percent. There have been all sorts of reports of mindfulness reducing cravings.

Transcription

1 Annie Grace: This is Annie Grace and you are listening to This Naked Mind Podcast, where without judgment, pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture. Hi friends, it's Annie Grace and I am answering questions from readers. I am the author of This Naked Mind and today's question is from Charlotte. She says, "Hi Annie, I'm really enjoying your answer sessions. I have another question. How to ride out urges and cravings to drink when you don't want to drink but you're really just doing so because you've done it for so long and you're really afraid that you won't be able to cope without it. "Rationally, I know that drinking only causes me pain and makes my life unbearable, but I have rheumatoid arthritis and I live in chronic pain and I know that the alcohol makes it worse, causing inflammation, but I get to that point every evening where I have to decide whether I can cope without alcohol before the shop shuts at 10 PM. I feel panicky and very unsettled during this time. The dissonance is very high. Sorry this is scrambled but I'd love some advice on how to stick to your guns when cravings, urges or the fear of coping with being alcohol-free for the evening strike. Many thanks, love, Charlotte." This is a really good question and it's so important. This video might be a little bit longer because I did a big, huge, deep dive into the number one thing that I think is most important for overcoming craving, and I'll have some other tips too, but where we're gonna start today is we're gonna start with "what is a craving?" We're gonna look at it both neurologically and emotionally. Emotionally, obviously, a craving is an unconscious or conscious belief that alcohol is doing something for you, that it's gonna provide some relief or pleasure or pain, and emotionally my best advice on how to overcome those unconscious beliefs because your unconscious and your subconscious mind actually dictate what you desire. What you want is through liminal thinking, and liminal thinking is just becoming aware of why you believe what you believe and then comparing that against reality. In my book, it's made up of nine different liminal points and it takes you through if you're drinking for relief or stress or having a good time, et cetera, and so reversing the years, decades, sometimes lifetimes of unconscious conditioning around alcohol and getting to the bottom of these beliefs that we have... We believe alcohol relaxes us like we believe the sky is blue. At least I know I did when I was drinking, and reversing that so that we really come to a point where we know that alcohol isn't doing us any favors and then we believe that. That really takes care of the emotional part of it, and that's really important. I'd recommend doing that. There's blog posts on thisnakedmind.com/blog with all the liminal thinking points are right there, so you don't need to buy the book, you can just go and read through the blog posts. Get the book, deal with the emotional part. I think that's really important, but there's this whole other aspect to cravings that's very physiological and it's actually neurological and it involves different parts of your brain if you've been drinking for quite a long time. There's two aspects. There's the habitual nature of it, and habits by their very nature mean that we think less consciously, so if you get in the habit of driving to work, you can often drive to work without even thinking about it and you won't even remember the

2 drive. That's because pathways have actually been formed within your brain, within your neurons, these neuropathways where all of this stuff happens automatically, and that stuff happens inside your brain with drinking. Charlotte probably, after work every day, til about 10 PM when shop closing time. These habits are very strong, and so interrupting these habits and interrupting those neuropathways and laying down new neuropathways is really important. I'm gonna get to how to do this. Besides the habitual nature, there's also the dopamine response, and often after you've been drinking for years and years, there's a theory, and it's called the dopamine sensitization theory. It's by Kent Berridge. What he theorizes is that eventually you become hypersensitive to a certain substance, and this has been demonstrated in rats and different animals where eventually something changes over to the brain and then when that substance is introduced or even when the triggers preceding that substance are introduced, think the bell in the Pavlov's dog experiment or the bottle of wine as you're pulling it from the shelf, dopamine releases to such a degree that actually what happens is your ability to make good decisions is reduced. Your prefrontal cortex which is your human side of your brain, your ability to really make good, thoughtful decisions based on longterm goals actually is reduced and your midbrain, which is the survival part of your brain, the part that takes over in a car wreck, takes over and starts running the show. You are faced with cravings which are much more than wanting. They are very intense and there's actually been MRI studies done where somebody, an addict will go into an MRI machine and they'll be shown images of the drug that they're craving and they will show that the mid part of their brain will completely light up and the front part of their brain, their prefrontal cortex, the part that makes good, human, rational decision actually goes black. These cravings are extreme and intense and very hard to deal with and they happen over prolonged exposure to the substance, so a very long time of drinking and some studies have shown that they specifically happen when you start to use the substance for self-medication, especially when something specifically traumatic has occurred. That actually encourages your brain to use it in a different way because it does provide this artificial relief to your stress. Your brain gets confused and actually learns addiction and starts to confuse the substance with something that is vital for your survival, something that you need to survive. So, if your brain is neurologically believing that the alcohol is something you need nightly to survive, those types of cravings are very difficult to deal with, but there is really good news because I'm gonna talk to you about a way that's been proven over and over to really help deal with those cravings. Anyway, that's kind of what's happening neurologically in your brain, but your brain, it has the power to actually change and go back, and neuroplasticity is a phenomenon that the Dalai Lama actually talked about back in the '70s and that's now been proven over and over again in brain scans and whatnot, but we, with our thoughts, with our behaviors,

