Boredom

I’ve said that when we are doing something we instinctively know to be stupid, we have to come up with some rational reasons to try to justify it. However, this particular excuse really takes the biscuit. In my private sessions I often get drinkers telling me that alcohol helps when they are bored. Helps what: the boredom? Alcohol cannot in any way relieve boredom. In order to succeed we have to be honest with ourselves. If you are sitting by yourself and bored out of your head with a drink in your hand, you are still bored. When I was a child and I was bored, my mother would never say, ‘Oh, have drink son’; she would say, ‘Go and do something .’ Alcohol is a drug and, as such, creates a void and when you have a void in your life you can frequently feel bored.

The effects of the body trying to repair itself after you have taken the drug combined with the gradual suppression of the nervous system can also lead to boredom. After all, every minor task can appear to be a huge effort when you feel as if you have just been run over by a truck. You can eventually reach a permanent state of tiredness and lethargy so you just can’t be bothered to do anything. If you have enough alcohol it will knock you out so I guess you are no longer bored but then you are no longer anything. Shooting yourself in the head would also knock you out and it would solve your boredom issues for life. The only way alcohol can relieve

boredom is when you watch somebody who is drunk. You’re not bored then because you know anything can happen. Alcohol is incapable of relieving boredom as, once again, it helps to create it.

If we look closely at some of the apparently rational reasons that are given to justify alcohol intake, not only does alcohol fail to do what we think but it does exactly the opposite. Most of the reasons we give completely contradict one another: ‘It calms me down’ and ‘It livens me up.’ How can the same drug help to solve the opposite problem? It can’t, it is just another part of one of the cleverest con tricks ever devised.

… not only does alcohol fail to do what we think but it does exactly the opposite.

The truth is that alcohol does the opposite of what it appears to do. It causes mental and physical stress, mental and physical tension, mental and physical aggravation . It suppresses your nervous system, destroys your courage, undermines your confidence and keeps you a slave to the stuff.

‘Yes Jason,’ I hear you say, ‘but I do not drink to help relieve stress or help with my boredom. I am just a social drinker and you cannot escape the fact that even if alcohol doesn’t do anything else it is a tried and tested …’