WHY WE DESIRE TO DRINK Brooke Castillo
Introduction Welcome to SO Stop Overdinking. I m Brooke Castillo. I created this program to help people who want to stop overdrinking, just like I did. People who aren t alcoholics. People who don t identify as alcoholics, but who still have a problem with overdrinking. Maybe you have just a little too much alcohol every night after work. Maybe you want to stop at your first or second drink but always end up drinking more than you want. You don t feel good and you don t feel in control. You want to be in control again. If that s you, I can help. I ve been where you are, and I m telling you that there is a way to stop overdrinking. I can show you how. In this booklet, we will cover: Why we desire to overdrink Why it is so hard to quit and How we can change our thinking and finally stop overdrinking SO Stop Overdinking: Why We Desire to Drink is all about your desire and where that desire comes from. We ll lay some groundwork on why we desire to overdrink and what s actually going on in our brains that makes stopping seem so difficult. Specifically, in this booklet, we are going to cover: Why we desire to drink What desire actually is Why we are not actually out of control How we are programmed to desire alcohol How rewards intensify our desire What our thoughts and emotions have to do with creating rewards The difference between our human brain & our lower brain How our brains are rigged for survival (and what rewards have to do with it) How modern concentrated pleasures lead to big rewards How programmed thoughts + big rewards lead to the perfect storm for overdrinking Why your lower brain always wins the race to overdrink Why your human brain is the key to stop overdrinking. I have packed a lot of important information into this booklet, but if you take away nothing else from this booklet, I hope you remember this: You are not out of control. You are perfectly normal. Your brain is functioning exactly the way it is supposed to. There are reasons why your brain has been programmed to overdrink. But you can change your thinking and your actions. I can teach you how. I ve been where you are, and I m telling you that there is a way to stop overdrinking. I can show you how 2 www.stopoverdrinking.com
Why We Desire It So Why Do We Drink? As a society, we drink. When you go to a restaurant, you re asked if you want a cocktail. When you watch TV, you see lots of beer commercials. You see wine commercials. When you go to a wedding, you re going to be asked if you want wine. They re going to ask, Red or white? A lot of people are going to be drinking out of very glamorous wine glasses. There s wine tasting everywhere. There s alcohol at all the sporting events. We drink as a culture. The question is, why? What is it about alcohol that we have come to embrace in our society and enjoy as individuals? We have all grown up with the idea that alcohol is something that we do. Young kids, very young kids go to parties and drink alcohol. It s just part of growing up. The question we have to ask is: why do we desire it? Desire is about programming something until it becomes automatic Before I begin to answer that question, I want to address the concept of desire, in and of itself. If you ve listened to some of my other programs, this may be a review for you but it s worth really paying attention to. What is Desire? Thinking about desire is really important when it comes to thinking about the things you desire and deciding whether they re serving you well. Desire is something that we learn. Now most of us think about desire as something that s an innate. When I do coaching with clients and we talk about desire, people feel like that desire isn t a choice, that desire is something that we either have or we don t. We either desire our husband or we don t. Nothing we can do about it. We either desire peaches or we don t desire peaches. We think that it s innate and something that we don t have control over. The reason why we believe that is because desire is one of those unconscious programmed things that we seem to do involuntarily. It s because of the way that the brain works. When we learn something and we repeat it many, many times, the brain recognizes that it s a pattern and then takes it out of the prefrontal cortex where it takes a lot of energy to think about and puts it back in that midbrain, in that lower brain so it can just be automatic. If you think about any habit that you have in your life, anything that you repeat regularly, it s not something that you have to consciously think about. Picking up a glass, brushing your teeth, driving your car, it s all very learned, and in the beginning, it took a lot of energy to learn it. Then once you repeated it several times, it became automatic and then became something that went on in the background. Desire is the same thing. Desire is something that we learn and repeat. Think about learning a language. You learn a language by repetition, repetition, repetition, right? You practice over and over and over and then you become natural at it and you can just speak that language without even thinking about what you re trying to say. It s the same with desire. It s the same with how you want something. You practice it enough times and you get rewarded enough times for practicing it that 3 www.stopoverdrinking.com
