How to Break Ingrained Patterns of Drinking Behavior

If you’ve made the difficult decision to stop drinking, you’ve already taken the all-important first step. Nothing happens without conscious intent – especially when it comes to altering behavior involving alcohol. Whether you were a moderate drinker who has stepped over the line and become a problem drinker or someone who has been abusing alcohol for quite some time, changing your ingrained patterns of drinking behavior will take a systematic and determined effort – and time. Here are some tips on how to accomplish your goal.

Enlist an Ally

First of all, you can’t do this on your own. It’s just too easy to fool yourself, tell yourself a few lies, and fall back into your old habits. You need an ally, someone who can help by reminding you of your goals and encourage you to stick with the program.
The person you choose should be someone you trust. After all, you’ll be getting some flak from your ally if you veer from your path, so you’ll want that constructive criticism to come from a person whose opinion you value. If you are married or have a partner who shares your desire to quit drinking, this is an obvious choice. If, however, your spouse or partner is also a drinker who’s had difficulty quitting drinking, you might want to choose someone else with a little more fortitude – and not as much skin in the game.

This is not to say that two spouses or partners can’t make a go of it together in a mutual goal to steer clear of alcohol. It’s just recognition of the fact that it makes it tougher. Sometimes, however, you two are all you’ve got, In that case, make the best of it and move forward with your plans. Just be sure you both know that you’ve been enablers of each other’s drinking in the past, and that’s got to stop – right now.

Make a List

When you’re trying to change ingrained patterns of behavior, it’s important to figure out the people, places and things that prompt you to drink. This includes friends that you hang out with at the bar or after a game or co-workers with whom you de-stress by knocking back more than a few toddies. It also includes the sports bar, tailgate parties, a friend’s house for weekend barbecues where everybody gets sloshed. For some, just the sight of a billboard advertising Ketel One vodka or some other spirits is enough to get them turning off to the nearest liquor store. Better get your supply, right? Don’t want to run out of your favorite drug of choice.

These people, places, things – and sights, sounds, smells, and tastes – are the cues the signal to your brain that it’s time to drink, that you want to drink, that you must drink. It’s the response to stimuli that has always resulted in you actually drinking. These are things you will need to change. And it’s definitely not going to be easy.

How can you alter your behavior to avoid these cues or, if they are unavoidable, how can you overcome them when they occur? Here are a few suggestions you can try to start:

• Change Your Driving Route – Don’t be a creature of habit – in more ways than one. A simple and easy-to-do behavior change is to vary the route you normally take to work, school, church, the mall, grocery store, gas station, etc. If you always take the same way to and from home, and that driving sequence takes you past your neighborhood hangout or the liquor store or the gas station where you also buy Lotto tickets and booze, guess what? You need to drive a different route.

• Turn Off the TV – If you’re watching a TV program and an ad comes on for beer, wine or spirits, either change the channel, get up and leave the room, or turn off the set. Ditto if a program that’s on depicts characters boozing it up. You don’t need the reinforcement of bad behavior or the visual and auditory cues of people drinking.

• Recommend Something Different – One way to switch off what’s become a habit of going to the bar after work with co-workers is to recommend something different. Instead of meeting up at the saloon, why not suggest an alternate location – or an activity that doesn’t involve drinking alcohol? Maybe you’ll get opposition and some deprecating comments, such as, “What’s up? You trying to lay off the sauce?” What do you care? You can be upfront about it and say you are, or deflect the comments by saying you’re just tired of the same old thing all the time. You’d rather engage in other types of activity – and tell them they’re welcome to join you, but there’ll be no drinking involved. If they don’t want to go along with the idea, don’t allow them to pressure you into going back to the bar. Head out on your own and create more constructive uses of your free time.

Do a Thorough Inventory

Begin at home to scour all the nooks and crannies for liquor – and get rid of it. Pour it down the drain and take the empty bottles and cans to the recycle container. Don’t save a single bottle or can of booze. It will only tempt you – and, once you start in on that last remaining reminder of drinking, you’ll only go on to get more.

Removing all liquor from the house, garage, shed, car, office or any other hiding places is just the first step. Donate or give away or discard all your favorite drinking glasses, mugs, towels, shirts or other items that have liquor slogans or advertising on them. Even T-shirts from vacation that depict people drinking need to get the old heave-ho.

