Kick the Drink Easily! Page 8

  When you see people who are drunk and you haven’t had a drink yourself, does it really make you want to have some alcohol so that you can get the same ‘enjoyable’ effect? For example when you see someone drinking from a can of beer in the middle of the street during the day, do you envy them? Not many drinkers do, but why not? Don’t you want to have fun too? The fact is that alcohol can never make an evening or improve a holiday; it has certainly destroyed a few. However, alcohol gets the credit when, in fact, the good time has nothing at all to do with the alcohol.

  I went to Tunisia a few years ago, when I was still drinking. The first few nights were spent in the hotel bar where they had some really ‘stunning’ acts for our entertainment. Personally I think a better time would have been had watching paint dry! Still, we were in the middle of nowhere and there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go. I was, of course, drinking every night. This makes me sound like a heavy drinker but every alcohol addict drinks virtually every night on holiday. This is because they have no restrictions preventing them from taking their drug and they feel as though they cannot enjoy themselves without it. The point is that, although I was drinking, the evenings were very, very boring and, if there is nothing to stimulate your mind when you are drinking, you get tired very quickly.

  I was only there for a week and on the fifth day we decided to go on one of those pre-arranged evenings with a meal, entertainment and free wine all night. At the time, it was the last part that appealed. The evening was excellent; the best of the whole week and it made the holiday so much better. Was the evening so good because I was drinking? No, I had been drinking every night before that evening. It was because the atmosphere was excellent. There was belly dancing, snake charming, a room filled with about 500 people all clapping and dancing on the tables and the stage. I was dancing and interacting with others and it was really fun. I had an excellent evening, not because I was drinking alcohol but in spite of the fact that I was drinking. If someone had said to me at the time that there wouldn’t be any drink, the sad truth is that I would rather have stayed in the hotel bar than attend the event. At the time I was convinced that some of the success of the night was due to the amount I drank but, looking back, I didn’t actually drink that much as I was too busy dancing and having fun.

  In fact, when I was hooked, there were several occasions when I had an excellent evening with hardly any drink. Haven’t you ever been to a social gathering where you danced all night with very little to drink and realised at the end of the evening that you had a great time, yet hardly touched a drop? To your surprise you knew you could even have driven home. But if you had been told you couldn’t drink, you would have felt miserable and deprived. The truth is that we do not need alcohol to enjoy ourselves, because alcohol does not make you enjoy yourself; it is a depressant. It also gives you the feeling that you are in control but in fact you are …

  Under the Influence

  The biggest danger of the alcohol trap is that it gives the addict the illusion of control. This sounds like a contradiction, especially when you see someone who has drunk alcohol when you haven’t, but alcohol removes one’s natural fears and inhibitions. When that happens you feel as though you are more in control but, in fact, you are not. Consequently this leaves the drinker out of control, vulnerable and unprotected. When you are driving your car, you have to be alert in order to make sure you don’t injure yourself or other people. It is natural to have some fear at these times as it’s this fear which is vital for our survival. However, when alcohol short-circuits the brain, it removes this fear and gives the addict the illusion that they are calmer and more in control so their perception has now changed.

  There are still some people who believe that they are better drivers when they have had a couple of drinks and I used to be one of them. Was I stupid for thinking this? No, the reality is that I did feel calm, more relaxed and in control at the time but these were illusions, and how was I to know when I was the one who was under the influence? When I woke up the next morning, my perception of what had happened had not changed. I felt hungover and thought I had been outrageously stupid to drink and drive but I still believed that the feelings I had experienced while under the influence were real.

  They say that a good friend should never let you drink and drive. That is true and a good friend wouldn’t. A friend who actually knows what they are doing that is. It is no good asking them to hang on to your keys so that you don’t drive home if you have too much to drink. Once they are under the influence themselves, their judgement vanishes and it is not them any more. Your true friend has already left and the person who remains just wants to get home and wants you to provide the transport. You may drive to a pub with the best intentions in the world but, as soon as that alcohol hits your brain cells, you feel a false sense of control. You would never normally contemplate drinking and driving but it’s no longer the real you who is driving home. ‘Under the influence’ means literally that: being controlled in what you say, do, and think.

  Most people realise that alcohol drinkers do not drive better but are in fact endangering the lives of others as alcohol slows down their reactions. This awareness was highlighted partly due to the organisation MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). Their campaign in the early eighties led to people changing their attitude to drink-driving but it still wasn’t enough to make me ask myself whether all my other reasons for drinking were fallacies too. Take the idea that it makes you a fun person. Alcohol does not turn you into a fun person. How many people do you know who are dull and annoying and who, after a drink, don’t turn into fun people? Far from it, they become even more boring and annoying and all you want to do is get rid of them.

