Category: Mental health

10 tips if your feelings are making you drink too much

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Mental health

In previous posts we explained how childhood emotional neglect can make you drink too much. We  also described  how to recognise the signs of childhood emotional neglect.  This week we give some tips from Dr Jonice Webb on how to recover from childhood emotional neglect.

 

 1.Ask yourself regularly how are you feeling?

Very often people brought up in families that did not openly discuss emotions don’t know how they feel. During the day stop and ask yourself how are you feeling? Initially this may be difficult so just ask yourself are you feeling positive or negative?

 

2.Accept your feelings

Don’t judge or criticise yourself. Just accept the feeling. Becoming aware of your feelings and accepting your feelings is a major step towards resolving your childhood emotional abuse.  Once you start accepting your feelings and not criticising yourself it’s easier to not drink too much. The need for the emotional crutch alcohol provides is reduced.

 

3.Identify your own needs

Very often people who experienced emotional neglect as children don’t know what they want or don’t feel they deserve to have their own needs met. So imagine you have a magic wand and could immediately grant yourself three wishes. What would those three wishes be?

 

4.Imagine a kind person helping you

If you still find identifying your own needs  difficult, don’t despair. You might be a successful first class honours graduate from Trinity with an amazing career and family. However if your feelings have not been acknowledged as a child, and it was all about career success, this can still be really tough.

It helps to recognise that you’ve grown up with a belief your feelings are not important. But this belief is not a fact and it’s not true. So imagine a really kind person who loves you no matter what. Some people find imagining themselves as a young child works. Imagine that kind person or child gently telling you what you need. What would they say?

 

5.Ask yourself questions

Asking your self questions about your feelings can also be helpful

For example

What’s wrong?

How do you feel?

What do you want?

What are you afraid of?

What are you worried about?

What’s making you angry, sad, hurt, etc.?

The answers to these questions will help you to start unlocking and understanding your feelings.

 

6.Small steps work

Adults who experienced emotional neglect as children often have difficulty  looking after their own needs (self-care). Frequently.they look after everybody else but themselves. Often they are carers in very stressful situations who then hit the bottle at night to keep going. So be very gentle with yourself. Talk to yourself with compassion and kindness as if you are talking to a small child.

For example, Instead of saying

“I drink too much because I’m lazy, stupid and can’t cope”

Try saying

“I’m in a really stressful situation and that’s why I’m drinking too much. But I’m becoming more aware of the need to manage my drinking”

You’ll be surprised how even this very small change in thinking will help.

 

7.Be Patient

It takes time to unlearn old ways of behaving. After all if during your entire childhood your feelings were ignored, you are not going to change this overnight.

As the Japanese proverb says

“Fall seven times, stand up eight is success.”

8.Use these tips when you’re feeling bad, sad etc.

While these tips are really simple, they really do help.  I find when I’m feeling numb or bad just becoming aware I’m feeling like this really helps. In my case, it’s often because I have a very unrealistic belief that everything I do must be perfect.

 

9. Accept we drink too much for a reason

As Valerie says

“You don’t wake up & go ‘I’ll drink a litre of vodka and destroy everything around me’,”

In Valerie’s case, she was was treated for 10 years for alcohol abuse, before finally post natal depression was diagnosed. So we drink too much for a reason.

If you’re finding it difficult to cut back on your drinking, try and identify the reasons why rather than just blaming yourself. If it’s childhood emotional neglect, these tips will really help.

You might also  find our short course on the pro’s and con’s of drinking helpful.

 

10. Read the book

This material has been drawn the book

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

We’ve  recommended this book to a number of people who have all found it very useful. So worth reading.

7 signs your emotions are making you drink more alcohol

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Mental health

In our last post we described childhood emotional neglect and how it can make you drink more alcohol

While we may come from a loving caring family, very often our parents never learned to acknowledge our feelings. or emotions. Because this is something that did n’t happen, we’re often totally unaware.

This lack  of  parental support for feelings is called childhood emotional neglect.

As we described previously if we’ve experienced childhood emotional neglect we tend to blame ourselves for whatever is wrong in our lives.  Often  we tend to  drink more alcohol to make ourselves feel better.

Dr Jonice Webb PhD a leading expert in this field lists 7 signs of growing up with childhood emotional neglect.