Is such a cleaning-out really necessary? It is if you are serious about breaking your ingrained patters of drinking behavior. Problem drinkers as well as alcoholics simply cannot have alcohol anywhere in their presence. If it’s there, it will be consumed. Why take the chance? Get rid of it all – and don’t buy any more.

Schedule Your Time

Many people get into trouble with alcohol because they have too much time on their hands, or they’re bored, and use alcohol as a way to pass the time and not think about how empty their lives are. When you’ve become accustomed to using alcohol regularly, you’ll need to find alternatives to occupy your time.

Schedule your days so that you account for the free time that you have available to you. You should be able to create other activities to fill up those hours when you used to drink by getting involved in hobbies, sports, exercise, or relationships. If you don’t have anything that readily comes to mind, think about what’s interested you in the past. Take lessons or buy a book or check out things on the Internet.

Factor in vacation time as well. If you’re planning a trip, make sure it’s to a place where you’ll be occupying your time with activities that don’t involve getting hammered.

Become Physically Active

Physical activity is a great way to promote healthier patterns of behavior. You don’t have to lay out a big chunk of change to do it, either. You can start by taking brisk walks around the neighborhood. Ask your spouse or partner to join you. The workout will be good for both of you. Start small, maybe 20 minutes a day. Work up to a good hour 4 to 5 times a week. It’s easy enough to do, and you’ll be amazed at how much better you feel after you get used to the schedule.

Add in a little more challenging activity as your body becomes stronger. Take up a sport, such as racquetball, or tennis, or golf, or go swimming, skiing, backpacking, kayaking, whitewater rafting. Plan vacations where you can engage in a variety of challenging recreational pursuits.

The endorphins that kick in following an active workout are the body’s own feel-good chemicals. This natural high is physically and mentally enjoyable – and healthy for you. Better yet, adopting a physically active lifestyle is a great way to establish healthy patterns of behavior.

Find Appropriate Substitutes

Once you give alcohol the boot from your environment and your life, you’ll undoubtedly need to find appropriate substitutes. This goes for drinks you consume as well as for ingredients in popular recipes. Obviously switching from an alcoholic beverage to a carbonated drink is a little like swimming in a wetsuit. You go through the same motions (downing the beverage) without the same experience (the buzz of the alcohol). But carbonated drinks do have caffeine, which works to give you a lift, a bit more energy, and the benefits of not being addictive.

People who drink too much and too often likely experience not only hangovers, but dehydration as well. In fact, the headaches and nasty after-effects of too much booze are caused by dehydration. In any event, make it a practice to start drinking more water. Your body has already suffered the accumulated damage to various organs and systems – not to mention your brain – caused by problem drinking. Rehydrating is one way to replenish your bodily fluids and is a healthy substitute for alcohol. Besides, if you drink a full 8-ounce glass or bottle of water at a sitting, you’ll feel full. So, it’s a double benefit: You won’t need anything more to drink and you’ll probably not over snack either.

Find New Friends

If Walt and Jimmy or Becky and Sue are your drinking pals – and they have no intention of quitting their regular routine – it’s time to find new friends. These should be non-drinking ones, of course, in order for you to begin establishing healthier relationships that are not based primarily on the ritual of drinking.

Where to find new friends is always an obstacle that drinkers toss out as an excuse not to do anything about it. Where do you meet people? The answer is: everywhere. Strike up a conversation with the parent of your son or daughter at the next school function or PTA meeting. Join in a discussion group at your church. Participate in a community picnic by volunteering your time at a games booth or take up a sport that puts you into contact with like-minded individuals with whom you may become acquainted.

Join a travel club, a group that goes on week-end camping trips, hiking or mountain biking, or cross-country skiing. Or, consider taking a gardening or cooking class, going back to school to resume or complete your degree, gain additional training or just learn something new, such as a language or skill.

Everywhere you go there are new people to meet. If your efforts to engage individuals in conversation don’t pan out, don’t give up. Some people are too shy, don’t talk to strangers, or just are too wrapped up in their own lives to let anyone else in. You don’t need those people anyway.

Sooner or later, you’ll find one or more individuals who you not only like, but can share meaningful conversation with. Go out of your comfort zone and try new activities that can put you together with a diverse set of people. You’re bound to come up a winner.

