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THIS NAKED MIND: HOW AND WHY IT WORKS

unconscious: un·con·scious | /әn'känSHәs/ noun.

The part of the mind that a person is not aware of but that is a powerful force in controlling behavior.

conscious: con·scious | /'känSHәs/ adjective.

Aware of something (such as a fact or feeling), knowing that something exists or is happening.

consciousness: con·scious·ness | /'känSHәs-nәss/ noun.

The condition of being conscious

: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself

: the upper level of mental life which the person is aware of as contrasted with unconscious processes.

Definitions sourced from Merriam-Webster’s.

Conscious or Unconscious Thought?

Did you know your unconscious mind is responsible for your desires? Most of us don’t think about the distinction between our conscious and unconscious thoughts, but that distinction forms a vital piece of the alcohol puzzle. Studies confirm we have two separate cognitive (thinking) systems—the conscious and the unconscious.¹ The give-and-take between unconscious choices and our rational, conscious goals can help explain the mystifying realities of alcohol.² We are all fairly familiar with the conscious (or explicit) mind. Conscious learning requires the aware, intellectual grasp of specific knowledge or procedures, which you can memorize and articulate.³ When we want to change something in our lives, we usually start with a conscious decision. However, drinking is no longer a fully conscious choice in your life. Therefore, when you make a conscious decision to drink less, it’s almost impossible to adhere to that decision because your larger, more powerful unconscious mind missed the memo.

Unconscious learning happens automatically and unintentionally through experiences, observations, conditioning, and practice.⁴ We’ve been conditioned to believe we enjoy drinking. We think it enhances our social life and relieves boredom and stress. We believe these things below our conscious awareness. This is why, even after we consciously acknowledge that alcohol takes more than it gives, we retain the desire to drink.

The neurological changes that occur in your brain as a result of alcohol compound this unconscious desire. Thad A. Polk, neuroscientist, professor, and author of The Addictive Brain (a 2015 course on the newest science of addiction), says viewing addiction through the eyes of neuroscience allows us to “look beyond the seemingly bizarre behavior of addicts and see what is going on inside their brain.”⁵ In my early days on this journey, the undermining of my desire to drink less by a strange desire to drink more seemed nothing if not bizarre.

The mind, specifically the unconscious mind, is a powerful force in controlling our behavior. Information suggesting the benefits of alcohol surrounds us, yet we rarely become conscious of it. According to the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) communication model, we are assaulted with over two million bits of data every second, but we are only consciously aware of seven bits of that information.⁶ Television, movies, advertising, and social gatherings all influence our beliefs. From childhood we’ve observed, with few exceptions, our parents, friends, and acquaintances appearing to enjoy moderate, “responsible” drinking. These images teach our unconscious minds that alcohol is pleasurable, relaxing, and sophisticated.

Your opinions about alcohol and your desire to drink spring from the lifelong mental conditioning of your unconscious mind. This desire has likely been compounded by specific neurological changes in the brain. The goal of This Naked Mind is to reverse the conditioning in your unconscious mind by educating your conscious mind. By changing your unconscious mind, we eliminate your desire to drink. Without desire, there is no temptation. Without temptation, there is no addiction.

Like most things that have been ingrained in us since childhood, we believe in alcohol without question, like we believe the sky is blue. Through this book, you will think critically about your deeply-held beliefs about alcohol and strip away those that are false. This will convince the all-powerful unconscious mind and allow harmony and agreement between your conscious and unconscious minds.

When the Brain Causes Pain

I cannot overstate the importance of your unconscious mind. I learned this lesson from Dr. John Sarno, a renowned physician who investigates the connection between physical pain and emotions. A Forbes article calls Dr. Sarno “America’s Best Doctor,”⁷ and his methodology has successfully healed all sorts of people, including controversial radio personality Howard Stern. Sarno coined the term The Mindbody Syndrome, the theory that your mind, below your conscious awareness, rather than any physical injury or ailment, may be responsible for your pain. After the birth of my second son, I experienced crippling back pain. Incapacitated for weeks at a time, I spent thousands of dollars on treatment. I tried chiropractic care, acupuncture, traditional doctors, muscle relaxants, and painkillers. I attended weekly physical therapy, including traction and massage. For three years I was unable to pick up my kids, and no type of treatment helped.

