The problem with willpower

willpower

Willpower is important and even admirable. But it’s not the best way to change your relationship with alcohol. Think about trying to stop a runaway train. Okay, that probably doesn’t come up very often in your daily life, but you can imagine it. You leap into the engineer’s seat and, realizing that you don’t know how to control a train, you jerk the steering wheel (if trains have steering wheels) and run it into a wall.

Driving a train into a wall will almost certainly stop the train. Maybe not immediately; it might continue through the wall and have to hit a few more walls before it actually stops.

It might also not be a smooth and harmless stop. It might cause some serious damage, in fact. It will work, but it isn’t the best way to stop a train.

back to willpower

Just as driving a train into a wall is one way to stop a train…but not the best way…willpower is one way to change your relationship with alcohol. The problem is, relying on willpower can mean that you spend years, and perhaps the rest of your life struggling with cravings, fighting against your desire for alcohol, and working on being sober.

That’s not freedom.

You don’t know how to drive a train. Neither do I. I don’t even know if trains have steering wheels. If I knew how to stop a train in the safest and most effective way, I could do that instead. Equally, by using the information on the brain and alcohol that science makes available to us, we can use the safest and most effective methods to gain freedom from alcohol.

Instead of focusing on cravings and desire for alcohol, we can retrain our brains by exposing the subconscious false beliefs we have in the benefits of alcohol. When we identify those false beliefs and replace them with factual understanding of alcohol, we can reset our minds to a time before we thought we needed alcohol. Without those desires, we can be free from alcohol.

coaching

You can do this. You can make the changes you want. But you don’t have to do it alone. Working with a certified coach helps you gain freedom from alcohol faster and more painlessly. I wold like to share what I’ve learned with you. Book a free 30-minute coaching call with me and see whether it’s right for you. There’s no obligation.