If you liked that book, you should find this one up your street as well. Ten tried and tested Strategies to avoid alcohol cravings and switch them off if they start.
For the price of a round of drinks or a decent bottle of wine, these two books give you twenty proven strategies that help you avoid alcohol cravings or switch them off if they start. These strategies are ones that I have seen work and have had feedback that they really helped people (maybe you?) get free of the wish to drink.
Wouldn’t it be great if in a year’s time, you could look back at this year and say to yourself “The one big thing I did this year was free myself of alcohol”? Can you imagine that? Is this your dream?
The new set of ten tried and tested Cravings Busters are:
#11 How to make not drinking your only priority
#12 No alcohol in the house
#13 Enlist your inner ninja
#14 Step by step Gratitude practice
#15 A good book
#16 Anger interrupted
#17 Enough sleep
#18 Timeline
#19 Avoid sugar
#20 Ask for Help
These Strategies are for you to pick and choose, test and embed, ways to take a break from alcohol, either a holiday or a permanent change without it being shockingly difficult. Many try to stop drinking or have a break, many under estimate the challenges.
I am not saying that stopping drinking is hard because for most people it isn’t. But it is a whole lot harder if just do it without any strategies to take the strain.
The No.1 reason that we put off trying to change our drinking habits is because of we don’t want to have to tough out the denial .How will it will be if we cannot pour ourselves a drink when we really need one? How will we cope without our pick me up/ calm me down/ get me in party mood/let me switch off drink?
Maybe you have tried before and failed because it was just too hard. Maybe you just keep putting it off until you have the perfect low stress time to do it.
You are Orphan Annie “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I luv ya! Tomorrow. You’re always a day away!”
The traditional advice on cravings to just sit with those feelings when you really want a drink.
That is not what I advocate.
Why suffer?
I am not in that camp. I am a coach which means that I am meant to come up with ways to make stopping drinking easier. I tell my clients, you, to find other ways to get the pay-off you get from a drink.
Pay off from a drink? Isn’t it all bad? Shouldn’t I just turn my back on my drinking life and try not to think about how a drink made me feel?
No. Drinking was a sane strategy, it just came back to bite you. You drank to get a benefit, usually mood-related. A pick me up, a calm me down, a zone me out.
You can just tough it out in sobriety but it’s miserable. That’s why you put it off. The downside of all that denial just overwhelms your good intentions.
Why not recognize yourself as human and find out ways to get the payoff without the alcohol? Does that not sound saner and more likely to succeed long term?
You can have a battle within yourself between the good girl and the bad girl. Or you can integrate and accept both and find ways to head off your cravings so they do not bother you. You get on with creating a fantastic life without relying on a drink to be your happiness in wine glass form?
So what will work?
This is where Cravings Busters come in.
Book No.1 gave you ten tested and proven strategies to avoid the wish to drink and switch them off it they started. The ten are a range from distraction strategies to strategies to replace some of the feel good feelings you got from a drink. If you have not read the first volume and you have picked up this book because you want to take a break from alcohol, I recommend looking at the first book as well as they go together like sausages and brown sauce.
Between Book No.1 and this book, you have twenty ways to tackle cravings. You are going to find a range that works for you. You will feel so much more confident about stopping drinking if you know that you will not be clawing the wallpaper off the walls with stress or bashing the kitchen wall with a frying pan to get rid of tension (I had a client that had done that).
If my first book was the top ten strategies for avoiding and switching off cravings, what is this book?
It is the 2.0 release to the first book. It is ten more cravings busters but these ones are a level up in terms avoiding cravings and switching them off.
The first book was a fire fighter’s manual of things that will definitely help you to resist the urge to have a drink while you take back control of your life and start to figure out just who you are without a drink in your hand.
This second book gives you ten more tried and tested strategies you can choose from but the emphasis is on deeper strategies that actually quell the need that you thought only alcohol could feed
When I wrote the first book, I think it became a best seller because it was practical and positive and took as its subject the main fear of stopping drinking – cravings. It was focused and to the point. At the time when you are seriously considering taking a break from alcohol, you know things have to change. You have all these worries about how things might change but you know that things have to change, that much is certain.
I am no Pollyanna, trying to make lemonade out of lemons but I am a coach and I am alcohol-free. When you coach people, they expect more than advice to tough it out. They expect strategies, plans, experience: things to make the route easier and faster.
what I can do is help you succeed at the thing you want most – to take a break from alcohol, temporarily or permanently.
I can help you follow through on your wish to stop drinking so that you are much, much less likely to fail. I can and will also make the journey to a happy, calm, even euphoric at times, alcohol-free way of living, quicker and smoother.
When you are thinking of stopping drinking, it is not a capricious idea that comes out of the blue. You will have had weeks, probably months, even years, of the idea going round and round in your head. In your head will be a to and fro arguments “I need to stop” “Not today/after such and such a date” “If I don’t stop, I am going to get found out/sacked/ lose my children (that makes you feel even worse) – “It’s not that bad. Loads of people drink the way you do”.