it becomes natural and habitual and something that s going on in your involuntary brain. When you see a glass of chardonnay or you see a whiskey or you see a drink or a beer or something, you feel that desire and it feels like it s coming from something unconscious. It seems involuntary and it is because it s something that you ve programmed in your mind. Just as if someone were to ask you a question in Spanish, you would involuntarily, if you knew Spanish, answer in Spanish instead of in English. You re Not Out of Control, You re Just Programmed to Desire That s how the whole process goes when you learn something involuntarily. I think this knowledge in and of itself is life-altering because I think it can be scary for someone like you and me who feel this kind of involuntary, unconscious type of craving for alcohol. It can be scary if we don t understand where it s coming from. We can be like: Oh my gosh. Am I an alcoholic? Where is this coming from? Why do I feel so out of control? Why did I drink so much more than I wanted to drink? Why did I drink when I told myself I wasn t going to drink? It can seem like, Oh my God. Something s taking me over. When you understand desire, you ll understand that nothing is taking you over. The only thing that s happened is that you have programmed your brain unconsciously to desire automatically. You have trained your brain to desire something automatically and so you re feeling that desire. You are the one that trained your brain to do that. You are the one that practiced that desire enough that that s why you re feeling it. If you are the one that created it, you are the one that can uncreate it if you don t want that desire to be there. Just because you ve practiced it and you re so good at it doesn t mean you have to keep doing it, even if it feels intense. Reward is The Key To Desire Now, the reason why your desire feels intense is because of the reward associated with it. Desire is about programming something until it becomes automatic, but it is not going to be an intense desire unless there is a reward. Our desire to brush our teeth is something that we ve programmed. It s something that we ve practiced. It s something we have repeated often enough that we automatically do it. But we aren t compelled to do it. We don t have a compulsion to do it, most of us, because we don t have a strong enough reward associated with it. The reward hasn t perpetuated the desire. It s really important that we know that when you learn something, if there s a reward associated with it, the habit becomes even more intense as an involuntary desire. There are two pieces to this. The first piece is we desire something because we have automatically practiced it with enough repetition to have it become unconscious. The second piece that I want to talk about is what creates an emotion. If you ve been with me and studied my work, what you realize is that all of our emotions, all of our feelings, come from our thinking. When we think about something, we create that emotion. Desire is the same thing. Desire is something that we learn and repeat 4 www.stopoverdrinking.com
Let me repeat that: When we think about something, we create that emotion. How Your Thoughts Create Emotions, Which Create Desire So what are the thoughts that we are having that are creating this desire for alcohol? One of the most powerful thoughts we have, that many of us don t even acknowledge that we re having, that can be the trigger, that can be the clue as to how we re creating our own desire is: I Desire is about programming something until it becomes automatic, but it is not going to be an intense desire unless there is a reward want that. I want a glass of chardonnay. I want a beer. I want a cocktail. I want a drink. It seems like such an innocent little thought, but even just a little thought like that perpetuates that feeling of desire. It creates that desire within us and we don t even notice that we re thinking that thought. Why? Because we ve programmed it into our brain and repeated it so many times that it s going on underneath our conscious awareness, underneath the supervision of the prefrontal cortex. The Human Brain vs. The Animal Brain The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that makes you human. I call it the human brain. It s the part of your brain that s right in the front that can plan something. It can think about what it s thinking about. It can think about the future in relation to the past, in relation to the present. It s something that animals cannot do. But we like to use our lower brain, the same brain that animals have, because it s efficient and our brain wants to be efficient So we delegate to that part of our brain. The example that I like to use to explain how why we delegate to the lower, animal brain is this: The brain is like a factory. The prefrontal cortex is like R&D, or Research & Development. This is where we learn everything new. And this can be intense, hard work. It can be slow, it can be time-consuming, it can involve trial and error, thinking and planning. The lower brain, on the other hand, is like Manufacturing. And Manufacturing is very efficient. It doesn t question anything. It doesn t argue. It doesn t think logically. All it does is produce a repeating program that you ve programmed it to do. The repeating program that you ve created in your lower brain is, I want to drink. Desire, drinking. I want to drink. Desire, drinking. I want to drink. Desire, drinking. 5 www.stopoverdrinking.com
