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• Drink plenty of water to flush out all the toxins in your system. The more you drink clean, pure water, the faster your body can cleanse itself.
• Get lots of sleep. Your body repairs itself when you’re asleep, so give it all the time it needs. If you’re worried you won’t be able to sleep without drinking, we’ll cover that later in the book.
• Get some exercise. You’ll feel better when you get your blood moving. And I’ve found vigorous exercise to be a great way to overcome both cravings and irritability.
• Eat healthy foods, especially protein. Your body needs protein to make amino acids, which help elevate your mood.
• Start a journal. You’re going to want to “talk” through what you learn in this book, and a journal is a great place to record your thoughts privately. You can use an app on your phone, make a video diary, or use good old-fashioned pen and paper. If you sign up at alcoholexperiment.com, you’ll get a private daily digital journal. It’s a great way to keep track of your amazing progress.
• Take a photo and weigh yourself. You might be surprised at the differences you see in your physical appearance after 30 days without alcohol.
• Stay social. Now is not the time to isolate yourself or lock yourself away from your friends and family. You need your social life. You need your friends. You might be nervous about going out to places where you regularly drink. But this is an experiment. You have to get out there and try it. You are experimenting with how your real life will be without alcohol. As you go along, you will be amazed to realize you don’t need alcohol to socialize or have a good time. You only thought you did. Think back to when you were a child or in high school—did you need alcohol then? Weren’t you having the most fun? And what’s the worst that can happen? You go out to happy hour, you order a refreshing glass of iced tea, and you have a miserable time. So what? It’s just one evening, and it’s all part of the experiment. That is great data. You can examine exactly why you had a miserable time and whether the lack of alcohol is truly the reason. I bet you will surprise yourself by having an amazing time.
• Be positive! Many people tell me their biggest fear is they don’t think they can do it. They aren’t sure they’re strong enough to make it 30 days. Don’t kick off this experiment by feeling sorry for yourself. You have so much to look forward to. Sure, the cleansing process takes a little while and it’s not entirely pleasant, but you are strong and you can handle it. The same people who thought they couldn’t do it write to me after a week or two to say they can’t believe the difference in themselves. They now know they are stronger than they thought.
• Join this book’s online social challenge at alcoholexperiment.com. There you can do this experiment with thousands of like-minded people from all over the globe. You will get amazing community support, plus daily video resources and a private online journal to document your progress. There are even Alcohol Experiment mentors there who’ve already gone through this process and who are committed to helping you make it all the way to the end. (For a reader’s discount, please visit alcoholexperiment.com/reader) Throughout this book, you’ll find stories and observations from actual community members. The comments are real, though the names have been changed.
This is a 30-day experiment, right? So I just want you to read the short lesson for each day. Try to read it in the morning, if you can, and put the recommendations into practice during the day. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself having epiphanies in the shower or shouting, “Holy cow!” while you’re driving. Once your mind starts mulling over some of these ideas, there’s no telling where your thoughts can go.
As with almost everything in life, your perspective can determine your outcome. So instead of thinking about giving something up, think about what you’re going to gain: self-respect, more money in your wallet, a better relationship with your spouse and your kids, better health, better working relationships, a leaner body, and more.
This is exciting! You are embarking on an amazing journey. And don’t worry—it’s only 30 days. You can do anything for 30 days.
Are you ready?
Let’s go!
DAY 1
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What’s Your Why? (#ulink_92870809-9af2-5441-b65a-ad277b8108c7)
The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to blame. The gift is yours—it is an amazing journey—and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.
—BOB MOAWAD
We’ve talked about how you’ve been unconsciously conditioned to believe alcohol is a vital part of life for relaxing, socializing, and everything in between. And you know there are competing desires inside your mind. Your conscious mind wants to drink less, or even stop drinking completely. And your subconscious mind believes you need to keep drinking for some very good reasons. Before we dive into those beliefs and stories and deciding if they’re true, we need to know what those beliefs actually are. After reading literally thousands of stories from people who’ve gone through this process, I’m pretty sure I know what your beliefs are. But that’s not important. What’s important is that YOU know what they are. So let’s start this experiment by writing a list.
