How to Use Your Drink Plan

One of the problems that we have is that we have this involuntary desire that we've trained ourselves to have and so we're constantly feeling this desire without any conscious control. What we want to do is take all of the drinking activity and put it back into our conscious control. Back into the humanness of who we are and letting our prefrontal cortex take control of any type of drinking that we do.

I've created a worksheet for you and it's called The Drink Plan. Especially in the beginning you want to make sure that any time you're going to drink alcohol that you decide ahead of time that you're going to do it. This is so important. Never drink in response to an urge. If you are drinking in response to the urge then all the work that you've been doing in non-responding to those urges will become much, much harder. You are de-conditioning yourself. The last thing you want to do is interrupt that.

If you want to keep drinking a way to do that is by managing with your prefrontal cortex. What we do is we decide at least 24 hours ahead of time that we are going to drink and we plan on it very specifically. I highly recommend that you write it down or I've made the PDF so you can fill it in online. You download it and you can fill it in and print it out or save it on your computer.

I'm going to ask you some really important questions. I'm going to ask you, "What is the date and time that you're going to drink?" Be very specific. "How many glass are you going to drink and what will those drinks be (wine, beer, cocktails)?" You need to plan this ahead of time.

"I don't know," is not a sufficient answer. You need to have a really thought-out plan and you need to make sure you're deciding right now instead of in the moment when you're there. You do not want to be reacting or responding to anything that's going on from your involuntary brain. You're going to talk about why you've decided to drink, why it's important to you. You're going to use your conscious human mind to decide this is the decision that I'm making and here is the reason why. Then you're going to anticipate how you're going to feel before, during and after the drink.

You are going to be very conscious about this decision. You're going to put a lot of forethought into it, use that prefrontal cortex. Afterwards you'll be able to evaluate that decision from a much cleaner conscious place than just from a reaction type of place.

Make sure you print that out any time you're going to drink and you make sure you plan 24 hours ahead of time. If you haven't planned 24 hours ahead of time, don't do it.

Think about your week ahead. Write as many of those as you need for 24 hours ahead. You can do it more than 24 hours ahead if you want to plan your whole week ahead of time. Make sure you have a form filled out for every single time you plan on drinking.