3 can actually change the neurological makeup of our brain, so these pathways that have happened, they're not permanent, they're not forever. You can heal from this, and that's the really good and important news. That's kind of what a craving is. First I want to talk about willpower because I talk a lot about willpower in the book and how willpower... It doesn't work over the longterm. It definitely can work in the short term, but over the longterm, willpower studies have shown act much more like a muscle and it becomes fatigued, and so you can exercise it, exercise it, exercise it, but eventually it weakens and then you are faced with... You break down, basically, is what happens, but the good news about willpower is that just like a muscle, willpower can actually be strengthened, and again, that's forming the correct neuropathways in your brain. The pathways of kind of denying the need for whatever substance it is. The other thing about willpower that's really cool, that they're learning recently is that willpower's contagious. There was this really interesting study done about obesity and you would think that obesity spreads like... It's a percentage of the population is obese. That makes sense. You would not think that obesity spreads like a virus, that actually depending who you're in contact with will dictate if you are obese or not. If you are in contact with somebody, like close friends with somebody who is, you actually have a 40 percent higher chance of being obese. It actually spreads like a virus and that's because willpower and what we do in our habits are contagious. Being around people who are exercising willpower, especially when it comes to alcohol during those times is a really important suggestion, and there's all sorts of great online forums. This Naked Mind Community dot com is just a specific Naked Mind community that's really positive and empowering. Got Hello Sunday Morning dot org, Join Club Soda dot co dot UK and One Year No Beer and these are all really great online places where you can kind of connect with other people and get some of that contagiousness that willpower is which I think is really important. Positive peer pressure, especially during these times of cravings can be huge. Willpower is one thing, but the most important thing I want to talk about is mindfulness, and mindfulness is something that I think a lot of people get confused about. You think that it's meditation, you think of monks sitting there and being very blissed out in some Zen part of the world, but actually, all mindfulness really is is it's defined as nonjudgmental observation, and it has three components. Attention, awareness and remembering, and the remembering is remembering to bring your attention and awareness to whatever you're being mindful of. Studies show that mindfulness drastically reduces cravings. There's more studies coming out all the time that prove this over and over again and it's not a hard thing to do. It is kind of boring at first and I will say that that has been my experience, but as you get into it, you find it actually not boring and extremely empowering. There was a study published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences and it found that smokers who were just briefly trained with mindfulness around their smoking habits curtailed their smoking naturally without any effort by over 60

