It’s a Habit

I must admit that I used to believe I was drinking certain drinks simply out of habit. Not all of them of course; some were for pleasure and some to help cope with stress, but I honestly thought that some of my drinking was due to habit. But who was I kidding? Habit? The reasons we come up with to justify our drinking are amazing. Did I really think I left my house, went to the off-licence, came home, opened the bottle and drank it all out of habit? I do understand that we can all get into the routine of doing certain things, but it’s easy to break other routines. For example, we drive on the left-hand side of the road in this country but when we go abroad, we switch to the right with no real problem. Some heroin addicts fool themselves into believing that they are injecting themselves through sheer habit as well. It’s even referred to as a ‘heroin habit’ but anybody on the outside can see that it is pure drug addiction. If it were only habit they could just inject themselves with a syringe full of water. It would save them a fortune. If it were just a habit people could simply stop doing it.

Do you believe that people who lose their homes, family, self-respect, dignity, pride, self-worth and sometimes even their lives as a result of alcohol do so because they couldn’t break a habit? Of course not; they do so because it’s a drug addiction like any other. If you still think that some people are drinking out of habit, why is it that people who haven’t had a drink in years are still

taking one day at a time? Are they still in the habit of drinking alcohol? Are they still in the habit of buying alcohol? No, they are not. When you go on holiday to a place you have never been, to a hotel you have never seen and a beach you have never visited, are you in the habit of drinking on that beach at that time of the day? No. How long does it take to break this habit anyway? Is this the only habit in the world from which you are in permanent recovery? Is it the only habit that is never truly broken? Or is a more likely explanation that these people who haven’t touched a drop in years and are still finding it hard to cope are simply feeling deprived because they still feel as though they are missing out on something pleasurable; that they are not like normal people but have a disease for which there is no known cure. The reality is that alcohol addiction is just that, an addiction and not a habit.

The problem with alcohol addiction is that most drinkers really have no idea that they are hooked. They honestly think they are drinking because they choose to and because they enjoy it. If they cannot think of a rational reason for why they are drinking they will resort to calling it a habit. We have told the same lies about alcohol for so long that we all end up believing them. I was constantly justifying why I drank, just as the majority of drinkers do. We instinctively know that we shouldn’t be doing it and we instinctively know that it is not normal to poison ourselves. We sense that we are miserable at times if we are not allowed to drink. We even have moments when we sense we just might

be hooked. So, in order to rationalise our drinking, we have to build up all these sound reasons for not being able to enjoy ourselves without first taking a drug. As you know, if you tell a lie for long enough and convincingly enough, even the person who started the lie will end up believing it.

The heroin addict may think they are getting high but any outsider can see clearly that they are simply trying to end the lows caused by the drug. All the over-sixteens who drink alcohol in the UK will also come up with rational reasons as to why they drink. If, collectively , they use the same reasons to justify their drinking, then we are bound to end up believing them, even if they make no rational sense whatsoever. Everything that I believed alcohol did for me was an illusion. The illusions simply confirm what we have heard for years, so we end up believing that alcohol provides a host of genuine benefits. But does it? One of the biggest delusions is that alcohol provides the drinker with a genuine pleasure. Exactly what pleasure is there in drinking alcohol? If it’s a genuine pleasure then it can only come either from the taste, the thirst-quenching or the marvellous effect.

So let’s remove the brainwashing a bit at a time. First of all let’s get it clear that …