You Know Why You Drink. So Why Hasn’t It Changed?
Hey everybody, welcome back to another one of these ten Minute Mondays. I want to start off with talking about behavior change. Because changing a behavior usually starts with us trying to understand that very behavior. Why do I keep doing this? What am I getting from it?
Speaker 1:What's happening on the nights when I plan to make changes and I don't? And with alcohol, those questions, they can take you pretty far. After enough time paying attention, you can actually get pretty good at explaining your own drinking. You already know you drink more when you're stressed. You already know that certain people or places are going to make it harder.
Speaker 1:Maybe alcohol is comfort for when you're anxious and lonely, of course bored, or you're just trying to get out of your own head or out of your own way. You might even be thinking, Okay, we're getting somewhere. And then that same night arrives and you still pour a drink. That can be really frustrating, I know, because we tend to assume that understanding should lead directly to change. Once I finally figure out why I do this, then I'll know how to stop doing it.
Speaker 1:And I spend a lot of time thinking that way. When I look back on my own drinking, I could actually trace parts of it pretty far back. Now I wouldn't say I went to a rough school, but some of those kids were definitely tougher than I was, and there was a fair amount of bullying. Even though I was athletic, I was very outgoing, but I also remember feeling like I really wasn't one of the cool kids. I paid a lot of attention and also emphasis to where my status, where I stood in regard to other people, probably more than I realized at that time.
Speaker 1:But then I started in my high school years drinking at parties and something changed. I felt accepted. I felt cooler. I was less worried about whether I fit in. And by high school and college, alcohol had really become tied to being social, having fun, and being willing to let the night go wherever it would go.
Speaker 1:And years later, I could look back on this and think, that makes total sense. Alcohol helped quiet some of those fears, got rid of that feeling of rejection. It gave me confidence when I needed it, and it made social situations much easier to ease into. But as I got older, other reasons also got added. Stress, that became part of it.
Speaker 1:Anxiety, that was also part of it. Even certain environments and routines, those also counted. And of course, there was nostalgia around drinking. Alcohol still carried some of those old associations of me being young and spontaneous. And I remember even as I was older, I would drink and I'd feel like I was doing something even though I wasn't because it was connected to when I was younger.
Speaker 1:But at one point, I really did start to wonder whether there was something deeper that I hadn't found. Maybe some old trauma was hidden, and that was the reason that I was sabotaging myself. Maybe something buried underneath all of that. And I thought, you know, if I could finally uncover that, would that make this whole thing that I'm dealing with kind of just click? I could figure it all out.
Speaker 1:And I got pretty good at explaining my drinking. And some of those explanations, yeah, they were probably right. But they just didn't automatically change what happened the next time I wanted to drink. I think we ask these insights to do more than it actually can do. Knowing where a behavior comes from, yes, incredibly useful.
Speaker 1:It can change how you see yourself. It can help explain why something has such a strong pull. And if alcohol is connected to things like trauma and depression, anxiety, and maybe something painful in your life, working on that deeper issue, that is very essential. But at the same time, once you start looking underneath a behavior, it's really easy to assume that there's always going to be this deep thing underneath it. Sometimes there is, but sometimes there really isn't.
Speaker 1:And for an extreme example, sometimes you want a margarita with Mexican food just because a margarita tastes really good with Mexican food. There doesn't have to be some unresolved emotional issue sitting underneath every single drink. The same thing happens with food. Somebody can eat too much ice cream just because ice cream tastes good, but somebody else may reach for ice cream because every time they feel stressed or they're lonely, that behavior looks really similar from the outside, but what's keeping it going is completely different. The question gets more interesting when you already know you want something to change.
Speaker 1:You understand a lot about why that pattern exists, and then somehow the pattern keeps showing up anyway. Behavior researchers often talk about something called the intention behavior gap. Basically, what we intend to do and what we actually do aren't always the same thing. Now I know this is probably not news to anybody. We intend to go work out tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We intend to spend less time on our phones. Of course, my biggest difficulty right now, I'm trying to get to bed earlier. We But also have save more money, eat better, be more patient, and, of course, drink less. And then life shows up. And knowing why you do something is only part of what determines what happens next.
Speaker 1:It's not the whole thing. Think about your phone. You probably know exactly why you pick it up when you're bored. Then you know also the apps are designed to be addictive. You know that scrolling wastes your time.
Speaker 1:And you may even know exactly what you're avoiding when you reach for it. But then guess what? Maybe five minutes later, with all that knowledge, the phone is in your hand. At some point, spending time analyzing your relationship with boredom probably isn't the thing that's going to change that moment. However, putting your phone in another room, that might solve the problem.
Speaker 1:And I think this is where sometimes we make change harder on ourselves. A simple solution can feel very unsatisfying when we have this complicated, deep rooted explanation. So if a behavior, let's say, has twenty years of history behind it, then moving the bottle out of sight almost seems ridiculous. Things like eating before you go out, that's got to be too basic. Leaving the party early, that's avoiding the real issue.
Speaker 1:And buying less alcohol might even feel like you're cheating because we should be able to choose to have it there and then simply choose differently. But if changing something simple changes what happens, then we found something useful there. What we find there is leverage. We use leverage everywhere else without turning it into a test about our character. I put things on my calendar because I don't want to rely on my memory.
Speaker 1:People keep healthier food around when they're trying to change how they eat. We silence notifications on our phone when we need to focus. No one really looks at that person who turned off their notifications and says, well, if they had self control, you'd leave them on all the time and just resist checking. Yet alcohol can become this strange exception where we expect ourselves to stay in that exact same environment around the exact same people with the exact same bottle, following the exact same sequence that we've done hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and then somehow prove that we've changed by making a different decision at the hardest possible moment. You can understand that stress makes drinking more appealing and still make a stressful evening easier on yourself.
Speaker 1:You can know that you have social anxiety, and this is part of the picture that drives your drinking at an event. You can also understand, hey, there's years of history behind my drinking at home and still decide that you don't want that extra bottle sitting there tonight. None of those things settles the deeper question of why alcohol became important in the first place, but they can still change what happens tonight. Sometimes you make simple changes and they barely do anything. You eat before dinner, you still want that wine.
Speaker 1:You skip the usual store and then guess what? Twenty minutes later, you're thinking about stopping somewhere else. That might tell us that these easy levers might not work for you. Maybe try a few other ones, or guess what? Maybe that isn't the whole story.
Speaker 1:Maybe you do need to keep looking for something deeper there. Here's what's important, is you don't need these experiments to explain your entire relationship with alcohol. You're looking for one useful piece of information, and that is, did this small change change what I did? If it didn't, now you know to look somewhere else. Now I started at deep.
Speaker 1:I went to basic. And I just wanna summarize here that you can spend years getting better at explaining yourself. Some of those explanations, they can be really important and completely true. But my point is that eventually something has to change in the moment where the behavior actually happens. So this week, take one moment that you know you'll be challenged and ask, what can I change before I get there?
Speaker 1:Okay. Thanks for hanging out with me this week. If you got anything out of this, please rate and review. Send me an email, [email protected]. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.
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