 

1.Feelings of emptiness

Some people just feel numb. Others have an empty feeling in their belly, or chest or throat.  The feeling may not be there all the time, it may come and go. Often people drink more alcohol to make the feeling go away and feel better.

 

2.Fear of being dependent

Some people find they never want help from anybody. This is not a normal healthy need to be independent but a total unwillingness to let anybody help.  These people find the thought of being dependent on anybody really frightening. As they get older and maybe they get less physically able they tend to drink more to push away the fear of becoming dependent on others.

 

3.Unrealistic self-appraisal

Some people find they don’t understand themselves very well. They don’t understand their strengths and weakness or know what they can do well. They tend not to have a clear purpose in life or even understand what they like or dislike.

 

4.No compassion for yourself, plenty for others

Some people are always helping their friends and colleagues, listening to their problems with empathy and compassion. They provide lots of practical support to their friends. Yet they find it hard to be kind themselves and won’t discuss their own problems with friends and family. They often berate themselves for not doing more or for needing time out to relax because they are totally exhausted.

 

5.Guilt, shame, self-directed anger and blame

Guilt, shame, anger and blame; The Fabulous Four.  People with childhood emotional neglect direct a lot of this at themselves.  They do something minor wrong and become very self-critical. For example being 10 minutes late for an appointment means a day or two  spent criticising themselves for being lazy and unpunctual.

Or a daughter gets poor marks in school and they blame themselves for not helping enough with homework.

So the glass of wine becomes a great ally for numbing these painful feelings.

  

6.Feeling fatally flawed

This often feels like other people don’t like you. It’s an underlying sense that

“I’m flawed”

“Something is wrong with me”

“I’m not like other people”

Many people drink too much to push these feelings away.

 

7.Difficulty feeling, identifying, managing and/or expressing emotions

Often people feel they can’t speak out on what they actually feel. This can be because they don’t feel they have the right to speak about their feelings or because they don’t actually have the right words to describe their feelings.

They often feel confused about what other people do or even what they do.

They may feel very uncomfortable when people talk with emotion e.g. people talking with anger or sadness.

 

Do any of these signs ring  a bell with you?

The more of these signs you can identify with, the more likely it is that you experienced childhood emotional neglect.

This is not saying that our parents did not love us, but they did not have the skills to help us deal with our feelings or emotions.

So the less in touch we are with our feelings the more likely it is we’ll turn to drink to make ourselves feel better.

 

What to Do?

If you’re feeling childhood emotional neglect applies to you, don’t panic. By simply being aware of it you’ve just taken a major step towards fixing this problem.

In a future post we‘ll look at how to get more in touch with your feelings and deal with the effects of childhood emotional neglect.

 

Are your feelings making you drink more alcohol?

If you’ve experienced childhood emotional abuse, you’re not alone if you’ve taken to drinking more alcohol.   So try not to constantly criticise yourself as this is more likely to encourage you to drink more. If you find it impossible not to constantly criticise yourself, you may find support from a counsellor helpful. Our tips for finding the right counsellor for you can be found here

Or you may find Dr Jonice’s book “Running on empty”  helpful.

 

Is emotional neglect making you drink more?

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Mental health

The term childhood emotional neglect is becoming better known and understood. It refers to a failure by parents to respond to a child’s feelings on a regular basis.

 

Ciara  is emotionally neglected

Ciara’s  friends gang up on her on in the playground.  She comes home from school feeling sad. Ciara’s parent’s don’t notice her sadness. Neither says,

“Ciara are you OK?” or

“Did something happen at school today?”

They help Ciara with her homework and then bring her to Irish dancing.  They tell her she is a smart kid and great at the dancing. No one seems to notice that anything is wrong. Ciara says nothing about feeling sad.

 

Emotional neglect is not a once off event

Now if it’s just one time, that Ciara’s parents don’t notice her sadness, it won’t do any damage to her development. But if it keeps happening then Ciara learns that her feelings are not important. She learns not to acknowledge or accept her feelings.

 

Emotional neglect can be invisible

It’s much easier to see if there is physical neglect or if a child is not getting enough to eat. It’s much harder to see emotional neglect. It’s a failure by parents to do something, so it is much more invisible.

Think about something that happened yesterday. Now try and think of something that did not happen yesterday. It’s a lot harder to do this.

