Stop Drinking Podcast by Soberclear

4 Things Nobody Will Tell You About Stopping Drinking (it's dark...)

• Leon Sylvester

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Speaker 0:

Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol-free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. I struggled with alcohol for almost 10 years and alcohol was by far the biggest source of pain that I had in my life. It was responsible for every bad decision I ever made. Okay, ultimately I made the decision, but alcohol was always linked to it in some way. Whether it was an argument saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, a stupid financial decision pretty much every bad thing that happened in my life was linked to alcohol in some way. I tried stopping drinking with AA. With willpower, I dropped to my knees in church and just begged God to help me, but nothing worked. Seven years ago everything changed. I changed the way that I viewed alcohol and my life looks totally different. But today I'm going to unpack four things that nobody is going to tell you about stopping drinking. And I say nobody because when you try and stop drinking alcohol, you're going to get so many mixed messages. One friend is going to say well, why don't you just cut down, like me, you might go to the doctor and they might say well, you should drink the recommended daily allowance. You go and read the alcohol bottle and it just tells you to drink responsibly. See, the things that I'm going to tell you are kind of what you need to hear but probably don't want to hear. So this video might make you a little bit uncomfortable, and that's okay If you haven't met yet. My name is Leon Sylvester. I'm the founder of SoberClearcom and if you actually want to access a free video training that shows you how to control your drinking in as little as 24 hours, you can click the link in the description, put in your name and email address and then a new video will start playing that's going to show you a new, scientifically validated approach to getting in control of your drinking quickly. So just click the link down below, put your name and email address in and definitely check that one out.

Speaker 0:

But now let's unpack things. So number one and this won't make sense until I fully unpack it but if you stop drinking alcohol or you want to stop drinking alcohol and let's say you've got a friend that stopped, you might have a friend that just decided one day. Do you know what I'm not drinking? And that friend of yours. They could be a few months sober, a few years sober, and for them it was just like I'm just going to not drink, and that was it. They didn't drink. I've got people like this in my life and all they did was use their human will to stop drinking. Now, does this exist? Of course it does.

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There are people out there that use willpower to stop drinking all of the time. I have used willpower hundreds of times and it's fine. You can use willpower to not drink alcohol, but what people aren't going to tell you is that it rarely works long term. See, when we use willpower to not drink, what we're doing is we're resisting the urge to drink, because that's what we're doing. We're exerting our will and our personal strength against a craving or a thought of drinking.

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But making a decision to not drink should not have anything to do with willpower. Think about it like this let's say you drink a lot of water, but let's say you always add lemon and lime into your water. If, all of a sudden, I said do you know what? No more lemon and lime in your water, are you going to need to use willpower to just drink plain water. Are you going to need to fight the urge to squeeze the lemon and lime into your drink? No, you're just going to be fine, like it's just whatever.

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See, the whole idea of using willpower to not drink alcohol is a fallacy. Think about it. If you need to fight the urge to not drink, you still see alcohol as a good thing, as something that enhances your life in some way, which is why willpower never works long-term. It can work. I am not saying that there aren't people out there that stop drinking with willpower I've done it and there are people out there that don't drink for years, sometimes decades, with just willpower. So there are people out there that do do this. But listen, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but if willpower really worked, then we'd probably stop drinking in our teenage years when we get that first hangover and we're like, oh, I feel terrible, I'm never drinking again. Do you remember when you told yourself that? Because I've told myself that so many damn times, never again, never again, never again.

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Fight the urge back to the drink. What you need to do is change the way that you view alcohol. Make one decision that's it Again. That's what I help people do in my coaching program in my company. If you want more details on that, just go to SoberClearcom or click the link down below. But I'm telling you you do not need willpower to not drink alcohol. You need to see it for what it is, in a purely logical way, because all it is is ethanol, right, poison. You need to see it this way make one decision and move on with your life, and that is not something you're going to hear anywhere else.

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The second thing that nobody's going to tell you and this one is pretty close to my heart and listen if you're a member of a 12-step program Alcoholics Anonymous, narcotics Anonymous, whatever and you found success with that approach then just probably skip this one. But if you're trying to stop drinking alcohol, you're not an alcoholic. Right, you've got nothing wrong with you. I've unpacked this many times on the channel, but a medical professional will never call you an alcoholic. This has stopped, which is a great thing, because what happens when you call yourself an alcoholic is you say that you are the problem If you drink something that dehydrates you and lowers your inhibitions and you end up drinking more than you intended to. That has got nothing to do with you.