  In truth, alcohol does none of the things which we are convinced it does including the one about …

  It Helps Me to Relax

  In what situation does alcohol help us to relax? I used to find the drinks that helped me were consumed when I was in what should have been relaxing, situations anyway. We must keep this point very clear: the alcohol never changes. Circumstances change, situations are different; never the alcohol.

  I would come home from work, fix myself a drink, put my feet up and think ‘Aaah that’s relaxing’, but coming home from work and putting your feet up is relaxing anyway. It is a way to unwind from the pressures of the day. Most of the time I would take just one mouthful and think that it was the drink that was helping me unwind. It didn’t even occur to me that the alcohol hadn’t had time to take effect. The truth is that your brain will do as you tell it. If you tell your brain that you cannot relax without a drink then the brain will say ‘OK, I won’t relax until you get one then.’ That explains why I could relax after just one sip but it was not the drink that helped me relax; it was just the relaxing situation.

  In reality, the only reason for being my being so tense was partly due to my alcohol addiction. Alcohol does create withdrawal. However, unlike heroin where the withdrawal is very noticeable, alcohol withdrawal is very subtle. Now anybody who has reached the delirium tremens stage no doubt disagrees. What about the terrible physical withdrawal that is the DTs? Do we mean the shakes? Are we talking about not being able to hold a cup properly because our hands are shaking too much? Is it the trembling body? I would like to ask you a question. Do these people look relaxed when they are trembling and shaking? It sounds a ridiculous question but it is simply put to illustrate the point clearly. When someone is shaking, trembling and ill at ease they are clearly not relaxed. What caused this feeling? The alcohol of course. The addict then has some more alcohol and the shakes stop. The drinker now believes that alcohol helped him relax. The reason is because they are more relaxed than they were a minute ago but nowhere near as relaxed as they would feel as a non-drinker. This is because, even while they are drinking alcohol, they are still only partially suppressing the tense feeling that the alcohol caused in the first place. The more of the drug they take, the more of a withdrawal they will have; the more the withdrawal, the
more they take to try to stop it. They have treated the symptom of the disease with the very cause and created a vicious circle. Until they remove the cause they will always suffer with the symptoms because they will always have the disease.

  Even though nearly every drinker has suffered at least once from ‘the shakes’ (the morning-after feeling when you have had one too many), most of the time they are not aware that the body is in an almost permanent state of attempted recovery. It is when the body is recovering from the physical and mental pounding of the poison flooding the bloodstream that it becomes tense and for it to recover fully from this feeling will take anything from three to ten days. The average drinker rarely goes longer than four days without a fix. In order to see how part of the illusion works, we need to understand exactly what happens when alcohol enters the body.

  Alcohol goes straight through the stomach wall without being digested, giving an instant rush of glucose to the bloodstream. This stimulates the excess production of the powerful hormone insulin. Any rush that you feel when you have alcohol is simply the insulin going through your blood trying to burn all the alcohol you have just put in. The insulin produced to deal with this actually causes your blood sugar levels to fall. When you feel the effects of low blood sugar, what do you need? A quick fix of course. The moment the insulin reaction has cleansed your bloodstream of this excess sugar, you are then running on empty. When you feel empty you feel tense but when you drink more alcohol you feel instantly more relaxed because you have loaded your bloodstream with glucose and momentarily suppressed that empty feeling. But again, all that has actually happened is that you have partially ended a low that the drug itself caused. A low that, for most of the time to the average drinker, is imperceptible. Now I understand how this accounted for my really low feeling on a Sunday morning after I’d been on an alcohol binge on Saturday. I would always crave a big fry-up and now I know why: I was suffering from hypoglycaemia or low blood sugar. This accounts for the fact that many drinkers eat a lot of sugary foods and why they run on nervous energy.

  So, alcohol causes low blood sugar, drains the body of water, overworks the liver, pancreas and kidneys and leaches oxygen from the brain. That doesn’t sound very relaxing to me. The truth is that alcohol does not really help anybody to relax. We tend to fix ourselves a drink at relaxing times like a lunch break, finishing work, having a long hot bath, finishing the chores, a dinner party or lying on a beach. The drink gets the credit but alcohol is incapable of creating a genuine feeling of relaxation. If you drink alcohol in situations that are not relaxing, will the drug create the feeling you crave?

  THE DRUG NEVER CHANGES, ONLY THE EXCUSES WE GIVE TO JUSTIFY OUR INTAKE!

  Did we start drinking to help us relax? Did our parents encourage us to drink alcohol before we took our exams so that we would feel calm and relaxed? They should have in theory. Come to think of it, we should all be encouraging children to have alcohol before they go into exams because that way they can feel calm, relaxed, confident, courageous and happy while tackling this unnerving task. If people genuinely believed that alcohol relaxes them, then why do bosses get so annoyed when their staff have had too many at lunchtime? Surely it is good to have a calm and relaxed workforce, isn’t it?