 

But my childhood was very happy

Angela often finds that clients tell her their childhood was very happy. They had loving parents, who were always there for them, with a nice home and plenty of support. It’s only later on in the counselling process they begin to realise their parents did not help them to deal with their feelings. The support was always for practical things like dinners, homework help and driving. Feelings however were rarely  discussed.

If feelings are rarely discussed, then we believe feelings are not important. Yet all the research shows that being aware and accepting our feelings is a really important part of mental health and happiness.

 

Parents can only give what they have

This is not to blame parents. If our parents  were not brought up to deal with their feelings then it’s unlikely they can help us  deal with our feelings. So without outside help or self-development the cycle of emotional neglect continues.

 

We’re more likely to drink too much if we have emotional neglect

The research suggests that women who fail to learn how to handle feelings like anxiety and depression are much more likely to drink too much.  They are also much more likely to get pregnant earlier

In his  Irish Paradox book, Sean Moncrieff thinks the reason we all drink too much is so we can share our feelings and not have them reported back to us the next day. We Irish are funny. we don’t do feelings.

 

Drinking too much?

If you’re drinking too much and finding it difficult to control your drinking, childhood emotional neglect may be a cause.

A really important point is not too berate yourself for failing to control your drinking. People with childhood emotional neglect tend to be very self-critical. Instead tell yourself you’re trying and that’s a big start.  Every time you drink too much, try and learn from what happened, rather than criticising yourself. As you can see from the wheel of change picture  below, failing is an important part of changing behaviour.

emotional neglect

 

How do I know if I have childhood emotional neglect?

People with childhood emotional neglect often ask themselves

“I have it all, why don’t I feel happier?”

“I have this empty feeling which only drink takes away”

“I feel like I’m an outsider.”

“What is wrong with me?”

“Why do I struggle so much with controlling my drinking?”

 

There are 7 key signs of childhood emotional neglect and we’ll describe these in a future post.

If you’d like to read more on this topic now, Dr Jonice Webb has a really good questionnaire on identifying childhood emotional neglect.  Click here for the questionnaire

6 top tips to feel happy

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Mental health, Practical tips

We’ve been working with the nice folks in Mental Health Ireland and thought you might find their top tips  to  feel happy useful.

1.Connect

The research shows people with good social relationships tend to be happier. This is n’t about spending time on social media but actually meeting people face to face.

So try to make time every day to chat to people you know- even if it’s just a 15 minute chat with a work colleague away from your work desk.

If you’re finding it difficult to connect to people, because in Ireland it always seems to involve drinking you can find out about alcohol free events here.

 

2.Be Active

You’ don’t have to get all sweaty to be active. A daily walk to the shop instead of taking a car is great. Even better is a relaxing walk in nature- such as the beach or country side. It really does help me to feel happy and more grounded. Exercise is also great for filling the wine shaped bottle hole as Lucy explains here.

You can find lots of help on getting more active here.

 

3.Take notice

Life is so busy, it’s easy to just rush from one thing to another. Actually stopping for a moment and paying attention to our own thoughts, feelings and the world around us can make a big difference.

 

4. Keep Learning

Learning new ‘things’ can boost our self-confidence, self-esteem, build a sense of purpose and help us connect with others.  It does not have to be classroom type learning, even trying out a new cooking recipe helps.

 

5. Give

From small acts of kindness to volunteering, giving can give us a sense of purpose, community and connection to others. Giving can be a simple as saying thanks to the bus driver.

We would add a caution, on giving though.  Sometimes people who are drinking too much or in relationships where the other person is drinking too much can be “co-dependent”.

Co-dependent is a word used to describe people who give too much. So if this is you, giving more will not help you feel better. You can find out more about co-dependency here.

One final tip  from us.

 

6.Drink less

Stay within the low risk drinking limits shown below and you’ll start feeling better. It may take a while, but even moving towards one day a week without alcohol will make a difference.

feel happy

If you would like more information on safer drinking click here.

 

Interested in more stuff  which will help you feel happy?

If you liked these tips, Mental health Ireland run free “mind your mental health” courses nationwide which you might enjoy. Find out more here

 

Even moderate drinking affects your brain power

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Mental health, Physical health

It’s so hard to know what is safe moderate drinking. Different countries use different measures and there are so many  research studies saying  different things from moderate drinking protects your heart to there is no safe level of drinking.