Through Sarno’s work I learned the true source of my affliction, and through reading his book I was cured. I know this is hard to believe. Yet here I sit—I’ve remained pain-free for years. Many thousands of people have been forever cured of chronic pain through Dr. Sarno’s work. There is even a website set up by individuals Dr. Sarno has cured. The purpose? To provide a place for people to write thankyou letters to Dr. Sarno to express their gratitude for giving them their lives back. It’s truly amazing and can be found at thankyoudrsarno.org. Dr. Sarno’s approach of targeting and speaking to your unconscious mind is the same approach I employ for regaining control over alcohol.

Dr. Sarno methodically proved to me that the back pain I felt—pain that no medical professional could diagnose—was related to suppressed stress and anger.⁸ How do we accumulate all this suppressed stress and anger? Imagine a young father. His wife (who no longer has time for him) hands him their screaming baby. She is exhausted and needs a break. He takes the child and tries everything to comfort him. Forty minutes later the baby is still screaming. The father is frustrated and angry. How can he not be? His needs are not being met, the baby’s actions are illogical, and he feels useless. In his mind, it is unacceptable to feel angry at a helpless baby, so these emotions remain buried in his subconscious, or as psychiatrist Carl Jung calls it, “the shadow.”⁹

We hide emotions that we feel to be abhorrent in “the shadow.” We are unwilling to accept this part of us. So, we assert, “I am a good person; there is no way I want to harm this helpless baby,” and we unconsciously repress our negative emotions. In order to deeply bury reprehensible emotions, your brain can cause physical pain to distract you. The pain is real. Laboratory tests demonstrate that the pain is caused when your brain cuts off oxygen to the afflicted area. Epidemiologists call this transfer of symptoms amplification.¹⁰ Amplification prevents unacceptable ideas from surfacing.

Your Unconscious Mind at Work

“Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.”

—Eckhart Tolle

Why am I telling you all this? Drinking and back pain seem like two very different problems. So what do “the shadow” and amplification have to do with drinking? It’s hard to believe that reading a book cured my back pain, but perhaps you can see how physical pain could originate in your emotions. Your conscious mind may now be willing to entertain this theory. But if I only needed to consciously accept the fact that the pain stemmed from my emotions rather than a physical injury, the cure would have been instant. Simply hearing the theory and accepting it consciously would have been enough to heal my back. But while my consciousness could grasp the concepts relatively easily, the pain remained. This is because it was my unconscious, rather than conscious, mind that needed to understand, to grasp the reality of the situation. And that process, the process of Dr. Sarno speaking to my unconscious mind, took me reading a 300-page book.

The unconscious mind is not logical; it’s all about feelings. It is the source of love, desire, fear, jealousy, sadness, joy, anger, and more. The unconscious mind drives your emotions and desires. When you make a conscious decision to quit or cut back on alcohol, your unconscious desires remain unchanged. You have unknowingly created an internal conflict. You want to cut back or quit, but you still desire a drink and feel deprived when you do not allow yourself one.

Also, the unconscious mind often works without the knowledge or control of the conscious mind.¹¹ Studies from as far back as 1970 prove our brains actually prepare for action 1/3 of a second before we consciously decide to act. This means that even when we think we are making conscious decisions, our unconscious mind actually makes the decision for us.¹²

You can easily test this and reveal the extent to which your unconscious mind controls your conscious decisions. Remember a day when you were in a bad mood for no reason. You couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong; you just felt grumpy. If your conscious mind controlled your emotions, you could simply think, “I am going to be happy,” and your mood would change from grumpy to sunny. Have you tried that? Did it work?

