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When You Start Quitting Drinking You Are off the Map

by | Stop Drinking Alcohol | 1 comment

Today I want to talk about, concept that is – when you stop drinking alcohol your whole life goes off the map for a while – it goes off the grid.

And what I mean by that is, when you look at a map of your local area, you can sort of pinpoint the areas that you know. You can say, yes, this is, I know this, you know, just your local area, you know, nothing too mad. You can pinpoint where you are. You know, where you, if you want to get to a certain point, you know where to go, how to get there, which roads to take and stuff like that.

It’s the same with your life. You know habits are that way, it’s automatic, I go here, I start here, this is what I do. If I want to do this, then this comes first – and this all happens underneath the radar – so you don’t have to, there’s no, not a load of energy put into thinking about these things, right?

But when you stop drinking alcohol, there is so much of this new life, there’s so much of life is going to be new to you, because, alcohol permeates so much of your life. Alcohol is a part, becomes a part, of so many different aspects of your life.

But this is your opportunity, your chance, to rewrite your own map. To become a cartography in your own life. To sort of say, well, what do you want to see, in your own life, you know. You’ve got no alcohol holding you back any more. You don’t have this, fucking monkey on your back, where every time you try and take one turn, it’s steering you in the opposite direction, you know.

You don’t have that any more. So, you don’t have this toxin in your brain that’s fogging every thought and stopping you from achieving your best because, you know, your brain waves are being highjacked by the alcohol.

You know how many people in life get that opportunity to absolutely – not only to rewrite some of their life – but to totally and utterly rebuild certain aspects and structures in your life. The fundamental things, you know, the fundamental thoughts that drive you – your beliefs. Your belief systems that bring you from one part of your life to another and basically rule your life.

You get to, totally rip them apart, you know, take them out, pair them up and rewrite them and re-build and re-structure, your whole life. Not many people get that opportunity and I think that’s one of the craziest but the most marvellous parts of quitting alcohol.

As I say without all that influence, without that monkey on your back anymore, you get the opportunity to direct your life in the direction that you want to go, instead of this automatic thing, because everyone else is doing it, you’re doing it and because you’ve done it for so long, this is what you do. This is what you are. This is who you are as a person – it’s bullshit. You know, you re-write that. Re-write your map.

This was one of the best parts for me, completely being able to say to myself – well. You know in the beginning it’s difficult, right? I’m not doubting that. You just don’t know where you are. You feel like you’re lost, you feel like somebody has just taken a big fucking tin of paint and scribbled over massive parts of your map, so you just, you feel like, you’re in territory that you don’t know, you know. But you gradually get used to that.

You gradually start to – your brain adapts to it very quickly. Your brain adapts to the new way of living, to your new way of living and, before you know it, you’re sort of, one thought leads to another, which leads to another and you start to think of different ways that you can do things.

You start to build these new neuro-connections, both mentally, you know in your brain and you know metaphorically speaking out in the world.

You know, it’s like I was saying to my Son. He’s having a baby soon and he’s nervous about the whole thing. And I was talking to him about it recently and I was just saying – “Look, you know, once the baby is born, this whole thing will start to come naturally to you.”

It will feel really weird at the beginning, you know, you start of and you’ve sort of got this little bundle and it needs to, and it’s shitting and pissing everywhere and it needs to be fed and it’s crying and you don’t know!” But eventually you’ll know. You’ll know these things, you’ll recognise the cry, you’ll recognise why it’s crying, what it needs, and you’ll eventually be able to do all these things, you know.

And nobody is going to tell you these things, because each child is different and each situation is different. So, you’ll learn these things as you go along. And one, building block adds to another building block.

One thought builds to another one, you know. So, by the time, I mean, any Parent knows that once their child, gets to the teenage years, they sort of can read them like a book. They know, what they’re going to say before they say it, they can tell when they’re lying, they can tell all these different things about their children.

And they know them inside out, maybe when they get to the teenage years, then things start to change, the hormones kick in and the children start to become different people, once they get out and they mix around with their peers, and they start to behave more like their peers, then you start to lose them a little bit, but you’ll always know that to a certain degree. Because you know those fundamental things about them.

What I’m saying is, when I first started out on this journey, it was one of the best things for me, to be able to redefine who I was and what I did and redefine myself as that, core, that core person that I am inside.

And I didn’t know this in the beginning. For the first two or three months, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know that I was redefining myself, you know. I just wanted to know, I knew that I wanted to be a different person than I was. I knew that I wanted to do different things.

And when you do the same thing over and over again, all your life, it’s very difficult to know what those certain things are, but, it comes to you very easily after a time and it just comes, bit by bit, by bit.

And you have to take it gradually and you have to take it, bit by bit, by bit. You just, there’s no other way of doing this, you know.
So, you know, it’s in order to re-write a map, if you were going to do this physically on the Street, you would have to take each road as it comes.

You know, when you look at google maps for instance right, they don’t just do that by taking a satellite, you know when they do the roads and all this kind of stuff. I mean you can take satellite pictures, but when they do the roads and you can get down to the road level.