 

 Why is there so much confusion about moderate drinking?

A big problem is the money spent by big alcohol to fight  efforts by government and public health care professionals  to develop common standards. Recently here in Ireland they launched an “independent” report stating alcohol consumption was declining when alcohol consumption actually went up 5% in Ireland last year.

Many of the earlier studies showing there are health benefits from moderate drinking are now shown to be flawed. They compared people who had given up drinking for health reasons to people who were still drinking. This meant the people who had given up drinking had more health problems than the people who were still drinking!

 

There is no safe level of drinking

The reputable British journal  the  Lancet brought together a number of experts who concluded that overall alcohol is a more harmful drug than even heroin or cocaine.

So the public health experts have concluded there is no safe level of drinking.

So now they talk about low risk drinking limits and moderate drinking.  For women this is  eleven or less standard drinks and two drink free days. See the picture below for an example of a low risk drinking week.

  moderate drinking

 

Even moderate drinking decreases your brain power

Worryingly a new research study states that even moderate drinking can affect your brain power. The researchers did brain function tests including  MRI scans and adjusted for age, social class and smoking. They found that even those people drinking to low risk guidelines were more likely to have damage known as hippocampal atrophy. The hippocampus is a key part of the brain for remembering and learning. The researchers found  even moderate drinking  affects memory and ability to move around spaces.

The more people drank the more brain damage they had.

 You can see a report on the study here.

  

The majority of people who drink, drink too much.

In the same article, of 800 people who responded 57% felt they needed to reduce their drinking. This confirms earlier HRB reports that the majority of Irish people who drink are abusing alcohol.  

 

 moderate drinking

 

 

Reducing your drinking is a good idea

So for the sake of our poor brain and to reduce the risk of dementia we should reduce the amounts we drink. For some quick tips on reducing the harm that drinking can cause  please click here.

Bressie’s six top tips for good mental health

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Mental health

We were at a very interesting event  where Bressie, the celebrity mental health campaigner gave his top tips for good mental health. They’re worth sharing.

 

1.Limit exposure to toxic people

These are the people  you meet who are  always moaning or being negative. They don’t even have to be nagging you, they may just be giving out about the world and how bad it is  in general. Limit the time you spend with these people as they will lower your energy levels.

 

2.Draw a circle

If you do have to spend time with toxic people, then before you meet them, take a few minutes to draw a high, thick colourful imaginary circle around yourself. Then tell yourself, nobody can get into your circle. When you’re with this person keep thinking of  the person being outside your imaginary circle and you’ll be impacted less by their negative energy. This is a very helpful tip for people who have a lot of empathy and tend to absorb other people’s emotions.

 

3.Be grateful

Each day before you get out of bed, think of a list of 30 things you’re grateful for. These can be as simple as you’re glad you’re awake, to looking forward to your breakfast, to meeting a friend. Initially it can be hard to think of 30 things, so start with 10 and build up. What this does is changes your mind set so your day starts on a much more positive note and you’ll have more energy to get through the day.

 

4.Limit the amount of bad news you listen or read to

We’re biologically wired to respond more to fear, because as cavemen the ability to react to threats kept us alive.  So the media attract our attention by always focusing in on bad news and creating a sense of fear.  They rarely report on all the good things happening because that does not sell enough newspapers or attract social media attention.

So limit the amount of bad news you read or listen to especially when there’s yet another dreadful tragedy. It does not mean you don’t care about the people involved. Does reading every little minute detail about a tragedy really help anybody? Why not focus your energy on something more positive instead to show you do care?

Try just two  days without reading or listening to any  news and you’ll be surprised how positive your mood becomes.

 

5.Stop judging people

As Atticus Finch, said in to “To kill a mockingbird”

“You never really understand a person, until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”

bressie

Yet, we spend a lot of time and energy judging people and what they do. Getting annoyed or angry at what someone does or does not do. Wasting a lot of energy on our thoughts saying,

“Well she was right out of line, saying that, she’s so mean and unfair, does she not realise I worked so hard on that”

We need to accept we can’t control what other people do and all we can control is our reaction to other people.

We don’t know what is going on in their lives. There may be very good reasons why they are acting the way they are.

So assuming you’re not in a toxic  relationship and need to take action to protect yourself, don’t waste time judging and analysing other people.

