If The Thought Of Quitting Drinking Forever Is Too Permanent, Try This

If the thought of quitting drinking forever is too permanent, you may want to try the following tip. And by the way, it isn’t an easy thing to accept. So, if you’re beating yourself up, please don’t.

I felt the exact same way and what I did made the world of a difference in my own journey- sobriety felt more relaxing and less “what if I screw up?”

TRY THIS:

Break forever down into manageable time frames. Instead of eternity, start with a sabbatical. Maybe it begins as a month of no drinking. As you get close to one month of sobriety, extend it to another, and another, and so on.

Or maybe you’re in a place where a week of no drinking feels more attainable. Aim for a week and keep extending it by another week as you get close to reaching your goal.

This is about gently pushing yourself out of your comfort zone while giving yourself the time to accept a different reality.

This also isn’t about your mindset. So, if you’re thinking that you don’t have the willpower or determination, that isn’t it.

Both your brain and nervous system need time to adapt to a new story. Give yourself time until you’re ready to accept forever.

It also takes so much pressure off of yourself. You don’t feel the heaviness of it all. You don’t worry as much about relapsing or making the wrong decisions. And it helps you to ride the waves instead of trying to predict every potential worst case scenario.

When you’re ready to accept forever without a drink, you will. Don’t push or force or rush your journey. You’ve already reached your destination. Now, you get to create a new life for yourself and become the person you’ve always wanted to be.

And please don’t tell yourself, “I need to accept that I can’t drink by this date.” There is no timeline in healing. You don’t need to compete with yourself or even prove anything to yourself. This is about learning to adopt a healthy mindset surrounding sobriety.

What I can say from my own experience is that the shame I felt for being sober was one of the reasons it took me two years before I acknowledged my fate. It wasn’t that sobriety was the issue, it was the idea of it that made it hard to grasp.

Which is why when I broke it down into small milestones, it helped me so much. For the first six months, I took it month by month.

When I was six months sober, I told myself I would go one full year. On my one year anniversary, I told myself I would go another year without drinking. It wasn’t until I was two years sober, that I was ready to accept my fate. That was when I told myself forever.

None of us has a switch that we can turn on or off. It takes time to break habits, behaviors, and patterns. If it were easy, all of us would have what we want without putting in any effort.

Sobriety is no different. So, if you can’t accept forever right now, then you can’t. And that’s ok. One day, you will. Trust yourself.

I’ll see you soon…in the meantime, love yourself so much that even a Hallmark Christmas movie would be jealous.