As you’ve heard me say many times, quitting drinking, at least the stopping drinking part is easy…It’s the long term changing of your thoughts, rituals, behaviours, and ultimately your habits which determines how successful you will be in this venture.
How do you fill the void?
Are you filling the void with alcohol?
Let’s take a look…make a couple of important comparisons…
How do you fill the void after you’ve stopped drinking alcohol? Let’s look at that void for a start.
Most of the time when people drink alcohol they are drinking alcohol to fill a void; but they don’t actually fill it, all it does is creates a deeper, wider and more slippery void than was there in the first place – because you’re replacing life with alcohol.
You are replacing doing things, getting out there and being a part of society and doing all the things that you used to do. Think about the things you did and the dreams you used to have and think about when you were a Kid. When I look at my life now and my life when I was drinking, I realise I was just gradually and consistently moving in one direction. Everything was converging in drinking alcohol.
My social life was going down that avenue. When I wanted to socialise I would drink. When I wanted to relax at home, I wanted to drink. I wanted to drink with meals, when watching the TV, and so many other different areas of my life.
When I wanted to forget something, I wanted to drink, when I wanted to celebrate I wanted to drink, so you’ve got all these areas of your life that start converging on this one basic habit and it’s relying on an outside toxin, a substance that is toxic, for your body, for your life, for your mind.
So, that is creating a void, so when you stop of course you’ve got all these big holes in your life that you’ve got to fill, but that’s your opportunity isn’t it?
Fill those things with what you want, write your own story. As a drinker, your story is being written by the Alcohol Companies. That is what they do. It’s being written by the alcohol Companies, it’s being written by advertisements, pubs, alcohol stores – all these other people are writing how you’re going to live your life.
You’re going to celebrate only with alcohol, with champagne maybe, pop a cork of champagne and that’s the only way you can do it.
When the first Grand Prix race that was held in Bahrain was happening, they weren’t allowed to pop champagne but used a fizzy drink instead, because Bahrain is an alcohol-free Country and I remember thinking “Oh that’s shit you know, if they can’t drink alcohol, what’s the point of champagne without alcohol?”
I’ve never liked champagne but I was defending it. I was defending alcohol, I was defending my own right to drink alcohol, by putting it off onto this podium celebration.
You know when you’re faced with the question of what to do with your time once the alcohol is gone and everybody who quits drinking will be faced with this – you wonder what do you do with your time and with all these things that are left outside of drinking alcohol?
Just understand one thing – you’re not going to fill these holes in day one.
You’re not going to fill them in the first month. You might not even fill them in the first year. I’m four years into this and I’ve still got many different areas of my life that I want to tweak or to do something different with and that’s the way life is. That’s the way that life should be, how you should go through life, just as a normal day to day human being.
When you go through life and you do certain things which you then either outgrow or become bored of, you change track and to do something different – it doesn’t cause a massive void that you have to fill.
Voids that you need to fill may be – finding relaxation, sleep, your relationship; perhaps there will be a massive void in your socialisation or how you respond to celebrations.
So, you have all these voids and there’s no other time in life when we have these, except maybe when you are trying to quit smoking or you’re trying to quit some other large thing in your life.
Maybe you’re a sports person, you’re exercising all the time and then something happens that means you can’t exercise ever again. That causes a big void.
So, these are massive things and from the perspective of quitting drinking, it’s only a small thing – you just don’t put the alcohol in your mouth – that’s how you quit drinking, but to fill the voids, that takes a lot of work.
It’s not going to happen straight away, it’s a step by step process. It’s like everything else, you take one step at a time, you get rid of the alcohol and you start filling in the voids that you need to fill, on a day by day basis.
So, you start filling in what you do when you come home from work, that’s one of the first ones that you may have. Another that you’ve got to try and fill is – What are you going to do at the end of the day when you’re trying to sleep?
So, you start with these things. You are not going to be able to fill this void all of a sudden with something else and you won’t start to feel more comfortable, from day one. You’ll start to be more comfortable on day thirty, definitely on day sixty and on day one hundred.
You will have come home from work or you’ve gone to bed, 360 times. So, you’ve created another habit on a daily basis, going forwards, and you’ve also enforced that habit on a daily basis and it’s getting stronger.
Other things such as celebrations and socialisations happen on a less consistent time frame, so you’ve got to do these things a lot more, over a lot longer period of time in order for them to become as concrete as your daily habits.
So just understand that when you fill in these habits, they are voids that are already there anyway. Drinking alcohol doesn’t fill anything but it does is make you think that there’s isn’t a void there; it fools your mind into thinking that there wasn’t a void there in the first place.
All of these voids are created by the Alcohol Companies and their Marketing. At the end of the day it boils down to what is going on up here in your mind. If you don’t listen to any of this shit it can’t affect you.
The only way you are going to fill these voids is not with alcohol but by stopping drinking the alcohol and filling the voids one by one, bit by bit, as you go forwards.
It’s just life but it’s a great life, it’s a fucking great life, it’s a great life you know, push yourself forwards. Push and push and push and push and put up with the discomfort.
Take the days that are good, take those as blessings;
Take the moods when they are good and take them as blessings;
Take the moods that are bad and the discomforts that are bad and just take those as things that you have to go through in order to move yourself forward towards the place where you want to be.
That’s it for today it you want to sign up for a newsletter, go over to the website, there’s a sign up form on the home page, Click Here (https://www.alcoholmastery.com) and you can get a free video every day into your inbox, there’s a huge heap of stuff over there that will help you to quit drinking alcohol and to just change your mindset.
The whole point of alcohol mastery, it’s to try and change your mindset away from thinking about drinking and thinking of it as something beneficial in your life, to thinking that’s it’s something shit and the only beneficial things in your life are the things that you want, the goals that you want to achieve in your life, a happy life.
If you want to contribute to alcohol mastery you can become a patron of alcohol mastery for a couple of dollars a month or as little or as much as you want. Everything is very much appreciated and can be contributed by going on over to http://www.patreon.com/AlcoholMastery.
Stay safe keep the alcohol out of your mouth and keep filling those voids. Good luck, take care, onwards and upwards.
“We drink to one another’s health, whilst damaging our own”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
Would like to stop drinking .
Sick of drinking and would like to stop ?
I have stopped drinking for 3 weeks now. Finding new positive things to fill the void and get my life back, become part on society, get back to work and move house will take time and hard work. I’m scared of an unknown future. Its like being reborn and and relearning not knowing have to conduct myself as a normal sober human being.