 

6.Don’t use alcohol as a crutch

Bressie has been very open about his own struggles with mental health and using alcohol to manage his anxiety. While the first drink of alcohol can initially help you relax  all the research shows  alcohol makes you depressed.  So don’t binge drink.  Drink less than six standard drinks each time your drink  and have two days off alcohol every week.

bressie

For more information on managing your drinking and avoiding hangovers, please click here.

Bressie has set up “Lust for Life”

If you find these tips helpful, Bressie and his team have set up a useful website on all things mental health  and well being and you can find it here.

 

One very simple action to help manage your drinking

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Mental health, Practical tips

Nearly all of can feel at times we’re stuck in a dark place with too much going on, drinking  a little too much but feeling too low to even think about manage your drinking. We know drinking alcohol helps us to relax but don’t realise too much alcohol, is actually stopping us getting out of that hole or dark place we’re stuck in.

We need to take some kind of action but there’s too much pressure at the moment to think about changing our lifestyles. That glass or two of wine at the end of a long stressful day helps us get through the day. Maybe we just don’t have the energy to take on and plan a major lifestyle change. Anyhow in our society, it’s just so difficult to get away from alcohol is n’t it? So it’s just too much effort to do anything to manage your drinking.

 

Don’t run away

But don’t give up.  There is one simple thing we can do which all the psychological research shows really does help us to take control of our drinking.

All we have to do is to actually record how much we’re actually drinking. So why not try tracking your drinking for just one single week?

 

Track your drinking for a week

Tracking our drinking really does improve our motivation to actually take action on reducing our drinking.  It really helps us to see just how much we are drinking on different days, helping us to see if we are drinking too much. The really nice benefit from this is many people find the very action of  recording their drinking helps them to actually reduce their drinking. They don’t have to do anything else! This can happen even when we don’t set specific targets for our drinking.

 

How to get started

First thing is  keep it really simple.  You can get into very complicated calculations but we recommend using a “standard drinks” approach. So you simply find out the standard drinks for your usual tipple of choice and use that.

To make it easy we‘ve shown the standard drinks for the most popular drinks below.

manage our drinking

 

If you have any trouble knowing your standard drink, you can use this official HSE online calculator here.

 

Start tracking

So now you know your standard drinks, every time you drink, complete  the form  below. Try and fill it out before you have each drink. This helps you to be more aware of what you’re drinking. It takes less than a minute. If you forget to complete it when you’re drinking try and complete the form the next morning.

Use this form below to start tracking your drinking. Each line should be for a separate drink.

manage your drinking

You can download a copy of this form to print here

We’ve completed a form below to show you how.  You can see this person is drinking more than the low risk drinking guidelines of 12 standard drinks for women. (explained here)

manage your drinking

 

You can add other helpful comments such as who you were with or what your mood was like, but to get started we recommend keeping it really simple and not too complicated.

 

You really can manage your drinking

Sometimes if feels like we’re on one of those hamster wheels & have to keep running. Constantly trying to stay on top of things. Finding a drink or two is helping to keep our feet running and not fall off the hamster wheels and get stuck in a really dark place.

So if you feel like this and are finding it really hard to motivate yourself to start managing your  drinking  to a safer level, try this tip.  It takes very little time and effort as you’re simply recording your drinking and not making any major life decisions.

More free  help to manage your drinking is just a click away here.

 

Does alcohol abuse run in families?

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Mental health, Personal stories

As an adult child of a Mother who drank too much I was no stranger to the effects alcohol abuse had within my family.  My childhood experience of my mother was marred by her daily drinking and punctuated by short lived periods of sobriety.

 

There was no history of alcohol abuse

It is important to note that my mother did not have a history of alcohol abuse in her family.  She developed chronic depression after the death of my sister in 1973. And after years of struggling to cope with her death and being told

“that is was Gods will”

and she

“needed to get over it”,

she succumbed to alcohol abuse in a bid to cope with that loss.  My mother was first introduced to alcohol at a work function.

 

My Mother was a high performing sales manager

Contrary to popular belief, my mother was not an unemployed fall-down-drunk.  She worked as the sales manager for a publication firm.  She was what I later learned to be  “a high functioning Alcoholic”.  In fact, in my mother’s 30-year long career she rarely missed a day of work because of her drinking.  She was a master at hiding her love affair with alcohol to the outside world.

