The Alcohol Experiment: 30 days to take control, cut down or give up for good

ACT #2

Alcohol and Sleep

When I started researching this book, I sent out a survey asking people what their biggest fears were about giving up alcohol. I was surprised to see sleep come up high on the list. It’s a huge fear for people that they won’t be able to fall asleep or they won’t be able to stay asleep. Let’s name this belief:

“I need alcohol to sleep.”

If you’re struggling with this belief, you’re definitely not alone. One of my favorite authors, William Porter, who wrote Alcohol Explained, is well versed in alcohol’s effects on sleep, and he explains this topic brilliantly. So let’s dig into this belief a little deeper.

I’m not sure how much the media is responsible for this particular belief. There’s not a lot of insomnia portrayed in the movies or on TV. However, if you’ve ever had a bout of sleeplessness, you know how disconcerting it can be. Sleep is critical to our mental and physical well-being. And when you can’t sleep, you’ll do anything to be able to fall asleep. Lack of sleep has been linked to serious health problems, including cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, infections, and obesity. It also affects alertness, mood, and physical strength. This is because your body repairs itself while you sleep. It’s also a time when your mind digests what happened during the day. It assimilates the information and often comes up with solutions to problems. So when you wake up, you feel better physically and mentally. That means if you’ve experienced alcohol helping you sleep, then this belief takes hold very quickly.

Regular, high-quality sleep is essential to our well-being. So let’s look at how sleep actually works. There are two levels of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and deep sleep, or slow-wave sleep. Every night, you go through several cycles of both levels. First, you dip into REM sleep, when you’re a bit restless and your eyes are literally darting back and forth inside your eyelids (which is where the name comes from). This is light sleep, but it’s crucial to your good health. Scientists don’t actually know why REM is so important, but they’ve done studies where rats were deprived of REM sleep and it killed them in just a few weeks. Once you cycle out of REM, you go into a deeper level of slow-wave sleep. That’s when the body does the repair work that needs to happen to keep you healthy. When you’re getting a good night’s sleep, you go through six or seven cycles of both REM and deep sleep.

Now, what happens when alcohol is introduced to the equation? Alcohol is a chemical depressant, so it reduces neural activity in the brain. Normally, your brain releases a variety of chemicals and hormones at different times to help bring you back to homeostasis. As you already know, homeostasis is the delicate balance where all the systems in your body are working correctly. When you drink, you’re introducing a foreign chemical. And in order to reach homeostasis, your brain has to release powerful counter-chemicals and stress hormones.

So the cycle looks like this:

You have a drink, and you stimulate your pleasure center while the blood alcohol is rising. But as time goes on and the alcohol levels start to go down, your brain knows there’s a depressant in your system. So it releases stimulants (adrenaline and cortisol) to bring you back up into homeostasis. Unfortunately, the depressant alcohol wears off before the stimulants do, and you’re left with an overstimulated brain for hours after the drinks have worn off. It’s as if you drank alcohol and a triple espresso at the same time. The alcohol wears off, but the espresso is still affecting you hours later.

The alcohol is disrupting your sleep schedule. After you drink, you go into a deep sleep for the first five hours or so. That might seem great, but you don’t get into REM sleep. And you need both. So while your body is trying to process all the chemicals in your body, your cycles are completely thrown out of whack. You wind up with only one or two cycles of REM sleep instead of the six or seven you actually need.

After those first five hours, you wake up and can’t get back to sleep. Many people wake up at three or four in the morning and fret about everything they can think of. The worry and regret creep in, and the negative thoughts take over the brain. All this is happening because you’re overstimulated and your body chemistry is completely out of balance. Here’s the thing—any amount of alcohol will disrupt your sleep. It doesn’t matter if you have one drink or you go on a margarita binge-fest. You’re not going to sleep well. If you do this night after night, the lack of quality sleep cycles will begin to take its toll.