Dopamine, The Neurotransmitter Of Desire Programmed Thoughts & Rewards = The Perfect Storm Now here are some other thoughts that I wrote down that I think are important to remember when you think about drinking. There are a lot of thoughts we have that are associated with drinking: It provides relief. I want to drink because it provides relief. It s relaxing. It s sophisticated. Normal people who are in control can drink. It s fun. It s celebratory. It relieves stress. It turns off my brain. Those are the kind of thoughts that keep us drinking. We have them programmed so deeply in our unconscious. We ve learned these thoughts from all the people around us, from the environment around us, from the commercials that we ve watched, from all of our associations to drinking, all of these thoughts have come up for us. We re constantly thinking them and then drinking, and then thinking them and then drinking. We ve created this programmed, repeatable thought process. On top of that, we ve associated a huge brain reward with it, and that s what makes it so intense. I m going to talk about that reward. Basically, it s a flood of dopamine into your brain. You have the thought, you have the desire, you drink and then you re rewarded. Let me repeat: You have the thought, you have the desire, you have the drink and then you re rewarded. There is no more powerful combination than that. If you look at all the psychological research on learning and you associate reward to learning, reward perpetuates the speed and the intensity of that activity. That is the perfect storm when it comes to alcohol. Your Brain is Functioning Just The Way It Is Supposed To Now, this does not mean that there is something wrong with your brain. In fact, it s the exact opposite. Here s the example I like to use. If you re walking down a hallway and your sibling jumps out and scares you, you re going to have an intense reaction to that. You re going to be terrified, right? Now, it doesn t make sense. It s someone you know. They ve just jumped out from behind a door. They re laughing hysterically and you are still filled with fear because your brain is functioning normally. Now it hasn t evolved to the point where it can anticipate that happening. It hasn t repeated enough of this person jumping out and scaring you. If they do it to you enough times, your brain will catch on to it. But in that moment, it is terrified illogically. Nobody s going to hurt us and it takes us a minute to calm down. That means your brain is functioning normally. Just because you re having that reaction doesn t mean, Oh my God, there must be something wrong with your brain. Your brain is like that because of the way that we ve evolved. On top of that, we ve associated a huge brain reward with it, and that s what makes it so intense Now there are very few things that scare us or that go 6 www.stopoverdrinking.com
boo in the night. It used to be much more scary when we were children. We needed to be more alert and be terrified and ready to have that adrenaline and now we don t. One of the things that I like to say is: all of the things that got us here, all of the brain processes that have gotten us to this point, are the exact same brain processes that we re going to have to overcome to evolve to the next level. All the primitive, lower, animal brain stuff is now causing us tremendous problems. Before, being afraid all the time served us well. Now, being afraid all the time, stressed all the time, worried all the time, is killing us, so we need to evolve past those survival mechanisms that got us here. The same is true when it comes to desire. Your Brain is Rigged For Survival I m going to explain this to you because it s so important to understand the way that our brain was rigged for survival. All the primitive, lower, animal brain stuff is now causing us tremendous problems The way that our brain evolved is that it provided us reward when we did things that perpetuated our survival. The things that we do that make us live are: eating warmth sex accomplishment connection All of those things, every time we did them, we ll get a little dopamine in our brain. We d get rewarded. Our brain used that as a feedback loop. When we ate, that was good for us. When we had sex, that was good for us, it perpetuated our species. When we were warm, that was good for us. We didn t freeze to death, right? All of those pleasures provided a little bit of dopamine in our brain. Basically, the whole motivation pathway for neural desire for reward kept us alive. I want you to think about how, when you eat, let s say, a nice steak, there