4 percent. There have been all sorts of reports of mindfulness reducing cravings. There was another study where they had two different components to this study and they demonstrated... It was a thing where they showed, again, images and things that created cravings to people who were addicted and then they did interviews of these individuals to see what the interviews, what the people reported, and then really exciting about this study specifically is that they did MRI scans to see what was actually happening in the brain. The verbal reporting of the people who were studied said that mindfulness reduced their cravings and they verbally said that they felt more in control and stronger after using the mindfulness technique. Really interestingly, the MRI of the brain showed that the areas that are specific to craving-related things, so one of the areas is the anterior cingulate cortex, actually have reduced activity, and even more interesting is it didn't just reduce activity in the craving areas of the brain, but it disconnected the regions of the brain that make up the craving network. There's a region of your brain that influences craving and that's where you feel desire, the anticipation of whatever you're going to do, or where you experience the stress of not doing whatever you're going to do, and those two emotions can be very intense. That's one area, and then there's a region of your brain that actually motivates you to get what you want, and the mindfulness study and the MRI screens, they show that those were actually becoming disconnected, and so further reducing the strength of the craving. There was an experiment, another study... I'm gonna go deep into the studies before I tell you how to do it because it's really important that you know that this stuff works and it's very scientific and it's not just some mumbo jumbo. There was a doctor. Her name is Doctor Kelly McGonical and she has a book which is a great book. It's called The Willpower Instinct, and what she did is called The Torture Experiment. She had smokers come into a room and she had told them not to smoke for the preceding 12 hours so their physical craving for a cigarette was very high. She did a ritual with mindfulness for half of the people and not for the other half the people, and with the mindfulness, what she did is she took... She goes, "Okay, pull out your pack of cigarettes. Okay, look at it. Smell it. Unwrap the cellophane. Okay, get out your lighter but don't light it," and all of these sort of things were happening. She was directing them to go really deep into how does this make you feel? What are you experiencing in this moment? How is your breathing? How is the pit of your stomach? What is your mind doing? What are you thinking about? You paid very, very close attention to everything about this kind of torture of having these cigarettes that you knew, because you were in this nonsmoking area you weren't going to be able to smoke, and then she let the people go, and, again, this was a study where 60 percent of them just naturally started smoking less because she taught them to be really aware in the moment and not just let the cravings kind of run roughshod over their mental capacity to choose.

5 How to do this, how to practice mindfulness. First of all, you need to clear up the misconception that it's about not thinking. It's not about not thinking. It's about becoming highly aware of your thinking, of what's going on in your mind and of what's going on in your body in a completely nonjudgmental way. That is not typical, and it's not normal. What happens normally is you see an add for a beer or you see a bottle of wine or you see the cork opener and you feel a craving, and then you immediately judge yourself and you say, "Oh God, Annie, you're never gonna get this, you're always gonna be missing this. It's so miserable," and you just immediately judge what's happening. I think that mindfulness is about the opposite. It's just observing what's happening. You can't judge yourself. That's the main rule. You can't judge what you're thinking. You can't judge how you're feeling. You can't put any labels on it and you're not there to try to control it. You're just there to observe it, and then, counterintuitively, go into it and say, "Okay, there's the corkscrew. How is this making me feel? What's happening in my thought? Where am I going with this?" And just be really observant of this. There's this really cool technique. It's called surfing the urge and it's by Sarah Boden. She's a researcher at the Addictive Behaviors Research Center and I'm gonna include the link below because she actually has an MP3 that's available online that will teach you this entire process called surfing the urge. Importantly, urges, they always pass eventually, and not giving into the urge and being mindful of it but not giving in to it, that's what recreates the neural connections. That's what makes it so that you're building these habitual pathways of willpower and not drinking instead of reaffirming the pathways of drinking. You both need to break the old habitual pathways and to build new ones, so mindfulness is in the moment, being hyper-aware without any judgment, and then also trying to practice that skill. Where I started my mindfulness is back in November of this year, I just had read a book because I was never... Well, I told myself, of course, famous last words, "I'm never gonna be someone who just sits around and meditates for a period of the day." Whatever. Of course you say that and then you end up becoming that exact person ironically, but I had told myself that. I had read this book and in this book it basically said, "Okay, all I want you to do is just a few times during the day just wake up to your surroundings, because so often we're existing in front of our phones, in front of our screens, with our coworkers and our minds, that we just don't wake up to our surroundings, so a few times a day, just say, 'I'm sitting here. It's sunny outside. I'm talking into this iphone. That's kind of weird. Here's my computer. How do I feel? It's a little chilly in this room.'" Just very aware of what exactly is happening, for maybe 30 seconds in the beginning, and just start to do that two or three times a day. All that does is it's, again, the remembering part of mindfulness. Remembering that you are, that you exist and then practicing the hyper-awareness of what is happening without judging it. It seems like such a simple thing. How can this simple thing of just remembering that I am here, that I exist in this moment and then not judging it and just