And there’s another big problem. When you start getting ready for bed without alcohol in your system, your body releases its own chemicals to quiet you down and prepare you for sleep. But when you drink regularly, you train your brain to utilize the artificial depressants in the alcohol to do that job. So that means you’re relying on alcohol to put you to sleep. But you still aren’t rested, because your natural sleep rhythms are out of whack.

So what does this mean for you during this experiment? It means that for the first two to five nights of not drinking, your body may still be expecting those artificial depressants. Your brain might be confused during those early days, and you could have trouble falling asleep. The worst thing you can do at that point is to have a drink to help you sleep. It might seem like the right thing to do, but it will actually set your progress back. The good news is most people find they’re sleeping better than ever after the fifth night. You’ve given your brain time to readjust itself and get the chemical release balanced again. And once this happens, for the first time in years, or maybe decades, you will start getting the rest that your body so desperately needs. This is great news!

While you’re waiting for your brain to readjust, you can try a few tricks to help you get to sleep. First, avoid caffeinated drinks after about noon. Caffeine can affect the body for up to 10 hours. So you want it all out of your system by the time you’re ready to hit the sack. The other trick is to get a bit of exercise. When you get your body moving, you’ll actually find you sleep much better than if you’re at rest all day long. You don’t have to do anything extreme. You can simply take a walk in the fresh air and get your blood moving.

If you’ve been drinking for a long time, you may not even notice the daily fatigue you’re experiencing because of disrupted sleep patterns. You might think it’s because you’re “getting older.” Maybe you’re always tired and you tell yourself, “That’s just how I am.” We are so overworked and undernourished that fatigue has become completely normal. Let me give you some good news: Once you stop drinking and get your sleep regulated, that fatigue and brain fog often disappear completely. You’ll feel better than you have in ages! That’s your reward. But you have to get through those first few days and give your body a chance to fix itself.

The opposite of “I need alcohol to sleep” is “I don’t need alcohol to sleep.” Come up with as many ways as you can that the opposite is as true as or truer than the original belief.

Dealing with Discomfort

If the only thing that people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.

—SYDNEY BANKS

When you decide to give up alcohol, you might experience some discomfort. I am not talking about severe physical addiction here. If you’ve been drinking heavily for a long time, your body and mind may have become physically dependent to the point where you have severe withdrawal symptoms, such as delirium tremens or hallucinations. If that’s the case, you need to get medical help. You may even need to be hospitalized for a while. When I say “discomfort,” I’m talking about the physical symptoms that occur while your body is healing itself. I’m also talking about the psychological and emotional discomfort that comes up because you’re giving up something you believe you need.

It takes time, up to a week or longer, for your body to rebalance after you stop drinking. While that’s happening, you’re probably going to feel uncomfortable. Because alcohol is physically addictive, there are withdrawal symptoms, which are different for different people. When I stopped drinking, I had headaches, anxiety, irritability, and weird nightmares that I accidentally had a drink. The first 10 days were the most intense, but the symptoms went on for about 30 days. Clearly, that’s longer than the time it took for the chemical substance to clear out of my body. So, what gives? Why did it take so long? Shouldn’t we feel better as soon as the alcohol is gone? Our bodies are more complicated than that, and there’s an emotional side to withdrawal as well.

When researchers studied heroin addicts, they found that the severity of withdrawal could depend on the individual’s access to the substance they were addicted to. For instance, if the person went to jail and suddenly had zero access to their drug of choice, the withdrawal symptoms weren’t as severe as one might expect. But when that person was released years later, and they suddenly had access again, the withdrawal symptoms came back. How weird is that? How is it possible to go through withdrawal years after ingesting a substance? This demonstrates how physical and emotional withdrawals are intertwined. Each affects the other, and our subconscious can easily keep things buried for a long time and then allow them to resurface later.

What helped me get through this initial period of physical withdrawal was flipping my mind-set. Instead of seeing the headaches and anxiety as punishment for an addiction that I should have been able to control, I chose to see them as signs that my amazing body was healing itself. I was willing to be sick and put up with the discomfort to make my body whole again. I knew I had been treating it poorly. So I decided to treat it with kindness and give it whatever time it needed to heal.

