of Drinking Less

Why Do We like to drink? - Part I

I want to talk to you about your desire and where that desire comes from.

As a society, we drink, right? When you go to a restaurant, you're asked if you want a cocktail. When you watch TV, you're going to see lots of beer commercials. You're going to see wine commercials. You're going to be asked if you want wine. After a hard day of skiing or mountain biking, everyone talks about grabbing a cold beer, or, as I often said, "I've earned my beer after that day!"

When you go to a wedding, they're going to say, "Red or white." A lot of people are going to have very glamorous glasses. There's wine tasting everywhere and there's alcohol and booze and options at all sporting events, right?

We drink as a culture. The question is, why? 

What is it about alcohol that we have come to embrace in our society and enjoy as individuals? We have grown up with the idea that alcohol is something that we do, right. Young kids, very young kids go to parties, drink alcohol. It's part of the deal. The question we have to ask is why we desire it? Before I begin to answer that question, one of the things that I want to address is desire in and of itself. If you've listened to some of my other programs, this may be a review for you but it's worth really paying attention to. What is desire? Thinking about what desire is, is really important when it comes to thinking about the things you desire and if they're serving you.

Desire is something that we learn. Now I think this is so interesting that most of us think about desire as something that's an innate. When I do a lot of coaching with clients and we talk about desire and we talk about desire for mates and we talk about desire for food, people feel like it's not a choice, that desire isn't a choice, that desire is something that we either have or we don't. We either desire our husband or we don't. Nothing we can do about it. We either desire peaches or we don't desire peaches. We think that it's innate and something that we don't have control over.

The reason why we believe that is because desire is one of those unconscious programmed things that we seem to do involuntarily. It's because of the way that the brain works. When we learn something and we repeat it many, many times, the brain recognizes that it's a pattern and then takes it out of the prefrontal cortex where it takes a lot of energy to think about and puts it back in that midbrain, in that lower brain so it can just be automatic. If you think about any habit that you have in your life, anything that you repeat regularly, it's not something that you have to consciously think about. Picking up a glass, brushing your teeth, driving your car, right, it's all very learned, and in the beginning, it took a lot of energy to learn it.

Then once you repeated it several times, it became automatic and then became something that went on in the background. Desire is the same thing. Desire is something that we learn and repeat. It's something like, if you think about learning a language. Learning a language is by repetition, repetition, repetition, right? You practice over and over and over that same language and then you become natural at it and you can just speak that language without even thinking about what you're trying to say.

It's the same with desire. It's the same with how you want something. You practice it enough times and you get rewarded enough times for practicing it that it becomes natural and habitual and something that's going on in your involuntary brain. When you see a glass of chardonnay or you see a whiskey or you see a drink or a beer or something, you feel that desire and it feels like it's coming from something unconscious. It seems involuntary and it is because it's something that you've programmed in your mind. Just as if someone were to ask you a question in Spanish, you would involuntarily, if you knew Spanish, answer in Spanish instead of in English.

That's how the whole process goes when you learn something involuntarily. I think this knowledge in and of itself is life-altering because I think it can be scary for someone like you and me who feel this kind of involuntary unconscious type of craving for alcohol. It can be scary if we don't understand where it's coming from. We can be like, "Oh my gosh. Am I an alcoholic? Oh my gosh. Where is this coming from? Why do I feel so out of control? Why did I drink so much more than I wanted to drink? Why did I drink when I told myself I wasn't going to drink?" Right? It can seem like, "Oh my God. Something's taking me over."

When you understand that nothing is taking you over, the only thing that's happened is that you have programmed your brain unconsciously to desire automatically. You've trained your brain to desire something automatically and so you're feeling that desire. You're the one that trained your brain to do that. You're the one that practiced that desire enough that that's why you're feeling it. If you're the one that created it, you're the one that can ‘uncreate’ it if you don't want that desire to be there. Just because you've practiced it and you're so good at it doesn't mean you have to keep doing it even if it feels intense. Now, the reason why it feels intense is because of the reward associated with it, okay?

Our desire to brush our teeth is something that we've programmed. It's something that we've practiced. It's something with enough repetition that it's something that we automatically do but we aren't compelled to do it. We don't have a compulsion to do it, most of us, because we don't have a strong enough reward associated with it. The reward hasn't perpetuated it.

It's really important that we know that when you learn something, if there's a reward associated with it, it becomes even more intense as an involuntary desire. 

There's two pieces to this. The first piece is we desire something because we have automatically practiced enough repetition to have it be unconscious.

The next piece is in the next lesson;)