Join a Support Group

Sometimes, however, the effort of staying away from drinking buddies, places and times of day are enough to get you down. You may figure, what’s the harm in having a few drinks? I’ll get back on my routine next week, you may tell yourself. Don’t fall for it. This is your mind playing tricks on you, pushing those cravings and urges smack in your face and tempting you to give in.
Instead of doing that, you might consider joining a support group. If you’ve never had treatment for a problem with drinking, a 12-step group may be unfamiliar to you. But you don’t have to be a recovering alcoholic to find benefit from a support group such as Alcoholics Anonymous. The fellowship is comprised of members who genuinely want to make a change in their lives, to live clean and sober, and to help others who have the same desire.

There are other support groups that may be more to your liking. You’ll have to do your homework to find them, and to determine if what they have to offer meets your particular situation. Support groups, by their very nature, encourage and support members. The support group that you join may be a support group for parents of autistic children, or for gifted children, or for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). If it works for you – that is, you find friendship and help in overcoming your self-destructive patterns of drinking behavior – by all means, get involved.

Get Counseling

Making a list, doing inventory, scheduling your time, becoming physically active, finding new friends – what if you still have doubts? What if you find it increasingly difficult to turn your thoughts away from the desire to drink? What if you find yourself falling back into your ingrained patterns of drinking behavior? Maybe it’s time that you seek counseling.

Professional therapists who are trained to help people with problem drinking, abuse of alcohol and/or other substances, and alcohol dependence can definitely help. Don’t think that you have to be a stone alcoholic to benefit from counseling. You can still get a lot out of counseling even if you’re not bad enough to require detoxification and residential treatment at an addiction treatment center. What is counseling, anyway, but an objective look at what’s been going on in your life, the underlying causes for your drinking, and learning new ways to cope and overcome unhealthy habits?

You can get a referral by visiting your doctor and talking candidly about your desire to break drinking patterns. You can say you want to improve your chances at living a longer, healthier life or be honest and say you would like a referral to someone who can help you break ingrained habits that you believe are self-destructive.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is one type of therapy that is very helpful in assisting individuals to establish healthy behavior patterns and break the cycle of self-destructive habits.

If you are leery of speaking your mind to your doctor, you can still get help. Call 1-800-662-HELP to speak with trained representatives who can refer you to local treatment facilities. Or, check out the treatment facility locator (http://findtreatment.samhsa.gov/) maintained by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Create New Goals

Look at your immediate situation. Do you have any short- or long-term goals? Or do you just exist day-to-day without any plan, any roadmap for the future? Vague goals like getting ahead, having more money in the bank, and so on, won’t get it. You need something specific, tangible, measurable.

When patients go through treatment for addiction (to alcohol, drugs, compulsive gambling or sex or overwork, to name a few), they always create a recovery plan that helps guide them through their early days of recovery. This is a useful tool for anyone who seeks to change ingrained patterns of behavior – drinking or otherwise.

Put down on paper (or create a spreadsheet on the computer) things that you’d like to accomplish in the next 6 months, one year, 5 years and 10 years. Does this seem a bit like busywork? It isn’t, and here’s why. Where many people get into trouble is that they have nothing to look forward to. They fall victim to the bad habits they’ve allowed themselves to become entangled in and never make any progress. They may think about doing something positive down the line, but they never get around to it. Time just slips away until next week becomes next year and nothing ever changes. Where’s the satisfaction in that?

It doesn’t matter what your goals are, just put them down. Keep in mind that nothing is etched in stone. Consider this a living document, one that you revise as new opportunities occur. Be sure to include a mix of goals, too. Make some personal, some professional, some that challenge you intellectually, physically, and emotionally. Include those that will require some stretch – in your abilities, your self-confidence, and your comfort zone.

Monitor Your Progress

Now that you have your goals, you need to monitor your progress toward achieving them. Revisit the document on a monthly basis – or sooner, if you have accomplished one or more of the goals you’ve set for yourself.

This practice is called tracking. It’s useful to help keep you motivated and grounded in what’s important to you.

Celebrate Wins

While we’re on the subject of accomplishments, it’s important that you take time to celebrate wins. When you master a challenge, reach a goal, advance to the next level, or determine that you’ve now entered a new phase where your horizon has expanded beyond that which you’d ever imagined, give yourself kudos. Acknowledge your efforts and celebrate your victory.
Just like receiving presents at Christmas or on special occasions is a reason for high spirits, so, too, is giving thanks and patting yourself on the back for all your hard work in achieving your goals. Be sure to include your spouse or partner (your ally) in your celebration. And, of course, you’ll make your celebration alcohol-free, in line with your new and healthier lifestyle.