If you’re not feeling your best right now, cut yourself some slack. Imagine if your child was feeling sick. Would you yell at her for being a “bad person” or tell her she was “getting what she deserved”? Of course not! You’d let her rest on the couch, eat chicken soup, and maybe watch some cartoons. You’d tell her to let her body do its job. Give yourself the same courtesy.

The Emotional Aspects

As you probably know, there’s more to withdrawal than physical discomfort. There’s an emotional side as well. And both sides are all tangled up with each other. It’s almost like as soon as you get a handle on one, the other falls to pieces and you’re so tempted to give up this experiment and crack open a beer. I get it! On the emotional side, you might feel sad, angry, or resentful. After all, you’re giving up something you believe you enjoy. Your subconscious believes you need alcohol to loosen up, relax, have fun with your friends, or handle stress. When you take that coping mechanism away without dealing with these subconscious beliefs, there will be consequences in the form of emotional distress and cravings.

That is why I’m calling these 30 days an “experiment.” You’re simply testing the waters to see how you might feel if you weren’t drinking. Your subconscious mind isn’t necessarily going to like that, but it’s better than laying down the law and saying, “No more alcohol ever!” That kind of ultimatum can result in a full-on emotional mutiny.

Throughout the course of this experiment, you’re going to explore those subconscious beliefs of yours. One day at a time, you’re going to read a little bit about different ideas that might make you question what you once thought was true. By the time you reach the end of this book, in fact, you might decide that you never need or even want another drink. And your subconscious will totally go along with it. That’s called spontaneous sobriety, and it happens all the time. It happened to me. When your conscious and subconscious minds are in harmony and desire the same thing, there’s no cognitive dissonance. And when that happens, there’s no struggle. You have no cravings and no desire to go back.

Getting Curious

But that’s later. For right now, simply realize that your feelings and physical symptoms are real. Take the time to feel them. Honor them. Appreciate what your body is trying to tell you. And do not give in to the temptation to use alcohol to numb them. These symptoms are temporary. They will go away in time.

So what can you do in the meantime? How do you handle the emotional discomfort and strong desire to give in?

My solution was to get curious about my own behavior. Anytime I had a strong urge to drink, I sat with it and went deep into what was going on. I became an internal reporter. I asked myself questions all the time to find out what I was feeling exactly and what was actually causing me to feel that way. Sometimes I felt like I was missing out because I was with a group of friends who were all drinking. Other times I’d had a hard day at work and felt like I needed a drink to calm my nerves. Other times I felt like I’d been good for so long that I “deserved” to have a drink as a reward.

TODAY, instead of trying to ignore or overcome your discomfort by having a drink, ask yourself, “Why do I want to drink right now? What is it that I think alcohol will do to make this moment better?” And then ask yourself, “Is that true?” If you’re completely objective and honest, you might surprise yourself with your answers.

Do this little exercise first. Write down your answers, or record yourself in a video diary or voice memo. By doing this, you’re observing the symptoms as something separate from you. You’re giving yourself perspective—and a little bit of time for the feelings to subside. And remember that your body is amazing. It’s taking care of you right now by getting rid of all the toxins it’s had to deal with for a long time. Yes, you might not feel your best for a bit. But when the process is complete, your body will feel better than ever.

And consider the online social challenge at alcoholexperiment.com; you can find thousands of others who are also doing this experiment. Sharing your insights with others in a safe, judgment-free environment is incredibly powerful.

Day 4 Reflections from alcoholexperiment.com

“Good days but bad nights. Woke up at 3 a.m. not feeling the best but definitely not hungover. And a bit of a headache this morning. I spent the day thinking about all the holidays and times with my kids I don’t remember. Yesterday it dawned on me how much time alcohol has stolen from me. Yes, I let it. But the reading today very much reinforced that. I am generally happy. Still thankful!”

—ROBYN

“I have been having such strange dreams, I feel such a physical difference. I didn’t realize alcohol takes so long to get out of your system, so even though I binge-drink once or twice a week, I was feeling so crappy because I was never alcohol-free. I had constant headaches, fatigue, bloating, nausea. I am learning so much!”

