10 Traps That Keep You Drinking Alcohol FOR LIFE

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Transcript

Welcome And Core Promise

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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 www.soberclear.com. When it comes to quitting alcohol, the world is filled with traps. It almost feels like the entire universe is conspiring against you sometimes to make you drink alcohol. Well, guess what? You're not imagining things if this has happened to you. At the end of the day, alcohol is not a zero-sum game. If you drink alcohol and die, somebody makes money. So there is a huge incentive to get you to drink regardless of what happens to your health or well-being. But the actual problem isn't the traps that are set up by alcohol companies or people that profit from it. Most of the traps are within your own mind. Your own mind has caused you to be a prisoner to alcohol. So once we've unpacked the 10 traps that can keep you stuck for the rest of your life, it's almost like somebody gives you the key to escape them forever. That's what we're doing today. Let's get into it. If we've not met yet, my name is Leon Sylvester. I'm the founder of SoberClear.com. We help business people and professionals stop drinking alcohol. I've helped over 500 private clients to do it. I've helped tens of thousands of people on this YouTube channel. So these traps, you're not gonna fall for them because we're going to crush them all. Trap number one, the biggest of all, is the fear trap. And it's the fear that you're going to miss out on something if you stop drinking. And when you buy into the fear trap, you think that stopping drinking alcohol is going to be a lifetime of missing out on things. It's a life sentence and you'll never fully recover from it. So what happens is you start to see social situations with a feeling of fear. You go to a wedding, a barbecue, a birthday party, people are drinking, you're not drinking, and you're the one missing out. And this is all based upon a lie that alcohol actually gives you something. It doesn't give you anything. It can't give you anything because it's a drug that all it does is take things away from you. In fact, it can give you cancer if that's what you're looking for. I don't think you are. But this drug doesn't give you anything. There are no benefits to consuming it. So the fear trap shouldn't even be a thing, but it is. It's the biggest trap of all. But this fear will keep you drinking poison until you eradicate it. The second thing is the trap of feeling like you earned a drink. You get home after just sending it all day at the office, right? You've done some massive projects, you've hired this person, you've done this, you've done that. You get home and you tell yourself, I deserve it. I've earned it today. I've pushed myself. You know, another big one is people like to say they drink, but they burn calories in the gym. So they've earned the poisoning of themselves. See, we shouldn't be turning poison into a reward in the first place. I don't see people getting home after a hard day of work and sitting down on the couch and punching themselves in the face as a reward. No, so why did we do it with alcohol? You make progress and then poison yourselves and go backwards. What a sad cycle. Listen, I'll tell you what you've earned after a hard day of work. You've earned rest. Real rest. You'd not earned the right to kill yourself. You've not earned the right to drink a poison. When you fall into the I've earned it trap, you're rewarding yourself with destruction. And I know I'm sounding over the top and harsh, but this is no joke. Number three, the third trap. The waiting trap. I have spoken with probably 3,000 people who want help stopping drinking. And these are one-on-one conversations. I've spent thousands of hours doing this. And I hear this all the time. Leon, I need a bit more time. I've got this big thing coming up. And there's always a different thing. Now, I was speaking with somebody a few months ago, and he was dealing with some absolute major health problems in his family. I'm not going to go into the details because I don't think he'll want me sharing them. And he said, Leon, let's get started after the hospital appointment. And I thought to myself, nah, it can't work like that. And I said it to him. I said, dude, if you want to do this, you should have done it yesterday. There's no point waiting till then, because what happens if you get bad news? What happens if you get good news? Delaying it and waiting just keeps you in the same cycle. And he said, You're right. You're right. You're absolutely right. We got started working together. The guy's not drank for months. In fact, he texted me the other day saying, we don't need to work together anymore. I'm done. And this is a this is an attorney. He's got a business, he's got real estate properties, he's a successful man. But he almost fell into that trap of later, right? After the big thing, after whatever. There is never a perfect time, and you're stalling. Waiting is staying trapped. Don't fall for this one. The fourth trap, oh, this one, this one gets me every single time. It's the trap of having just one drink. It's this idea that we think that we can have just one, and this time it's going to be different. The only reason why you drink is because you had just one drink. And you're in the position that you're in today because of a continuous chain reaction that still hasn't ended. So even the fact that you think you're having just one drink, actually, you've not just having just one drink because you've had thousands before that. It doesn't make any sense. There's no just one drink. You've already had just one drink. In fact, you've had more than just one drink. You've had just a thousand drinks. There is no such thing as just one drink. Because if there was, everybody would have one drink and then never drink again. Don't do it. Don't have just one drink. Change the way that you view alcohol, apply first principles thinking, break it down, see it for what it is, move on. Trap number five, the comparison trap. Now, this is when we drink. We know we've got a problem, right? We know in our heart that what we're doing is wrong. But then we