is a satisfaction associated with that. A little bit of dopamine goes into your brain and so you associate eating with pleasure, and learn to repeat it. I had a thought I should eat that. I ate it. I got a little dopamine. Now it s perpetuating, and I want to keep doing it and I want to keep doing it. The same with sex. I get that dopamine release. I want to do it again. I had warmth. I want to do that again, so I m learning how to survive. If I don t do these things, my brain gets a little bit upset with me. It s like, Yo, we ve got to go eat. Yo, we should have some sex. Yo, we should get warm. It s like an alarm. You could even call it a craving to go get this done. If A Little Dopamine is Good, A Lot of Dopamine is Better, Right? Now, we have a huge problem because of the way that we ve evolved. All of those little rewards that kept us alive have now become a problem because what we ve done is taken those little rewards and concentrated them. For example, we could eat something that would give us a little bit of dopamine reward and that would motivate us to want to do it again. Now what we ve done is we have taken things that occur naturally to provide us with that little bit of dopamine reward and we ve completely concentrated them. Think about: cocaine heroin 7 www.stopoverdrinking.com
alcohol sugar porn shopping All of those things that we have now in modern times involve taking the things that would have given us a subtle dopamine reward and completely concentrating that pleasure. Instead of having sex with one person one time and getting a small dopamine release, now we can watch an hour s worth of porn and get a huge dopamine release. Or instead of eating something like a beet that has a little bit of sugar in it, or a berry, and getting a little bit of dopamine reward, now we can have a spoonful of table sugar and get a complete domination of dopamine rewards. Now, this is a problem because the brain now associates that reward with survival: Hey, if that little bit of that berry kept us alive back in the day, this intense sugar is probably even more important than that. We got to get more of that. We d better get way more of that, so let s go do that. It all of a sudden starts prioritizing having that reward over anything else. If a little is good, then a lot must be better. The brain doesn t understand the difference between useful desire and harmful desire, and so every time we reward ourselves with that much intensity, the desire is completely intensified. Now, this doesn t mean there s something wrong with your brain. In fact, it means that your brain is healthy. It s responding to reward. That s how it s evolved. What isn t healthy, what it hasn t evolved to accommodate yet, is the intense and concentrated dopamine release that happens in the brain. What the brain does, for example, when you drink a lot of alcohol, is that it is given such an influx of dopamine that it starts trying to accommodate itself so it doesn t get completely overloaded all the time. So it downregulates those dopamine receptors. But it doesn t down-regulate the desire. It takes even more alcohol to get the same effect. Now it doesn t mean that you have a disease, it doesn t mean there s something wrong with your brain. All it means is that you have taught your brain that these substances are super-important and your brain wants to remind you that it has learned that lesson and that we need to do this for survival. The more you do it and the more you repeat it, the stronger the desire gets until it becomes the only thing that matters. Your brain prioritizes that above everything else and that s when you re into complete addiction. Now, I m not going to address complete addiction. That s beyond the scope of what I m going to teach in this series. What I do want to teach you is that when you have this seemingly uncontrollable desire for a second glass of wine or a third glass of wine, that this process of programming, pleasure and survival is what s going on. Your brain has learned that this is something that we repeat and we get rewarded for. Your brain thinks it must be associated with our survival because it has dopamine involved, so we need to do more of it. That is why you have created what seems to be an involuntary desire. Why You Give In To Your Lower Brain s Desire for Alcohol I want to remind you: It s not involuntary. It s just learned and you taught yourself, maybe unknowingly, to repeat it and to want it and to repeat it and to want it and you ve increased that desire so much that it seems involuntary. Now it doesn t mean that you have a disease, it doesn t mean there s something wrong with your brain Now what most of you may be feeling, if you are like me, is a competing desire, so what happens is your prefrontal cortex says, I want to drink less. I don t like feeling foggy. I don t like feeling hungover. 8 www.stopoverdrinking.com
