If you are someone who is struggling with alcohol, a headline like ‘rewiring the brain for less alcohol?’ likely caught your attention and led you to click through to this page. If this is your first visit to this blog, you can learn about my own struggles, failures, and triumphs with alcohol and pot addiction by visiting my Sobriety Journal.
“Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we creating avoiding pain is avoidable.”
– R.D. Laing
Coming out of Covid 19 fueled isolation, my decades long habits of daily marijuana consumption and binge drinking began to slip beyond my control. My concern was such that I strongly considered AA and Marijuana Anonymous.
Afterall, alcoholism runs in my family and my brother and his wife are both sober and devout followers of Alcoholics Anonymous and its well trodden path. So I’m quite familiar with that option. But I wasn’t sure AA was for me, so I decided, at great personal risk, to try another path: to explore Rewiring The Brain For Less Alcohol.
But before I get into my methods and practices, I need to fully disclose that:
- This path is not for everyone, and may not work for you
- There are no quick fixes here
- Professional help is the preferable and recommended option for most addicts
- I make no guarantees as to the viability of this method, so you proceed, like me, at your own risk
Rewiring The Brain For Less Alcohol
As I write in the introduction to my sobriety journey, being able to use less of an addictive substance with no personal ramifications is every addict’s wet dream. When I began on my own journey, I wasn’t sure if this was even possible. Thus, I was prepared to escalate and seek professional help quickly if I began to harbor any serious doubts concerning my experiment.
I had read a lot about mindfulness meditation and addiction, and had even tried my hand at meditation on and off over the years. But, for whatever reason, it never stuck. Now I realize, in 20/20 hindsight, that I had no real motivation to meditate before. But it was different this time as I had an existential crisis on my hands.
And I didn’t want to let a perfectly good personal crisis go to waste!
I had read extensively about meditation’s ability to rewire the human brain at a truly fundamental level. And not just New Age Yoda voodoo books, but material produced by neuroscientists, biologists, and medical doctors. The evidence was compelling.
But where to start?
Rewiring My Brain Begins
I was determined to rewire my brain for less alcohol, but how? Funny enough, it all started with a free app (which I later upgraded for $60/year – a worthwhile investment as you’ll soon see!).
I was surfing meditation apps in the Google Play store and I found Lojong (full disclosure, I receive no compensation from Lojong and recommend the app in good faith). Lojong is a Tibetan word that roughly translates to “the mind that comes to train”. And that’s certainly what I had in spades: an extremely out of shape mind that needed a personal trainer!
I started with the 10 day introduction to meditation. These were short, easy, and approachable meditations. The idea was to develop the habit of meditating every morning, not to over do it early and burn myself out. The trick to real and lasting change is doing it slowly over a long period of time. Patience and persistence are key to success in any endeavor.
After completing the 10 day program, I tackled the 21 day series, and then the 31 day program.
And a funny thing happened about half way through this 62 day meditation-a-thon.
Pot Quits Me
When I began experimenting with the whole rewiring the brain for less alcohol thing, marijuana wasn’t even on my radar. I really thought alcohol was the problem. Alcohol was the demon I was hoping to exercise, but good ol’ pot was caught in the crossfire.
At about day 35 of meditation, pot quit me. After over two decades of smoking weed nearly every day of my life, I suddenly lost the desire to use it anymore. It was inexplicably gone. I tossed all my weed and edibles over my back fence. And I’ve never looked back. That was almost nine months ago, and I’ll never touch marijuana ever again. That’s a promise I’m quite confident I’ll keep! How can I be so sure?
Somehow, in just 35 days, my daily meditation had supplanted whatever psychological or emotional benefit pot had previously provided. I had successfully rewired my brain not just for less marijuana, but for none at all!
This was truly miraculous, and with an unexpected benefit: not smoking pot reduced my desire to drink almost immediately. I had inadvertently decoupled smoking from drinking. And with one out of my life, I could focus exclusively on the other.