look at the homeless person in the street, you know, with the bottle of cider and, you know, they've ruined their whole life because of alcohol. Or we might even look to a friend or a family member and think, well, you know, I'm not as bad as him. It's like, so what? So what if you're not as bad as him? When you know in your heart that what you're doing is wrong, it's nothing more than cope. You're coping by making excuses and comparing yourself to people that are worse than you. Why not try comparing yourself with people who are doing better than you? Well, you don't because you're trying to reduce cognitive dissonance by comparing yourself to people who drink more than you so you feel okay. It's a terrible, terrible trap. You might think, well, I drink wine. It's not like I drink vodka. And then the vodka drinker thinks, well, I drink vodka. It's not like I drink diesel or I don't know. There's always somebody to compare yourself to to make you feel better. Listen, you can do that forever. Because even if you drink more, there's always someone drinking more, or it's somebody who's got a bigger health problem, etc., etc. etc. The list goes on. Don't do it. Don't compare yourself to people who have more further gone than you. Which leads me to the sixth trap. And the sixth trap is this idea of being an alcoholic and being in recovery. Now, if you go to AA and you found success in a 12-step approach, just skip this point. But I tried a 12-step approach. I went for around 90 days and I went all in. I really took it seriously, did the step work, but continuing to call myself a powerless alcoholic with a disease with no known cure, and I was going to have to be in recovery for the rest of my life, it didn't sit well with me. Because that label is with you forever, which makes it another trap. In fact, there have been scientific papers that have been published that show people who don't do AA and people who do do AA, they've done this with prisoners. The people that go to AA, when they relapse, they drink more because they believe they're alcoholics. And if you ask me, the reason why this happens is because of the belief that they're an alcoholic. They're different to everybody else. And it's so much better if you stop seeing yourself as the problem and instead you see the drug as the problem. And if you can fix your perception of the drug, then you don't need to label yourself. When you admit powerlessness, you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Number seven, the routine trap. Now, this is when you kind of, you know, wake up, you don't feel that great, you say, ah, do you know what? I'm not gonna drink tonight. You don't truly mean it, but you do decide to not drink that evening. But then you get home, you don't feel as bad anymore, the hangover's gone, you throw your keys down, you take your coat off, you sit down on the couch, and then it's like, ah, well, whatever. And it becomes this automatic state of being. You wake up, you say, ah, maybe tonight I won't drink, and then you drink. And it just keeps happening again and again and again. And this automatic habit, this automatic routine is pretty hard to break. This is why things like meditation and mindfulness can be useful when you're stopping drinking. Having a bit of awareness and recognizing when you're going into autopilot and reaching for the drink, knowing when that happens, of course, is beneficial. So just watch out for that. Number eight is the willpower trap. See, using willpower to not drink is fighting the desire, the actual desire you've got inside of you to drink alcohol. Do you know what's better than that? Than fighting the desire is eliminating this damn desire. Willpower depletes over time. It's a finite resource, and eventually, for me, every single time I've used willpower, it eventually ran out and I ended up drinking again. You can't fight the desire to drink forever. You need to eliminate the desire, break it down from first principles, look at the problem for what it is, use logic, use reasoning, get to a place where you see no benefit to poisoning yourself with a group one carcinogen. You're not using willpower to not inhale asbestos, which leads me to number nine, which is the hiding from alcohol trap. And this is related to willpower. Because if you've still got the desire to drink, but you're resisting it with willpower, you may start hiding from it. A friend invites you to a bar, you say, I don't know, I don't feel so comfortable there. I'm not gonna go. You walk past it in a supermarket aisle and you kind of just turn your head to the side and run down the aisle. What you're doing here is you are signaling to yourself that you've sacrificed something. If you were to drive into, I don't know, the center of Los Angeles, right, and see all the homeless people and people that are using drugs out in the street, would you feel any pull to going to take those drugs? Well, the chances are no, you wouldn't. You probably would want to avoid that place because of the danger, but it wouldn't make you want to take the drug. So why do we do things differently with alcohol? Well, you shouldn't. You should walk around in a supermarket, in a restaurant, in a bar, and feel no desire. As long as you fix your paradigm and your worldview, this trap is pretty easy to get your head around. But it leads me to the 10th trap, and this is the one that gets me all of the time. It's the success trap. It's this idea that alcohol drinkers are sophisticated, it's something successful people do, you know, powerful people drink the whiskey, sophisticated people are drinking the champagne. You might have a business deal and then everybody around you is drinking it. This is the thing, is when we link alcohol to success, it is incredibly dangerous. Because that means the more successful you get, the harder it will become to stop drinking. You need to break this entirely. People aren't successful because they drink alcohol. There is no connection here. And if you click the video on the screen now, I'm gonna show you some of the things you must avoid when you stop drinking. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking podcast by Soberclear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit www.soberclear.com.