Then you have this primitive desire that literally is thinking, We have to do this or we re going to die. You have this human brain that s newly-evolved and then you have this primitive brain that s very efficient. Now, what happens is that the lower brain is very good at being quick, and it s very good at acting in the moment and creating a ton of desire in the moment. What the prefrontal cortex is very good at is planning and making decisions for the long-term. But in that moment, when somebody places alcohol in front of you, the lower brain will win that race every single time. You may have thought, Oh, I don t think I ll drink this week, and then you are presented with that alcohol. That desire will be so much stronger from that lower brain than it is from that prefrontal cortex that you will drink every single time. It seems like it s against your own will because your prefrontal s like, Wait, we don t want this. It s a weak desire compared to the lower brain s strong desire. You have this human brain that s newlyevolved and then you have this primitive brain that s very efficient That s what feels so out of control. The truth is, you re never out of control. You are always making the decision to pick up the alcohol. You are always making the decision to drink it, but you re doing it because that desire is so strong. If you don t honor that desire, if you don t fulfill that loop, there will be some level of suffering. There will be some level of deprivation. You don t want to experience that. You d rather just have the glass of chardonnay. Of course, it makes sense. We re going to talk more about this later, but what I want you to understand here is that the reason why you re drinking the alcohol in that moment is because of that learned desire. That s not something that s permanent. It s not something that s wrong with you. It s something that you created and it s something that you can uncreate. You probably created it unconsciously. It s probably been repeated your entire life from the moment you started drinking. It isn t hard to uncreate it. It isn t hard to change it. I m going to show you exactly how to do it. Your Lower Brain is Nothing Compared to Your Human Brain You have positive thoughts that are associated with wanting to drink. You also have thoughts that are associated with not wanting to stop drinking, which you may not even be aware of. So many of us have them. A lot of times when I would think about not drinking, I would think: It s boring not to drink. It ll be dull. It s unsophisticated. What am I going to order, a Diet Coke or a juice, cranberry juice? I used to think: It s not as fun. It s hard. It s not fair that I don t get to drink. It must mean I have a problem. It must mean I m an alcoholic. It s a struggle that requires willpower and I just don t have the energy to do it. It s awkward, tedious, annoying, embarrassing not to drink. Without it, I will feel deprived. I ll be stigmatized and have to justify why I m not drinking and I will always feel like I want it, and I will always have to fight against that desire. 9 www.stopoverdrinking.com
If you are like that, if you have those types of feelings towards drinking and towards not drinking and you feel that desire really strong inside of you, you are absolutely normal. It means your brain is healthy. It means that it is functioning. It means that you re a good learner. It means that you ve associated alcohol with a reward and that your brain is responding to that reward really, really well. I don t want any of you who have been hiding in shame, not wanting to talk about this, feeling embarrassed about it, to know that I completely understand where you re coming from. There are techniques that I can teach you that will absolutely help you unlearn this seemingly irrational desire for this substance. There have been so many studies that they have done on those poor little rats, where they stimulate the reward center of their brains, and those little rats will sit there and hit that lever at the expense of everything else in their lives. They won t take care of their babies. They won t take care of their health. They won t drink water and they won t eat because that part of the brain has evolved to let them know what s important to survival. Dopamine is important. Doing activities, having accomplishments that create dopamine are important. If we didn t have those rewards, we might just sit around and not go get food, and not procreate, and not build a house, or go find a cave and a fire to make us warm. We might not have that motivation to do any of those things. Our motivation comes from the desire to seek pleasure and to avoid pain and to expend as little energy as possible in doing that. That is the perfect combination for creating an illogical desire for substances that have become concentrated pleasures. If you feel this way towards alcohol, please know that it s because of the way you ve evolved, because of the way your brain is. Here s the magic, and this is what I m going to leave you with: You have a prefrontal cortex. No matter how efficient your lower brain is, no matter how well it has practiced, no matter how much reward it has, it is nothing compared to your human brain. It is powerless compared to your ability to change what you believe, what you think and how you respond. There is nothing that that lower brain can do without the consent of the prefrontal cortex. You may not have learned the skill of how to use that prefrontal cortex yet, but it doesn t mean you can t. I can teach you. There is nothing that that lower brain can do without the consent of the prefrontal cortex 10 www.stopoverdrinking.com
