Mindful Drinking
How to cut down your intake, and why we drink
If you plan to not drink but end up imbibing anyway and then berate yourself the morning after, you are not alone. Even if it’s just one glass of wine you didn’t plan on consuming, it irks. Well, it’s time to stop beating yourself up because it’s not your fault.
The benefits of reducing alcohol are compelling – weight loss, brain clarity, better skin and sleep, improved bank balance – so why is it so hard to say no when a glass of wine is presented to us? Or to resist opening a bottle of wine while preparing dinner after a busy day?
The answer is mind-numbingly simple, and the insight it brings is totally liberating. It has now been scientifically proven that drinking alcohol helps silence our inner critic and that, coupled with our strong drinking culture, means you never stood a chance.
To put that more simply, we’ve been programmed to reach for a drink when the going gets tough, or to celebrate, commiserate, relax, reward, lower social inhibitions, and as a medicinal treatment. It’s an omnipresent factor that threads through the fabric of Western culture, making it nearly impossible to avoid, and, as statistics prove, even harder to not imbibe. In the past year, 85 per cent of Kiwis aged 16-64 had an alcoholic drink.
“The trouble with alcohol being so ingrained in our culture is that we often don’t even realise the real reasons why we’re drinking. But identifying these is a big part of being fully aware of the problem,” says Rosamund Dean, author of the recently released Mindful Drinking: How Cutting Down Can Change Your Life. “It’s perfectly natural that you want to reach for a bottle of wine after a bad day at work, but this process is all about spotting the feeling, and understanding it before we can tackle it head on.”
Demand for Dean’s book, and a duo by internationally renowned hypnotherapist Georgia Foster called The Drink Less Mind and Drink Less in 7 Days, attest to how thirsty people are for knowledge on how to drink less.
Dean and Foster show there is a way to cultivate a new, healthy and more mindful relationship with alcohol that doesn’t mean giving up alcohol completely. Or does it? Many find that a side effect of becoming a more mindful drinker is the decision to cut out alcohol completely, like Evolu founder Kati Kasza did because she thought she “might as well keep on enjoying her new-found wellness” (read her story on P42). Giving up drinking is one of the steps she’s taken on her health and wellness journey, and what surprises her is that when she shares this with other women their first question is: “How?”
Emotional rescue
The emotional pull of alcohol is strong. The fact it has now been scientifically proven that drinking alcohol also helps to silence our inner critic helps explain its appeal. It’s a way to escape our negative self-talk – until the hangover kicks in.
“One of the easiest ways to suppress the inner critic’s voice is to drink alcohol and this is why people over-drink,” explains Foster. “The aim of The Drink Less Mind is to assist people to train their mind to deal with their inner critic without having to over-drink. Through doing this, you can enjoy a drink without the emotional consequences the next day of anxiety, guilt and fear. What people don’t understand is that the drink is not the problem, it’s the emotional conditioning before the consumption of alcohol that needs to be focused on.
“There’s this part of the brain, behind the ears, the amygdala. What neuroscientists have said is that when the brain is feeling vulnerable – it could be the slightest bit of stirring, a bit of fear, it could be anticipation, it could be feeling lonely, or bored, the slightest feeling of vulnerability – in a nanosecond, the amygdala will fire off adrenaline, cortisol, all of those stress chemicals. It will send those chemicals to the body and then the body says ‘get me out of here this isn’t feeling good’ and then in a nanosecond the brain will look at the history and ask ‘what did we do last time to suppress it, to get rid of it?’ and if it’s beer, wine, alcohol, it will demand it. Not because you’re a failure, but because your mind is looking for a result quickly to calm yourself down, to go back to a sense of safety. This is not my evidence, this has been scientifically proven.”
It doesn’t help that alcohol also increases the release of dopamine in your brain’s ‘reward centres’, tricking you into thinking that it’s actually making you feel great. Over time, with more drinking, the dopamine effect diminishes until it’s almost nonexistent. But at this stage, a drinker is often ‘hooked’ on the feeling of dopamine release, even if they’re no longer getting it.
How hypnosis can help
Hypnosis is a fast and effective way to create behaviour modification. We naturally drift in and out of the hypnotic state during our waking hours. Hypnosis is just like a daydreaming state, where you are not totally consciously aware, explains Foster. The unconscious mind is like a muscle. When you work with it over a period of time it starts to build itself up and it becomes stronger and stronger. Using this underestimated part of the mind will allow you, emotionally and physically, to de-programme and re-programme yourself from old issues about your drinking habits.
Foster uses hypnosis and behaviour modification techniques to help people manage their alcohol, rather than being managed
by it, by building coping strategies that stop the chemical reaction taking place in our brains that tells us we want another drink.
