PERSONIFY YOUR INNER ADDICT – MINE’S VOLDEMORT

If you’ve found yourself velcroed to something, whether it’s nightly wine or a gambling app, there is hope

Labels are unnecessary

Addiction is simply a word to define: You consistently intend to consume X of a substance, and instead, you end up scarfing X, Y and Z.

But something that keeps many people drinking, smoking or eating whole tubs of ice cream, is their heel-scraping resistance to the word addict. Why? The stigma. Nobody wants to grow up and become an addict, do they?

But being addicted is more of a verb than a noun; something which alcohol harm charities and medical journals are beginning to acknowledge by banning the words ‘addict’ or ‘alcoholic’ and replacing them with ‘person with an addiction’ or ‘they had a drinking dependence’.

We now live in a world where the addict label isn’t the only way through.

Acceptance is compulsory

At the same time, acceptance of your current addiction is crucial. It was only once I fully absorbed the fact I’d been trying to moderate alcohol for six years and failing spectacularly, that I accepted moderation was an Atlantis I would drown trying to find.

This is because my brain has mistakenly reclassified alcohol as compulsory, so having just a little of it was like a Marathon Des Sables runner trying to take a sip from a litre of water.

“Addiction hijacks your system, adding drinking or gambling or drug-taking to the list of ‘behaviours needed for survival’,” explains Dr Julia Lewis.

You can’t rewind addiction, so the way forward is abstinence. But here’s a hopeful twist – none is easier than one for an addicted brain.

Personify it

In the 1960s, a very clever man named Jack Trimpey developed AVRT (addictive voice recognition technique) and since then, thousands have found success with it. It’s a little barmy at first glance.

You essentially separate out the “addictive voice” within you and give it a caricature.

I know people whose addictive voice is called Homer Simpson (gimme donut!), or Attila the Doormat (to denote the angry/submissive slalom when drunk) or they’re named after politicians.

Mine is called Voldemort, after the silken but ultimately deadly Harry Potter villain. Once you objectify your addictive voice, recognise it doesn’t have your best interests at heart and start to silence it (or even argue with it), you’ll find that the sway it has over you loosens.

Don’t be too hard on yourself Whatever your poison, it’s probably unsurprising it has dug in more in the pandemic. If alcohol’s your thing, it may be a peculiar comfort to learn that 48 per cent of us reported drinking more since March 2020 (which is odd, really, given so many of us thought we were social drinkers and socialising was literally cancelled). And then, as we approached full lockdown release, as a nation we were like wild-eyed greyhounds yipping at the beer garden gates.

So, if your alcohol use spiralled, you’re very far from alone.

The only question now is, do you want to do something about it?

Sunshine Warm Sober by Catherine Gray, (£16.99; Aster) Available from octopusbooks. co.uk