—GEORGE

“Didn’t expect the physical symptoms to be so real. Glad I understand why I am having them. Still better than being hungover. Need to be gentle on myself and others through this. Can’t wait to sleep again!”

—HECTOR

What Are Cravings, Really?

Knowledge renders belief obsolete.

—NANA JANE

I’ve found there are two kinds of cravings you have to contend with at different times: physical cravings and emotional cravings. Physical symptoms such as anxiety, restlessness, and the inability to sleep show up while the alcohol is still in your system. We know they’re cravings because they go away if you give in and have a drink. It can take up to a week for alcohol to completely leave your system, so that’s about how long you can expect those physical cravings to last. After that point, you’re most likely looking at mental or emotional cravings. (Fortunately, you probably know exactly the last time you had a drink. When people try to get over a sugar addiction, they sometimes consume sugar without even knowing it because it’s hidden in so many food products!)

Psychological or emotional cravings can be much harder to handle simply because they are triggered by certain circumstances that your subconscious knows (from experience) may be helped by having a drink. You’ve reached the point in your relationship with alcohol that it’s taking more than it’s giving, and you feel like you want to cut back or stop. That’s a conscious decision you’ve made. But if your subconscious mind still believes that alcohol is key to relaxation and that you have to drink to have a good time with your friends, then those psychological cravings will creep in—sometimes years after you’ve had any alcohol. Your desires originate from your subconscious mind. And a craving is a desire.

For example, if you used to handle work stress by drinking, like I did, then every time you experience work stress, you’ll likely trigger a psychological craving for alcohol. You’ve already wired your brain to do this. It’s a learned response. Your subconscious believes drinking reduces stress, even though science has proven that alcohol actually increases stress over time. And even though you’ve made the conscious decision not to drink, your subconscious didn’t get the memo. So it sends up a desire—a craving.

If your cravings are triggered by stress, you have to find another way to reduce that stress. Studies have shown over and over that exercise is a great way to do that. Once those endorphins get released, the stress and cravings subside. Mindfulness and meditation are other great ways to reduce stress. Don’t worry, you don’t have to shave your head and move to Tibet. There are all kinds of forms of meditation—all you’re really doing is exercising your brain.

The Internal Battle

So you have this battle going on inside you. Your conscious and subconscious are fighting it out over whether you want a drink. It’s frustrating. It’s confusing. And it’s tempting to try to ignore the craving or exert your willpower over it. But that rarely works. Science tells us that the more we try to repress a thought or ignore something, the harder it is to escape. It’s much better to be completely present and mindful during a craving. Notice how you feel and what thoughts are running through your head when you separate yourself and become an observer watching this weird battle between your conscious and subconscious. Detach yourself from the outcome and you’re less likely to give in.

I like to visualize my subconscious mind as a child riding in the backseat of a car. Suddenly the child decides he or she wants an ice cream cone and won’t let it go. Children are the best salespeople in the world because they don’t give up. They don’t take no for an answer. They’ll keep attacking the problem in a different way over and over until they get what they want.

“Can I have an ice cream, Mom?”

“That ice cream sure looks good!”

“Look! A gas station. Don’t you need gas, Mom? I bet they have ice cream inside.”

“What’s your favorite ice cream, Mom? I like chocolate!”

“So, when are we getting ice cream? Now or after dinner?”

“You know what would make Dad happy? A surprise ice cream!”

If children think there’s even the slightest chance that they’ll get what they desire, they will keep pestering you. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ve been a kid. So you know what I’m talking about, right? The only way to get children to give up is to get rid of the desire, which means either distracting them or making them understand that there is NO WAY they are getting an ice cream.

Distraction

This is how you deal with cravings, too. You can distract yourself with a book, a walk, or a dinner date. You can also substitute something that will satisfy the desire without giving in to the craving. If you need to hold a glass in your hand at a networking event, fill it with tonic water or soda. Often that’s enough to satisfy your subconscious child.