 

At home, however…

A memory that sticks out in my mind as a child was watching the bus-stop across the road from our house while waiting for my mother to come home.  When she came in she was the Mother I wanted to spend time with. I wanted to be seen and loved by this beautiful lady, and for a brief hour before she pulled the cork out of that bottle in the drinks cabinet, she was all that, elegant, refined, witty, and kind.

 

My heart would sink

The minute I saw her reach into that oak cabinet, my heart would sink, it was when I knew that the evening was destined to go horribly wrong.  I would feel my belly flip, my mouth go dry with worry, I was acutely aware of the glug glug glug of the gin spilling out into a crystal tumbler.  Every evening I would try my best to distract her, fighting for her attention, and each time was always sent away to play with the words

“later darling, mommy needs to relax”.

 

It became futile to try and talk to her

After a while it became futile to try and talk to her. She slid further and further away from me with each glass. I would be engulfed with worry and sadness.  A short while later my Dad would come home.  At first, he wouldn’t say anything, but myself and my three brothers knew! We just knew my Father was disappointed and that potentially there would be an argument, a dinner ruined, crying, doors slamming and horrible tense silences.

 

The Elephant in the room

No one dared challenge my Mother, not while she was drinking and most certainly not the next morning.  We would tell her what she said and what she did.  We were told that we were lying and she would cry and we felt responsible.  My dad would shout, call her names, and us? We would take cover in the bedroom at the end of the hall and try and distract ourselves from the arguments, the banged doors, the futility of it all.  Not only were we not allowed to discuss my mother’s drinking with her, we were not allowed to let anyone outside of the home know what was going on behind closed doors.

 

I became my Mother’s carer

I became my Mother’s carer. While she was drinking, I would make sure she wouldn’t hurt herself.  I became her confidant, her friend, her Mother.  We were all affected by my Mother’s drinking. My brothers all reacted differently.  My brother Ciaran became rebellious and angry, Brendan was the clown and Dara, poor Dara the quiet one. It is fair to say that due to my Mother’s depression and subsequent alcohol abuse my Mother for those years was emotionally unavailable and absent to us.  My Father had lost his wife too and I remember him being a lonely man.  We had to grow up fast.  Emotional hostages to something we neither understood or could fix.

 

Editor’s Note

SouthLady beautifully describes the impact a Mother’s alcohol abuse often has on families.  But once again we see the pattern of pain behind the alcohol abuse. If Southlady’s Mother’s had received loving support and empathy around the pain of losing a daughter, her alcohol abuse would probably have stopped. She was most likely using alcohol to numb her grief. (Often called self-medication)

 

Are genes to blame?

While some types of genes have been linked to alcohol abuse, the exact process is not fully understood.

Pain and grief in families  is very common factor in  alcohol abuse. But it is not inevitable. It appears the more “adverse childhood events” or “ACE”  we have  the more likely we are to have a physical or substance abuse problem.

While SouthLady herself had an alcohol abuse problem, she made a full recovery because the pain behind her alcohol abuse was tackled.

 

Don’t blame yourself

So don’t blame yourself if you are finding it difficult to reduce your drinking. Instead focus on your mental health. Ask yourself if depression, past events or trauma in your life may be affecting your desire to drink?

You might find our Janus course useful which helps to identify the pros and cons’ drinking useful.  Or if you think a counsellor might be helpful, here’s some tips here on finding the right one for you.

12 Top tips to make your New Year Drinking resolutions stick

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Mental health, Practical tips

It’s that time of the year when people are “failing” their New Year drinking resolutions. So here’s some quick tips to make your New Year drinking resolutions stick

 

1.Set a goal which is bigger than your drinking

 I’m a great believer in setting goals because as Harvey Mackay says

 “A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline”

 I find setting goals and writing them on paper helps me to keep moving forward as I’m clearer on what I want. We usually know where we want to go when we turn the key in the car ignition, so why not know where we want to go in life?

 

2.Set a goal which is positive

It can be very depressing in January to decide my new year drinking resolutions means I stop drinking or I’m going to drink less. This implies sacrifice, pain, drabness and losing pleasure. A better way is to set a positive goal.

For example,

“I’m going to treat myself to a weekly beauty treatment with the money I save from drinking less.”

