Alcohol is SH!T: How to Ditch the Booze, Re-ignite Your Life, and Recover the Person you Were Always Meant to be. by Churchill Paul

Author:Churchill, Paul [Churchill, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Knowledge and Willpower Alone Won’t Cut It

On the afternoon of January 1st, 2010, I went to Barnes & Noble in the Seattle Northgate Mall with a crushing hangover, and pulled a book titled Beyond the Influence by Katherine Ketchum off the shelf. I looked over both shoulders to make sure nobody saw that I was reading a self-help book about alcohol addiction and I started to read. As the song “Fireflies” from Owl City piped through Barnes & Noble, I began to fill my brain with knowledge about alcohol. Armed with information about how dangerous alcohol can be for the body and mind and using strategies for how to remain AF, coupled with intense willpower, I went nearly two and a half years without alcohol. After the initial withdrawal from alcohol and an uncomfortable thirty or so days where it felt like I was learning to walk again,

I started overall to feel better. And after a couple months, I felt great. A feeling of bliss, which had been absent since my early twenties came back and I was riding a pink cloud which lasted nearly a year. The fact that my emotional state had dramatically improved in such a short period of time reinforced that alcohol was shit. Only when I completely removed the toxin ethanol from my body was I able to see how it was physically and mentally holding me back. I experienced mental clarity, bothersome physical ailments disappeared, inflammation in the body decreased and at about five months AF, I looked in the mirror and saw a six pack in my stomach starting to emerge. So much mental bandwidth was freed up because I no longer had to figure out when to drink, how much to drink, when to stop, what days to take off, how to mitigate shame the next morning, etc. I had no idea how much energy alcohol was sucking out of every aspect of my life until it was completely removed. Life started to get good and removing alcohol from my life was the reason.

I remember being asked by a friend while in graduate school at the University of Washington in the summer of 2010 if I would ever drink again. I unequivocally, resolutely said “No, never again.” I’m a smart enough guy with unrivaled willpower and there was no way I was ever going to drink again. Heads up, high levels of willpower can backfire like it did for me because it prolongs the solo journey. People with sports backgrounds, like I have, often have the “no pain, no gain” mentality and they think that they all alone, with steadfast determination, can overcome this problem.

In the summer of 2012, my willpower, which is an exhaustible and finite resource, ran out. Looking back, it’s clear what happened. The knowledge acquired in early 2010 gave me the motivation to depart from alcohol, and then I used willpower as my only source of fuel. For two and a half years, I was looking at sobriety as a sacrifice and not an opportunity.

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