When I am in a bad mood, a conscious thought to try to be happier—or, worse, someone telling me to just be happy—does nothing to improve my mood. It does the opposite. Why? Because your conscious mind doesn’t control your emotions. Granted, you can train your conscious mind in more positive or negative thought patterns, which ultimately alters how you feel. These repeated conscious thoughts eventually influence your unconscious and therefore your feelings.

So how does your unconscious mind feel about alcohol? Today’s society has conditioned your unconscious mind to believe alcohol provides pleasure, enjoyment, and support—that it is vital to social situations and stressful situations alike. This book reverses that conditioning by stripping away your false beliefs about alcohol. We will do this with the help of Liminal Thinking, a method developed by author Dave Gray. Liminal Thinking defines how, through the conscious exploration and acceptance of new ideas and truths, you can influence your unconscious mind. This gives you back your ability to make rational and logical decisions about alcohol, no longer influenced by illogical, emotional, or irrational desires. It will give you control and freedom by changing your understanding of and therefore your relationship with alcohol. While tradition, advertising, and societal norms condition our unconscious to believe that alcohol is beneficial, Liminal Thinking and the material in this book will expose that unconscious conditioning and recondition your unconscious, exposing alcohol and giving you freedom.

Experience and the Unconscious Mind¹³

In order to influence the unconscious mind, we need to first talk about the way in which personal experience ties to the unconscious. Perhaps you’ve heard the ancient story about the blind men and the elephant. Three blind men are brought into a room with an elephant, and each man touches a different part. One touches the tail, one the trunk, and one the side. When asked what they are touching they begin to argue. The one touching the trunk believes he is touching a snake; the one touching the body, a wall; and the one touching the tail, a rope.

Each blind man is saying what he believes to be true. And their experience proves it. Since we tend to trust our experiences implicitly, we understand how the argument started. Of course, the truth is that none of them are correct. They are all experiencing a piece of reality and forming their own, very different, opinions.

Gray explains that we only see and experience part of reality, and no matter how many experiences we have had, our brains are not powerful enough to experience and observe everything. Gray makes the point that we are limited by what we pay attention to: “In any given moment, the more you focus on one aspect of your experience, the less you notice everything else.”¹⁴ We usually notice only the things specific to our immediate reality: the society we grew up in, the media, the influencers in our lives, and our actual life experiences.

Gray states that upon those relevant experiences and observations we make assumptions, from those assumptions we draw conclusions, and from those conclusions we form beliefs.¹⁵ Gray defines belief as everything we “know” to be true.¹⁶

This illustration demonstrates that the things we “know” to be true are not actually formed by reality, but by reality as we have interpreted it from our experiences, observations, assumptions, and conclusions. Consider how this applies to alcohol. Collectively held beliefs are not built directly on the foundation of reality.

These beliefs can include statements like:

• Alcohol provides enjoyment.

• Alcohol provides relief.

• Alcohol is the key to social situations.

• A party can’t really be a party without booze.

• Alcohol makes us funnier or more creative.

• Alcohol can relieve our stress or boredom.

• For some it can be hard, if not impossible, to stop drinking.

• The very definition of alcoholic and alcoholism.

These beliefs can be particularly difficult to change for several reasons. One reason is that we unconsciously self-seal them by seeking out things that are congruent with them. This is called confirmation bias, the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. We can find confirmation for our preconceptions about alcohol in many forms, including the media, the people we drink with, and our internal rationalizations. Adages about drinking found hanging in so many households illustrate a confirmation bias. Some of my favorites are:

• It’s not drinking alone if the kids are home.

• We have too much wine, said no one ever.

• It’s not a hangover; it’s wine flu.

• I cook with wine; sometimes I even put it in the food.

• Wine! Because no great story started with someone eating a salad.

The kicker is that these beliefs have become so ingrained in our minds and our society, and so repeatedly self-sealed, that they are programmed into our unconscious. And our unconscious controls our emotions and our desires.¹⁷ By definition the unconscious is not readily accessible or easily changed.¹⁸ We need a specific process to dive into the foundation of our beliefs, examine them, and change our perceived reality.