Summary In this booklet, we covered the basics about desire and why our desire for alcohol seems to be so strong, that we think it s controlling us. We covered some important points: Part 1: Why we desire it 1. Desire is Learned. We are the ones who have trained our brains to desire. We have created the desire and we can un-create it. 2. Learning requires Repetition and Reward. Desire is something we learn and repeat. 3. Repetition allows the Learning to become unconscious. Our brains evolved so that anything we repeat gets delegated to the lower brain, where our actions get programmed subconsciously. 4. Thoughts Create Desire. Our thoughts and emotions create the rewards, which creates the desire. Part 2: Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of desire 1. Concentrated pleasures (alcohol, drugs) create artificial dopamine response. Desire is intensified by rewards dopamine released in our brains. Concentrated pleasures lead to bigger dopamine rewards, which leads to more intense desire. 2. Our primitive brains prioritize activities that create dopamine response. Our brain evolved to believe dopamine rewards are tied to our survival. 3. Our motivation triad is to: seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. For that reason, the lower brain is faster than our prefrontal cortex (human brain) and will always win the race to drink. But our human brain is more powerful than our lower brain. The bottom line? Our desire for alcohol is perfectly normal. In fact, we ve programmed ourselves to want it. But we can also un-program ourselves. Armed with this knowledge, the keys to stop overdrinking are just within reach. 11 www.stopoverdrinking.com
Are YOU Ready To Stop Overdrinking? If you are someone who enjoys drinking but has tried to cut back, you are most likely frustrated and discouraged. First, there is nothing wrong with you. Overdrinking is caused by disordered learning. It simply becomes automatic to drink more making it seem like it s out of our moment by moment control. Overdrinking is caused by disordered learning. It simply becomes automatic to drink more making it seem like its out of our moment by moment control process. Once you understand how this repetitive reinforcement works, you will understand why you overdrink and how to learn the skills to change it. You don t have to quit drinking to gain more control over it. If you do want to quit, I can show you how with a four step quick start Either way, I will teach you HOW to do it. Join me. Learn the Skill of Drinking Less When you join the membership at www. stopoverdrinking.com you get immediate access to the Quick Start Skills. This is a series of four short videos teaching you the skills to: 1. Manage Urges 2. Use the Drink Plan 3. Evaluate Your Drinking Thinking 4. Change Judgment to Curiosity You will get clear directions on how to APPLY these skills and learn them so you can start changing your life. It s not enough to understand what you need to do, you must actually do it and repeat it so drinking less becomes effortless. You will also get access to the call schedule where you will be able to jump on the line with me completely confidentially and ask me any question you need with the rest of the members. You don t have to use your real name if you don t want, but you can if you do! I will run Live Calls twice a month and all recordings will be available if you can t attend live. It is as simple as that. You listen to the FOUR SKILLS and you start applying them right away. You practice them until you start to unlearn your desire to overdrink. Then, you attend the twice monthly calls or listen to recordings and you will literally want to drink less. What Is Included In The Membership? I teach you how to drink less without subjecting you to a life of deprivation. The work in the beginning is challenging, but once you learn the skill, it becomes effortless. You will also get access to additional resources that pertain to the neuroscience around overdrinking and the learned urges that make it so hard to quit. 12 www.stopoverdrinking.com
Who This Membership Is Not For This membership is not for alcoholics. If you define yourself as an alcoholic and believe you need medical assistance, please email us directly and we will offer you some very effective resources. 13 www.stopoverdrinking.com
If You Feel You Are Ready To Be Free, Join Us There is absolutely no reason why you should struggle over your drinking. It s a skill you need to learn and then you will be free from the struggle. If you are ready, just go to http://stopoverdrinking.com/membership/ and click on the Join Now button. An amazing group of people and an awesome future are waiting for you there. If you have any questions, visit my website: SO STOP OVERDRINKING http://stopoverdrinking.com/ Or you can get in touch with me directly at: Brooke Castillo Brooke@TheLifeCoachSchool.com 14 www.stopoverdrinking.com