Alcohol Is Harder
While pot just up and left the building one strange and wonderful day, rewiring my brain for less alcohol (or none at all) proved to be much harder.
My strategy here was to string together as many strictly sober days as possible (ala AA). I even concocted a whole naming system to track these. At first I could only string together 2-3 days, but with constant practice I was sooner putting together 2-3 weeks in a shot. Twice, I went a whole sober month.
Within a couple of months I went from drinking 6-10 beers, 5+ nights a week, to a 2-3 beers once or twice a month. Sometimes I’d crack open my third or fourth beer only to take a sip and dump it down the sink.
I’d meditate most mornings and set my intention NOT TO DRINK, except once in a while, I’d set my intention to drink mindfully – only a few beers or less.
On days I intended NOT to drink, I was often confronted with strong cravings for alcohol. Here meditation tools like R.A.I.N. rode to the rescue and helped keep me on track. I also found RAIN to be of use on days I decided to have a couple/few beers in order to stop before things got out of hand.
At first, it didn’t always work, and I slipped up. But the more I used it, the better it worked. Another trick that worked quite well, was always having NA Beer on hand to bust out strategically as needed. One or two of these generally satisfies the craving for an ice cold brewski.
Alcohol Rewiring Starts To Kick In
In a strange way, alcohol is starting to look a lot like pot. While pot quit me in under six weeks of daily meditation, it’s looking like alcohol is doing the same thing as I approach 300 days of consecutive daily meditation.
You see, the less I drank (both in terms of frequency and quantity) the less I want to drink. Even though I can now have a single beer and stop without a problem, at three beers I notice my sleep is negatively impacted and I feel the effects of dehydration.
In other words, I’m far more sensitive to the negative effects of alcohol than I was before the whole rewiring exercise began. Being mindful of this makes me like drinking less and less as time goes on. And without marijuana to egg the drinking on, the buzz is no where near as interesting.
But the big thing here is: I can stop at one beer no problem after eight months of constant flow and pressure. Bigger: I’m losing the desire to drink altogether.
No Quick Fix
Rewiring the brain for less alcohol is a long journey that may not work for many suffering from alcohol addiction. I’m convinced that I hadn’t personally gotten all the way to full blown physical addiction before beginning my unorthodox journey. That may be why daily meditation and mindfulness worked in my case. I’m not entirely sure.
It may also be that I was really addicted not to alcohol, but to marijuana, and that alcohol played a supporting role only. This, too, is just a guess on my part, and may not be entirely accurate. Nevertheless, I’m glad to be free of the marijuana monkey. It’s departure has been a wonderful gift!
For alcohol, it’s taken almost 300 days of daily mindfulness meditation to get this point. And I expect this journey will continue for the rest of my life. I also expect that although I’ve managed to get my drinking under control, I will cease drinking entirely in the next couple of months.
The reasons for this go beyond my new found physical sensitivity to alcohol.
Letting Go Is A Key To Rewiring The Brain
Here’s the biggest takeaway from my journey so far: when we are mindful about our drinking, we soon uncover all the reasons we are drinking in the first place. A big reason most drinkers drink, beyond simple habit or physical need, is to numb emotional pain. That’s how it starts anyway.
Mindful meditation exercises have helped me let go of tremendous emotional baggage. It’s allowed me to make peace with so many demons. And the fewer demons I have plaguing my mental health, the less I feel the need to drown them in alcohol.
That’s the secret. But it’s no cakewalk. It can be hard to let go, tremendously hard. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.
But we must let go if our drinking and drugging is to let go of us.
My ultimate goal is not to be sober, it’s to be someone who doesn’t drink. Big difference! For me, having a few beers here and there is simply a waystop on my road to ultimately becoming someone who doesn’t drink.
I don’t want to fight drinking. That only gives it strength. I want to rob it of its power. I can only do that when I stop thinking about it altogether. And I believe daily mindful meditation practice will be the vehicle that gets me there.