SUNDAY 30TH OCTOBER 2022
At the risk of sounding boring and repetitive, work is horrendous at the moment. I’ve still gone through the motions of maintaining my exercise regime and fasting every day and I’ve even practiced my positive affirmations against the backdrop of all the drama. I totally object to the fact that it has consumed all my mental and physical energy this week to the point that I’ve thought of little else. Once again though, my main positive is that drinking to take the edge off all this stress has barely even entered my mind.
MY WHY
One of the main reasons I wanted to take such a long break from alcohol was to try to get away from drinking in certain situations just out of habit. Stopping for a month or six weeks has never been enough for me to form new habits and I’ve always slid straight back in to the notion that weekends and drinking alcohol go hand in hand. Not that I’d drink to excess every weekend but That Friday Feeling was always accompanied by musing about what I would drink to celebrate the end of the week, even if I was going to be working the next day. Then there’s the G&T at the end of a hard day or the bubbles to celebrate – drinking alcohol was always a knee-jerk reaction to far too many situations. I’d never come across the concept of creating new neural pathways until I started delving in to quit lit but it immediately appealed to me. I love the idea that my brain is getting a work out! I’ve gone from shrinking it and messing up all its chemistry to detoxing it and setting it on a mission of growth. I’m not great at retaining lots of facts if I don’t have them in front of me but I do believe I read that your brain starts to grow again once you stop shrinking it and can even surpass its pre-alcohol state. Check me, getting cleverer as I get older! I can only assume/hope that giving my brain the task of creating new neural pathways at my advanced years will also help ward off Alzheimer’s. I love being free of that automatic inclination to have a drink – I mean, it’s still there when I think of celebrating, but it is no longer on my mind just because it’s the weekend. I really don’t want to go back to that and I have to admit that I’m scared that, even after a whole year off, it wouldn’t be too long at all before I slipped back into old habits. Still, I don’t even have to think about that for months yet – in the meantime, I’ll continue to revel in the thought that all my brain cells are bursting with their new-found vitality and forming all sorts of new neural pathways in my head.
Theme Tune: Feeling Good by Nina Simone