Too much alcohol??
For quite sometime I’ve been worried about how much alcohol I drink. I’m happy that the bulk of the food that I eat now is generally good, healthy, raw, organic food, but I wonder why I still drink alcohol like I do. I don’t drink every day. I can go many days without any alcohol at all, but then a weekend comes, or a company dinner, and I can drink 5-10 alcoholic drinks easily in one night.
It’s surprising that I do this because I can feel the effects on my body the next day. I don’t really have a hangover, but I can feel that I’m lethargic and don’t have my normal vitality. It’s often not well into the afternoon that I start feeling normal again. So, all that time, my body is obviously busy struggling with processing the alcohol out of my system, so much so that it can’t do the normal things that it does.
Why do I do this to myself when I can easily observe that it’s bad?
This is no doubt because of some subconscious programs that I have running. Things like “you already look weird enough eating raw food, you’ll seem even weirder if you didn’t drink alcohol”, “you deserve to have a good time, if you don’t drink you’re being too hard on yourself”, “people like you when you’re drinking and having fun at a party”. I’m sure my subconscious is using some combination of these fears to perpetuate my propensity to drink alcohol. These are the perfect things I could work on with EFT (if you don’t know about EFT, the best place to start is with Nick Ortner’s book, The Tapping Solution). However, at the moment, I can feel my subconscious even trying to resist EFT, so I want to work on that first.
Now today, I stumbled onto this webpage – http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-almost-effect/201309/new-perspective-low-risk-drinking – and that has made something click inside me. Now I want to limit my drinking to no more than one drink on any given day. I won’t be stopping drinking, so that’s good. But I will be limiting the amount of alcohol that my body has to deal with, and that’s very good. I wonder if I’ll be able to do it. I’m already thinking (coming from my subconscious) “what happens at a party? can’t just have one drink!”, but I’m going to give it a go! It makes it easier for me when I have a rule to follow. So, no more that one alcoholic drink on any given day! I like it!
I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this topic. Please lead a comment. Thanks.
Obviously reducing your alcohol intake is a very good idea but I think you can enjoy a treat ( a few drinks ) on very special occasions. What harm would it cause to your body on a rare occasion? It would be like saying to your body, “Well done Peter, you look after yourself so well all the time, you deserve a few drinks on this special ocassional.” So that raises a question, What would happen to your body, if you allowed yourself a few drinks on rare ocassions compared to your 1 drink / day?
Thanks for the comment, Julie. I’ve thought about this quite a bit. What difference would a few drinks make, every now and then? Well, for me it’s a slippery slope. My mind seems to stay under better control when I have some simple rules to follow. I think it’s because when my conscious mind has a simple rule to follow, it can remember it very quickly and compete with the speed the subconscious might be trying to suggest the opposite. So, I’m going to keep trying to keep to a rule like “no more than 1 alcoholic drink per day”. But, you’re right, an occasional night with more wouldn’t be the end of the world.
However, excess alcohol always does some damage. It’s not good for the body. If we imagine that we’re trying to improve our health, then a night with excess alcohol would be a “setback” to that improvement. It will take some time for the body to recover from that. So it’s best to avoid such setbacks where possible.
Of course, you don’t want to become so fixated on this issue that the fixation becomes a problem itself. For me, this is a good rule to follow but, if I break it, I won’t feel bad about myself.