This Naked Mind: Transform your life and empower yourself to drink less or even quit alcohol with this practical how to guide rooted in science to boost your wellbeing

This is a key to all drug addiction—the drug creates the low and then deceives its victims into believing that, by ending the low, it is providing a high.

What is important now is to realize that alcohol does pick you up, but only from how far it kicked you down, never up to where you were before you started drinking.

Beck explains these reactions in his book, Alcohol Lied to Me: The Intelligent Way to Stop Drinking. He says that all humans are motivated by just two component factors: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. That is a key reason why your friends, no matter how much they care about you, don’t want you to stop drinking. When you stop drinking they are

The genetics lab at the University of Utah, a department that studies the role of genes in addiction, says that someone’s genetic makeup will never doom them to becoming an addict.28 Polk confirms that, despite any genetic connections, someone cannot become an alcoholic without repeatedly drinking alcohol.29

Disliking the taste of our first drinks helps us become stuck. If the first drink tasted amazing, we would be more cautious. Since those early drinks aren’t very good, we throw caution to the wind. After all, how could we become addicted to something we don’t like?

The hard part is going against groupthink, the herd mentality of our alcohol-saturated culture. After all, alcohol is the only drug on earth you have to justify not taking.

Before you drank alcohol, you didn’t miss it; you didn’t think about it. You were happy and free.

Shyness and inhibitions are not negative, yet we’ve been conditioned to think they are. These emotions protect us, helping us to navigate life with grace. It’s not a lot of fun to be shy, but it’s normal.