  If we believed our own hype about alcohol, let alone everybody else’s, it would make sense to drink all the time. When you wake up with worries on your mind, why not have a drink to relax you? It would seem the logical thing to do if you genuinely believed that is what alcohol does for you. If you see a person being violent, the first thing you should do is give them a drink to relax them. Can you imagine a country where over 80 per cent of the population was taking a drug regularly that helped keep them calm and relaxed? Wow, you would have little or no crime in such a society. It would be the calmest and most laid back nation in the world. We can but dream of such a place.

  The President of the United States should be advised to drink alcohol regularly as, to be a world leader, he should be confident, courageous, relaxed, strong and dominant wherever possible. Remember Boris Yeltsin who always looked the picture of happiness and courage? He always looked very calm and relaxed, don’t you think? Relaxed? He could barely stand up because of the amount he had been drinking. That is not relaxation, it is being drunk, and there is a big difference. He could hardly run a bath let alone a country!

  You are never genuinely relaxed when drinking alcohol. When a heroin addict is lying on the floor do they look relaxed or totally ‘out of it’? When you see an alcohol addict collapsed in a heap on the floor do they look genuinely relaxed or ‘out of it’? ‘Out of it’ means just that, or void of any genuine emotion and unable to relate properly to their surroundings. People also try to argue that alcohol is an anaesthetic. This is true, but being anaesthetised does not mean being genuinely relaxed. Heroin is also an anaesthetic, in reality a more powerful one than alcohol, but would you take heroin to help you to relax? And would it really relax you anyway? Do you believe that a heroin addict is more relaxed than a non-heroin addict? If you were having a nice relaxing jacuzzi with a person who had just taken some heroin, who would be relaxed and who would be tired and zombified?

  When a powerful poison like alcohol enters the bloodstream, the body has one of two options. It can either store it or get rid of it. Alcohol is so poisonous to the human body that it cannot be stored for very long or you would die. This is why your body expels all the alcohol within the first week to ten days. It has no choice but to get rid of it for its survival. Alcohol is removed by the liver at a rate of one unit per hour; this process cannot be speeded up by drinking coffee or anything else for that matter – that is yet another fallacy. This process takes up so much energy that your muscles, bones, in fact everything feels tired and heavy, or relaxed as we have been conditioned to say. The reality is that your body is a long way from genuine relaxation as it is getting a pounding from a poison. If you pass out on alcohol it means that your body cannot keep you alive and awake at the same time as it needs all its resources to deal with the poison in the bloodstream. When you lose the use of your sight, hearing and consciousness you are effectively in a coma. Being comatose is not relaxation.

  The addict, however, remains blind. I certainly did. In order to want to feel relaxed you must be tense to begin with. Why are drinkers so tense? I couldn’t relax properly even at a social gathering if for some reason I wasn’t allowed to drink or I had to control my intake. There is nothing more stressful than being a slave to a drug. We never seem to be aware of the mental and physical slavery we suffer. Of course I was tense and found life tough. I was permanently below par because I was dependent on a drug. Sometimes I would snap at people when I’d had a drink; also when I couldn’t have one. If I was drinking I was ‘under the influence’ and if I couldn’t drink I was ‘under the influence.’ I would feel deprived and that would make me tense, just like a child who, when told they cannot have a toy, throws a tantrum. It is exactly the same with the deprived drinker.

  ‘Give them a drink to steady their nerves.’ We hear that all the time, but what does alcohol do? It destroys the central nervous system. The only nerves that alcohol can steady are the nerves of somebody who is already suffering from alcohol withdrawal. Even then it only alleviates the unsteady nerves temporarily as it caused them in the first place. When you see a person smashing a broken glass into someone’s face in a pub would you ever, even for a second, think ‘I know what they need to steady their nerves; I’ll get them another drink’? When somebody is shouting obscenities after having had a drink you would never think of giving them another drink to calm them down! Why not if you believed alcohol to be a genuine relaxant? Give them enough alcohol and they will eventually pass out but, again, that is not true relaxation.

  Alcohol has even found its way into outer space. The Russian Mir space station is apparently partly fuelled by vodka. Not the station itself but the Russian cosmonauts on board. American astronauts arriving for duty on board the Russian craft
were said to be amazed and flabbergasted to be offered a stiff vodka to calm their nerves after a tricky spacewalk. It is said that one particular Russian spent his time aboard Mir completely out of his head, or totally spaced out! Why didn’t they have a drink before the space walk so that they could feel relaxed for that tricky task? Because they would be dead by now.

  So the conclusion is that alcohol does not help genuinely to relax at all and that this feeling is another fallacy. I also mentioned in this chapter that alcohol destroys your courage and confidence; surely I am not suggesting that alcohol doesn’t give people a little bit of the good old …

  Dutch Courage

  YOU CANNOT BE COURAGEOUS WITHOUT OVERCOMING FEAR.