WHY DO YOU DRINK?
Write down a list of every reason you drink. There’s no judgment here. We simply want a list.
To get you going, here’s a look at part of my list. You might have some of the same reasons.
• Work is stressful and drinking helps me relax after a long day.
• Drinking helps me be more creative on the job.
• Drinking helps me be more outgoing at networking events.
• Drinking is important to my social relationships.
• I love the taste of wine.
Don’t stop with a few reasons; keep going until you can’t think of any more. You might come up with 50 or 100 reasons, and that’s fine.
You’ve brought your subconscious beliefs up to the surface of your mind. Now we can shine a light on them, examine them, and you can decide for yourself whether those beliefs are true. And you can make that decision based on the facts, not social conditioning from the media and your peers. Don’t do anything with this list right now. Don’t try to change your mind. At the moment, these are your beliefs, and they’re currently true in your life. As I present you different ideas over the next 30 days, you may think about this list differently.
WHY THE ALCOHOL EXPERIMENT?
Okay, next I want you to pull out another piece of paper and make a second list. Write down all the reasons you want to take part in this experiment. WHY do you think you might want to drink less? Here’s a peek at my list:
• I’m tired of waking up slightly hungover.
• I no longer want to worry that I said something stupid the night before.
• I am sick of the internal dialogue about my drinking—I am tired of thinking about drinking.
• I saw a photo of myself out with friends and my teeth looked purplish from wine—it was disgusting.
• I look back on certain days and my memories are so fuzzy. I am afraid I am missing my life because I can’t clearly remember it all.
TODAY, read over both your lists and notice how they are in conflict with each other. This is the whole source of your cognitive dissonance. It’s the battle going in your mind all the time, written in your own words. Over the coming weeks, it might help you to picture these lists on either side of a seesaw or a balance. Right now, the first list might be longer than the second one. In a few weeks, check back in to see if the balance has shifted at all.
Day 1 Reflections from alcoholexperiment.com
“I am sick of alcohol damaging my life in so many ways, including making an idiot of myself, hangovers, feeling violently ill, wasted time and opportunity, horrendous fights with my husband, putting a strain on my marriage, weight gain, no exercise, loosened stomach, way too big an appetite, anxiety, smoking, money, no time.”
—JULIANNA
“Today is the first day of the rest of my life.”
—BRIAN
“Hey guys. Day 1 here. Interested to see if my list of reasons why I drink was smaller than my list of reasons why I am here. I am taking that as a sign that I have more reason to stop than to continue drinking. I have more to gain from being AF [Alcohol Free]. I feel quite motivated by that.”
—ROMERO
“I decided that my life is my own and I am ready to live it the way I want to, and that doesn’t include alcohol.”
—LIZA
ACT #1 (#ulink_5acdb886-c7ee-56ef-8537-d66588e19fbd)
The Taste of Alcohol (#ulink_5acdb886-c7ee-56ef-8537-d66588e19fbd)
NOTE: The idea of the ACT Technique—Awareness, Clarity, Turnaround—is to give you an alternate perspective. It is an exercise to help you resolve your or internal disagreement around alcohol. First, we’ll become aware by naming a belief you have about drinking. Then we’ll gain clarity around that belief, looking at where it came from and how you may have picked it up without even knowing it. We’ll also look at the internal and external evidence that supports that belief (or doesn’t). Finally, we’ll decide if the belief holds true through a turnaround. We will look at the opposite of the belief, and decide if the opposite is as true as or truer than the original belief. When this process is complete, you get to decide if you still believe this and, more important, if that belief is serving you or if your life would be better by simply letting it go. No matter what you decide, you will gain a new perspective. The whole idea is to play detective and look at the evidence and form an objective opinion.
What’s your all-time favorite drink? The one you can’t wait to get your hands on at the end of a long day or on Friday night? I bet if you think about it hard enough, you can even taste it right now. Taste is an innocent reason for drinking. After all, no one thinks twice about eating ice cream or nachos. They taste good! And our favorite alcoholic beverages are the same way. But for the sake of this experiment, let’s dig a little deeper.
