How to put the glass down and stop drinking

I am writing this after 58 days of not drinking and have been thinking about how hard I found it to actually say STOP.

The 57 days that have followed on my sober journey have been far easier than the fear and dread that accompanied the very first day.

I believed that my life would be awful without my daily bottle (or more) of wine each day, it was my way of unwinding at the end of every (single) day and helped relieve stress, enjoy myself and have fun.

I have been drinking regularly for around 20 years, that’s a lot of bottles of wine.

I am 44 now, for several years I have known that my drinking was excessive, I was always the first person to share an article about why wine os good for you and would always analyse what other people put on social media in attempt to convince myself that everyone else was drinking the same, or more than I was.

I managed to convince myself for quite some time, but I now know that many people don’t drinking anywhere near what I was and the amount of alcohol I was consuming was setting me on a path to ruining my life.

A couple of months ago I had been checking out a few ‘sober’ groups on Facebook and started to become interested in some of the posts, I was reading about people with very similar stories to my own and they were saying how amazing their lives had become after quitting the booze.

As I became more interested in the sober revolutionI also got hold of some excellent books, in particular This Naked Mind by Annie Grace, I couldn’t put the book down once I started reading it, I don’t use the words ‘game changer’ lightly but that is what it was.

I finished the book in a few days and by the end my mindset had changed, I no longer had my concious mind saying it wanted to stop drinking and my sub-concious mind telling me the opposite, the two had become aligned and they both didn’t want to drink any longer.

That was they day I stopped for good, at the same time I signed up for the absoloutley brilliant Alcohol Experiment, which is a free daily programme (also by Annie Grace) that guides you through the first 30 days of sobriety, I can’t speak highly enough about how much this engaged me and helped me better understand the journey to an alcohol free life.

My advice to anyone looking to stop drinking is not to use willpower, it doesn’t work (there is a lot of scientific evidence to back this up), you have to change your mindset from ‘can’t have a drink’ to ‘don’t want a drink’ and the way to do this is to deconstruct everything you believe about your relationship with alcohol.

The book I mention above alongside the website do exactly this and truly helped to set me on the right path for sobriety, I will talk about the benefits of becoming alcohol free in another post and hope these tips will help anyone struggling to get past the dreaded Day 1 of not drinking (trust me, it gets easier by the day after this).