

This book talks about learned optimism, learned helplessness as well.

This is one of the things I feel about alcohol, that people get into the state where basically they learn to be helpless in the face of alcohol, and they just can’t stop.

It’s any habit, whether a drug, or just something else in life.

You tend to get to a place in your life where you’ve been doing it for so long that you don’t know anything else.

You’ve learned to be helpless in certain situations.

Like anything else in life, learned helplessness can be overcome by learning optimism. Learned helplessness is a form of pessimism.

It’s a form of thinking a certain way about yourself.

It’s focusing on your mind first, and then by changing your mind, you change your life.

The Magic of Thinking Big

 
The final book is The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz.

This has got a very unique place in my heart because it’s one of the first self-help books my father gave to me, one of the first I read.

This guy talks about on a very basic level, how to change your life by changing your thinking.

He goes into a lot of different areas as Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Martin Seligman.

When you change your thinking on that fundamental level, it’s a cornerstone habit that will serve you well no matter what it is you’re trying to change.

Whether you’re trying to get rid of a habit or bring in a new habit, whether you want to change things happening in your work life.

You have to change your mind first.

I only have that on my iPad at the moment.

I had a copy, I lent it out and I never got it back.

I never lend out copies of my books.

Anyway, I thought I’d just give you 5 of the books I go back to time and time again.

The only book I really talk about with quitting drinking would be Allen Carr’s.

There are many other books out there, but they tend to have a lot of confusion amongst the alcohol books.

There is no one definition of a problem drinker, habitual drinker and that kind of stuff.

For me, it’s just grades on the same scale that nobody is born to drink.

No one is born to take drugs and get addicted.

I think some people might have more of a genetic inheritance for getting more addicted to something, but I don’t think it’s specifically any one thing.

A lot of people just have more or less dopamine in their brains.

If you start to rely on anything like that in your life, to think along those lines, then you’re delivering the power outside yourself and into something you can’t control.

So, everything about alcohol mastery, everything I teach, is to pull as much power back to yourself as you can.

Most of the books I read are nothing to do with alcohol.

I love reading about new alcohol studies.

Part of the course I’m doing now in the university, I get access to a big library.

I can download scientific documents, but it’s boring sometimes.

But, sometimes you do get clarity on certain subjects by reading widely. When I’m reading that kind of thing, I read as quickly as I can and skip a lot.

Anyway, that’s 5 of the books I’d recommend for motivation in an area of life, but especially in the context of drinking alcohol.

If you have any question, give us a shout on the website or on YouTube. We also have the Quit Alcohol starter pack.

It has 3 books and 3 videos, and it’s completely free.

Until next time, take care of yourself, and keep the alcohol out of your mouth.

A BOOK IS A GIFT YO CAN OPEN AGAIN AND AGAIN.

Just to let you know, the links above are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy a book through one of these links, Alcohol Mastery will receive a 2% – 3% commission. Thanks

Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!

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6 Comments

  1. Robert Hafer

    Another great one is Think and grow rich by napolean hill and the success through a positive mental attitude by napolean hill where he tells you about the 17 principles of success. Just google nspolean hill and you can get these books for free.
    So for now have a positive day

    Reply
    • Kevin O'Hara

      Two more great books. Anything by Napoleon Hill. And they’re available in audiobook format.

      Reply
  2. Robert Hafer

    Did you look up these books

    Reply
    • Kevin O'Hara

      ? I don’t understand your question.

      Reply
  3. Paul Murray

    Hi Kevin, Love your new direction with Habits Unplugged! One book that is close to my heart right now is Dr. Dean Ornish’s “Love & Survival – 8 Pathways to Intimacy and Health”. He talks about the four pathways to health:

    —What you put in your mouth (nutrition).
    —Moving you body.
    —Stress reduction
    —Group support.

    How many of us get all four? Not many. Please make these part of you new Habits Unplugged program!

    Paul

    Reply
    • Kevin O'Hara

      Thanks Paul. I agree with these pathways. They will each play a big part in the program in varying degrees. Some from day one and others will be gradually phased in over time. Good to hear from you. 🙂

      Reply

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