AWARENESS
Many people tell me they really like the taste of their favorite drink. I get it. I was a red wine girl all the way. Maybe you’re a margarita lover. Or maybe you enjoy the taste of a good scotch on the rocks. Let’s name this belief:
“I drink for the taste.”
I know a woman who drinks a shot of Baileys in her coffee every morning before she drives her child to school. She doesn’t think it’s a big deal. It’s just a shot, and nothing else makes her coffee taste as good. Her concerned husband tried to get her to try Baileys-flavored coffee creamer, but she insists it doesn’t taste the same. But if you think about it, she’s not actually tasting a lot of alcohol—it’s mostly the flavorings, cream and sugar. So what do you think? Is she truly enjoying Baileys for only the taste? Or is there something else going on?
CLARITY
In order to gain clarity around your beliefs, you need to look back at the past and figure out why you have this belief in the first place. Where did it come from? There are no right or wrong answers here, and everyone is different. So ask yourself, what observations and experiences have you had in your past that might have made you believe alcohol tastes good? Maybe it’s something as simple as watching your parents pour themselves a drink at the end of the day. Or observing how they drank glass after glass in the evening. Why in the world would they drink it all the time if it tasted so bad? They’re smart, right? They’re grown-ups. So it must taste good, or they wouldn’t keep drinking it.
I have a friend from France whose parents made sure she drank a little wine with dinner from the time she was eight years old. She hated how it tasted, and told her parents so frequently. But they continued to press on, saying she would appreciate the taste when she got older. The implication was that when she became more mature and grown-up, she would enjoy the taste of wine. We all want to appear more grown up when we’re kids, don’t we? Sure enough, over time my friend became a great wine lover and now drinks it every night.
Think back to your first drink and remember the experience. What were you drinking? Maybe it was wine at dinner when you were young. Maybe it was champagne on New Year’s Eve when you were allowed to stay up until midnight for the first time. Maybe you snuck into your parents’ liquor cabinet with a friend on a dare. Or maybe it wasn’t until much later—maybe your first beer was in college. Regardless of when it was, think back to your first sip. Did you actually like it? Or did you choke and sputter, maybe even spit it out?
Who was with you at the time? Was it a friend you wanted to impress? Was it a parent you wanted to make proud? Were you trying to find a place to fit in with a new group of people? If you’re like the vast majority of people I talk to, your first experience tasting alcohol was not pleasant. You didn’t like it. But someone was there to say, “Don’t worry, it’s an acquired taste. You’ll get used to it.”
So take a few minutes to write down where your taste for alcohol came from. What was it like the first time you tried a new beer or hard liquor? Was it always an amazing taste you immediately loved? Did you acquire the taste over time? Or did you fake liking it because you wanted to impress someone?
Now that you have an idea where your beliefs came from, let’s play detective and look at the internal and external evidence. This evidence will help you decide whether your belief that you like the taste of alcohol is true or whether you have been fooling yourself.
People have some pretty intense reactions when they taste alcohol for the first time. They talk about it burning on the way down. They wrinkle up their nose because it doesn’t even smell good. Their eyes start watering. They might even spit it out. Why? One of the major reasons we don’t like the taste of something is because it’s harmful to us. We don’t like the taste of rotten food because it can make us sick. Well, what’s going on when you have a hangover? You’re sick! Our taste buds react negatively to alcohol to protect us from a harmful substance.
Let’s think about the idea of acquiring a taste for something. Whatever your drink of choice is, you probably didn’t like it immediately. But your body allowed you to get used to it. Why? Because your brain assumes you have no choice in the matter. If you did, it would make no sense for you to keep drinking. So your body does the logical thing—it makes it easier for you to deal with the taste. You acquire it. Which, if you think about it, is the same thing as becoming immune to alcohol.
Let’s look at it another way: My brother has a goat farm, and whenever I walk into the barn, there’s an intense, unpleasant odor. As my sister-in-law says, it smells “very goaty.” But guess what? My brother and his family don’t even notice the smell anymore. Because they’ve gotten used to it. They have to go into the barn to feed the goats, so their brains no longer register the odor. That doesn’t mean they like it. But they have, over time, gotten used to it.