6 becoming aware of it without any intention of changing it, how can that have these huge studies saying that they reduce by, like, massive percentages, addictive behavior and cravings? I don't know, it's not linear. It doesn't exactly make sense, but it is very true, and so that, becoming aware multiple times a day, I got really into that and I thought that was really cool. It really opened up kind of space in my day, where the day would go by and instead of just falling into bed and being like, "I don't even know what happened," be like, "Oh, these things happened. It was segments," and I could really kind of be more present in every moment because I was present those few times in remembering that. Sure enough, I decided, "Okay." I'd read this article saying five minutes a day, that's all you need. It's much more important to do it every single day than it is to do it for 20 or 30 minutes, which was part of what was so intimidating to me about kind of sitting with my eyes closed, and so I said, "Okay, I can do five minutes a day. Let me give this a month and see how it goes," and sure enough, I gave it a month, five minutes a day and I would just sit there. All you do is you simply close your eyes, become aware that you're sitting, become aware that you're in this place, become aware of how your body feels and then become aware of the fact that you're breathing. Then allow your thoughts to come, but when they come and you get distracted by them, you just let them go without judging them, without being annoyed with yourself for thinking them, and then become aware of your breathing again. At first it's hard. It's hard because your mind just goes and all of a sudden five minutes is up and you're like, "Okay, I wasn't aware of my breathing for, like, any of that time," but then eventually you can become pretty aware of your breathing for the entire five minutes. Then I started to do it for 10 minutes and now I do it for, like, 10 minutes pretty much every day and some days I'll do 10 minutes in the morning and then three minutes mid-afternoon and three minutes before I go to bed. I've always been someone who's suffered from depression and anxiety and I got off all my medication for all of this stuff as a result of quitting drinking, which is a whole other video. Anxiety lingers and this, more than anything else, has reduced my need to worry, my need to be anxious and cravings. Not for alcohol anymore but definitely for sugar, and fatty foods and just comfort stuff. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible, so here I am. I would've never done this before. Not getting good on the mindfulness bag again but the science proves it. Mindfulness is so important to reduce cravings overall. There's a huge ton of resources. I really liked Dan Harris's book, 10 Percent Happier, because it was written tongue in cheek and very funny and witty and very mainstream. There was no "woo-woo, wah-wah" in that book and it really just taught me how to do it, so that's the book I would recommend on mindfulness. I would like to give you a few other suggestions on just kind of reducing cravings because I know that while I fully believe that mindfulness is probably the best way that we have right now based on all the science and all the studies, you need other stuff, so talking to someone. Definitely just pick up the phone or, again, get on one

7 of those online communities. Distraction but the knowledge that it will pass so very similar to how if you close your eyes and you become aware of your foot and there's an itch on your foot and then all of the sudden you become aware of something else, that itch on your foot goes away because you're distracted, so distraction can hugely reduce cravings, so just have a plethora of stuff to do, whether it's get out for a walk or watch a TV show, read a book. Just make yourself a list of things you like to do. Changing your environment. If you're in the same environment that you've habitually drank in, just change your environment and just make it a point and remember that these things, it's not gonna last forever. You're gonna be able to heal neurologically and inside from this, especially when you have 30, 60 days away from alcohol, and it's gonna be infinitely easier, so this isn't like a life sentence, it's just really to get you through some of the initial phases, and then challenge your cravings. One of the techniques is called opposition thinking and what that means is you can't actually hold two thoughts, especially two contradictory thoughts in your brain at the same time, so you say, "Oh gosh, wouldn't a glass of wine be nice?" Immediately challenge that and be like, "Oh, well, I would have four glasses of wine. Oh wait, probably six or eight, and then I'd have a hangover," and then go really deep into oh, how bad did hangovers feel? Can you remember? Sometimes you'd get sick while you were drinking, and that was so miserable, and then I wouldn't even remember what I did the next day, and just really go into the thought of the opposite of your craving, so take control of your thought patterns. Use something you know to be true, like how terrible hangovers felt and just imagine it in careful, vivid detail, and I think that will really help with the craving. Then there's a very traditional way which is called "HALT," and it stands for "hunger, anger, loneliness and tiredness," and that's just trying to be aware of the fact that your triggers might be those things. Most people's triggers are those things, and try to avoid being hungry. If you're lonely, seek connection. If you're angry, do some breathing exercises, whatnot, and calm yourself down. Those are my advice on overcoming cravings. Charlotte, best of luck with this. Let me know what you think, and if anybody else has any other things that they do to overcome urges, overcome cravings, please post them below. This has been Annie Grace with This Naked Mind Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. You can learn more at This Naked Mind dot com and please remember to rate, review and subscribe, as it really helps us spread the word.