When Annie Grace was writing This Naked Mind, she did a ton of research on drinking. Throughout the month, you’ll watch a daily video from her that will cover the findings; please watch them and share your thoughts in our Facebook group. I’ll be sharing my thoughts in the daily emails about how her findings apply to our lives as responders.
The biggest thing that resonated with her was how many people actually wanted to quit drinking but just couldn’t! But why?
Here are two definitions you should know:
Cognitive Dissonance
Essentially, cognitive dissonance means that there’s a disagreement in the way you think. Your brain has so many parts and, surprisingly, these different parts don’t always agree. In fact, they quite frequently disagree. The two parts that we’ll focus on throughout the month are the subconscious and the conscious mind.
In our society, we are inundated with advertisements that ultimately make our subconscious mind believe that drinking is sexy, drinking relaxes you, drinking makes you funny and social. What you’ll find is that these beliefs form and settle into our subconscious mind, and when we decide we consciously don’t want to drink, the two parts of our brains conflict one another. I’m going to teach you how to bring these ideas into the conscious part of the mind and find harmony between the conscious and subconscious mind in order to help your mind in harmony without cognitive dissonance.
So, if you’ve lost hope that you might be able to get control over your drinking, I’m here to et you know that it’s NOT because you are weak and it’s NOT because you lack will power. It’s because of cognitive dissonance.
Liminal Thinking
This is a technique that was created by best-selling author, Dave Gray and The Work by Byron Katie. Liminal is a term used for the space between your conscious and subconscious mind.
HOMEWORK
Write down the amount you drink each day - either in your phone’s note app or in your field notebook.