“This article is part of our series, The Belief Bucket, where we debunk common myths about alcohol and its perceived benefits.”
- Introduction: What is the Belief Bucket? ← you’re here
- Myth #1 – Relaxation (Alcohol helps me relax)
- Myth #2 – Happiness (Alcohol makes me happy)
- Myth #3 – Reward (Alcohol is my reward)
- Myth #4 – The Rosy Effect (Remembering only the good times)
- Myth #5 – Taste (Alcohol tastes amazing)
- Myth #6 – Social Ally (Alcohol helps me socially)
- Myth #7 – Sleep (Alcohol helps me sleep)
- Myth #8 – Moderate Drinking (Our obsession)
- Myth #9 – Boredom (Alcohol solves boredom)
- Myth #10 – The Buzz (Alcohol feels amazing)
Why Start With Beliefs
If you’ve ever tried to make a big change in your life, you know it’s not as simple as just setting a rule and sticking to it.
You can tell yourself, “I’m not going to drink anymore”, and maybe it works for a few days or even a few weeks. But if deep down you still believe alcohol is the thing that helps you relax, makes you more fun, or turns a dull evening into a good time, that rule starts to feel heavy. Restrictive. Like you’re missing out.
Here’s the thing: lasting change doesn’t start with a rule. It starts with getting curious about why we drink in the first place, and more specifically, about the beliefs that make drinking feel appealing or even necessary.
When those beliefs are left unexamined, quitting (or even just cutting back) can feel like a constant fight with yourself. But once we start questioning them and seeing what’s really true, change can actually feel lighter. It stops being about willpower and becomes more about alignment.
When your beliefs change, your choices follow. And they follow naturally.
That’s why I always start here with beliefs before talking about strategies, routines, or habits.
What Is a Belief Bucket
Think of your Belief Bucket as a container you’ve been filling your whole life. It holds every idea, assumption, and “truth” you’ve ever collected about alcohol.
Some of those beliefs came from personal experience. Others from friends or family. Many slipped in from ads, TV shows, or just the way alcohol is casually woven into everyday life.
If you were to peek into your Belief Bucket, you might find things like:
- “Alcohol helps me relax.”
- “Drinking makes me more social.”
- “It’s my reward after a long day.”
- “A drink helps me sleep.”
These ideas feel true because we’ve repeated them, sometimes out loud, sometimes just in our heads, for years. And when you repeat something often enough, it starts to sound like fact.
But here’s the twist: feeling true doesn’t make it real.
Maybe alcohol seemed to relax you in the past, but was it actually calming your nervous system, or just distracting you for a while? Maybe it made you more social in certain situations, but was it really the alcohol, or was it the setting, the people, or your own mindset?
When we start to see that these “truths” aren’t necessarily truths at all, we get our first crack in the armor of old patterns.
How Beliefs Shape Behavior
Our beliefs aren’t just little thoughts floating in our heads. They’re like instructions to the brain.
Here’s what that looks like in real life:
- Believe alcohol reduces stress? Your brain will prompt you to pour a drink when work’s been brutal or the kids are loud.
- Believe alcohol is your reward? That Friday night glass of wine (or three) becomes a ritual you feel you’ve earned.
- Believe drinking makes you social? You might start avoiding gatherings where alcohol isn’t involved, or feel nervous walking into one without a drink in hand.
The bottom line? Beliefs drive behavior.
If you try to change the behavior without touching the belief underneath, it’s like cutting weeds without pulling up the roots. Sure, you might get some short-term results, but before long, the old pattern grows back.
On the other hand, when you start with beliefs, when you see one for what it is and decide it’s not serving you anymore, the behavior can shift almost effortlessly.
Why Challenge These Beliefs
So, if these beliefs are so ingrained, why bother poking at them?
Because many of the ideas sitting in your Belief Bucket aren’t accurate anymore, if they ever were in the first place. They’re often stitched together from:
- Past experiences that showed only a sliver of the truth.
- Social pressure from friends, family, or co-workers.
- Marketing that works hard to make alcohol seem not just normal, but essential.
And here’s the problem: when we don’t question them, we keep running the same outdated scripts in our heads.
We keep drinking in situations where it doesn’t actually help. We keep using it as a solution for problems it doesn’t really solve. We keep building our social lives around it, even if it’s quietly costing us more than it’s giving.
But the moment we start challenging these beliefs, that’s when things open up.
We realize we can relax without a drink. We can have fun and connect without needing to loosen up with alcohol first. We can celebrate, grieve, reward ourselves, and even unwind in ways that actually support our wellbeing instead of chipping away at it.
Challenging your beliefs isn’t about judgment. It’s about freedom.
What’s Coming Next
What we’ve talked about here is just the start. This is like standing at the edge of the Belief Bucket, peering in, and realizing there’s a lot more in there than we thought.
Over the next few posts, we’ll roll up our sleeves and pull out one belief at a time. For each one, we’ll ask:
- Where did it come from? Was it from family, friends, a commercial, or our own early experiences?
- Why does it feel true? What’s kept it in place all these years?
- What’s the reality? What does the science, experience, or a broader perspective show us?
- How can we replace it? What new belief actually serves us better?
We’ll start with one of the most common: “Alcohol helps me relax.”
If you’ve ever felt that end-of-day craving, the one where you tell yourself, “I just need to take the edge off”, then you’ll want to be here for that. Because we’re going to look at what’s really happening in those moments, and it’s not what the commercials tell you.
This work isn’t about forcing yourself to quit or shaming yourself for drinking. It’s about getting curious. It’s about updating your mental software so you’re no longer running on old, unhelpful programs.
And honestly? It’s about making life feel lighter, calmer, and more yours.
— Brent
Continue reading with Myth #1 – Relaxation (Alcohol helps me relax) →