If you did happen to love the taste of your first drink, it was probably something fruity or creamy that was more sugar than anything else. Am I right? Some drinks go down more easily than others. Straight alcohol is ethanol. The same stuff you put in your gas tank! A few sips will make you vomit and a few ounces of pure ethanol will kill you. I think it’s safe to say you would never go suck on the end of a gas pump nozzle because it tastes good! No matter what your favorite drink is, the alcohol makes up only a small percentage of the liquid. The rest is flavorings, sugar, carbohydrates, and other additives.
Now of course there are things we appreciate as adults that we did not appreciate as children. We clearly grow a more refined palate as we age, but let’s not kid ourselves: If we were purely drinking for the taste, we could certainly find other substitutes that are similar and wouldn’t cause any of the side effects alcohol causes. I am intolerant to gluten and I’ve managed to find plenty of substitutes that aren’t exactly the same but are now a natural part of my life and don’t create the stomach pain gluten does. The fact is ethanol doesn’t taste good. Consider this: When scientists want rats or mice to drink alcohol for a study, they have to force-feed them because they will not naturally opt to drink it.
So are you honestly drinking it for the taste?
If not, then why are you drinking it?
You’ve almost certainly observed characters in the movies and on TV enjoying the taste of alcohol, or giving a satisfying burp and a smile after chugging a beer. Even if the actors are actually drinking whiskey-colored tea, the message still gets across—it tastes good. We all tend to choose our alcohol to match our identities. If we’re refined and classy, maybe we drink red wine. Or if we like old cowboy movies, maybe we lean toward whiskey. Of course, if you’re an international spy, you’ve got to order a martini—shaken, not stirred. We identify with the characters and tend to like the same drinks they like. I used to love chugging Guinness and was so proud of my chugging ability. It made me feel tough and like “one of the boys” in that masculine work environment.
Maybe you see yourself as a discerning wine lover, and your cellar has become a status symbol. If that’s the case, you probably pride yourself on your ability to discern the toasty-smoky-oaky flavors with their fruity or floral overtones. Or whatever. Here’s a fun fact—the American Association of Wine Economists conducted a study of more than 6,000 wine drinkers. In this blind taste test, they discovered that people cannot tell the difference between cheap wine and expensive wine. In fact, most people preferred the taste of the cheaper varieties. And you know what else? The same blind research later found that people can’t tell the difference between pâté and dog food!
So what about the argument, “alcohol enhances the taste of my food”? Do we say that about any other beverage-and-food combination? People say milk enhances the taste of cookies, but could that be because we physically dip cookies into milk? No one dips their steak into their wineglass. The truth is, alcohol is actually an anesthetic. It numbs our ability to taste, making it more difficult to savor our food.
Imagine we could remove all the physical and emotional effects of alcohol. If it couldn’t actually make you drunk, would people still drink it? There’s a body of pretty convincing research suggesting they wouldn’t. It tastes bad. It’s poisonous. Drinking for the taste is a convenient, innocent excuse. At the end of the day, is it a possibility that there’s something more going on with your drinking than just the taste? Humans are incredibly adept at lying to themselves and believing their own stories. It’s possible that you actually do love the taste of a cool, frosty margarita. But is it really the alcohol you like? You may not have tried a delicious virgin margarita, but the truth is, they taste as good, maybe even better! And you’ll be surprised and empowered by how much you enjoy yourself without the tequila—or the hangover.
TURNAROUND
This may be the most important part of the ACT Technique. Here you want to dig into the turnaround, or the opposite of the belief. You’ll want to take the time to come up with as many ways as you can (at least three) that the turnaround is as true or truer than the original belief. In this case, the opposite of “I drink for the taste” is “I don’t drink for the taste” or maybe even “I don’t like the taste.” Now it’s your turn to come up with as many ways as you can that the turnaround is true in your life.