 So develop a goal that has positive meaning for you using the tips below.

 

3.Understand what’s important to you

Is it family, money, fun, health, career advancement, and friends? Susan Jeffers in her book “feel the fear and do it anyhow” suggests making a nine box grid and putting the nine most important components in your life into it.

What changes would you like to make when you look at this grid?

For example leisure might be important but you’re always too busy working or doing housework to get any, so a goal might be to have more leisure time. So make sure your goals relate to your nine box grid.

 

4.Understand  what stage you’re at

Make sure you understand what stage your motivation is at using the “Stages of Change”  model below as this will help determine which goals are most useful for you.

New year drinking resolutions
Prochaska Stages of change model

 

So if you’re not totally convinced that you need to reduce your drinking, as you’re  still in the “contemplation stage”  maybe your goal should be to get a better understanding  of your pro’s and con’s of drinking, rather than  setting a goal of not drinking. You can use our course here for this.

 

5.Don’t set too many goals

It’s very easy to get carried away and try to tackle every area of our lives, but it’s better to focus on one or two aspects, as then we can be more committed to these.

So if you’re decided to reduce your drinking, make sure to balance this with something fun that you enjoy, rather than also deciding your house is going to be spotless from now on!

 

6.Leave out the “I should have’s”

 When people set goals, they often give out to much to themselves when they “fail”.

We find this is often the biggest problem with clients we see.

“I’ve failed, I should n’t have drunk that bottle of wine last night”

rather than

“I’m great, I went four nights without drinking and only drank too much on the 5th night”

As you saw from the “Stages of change” picture above changing our behaviour does not happen in a straight line. We can go back and forwards as we attempt to change how we live.

 

7.Recognise our culture makes drinking less difficult

The majority of people who drink are abusing alcohol according to the Health Research Board.

drinking socially

In this culture with social media pressure that sees drinking too much as normal, it can be difficult to reduce drinking so accept that sometimes drinking less can make you feel a little isolated from your friends.

Again your thoughts around this can help. See yourself as someone who is ahead of society, a thought leader, rather than someone with a problem with alcohol.

 

8.Break down your goals into smaller targets

So having set broad goals, often they need to be broken down into smaller targets. Particularly  if they are very ambitious.  In a work setting these are usually called objectives which many people use in their work performance reviews. So some tips on setting objectives.

 

9.Make sure your objectives are specific and measurable

Saying

“I want to be physically fitter”

is not as psychologically useful as saying

“I want to be able to climb the stairs at work without stopping”.

You can actually measure this achievement as it’s very specific.

 

10.Make sure your objectives are achievable

For example, saying

“I want to be CEO of RyanAir before the 30th of January 2017”

 is unlikely to be achievable as there is n’t even a vacancy. In the same way saying you’re giving up drinking altogether when you’ve drunk every day for 20 years will be very difficult unless you can afford professional help

So in this case an achievable objective might be “I’m going to research and find out what support is available to help me reduce my drinking. You might find this post here useful if this is you.

 

11.Make sure your objectives are realistic within your time scale and priorities

The person wanting more leisure time might find getting an hour a week to do something fun is more realistic before moving to an hour a day.

If you drink every day on the weekend, you might find reducing the number of drinks you drink each day helpful or maybe it’s easier not to drink on a Friday.

So set goals that are a little challenging but not too difficult as you want to have a good chance of succeeding by a specific date.

You’ll notice the tips for objective setting make up the acronym SMART:

   Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timed.

 

12.Don’t beat yourself up if you fail

As the Japanese proverb says

“Fall  down seven times, stand up eight.”

If you can learn from your failures you’ll be further along the path towards your goal then when you started.  Thomas Edison the inventor of the light bulb had thousands of failed experiments before he was successful. When asked how he kept going, he siad he did not see it as failure but thousands of ways he had learnt how not to make a light bulb.  So never lose hope, you can succeed.

 

Bo Bennett put it well when he said

“The discipline you learn and character you build from setting and achieving a goal can be more valuable than the achievement of the goal itself.”

 

Did n’t set  new year drinking resolutions ?

So maybe you’re not ready to set a goal or did n’t set  new year drinking resolutions?  For everybody who is thinking about their drinking a really useful tip is to track your drinking. We like this free  app developed by an English Charity as it has some useful tools as well.

 

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