“It can be challenging for some but clinical hypnosis is an easier method to make emotional change,” says Foster. “The goal is to help you move on from these familiar brain patterns in a certain way. Get your mind to be in the pre-frontal cortex before you have your first drink and when you are feeling the slightest bit of anxiety, fear or self-doubt, your mind goes straight to the pre-frontal cortex to calm down before drinking starts.
“I believe that we have incredible minds that can move on. At this point in time, your drinking is your history. When you go into hypnosis, your mind actually thinks that you’re there, with your imagination and all the senses you’re working with, and it stores those moments as the references. The more positive feelings we train your mind to feel in hypnosis, the more your mind will use these references rather than the old ones when you go out in the reality of your drinking life.”
The past is not your truth, your drinking past is your habit and there is nothing set in stone, says Foster. “There’s nothing wrong with you if you drink every night. You are a normal person who has a habit. It’s not complicated. The media and doctors make it seem like it’s something wrong with you. We’ve become so used to drinking. A client will say to me they’re chopping vegetables, getting the kids ready for bed, and they look over and say ‘where did that bottle of wine go?’ This is emotional conditioning. It’s because your brain has become familiar with it but you can train your brain to be familiar with drinking in a more healthy way.”
When Foster first pitched her book idea to publishers 13 years ago their reaction was ‘you’ve got to be joking’. Foster wrote the book anyway, selfpublished on Amazon and printed 2000 copies.
Within three months she had to do a reprint, confirming what she already knew from her work as a clinical hypnotherapist in London – people wanted to learn how to drink less. The Drink Less Mind has gone on to sell more than 25,000 copies.
Dean, who interviews Foster for her book, says we often joke about being addicted to cheese but most of us don’t like to think of ourselves as having a ‘problem’ with drinking. “You might reassure yourself that you don’t have a physical dependency on alcohol. It isn’t damaging your relationships or career. You’re not gulping straight vodka from that water bottle on your desk all day. So what’s the problem?” says Dean. “Well, I used to think the same thing. Until I realised that daily drinking, while not affecting my life in any dramatic way, was slowly disrupting everything from my skin to my mood, all while storing up health problems for the future.
Price of consumption on a nation
As a nation, how we consume is definitely an issue. Three in five (61.6 per cent) past-year drinkers consumed more than the recommended guidelines for a single drinking occasion at least once during the last year, and one in six (17.7 per cent) adults (aged15+) have a potentially hazardous drinking pattern according to the Ministry of Health 2009.
Alcohol consumption has been identified as an important risk factor for more than 60 different disorders, according to WHO. An estimated 3.8 per cent of all global deaths are attributed to alcohol.
In New Zealand, estimates indicate between 600 and 1000 people die each year from alcohol-related causes. The New Zealand Police estimate that approximately one third of all apprehensions involve alcohol and that half of all serious crimes are related to alcohol. In 2008, alcohol was a contributing factor in 103 fatal crashes, 441 serious injury crashes and 1156 minor crashes (Ministry of Transport).
A new study, published in The New Zealand Medical Journal, found 23 per cent of women who took part in the ‘Growing Up in New Zealand’ study continued to drink in their first trimester – when the risk of damage to nerve tissue was the highest – despite knowing they were pregnant. Thirteen per cent continued drinking after the first three months.
Women are drinking more than ever, says Dean, whether that’s throwing ourselves into work, with client dinners and drinks with colleagues, or compulsively reaching for the wine as soon as the kids are in bed. One study showed British women are twice as likely to become problem drinkers if they’ve been to university. However, it is not only professional women who are drinking too much. The majority of Foster’s clients are women in their 30s and 40s, and it’s a mix of those focused on careers and stay-athome mums. Drinking can be triggered by loneliness, or when life is suddenly more restrictive.
Women now buy eight out of 10 bottles of the wine that is drunk at home in the UK, and in the US, a recent report showed that high-risk drinking in women has surged by 58 per cent in 10 years.
Foster says her courses are not designed for those with alcoholism but for people who recognise their drinking behaviour interferes with their lives in a negative way.
“The goal of my work is to mindfully reduce by half what a person generally drinks. Even if they drink a lot, this is still very inspiring. All of us can learn to manage alcohol and retrain our habits rather than give it up entirely. It’s about drinking to enjoy, rather than to escape our lives,” says Foster. “We need to calm down our emotional over-drinking behaviour.
“I used to be overweight and a very heavy, regular drinker who used food and alcohol as a way to escape my insecurities. I successfully retrained my mind and body to feel better about myself through the power of self-hypnosis techniques, which I am happy to share with others. My approach is progressive rather than regressive. In other words, I believe that it is important to understand a little bit of history but, more importantly, to train the mind to move on.”