The Alcohol Experiment
You take away the drink and you take away the single most important method of coping you have. How to talk to people without a drink. How to sit on the sofa and watch TV and not crawl right out of your own skin. How to experience a real emotion—pain or anxiety or sadness—without an escape route, a quick way to anesthetize it. How to sleep at night.
Caroline Knapp • Drinking: A Love Story
“The Big Book of AA,” Jamison notes, “was initially called The Way Out. Out of what? Not just drinking, but the claustrophobic crawl space of the self.”
James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
SELF-GRATIFICATION: Part X gets you to give in to impulses like using alcohol or drugs, overeating, surfing the Internet, checking social media, texting, staying up too late, shopping, gambling, playing videogames, watching TV, etc.
Barry Michels • Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul's Potential
Now is a good time to stop and summarise where we are. Essentially, alcohol provides us with a feeling of relaxation. However, the brain and nervous system reacts to this by releasing stimulants and becoming more sensitive, with the result that when the alcohol wears off we are more anxious and unrelaxed than we were before we took the drink. So we
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