So what happens when your experiences with alcohol start to contradict your bubble of self-sealing belief? Perhaps your experiences are no longer wholly positive, and you start to question your drinking. Or maybe you hear new information about the dangers of drinking.

Gray says that one of the ways we make sense of these new ideas that don’t fit with our current beliefs is to look for external validity. Can we take the new information and test it out to prove its merit? However, especially with alcohol, we often don’t make it that far. This is because the new information doesn’t have internal coherence— it doesn’t fit with what you “know” to be true. And because it is lacking in internal coherence, you will unconsciously reject it before you have a chance to consciously consider it. This happens all the time. We both consciously and unconsciously disregard information we don’t want to hear. And when we do this, we never have a chance to see if this new information is indeed true; we never move to test it against reality.¹⁹

Why does this happen? Because we like certainty; it feels safe. Gray explains this unconscious behavior helps us deal with the realities of life, many of which are uncomfortable. It allows us to outsource some of the fear that attacks us when we confront certain truths. Reality is uncertain, and uncertainty causes fear. We try to protect ourselves from this fear by staying inside our bubble of belief until something happens that we cannot ignore. At that point we are forced to confront reality.

For me, it was one hangover too many, leaving me unable to function during the day as a result of my heavy drinking at night. I reached a point where I could no longer ignore the fact that alcohol was affecting my career and my relationships. This forced me to confront new information that said wine was not the joy juice I believed it to be.

But at this stage, attempting to drink less felt practically impossible. Why? I lived with a huge bubble of self-sealing belief around my drinking. I believed alcohol enhanced my creativity, made me funnier and more outgoing, allowed me to enjoy social situations, relieved my stress at the end of a long day, and comforted me when something went wrong. Giving up drinking felt like an incredible sacrifice, like the loss of a close friend. These were beliefs I had never previously questioned that had been built up over a lifetime of experiences, observations, assumptions, and conclusions.

I knew these beliefs to be true. I felt I would never be able to relax without a glass of wine. I honestly believed social situations would be boring and even depressing without alcohol. Even when I realized these beliefs were illogical, they still felt true because they were embedded in my unconscious and were much stronger than my logical, conscious reasoning. As Gray says, “construction of belief is not something we do consciously, it’s something we do unconsciously.”²⁰ In the illustration below you can see how everything shaded in below the line of our beliefs represents the things we are not consciously aware of.

So what can we do? How can we explore reality and change our unconscious belief that alcohol is the “elixir of life” to fit with our conscious desire to drink less? It’s relatively simple. We need to bring unconscious experiences, observations, assumptions, and conclusions into conscious thought. This allows your unconscious to change. The concept is scientifically proven—scientists now realize that the brain is able to change and adapt in response to new experiences, in a process called neuroplasticity.²¹

The process of illuminating your unconscious foundation of belief will influence your unconscious mind. To do this, I will logically and critically provide you with information about alcohol and addiction. I will expose your beliefs, assumptions, and conclusions by presenting you with methodical, factual, and rational arguments for you to question and evaluate. You’ll be completely in control: I will strip away misinformation and present new concepts you have not yet critically considered. I will give you the tools to discover your own truth, your own reality, to understand that the rope you think you are holding might really be the tail of an elephant. Let’s get started.

Alcohol: The “Elixir of Life”?

Alcohol is addictive. This fact has been proven over and over again. It is the nature of the substance, and it doesn’t matter who you are or how in control you believe yourself to be. Your physical response when you drink alcohol is to want more. Alcohol hooks you through its addictive and dehydrating nature. Again, this is a physiological fact. Before you drank alcohol, you didn’t miss it; you didn’t think about it. You were happy and free.

If you’re having problems with alcohol, you’ve already realized alcohol is not a miracle elixir. You know it’s costing you money, health, friendships, and maybe even your marriage. Your conscious mind knows all of this. The problem is that your unconscious is continuously assaulted with messages about the “joy” it brings and the stress it relieves. These messages come from external sources, friends, family, and of course, advertising. These messages are confirmed by internal sources—your past experiences with alcohol. This book will address both.