DAY 2
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It’s Not What You Give Up, But What You GAIN (#ulink_dbbde1fe-b97b-5263-88d2-daa1ce3aa076)
One reason people resist change is because they focus on what they have to give up, instead of what they have to gain.
—RICK GODWIN
As a participant in this experiment, you’re obviously giving something up. You’re giving up alcohol for 30 days. But there are two ways to look at it. You could focus on how hard it’s going to be and all the things you’re going to have to give up and go without. Or you could think about all the amazing insights and experiences you’re going to gain as a result of the experiment.
We all undoubtedly control our destinies through our expectations. In other words, we get what we expect. If we expect this experiment to be miserable, then that is what we’re going to get. And so to make this a more pleasant experience, we have to change our thinking. We have to expect to go into this and experience 30 days of amazing epiphanies, better health, higher energy levels, and systematic shifts in our thinking. How do we do it? We decide to focus on the positive. It’s that simple. You might feel weird at first focusing on all the good things that are going to happen, especially if you’re skeptical that they will happen. But when you shift your thinking to what you will gain, the good things will come. They truly will.
BENEFITS
For me, I lost 13 pounds in the first 30 days. My marriage has never been better, and I’ve finally started doing all the things I’d wanted to do for years and years. Things alcohol kept me from doing, such as starting a business, writing a book, creating a mindfulness practice, and building a strong family life. I’ve become much happier socially because I’m never worried about what I said the night before. I’ve become much more successful. I think I look significantly better—my eyes are clearer, my hair is thicker. But these are my stories. What about other people who’ve gone through the 30-day experiment? What have they gained? Here’s a short list from other Alcohol Experiment participants:
• Clearheaded mornings
• Better health
• Less anxiety
• True relaxation
• Better relationships
• Self-love
• Happier family life
• Freedom to fully participate in life
PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR LANGUAGE
So how, exactly, do you focus on the positive? The easiest way to do it is to pay attention to your language, the words coming out of your mouth. Saying something like “I can’t drink” is pretty negative. It sends all the wrong messages to your subconscious because it leaves you feeling deprived and thinking about something you can’t do. On the other hand, saying “I’m going to enjoy drinking an iced tea tonight” or “I really love this lemonade” is saying the same thing in a different way. You’re telling yourself you’re not going to drink alcohol, but you’re doing it in a positive way. And you’re giving your subconscious the message that you’re going to enjoy what you’re going to do instead of that you’re deprived or you can’t.
Saying “I’m giving up alcohol for the month” also sends a negative message to your subconscious. But saying “I’m experimenting to see how much better I feel” is totally different. Positive phrasing sends all the right messages and will help you be more successful. So start to be mindful and conscious of how you talk to yourself.
You don’t have to do this experiment. You get to do it. You have the opportunity to do this. You are excited to do this. You are choosing to participate. Recognize your old, disempowering, words around alcohol and replace them with new, empowering, words. This is important. The brain loves anything that gets you out of pain and into pleasure. It loves that shift both consciously and subconsciously, so choose the words you want to use. When you start consciously choosing your words, you’ll even start to get a little buzz, especially if you reinforce your statements afterward. If you say, “I’m going to enjoy some iced tea tonight,” reinforce it by actually feeling it. “Wow, I did enjoy that iced tea tonight!” The brain will latch on to the experience and repeat it more easily the next time.
Labeling
Another type of language you’ll want to pay attention to is how you’re labeling yourself and others. There’s a ton of research showing how labels can limit your experience. When we put a label on something, we create a corresponding emotion based on our beliefs and experiences. That’s especially true when we label ourselves and say we’re depressed or we’re alcoholics. It’s true that we might be suffering, but by labeling ourselves that we are those things, we ingrain the negative feelings and end up believing them subconsciously.
It might take a little while to start catching yourself focusing on the negative or unnecessarily labeling yourself, so keep at it. If you catch yourself once a day, it’s a great start. Over time you’ll get better and better at it, and you’ll develop ways to reprogram your language and be more positive naturally. Don’t be surprised if people start noticing and telling you how much happier and upbeat you seem. That’s because you are happier and upbeat when you expect to be and use language to reinforce the idea.
The Power of Positive