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Now, this was a big realization to me in my journey when I was stopping drinking, because, rather than blaming myself, I could now attack the problem with the drug alcohol. And what I had to do, instead of fixing myself because there's nothing wrong with you is I had to fix my perception of the drug. Now my own mother has been to AA for over 20 years. That program saved my life because if she didn't get sober with that program, my life would have just been a disaster.

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But when I tried that approach no, it wasn't for me, and I'm not trying to brush things under the rug and say that you don't have a problem, but this idea that you are the problem is wrong. We need to separate you from the problem and attack the problem instead of attacking you as a person. You're not the problem, alcohol is the problem, and let's not forget that distinction. You're perfectly fine the way that you are, and listen, that might not go down well with everybody, but these kind of things helped me. They were like light bulb moments, like feelings of relief, like okay, well, if I'm not the problem, then I can fix the damn problem. And you can, but not if you carry this baggage around for the rest of your life, this label for the rest of your life.

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Number three, and this will happen to everybody that stops drinking. But you're not going to hear this anywhere else. If you go and watch some of the stop drinking video where someone's talking about the great things that have happened, they will probably gloss over this. But when you stop drinking alcohol, your baseline will be down here. You're going to feel pretty bad, otherwise, why would you even stop in the first place? Something is going to happen in your life that spurs change, that motivates you, which is usually pain. You will get to a place where that pain has gone, where it will feel normal, and you'll reach a new baseline and you'll almost forget how bad things were.

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So when you stop drinking alcohol, you can start with this euphoria, right, this optimism, this I can do anything, kind of attitude and now that's great. Right, I'm not saying that's bad at all. When I felt this way, it motivated me to make so many changes in my life. But I got to a place where reality kind of hit me. I still wasn't in the shape that I wanted to be in. I didn't have money, I didn't have a business, I had no success. I didn't have a relationship, and there was a point where I realized, okay, I've stopped drinking alcohol, but life just hasn't mysteriously fixed itself, and you've got to be aware of this. See, people are going to talk to you about all the good things that happen when you stop drinking, but you will get to a place where being sober is just your new baseline and you cannot forget the pain.

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So, whilst it can start off with this initial euphoria, the most important thing that you can do during that initial phase, in the first couple of months, is just start taking action. Start trying to make your life better New gym membership, getting some coach in your life, working on your career, your business, working on your family, fixing things. If you can start getting momentum, then, once things feel normal and once you've almost forgotten the pain, you're becoming somebody else. You're evolving as a person. But just beware of this, because it happens to everybody. But there's a knockover effect of all of this, which leads me to the fourth thing that nobody's going to tell you about Now.

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What happened to me when I stopped drinking alcohol is I had had a decade-long battle stopping and starting more times than I can count. So what do you think my self-trust was like if, every time, I promised myself I wouldn't drink and then I broke that promise to myself? What do you think that does to somebody's self-esteem and self-confidence If you continually tell yourself right, I'm going to take X, y, z action, and then you don't take that action. You don't feel good and this is why drinking can hold you back in such a massive way. Because if you tell yourself you're going to drink less and then you overdrink or you're going to stop drinking, and then you drink again and relapse, I promise you this spills into every area of your life. Any goal that you set. You're kind of setting this precedent of well, I set a goal for myself, but it's not that important. You almost set this weird rule that it's okay to break commitments to yourself, and I'm not trying to say that you can't build a good life and break promises to yourself with drinking. Right, you might be in a good place in your life right now, but one thing I will promise you for certain is when you stop drinking alcohol and you keep the promise that you've made to yourself, that will have such a knock-on effect to every area of your life.

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I have worked with people who have gone from business idea to hundreds of millions of dollars in company valuation no kidding. I've worked with people whose wives have kicked them out of the house, said I've had enough of you. If you don't fix it, it's over. And I've seen them rebuild their marriage. I've seen people go from overweight, looking terrible, to being in the best shape they've ever been. I've seen this happen so many times because, through stopping drinking and staying committed, they now have the self-trust to go and commit to other areas of their life.

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Now, if you want help making that commitment, if you want to go through a completely new way of stopping drinking where we help you reframe the way that you view alcohol and then we use coaching to really focus on building this great quality future, click the link down below, fill in an application and you can book a free consultation to see if the Sober Clear program could be a good match for you. We've worked with hundreds of people now high-level business owners, professionals. So if you want to see if it's a good match, go and click the link down below, fill in the application book in a call and we'll speak to you soon. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by Sober Clear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.

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Leon Sylvester

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