Drinking

Alcohol has an effect on the way you perceive the world. It makes you less sensitive to the input you get. Your awareness will narrow, you will perceive less details, and that has the power to make you feel more relaxed: you no longer have to react on all kinds of things, you do not make them that important anymore. The nice part of this for your personality is, that it is much easier for him to make something out of a situation that he could not make really work for you before. With some standard ingredients and not hindered by detailed perception, he can now label situations. He can make your everyday inhibitions that he put on you because of risks, standards or unpleasant outcomes, disappear more or less.

Now in that way, alcohol gives you some form of relaxation, a short vacation from the ever judging personality. That is also why you can stay at crowded disco's with extremely loud music (that is hardly survivable without this kind of anesthesia), why a party with loud music is "fun" only because of what you make out of your perception (because a normal contact is not possible), or live through a boring evening. But it is also more subtle: you do not have to experience problems in your relationship. You hide from yourself the feeling that your job is no longer satisfactorily. It helps to diminish the awareness of certain mental pain. And that is somehow addictive: it now seems so easy to exchange your unpleasant feelings for more pleasant ones, thus "fixing your life", that it is very tempting to make this your standard resolution. A couple of glasses every day: it is almost accepted as normal behaviour. The experience of the guilt feeling afterwards can even be diminished by the same source that brought it about.

However, a more structural approach would be to look at the real causes of the process that make you feel tense and unpleasant. Your personality does not like you doing that, because that means that you are about to make him less powerful, and according to him it is much easier to use alcohol: a temporarily escape is allowed, without questioning your personality. That is why it is not an easy choice to make.

Is it wrong to use alcohol? Like everything else, that is not the real question here. But look for yourself what you use it for: you use it to diminish unpleasant feelings or live through situations that otherwise you can not make acceptable to yourself, so rest assured that alcohol is a toy of your personality. Who, by the way, hates people and situations where he is confronted with the fact that it is a choice indeed, like when he finds himself in the presence of people who do not drink alcohol. Remember that there is another way to deal with these unpleasant situations: become aware of the basis where these feelings stem from, and make the choice to look at them but no longer believe they are true or strengthen them. There is an alternative, this whole site is about that other way to deal with it. You do not have to focus on the fact that you drink or the amount of booze you use, that will change by itself when you start to become aware of the real source. It all starts with: facing the idea that this regular escape from what your personality made of your life, does not bring you what you really want.