- Introduction: What is the Belief Bucket? ← you’re here
- Belief #1 – Relaxation (Alcohol helps me relax)
- Belief #2 – Happiness (Alcohol makes me happy)
- Belief #3 – Reward (Alcohol is my reward)
- Belief #4 – The Rosy Effect (Remembering only the good times)
- Belief #5 – Taste (Alcohol tastes amazing)
- Belief #6 – Social Ally (Alcohol helps me socially)
- Belief #7 – Sleep (Alcohol helps me sleep)
- Belief #8 – Moderate Drinking (Our obsession)
- Belief #9 – Boredom (Alcohol solves boredom)
- Belief #10 – The Buzz (Alcohol feels amazing)
We can know alcohol is causing problems and still believe it helps us relax, enjoy ourselves or get through the evening.
And we can believe both for years. We might hate what drinking is doing to us, but still see the drink as the answer to stress, boredom, social pressure or a difficult day.
So while those beliefs still feel true, part of us can still want a drink.
What the Belief Bucket is
It’s a series of ten common beliefs about alcohol. Each belief has its own article where we look at why it can feel true and compare it with what drinking actually gave us.
These aren’t the only beliefs people can have about alcohol. They’re just ten that come up often and can make stopping feel like we’re giving something up.
Not all ten will feel equally true for us. We might recognise every one of them, only a few or perhaps just one.
Where these beliefs come from
We didn’t sit down one day and choose what to believe about alcohol.
Some of it came from family, friends, advertising, films and the way alcohol turns up in so many celebrations. And some came from our own drinking.
Maybe the first drink seemed to take the edge off after work. Maybe we felt more comfortable at a party. Or maybe the people, place and timing gave us a genuinely good evening.
We kept drinking in the same situations and kept giving alcohol the credit. A rough day meant a drink. Friday meant we’d earned one. A party meant alcohol would help us loosen up.
After years of doing that, these ideas didn’t sound like beliefs anymore. They sounded like facts.
Why the beliefs are worth looking at
Say we believe alcohol is the only thing that helps us unwind. An evening without it can feel like nothing but stress.
Or maybe drinking is our reward after a hard day. Saying no can then feel like we worked hard and got nothing.
And if we think it makes us more social, walking into an event sober might feel uncomfortable before we even get there. This is how a belief can keep alcohol looking useful even when we know how much damage it’s doing.
Of course, our beliefs aren’t the only thing going on. For those of us who’ve been drinking heavily, tolerance, dependence, withdrawal and automatic thoughts could be involved as well.
But while the drink still looks useful, stopping can feel like we’re giving up something we need. That can add to the argument in our head. We remember the reasons we want to stop, then a difficult moment comes and alcohol still seems able to make it better.
What we’ll look at
Each article looks at one belief. For each one, we ask why we believed it and then go through what the whole night and next day were really like.
The point isn’t to pretend alcohol never changed how we felt. Of course it did. That quick change is one reason many of us kept drinking.
But the first twenty minutes weren’t the whole experience. There were the drinks that followed, the poor sleep, the anxiety, the regret and the promises we made the next morning.
A belief may be true, partly true or it might only have seemed true at the time. We don’t have to decide straight away. We’re just going to look at what really happened.
And after the tenth article, the Belief Bucket recap puts all ten articles back in one place.
Where the series starts
The next article starts with one of the most common beliefs: “Alcohol helps me relax.”
For many of us, that belief was behind the evening drink for years. So that’s the first one we’ll look at properly.
— Brent
Continue reading: Belief #1 – Relaxation (Alcohol helps me relax) →