Over the next day, notice how many messages you are exposed to about the “pleasures” and “benefits” of alcohol. Look around—from your friends to what you watch on television, almost everything in our society tells you, both consciously and unconsciously, that alcohol is the “elixir of life,” and without it your life would be missing a key ingredient.

The Twelfth Juror

“Truth rests with the minority . . . because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.” —Søren Kierkegaard

Alcoholism appears complex because it is misunderstood, not only by drinkers and their families but also by experts. We must see through these illusions. In short, we need to become detectives and lay bare the information, evaluate it, and discover the truth.

You may wonder, if common knowledge about alcohol and addiction is false, why do we believe it? How do we, as a society, accept untrue propositions as fact? Great questions. To answer them, let’s look at a jury deliberating in a trial. It’s a large jury with twelve jurors. Eleven of them are convinced of the defendant’s guilt and one believes in his innocence. Do we believe the eleven jurors or the one? For the single juror to detain an exhausted jury (the decision must be unanimous), he must be absolutely sure of his position. In fact, you could argue that he is more certain than the eleven. Going against the grain is not easy. He must see something the rest do not. Suppose the eleven are experts? How much firmer in his stance must that single juror be? It appears the one juror is considering a perspective the eleven are not.

One of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, famously said, “We must be able, at any time, to accept the fact that we could all be absolutely and utterly wrong.” It can be difficult to accept that the majority might be wrong, but it is a possibility we must entertain. It’s amazing how drinkers can be incredibly open-minded about many things, yet close-minded when it comes to alcohol. This is because of the compartmentalization that happens within the mind of any substance-addicted person. So keep your mind open.

Visualize Success!

You are now ready to suspend judgment. To explore your unconscious desire to drink, to understand the reasons why you drink. This is great, and if you are willing to be honest with yourself and look deep into your belief system, you will find success.

This Naked Mind will help you explore your unconscious—and therefore influence it—as you work through the book. This type of book encourages your mind to consider the information when you are not actually reading and even when you sleep. That being said, you can take certain steps to ensure success. You may notice repetition throughout the book. You’re a busy person and want me to cut to the chase. Rest assured, it is repetitive for a reason. For most of your life you have been repeatedly exposed to media, peer pressure, and many other influences. Repetition is vital to undoing a lifetime of ingrained beliefs. Despite the repetition, I’ve tried to make the content as interesting as possible.

Emotions and images—not necessarily images you see but images in your mind—comprise the language of your unconscious mind. When you experience emotions related to the content, you will speak more directly to your unconscious. Importantly, you should feel hopeful when reading this book. The theory is sound, and I’ve included the most up-to-date scientific, medical, and psychological information. It works. It will work for you. Concentrate on that, and be hopeful.

Visualizing success always helps. A growing body of research suggests our unconscious minds cannot actually tell the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined fake experience.²² So visualize success—like being incredibly happy, laughing, and having a great time out with friends while drinking lemonade. You can even spend a few minutes each morning and night imagining the life you want while feeling positive emotions. This inspires success.

Get excited about what the future holds. Cultivate feelings of success even before you are successful. You hold all the tools you need to regain control of your drinking. Begin to think about the power of your mind and the strength of your body. This is exciting! In fact regaining control of my life through This Naked Mind is one of the most exciting and life-affirming things that has happened to me. It can be the same for you.

Don’t dwell on past experiences. Your past is in the past. You have been caught, and through this book you will see that your alcohol problem is not your fault. Forgive yourself. You are the hero of this story. There is no reason to dwell on the negativity of the past and every reason to forgive yourself. Look forward to an incredible future.

Finally, relax! Let go of expectations, remain positive, and just let it happen. In Shawn Achor’s book The Happiness Advantage, he states, “positive emotions broaden our scope of cognition and behavior . . . they dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly . . . and see new ways of doing things.”

Do what you can to put yourself in a positive frame of mind while reading. There is so much to look forward to! Trust the approach, and more importantly, trust your unconscious to do the right thing for you. You can’t control or micromanage your unconscious. Worry and stress are conscious activities—don’t bother with them.