And we’re recently moving to a new house now and it was amazing, I was able to go down and look around the streets and actually walk the streets and figure out a route to where I was going to walk in the mornings and stuff like that.

And we went down there recently to – we haven’t picked up the keys yet – but we went down recently just to scope out the area and it was like I knew the place. I’d seen it on google maps and it’s just such a fantastic tool, you know, to use and but that map is laid out by a car going around, with a camera on the top of it, a special camera and it’s like, it can see 360 or whatever it is but, it has to go through each road in order to map it out.

And that’s exactly what you have to do. In order to build that map up, on google maps, it’s got to drive down this road, that road, drive down every road that it wants to be, that it wants to feature on the Google Maps. And that is basically what you have to do, you have to sort off, map out your new life, bit by bit, by bit, by doing it.

You know, you can think about it all you want, you can go through it all you want in your own head, but it’s actually by doing it and participating in your own life and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, on so many different levels, that you build up your own map.

And you, you know, one piece falls in front of the other and you build and build out and build out and build out and you know, four years later for me and I’ve got a life which is completely unrecognisable to what I had before and I could never have, sort of , seen where I would be.

I mean physically I’m in the same place, as I was when I quit drinking. You know, I’m in the sound ground, I was walking these places before I stopped but not to this level. You know, I’ve just done so much, I’ve done so many different things but mostly, it’s up here you know. It’s the way my brain has changed, it’s not fogged any more by the alcohol.

It’s not being abused any more. My body’s not being abused any more. You have to look at this like the opportunity that it is. This is one of the best opportunities that you’re going to get for personal growth, for change for the better that you’re ever going to get in your life. So, seize it with both hands you know, take it on, use it as the opportunity to change for the good.

If you think about this in a pessimistic way that, you know, it’s going to be hard for you to achieve these things, then it’s going to be a lot harder for you to know. You know, you are what you focus on. You have to focus, if you focus on the positives all the time and look for the positive, look for the solution instead of the problem, you know. Don’t all the time look for the problems in your life, you know.

A good friend of mine from years ago, I don’t know where he is now, but he was such a negative person. Every time you suggested something to him, he’d look for the problem in it, you know, and say – “Well, I can’t’ do it because of that.” – you know, or this is going to happen.

If you look at life, like that, you’re all the time going to get more problems. One problem, breeds another. There is always a problem, there’s always a problem that you can find with anything.

The trick is to look for the solutions and focus your mind on building a new path you know and saying – “If I’ve come to a road block, how am I going to get past that?” Or you know waiting until the road block appears and then figuring out how to get past it.

Anyway, I’m going to finish up there and carry on with my walk. If you have any questions, at all about this, if you have any suggestions for videos by the way, leave them down in the comments below. I’d love to hear them.

Come on over to the website and sign up for the newsletter, it’s absolutely free. There’s, you get a free course there as well, on relaxation and destressing. I think that’s an important part of quitting drinking alcohol is to feel de-stressed and to try to keep your levels as optimism as high as you possibly can.

So, there’s a free course there, and I think its eighty odd videos. There just very simple stuff, right, it’s probably stuff that you know, but it’s just in a, maybe it will spark your mind to figuring out stuff that you can do yourself, you know, in your own life.

Maybe it’s not always about trying to fix something that’s broken. Maybe it’s about starting over and building something better”

Take Care of Yourself
Keep the Alcohol out of your Mouth
Until next time…
Good Luck!
Onwards and Upwards!

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1 Comment

  1. Mick

    A great video, often your video rather uncannily is exactly what I need to hear to help me press forward confidently in my new adventure.

    I don’t keep tabs on my none drinking days anymore, but if out of curiosity I want to check when I started this journey I have the date in my events on my phone, 153 days or nearly 22 weeks or 5.5 months ago. Not long, but I am very proud how much I have changed in that short time. The real interesting thing is if I could plot the changes and improvements on a graph it would look like a hockey stick, the positive changes and benefits exponentially increasing as I move forward. Ive lost best part of 3 stone, Ive ran a half marathon. Ive almost organized myself ha ha almost. But the biggest changes come in February because thats when my plan and organizing kick in big time. My old life will be gone in that my work life balance is going to change beyond recognition. This is not about doing less, its about doing more. But more of the things I like doing. None of this would have happened without stopping drinking, I just wouldn’t have had the get up and go to make it happen. Your videos have played a big part in getting me here and I will always be very grateful, I am sure you know this but your doing a great job. Thanks.

    An idea for a video comes from an audio book Ive been listening to about luck. called The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman, in it he explains the components that lucky people have. Explaining how you can scientifically improve your own luck, not happy clappy shit ha ha. Luck does play a massive part in your life eg how you met your wife, how you found your house, how you met influential people in your life, how you got into a particular trade, how I found your videos etc etc. But luck is not entirely a random thing, what makes some people luckier than others?

    Your take on that would be interesting, you have probably been intuitively making your own luck since you stopped drinking!!

    Reply

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