How To Stop Drinking

Most people drink alcohol as a matter of course. It is believed that the Bronze Age human around the Caspian sea had an alcoholic wine, and certainly the ancient Greeks were quaffing wine in 500 BC. Alcohol has been with us ever since. There was wine in Rome, Jesus' first miracle was the conversion of water to wine and he consecrated wine into his blood at the last supper.

Wine was the first but apparently a beer had been developed as well, as recorded by Germanicus, a Roman general, in Africa where he found a beer brewed by the Numibians. The distillation of spirits was in fact started 200 years BC and was a process that was confined to Monasteries during the dark and middle ages. Whisky distillation bagan in the British isles somewhere between 1100 and 1300. Rum was being distilled in the cane fields of the Americas in the 18th Century.

Alcohol consumption in moderation is fine. The difficulty with addictive substances such as nicotine, alcohol and drugs is that moderation is not the same for everybody. Some can and do drink copious amounts with no apparent ill effect while for others relatively small quantities can become addictive. What starts out as a mild and harmless habit develops to a point where it dominates the drinkers life.

Nicotine, or smoking is a common addiction and one easy to break, but if one watches hardened smokers the first thing they do in the morning is reach for a fag, and the last thing they do at night is smoke in bed. And when they are out of cigarettes they may be seen rummaging through ashtrays to find a but end that has a couple of drags left in it. And all this for addiction to smoking, whose insidious effects do not impair a person's abilities to function normally.

Alcohol does impair ones abilities. And what is worse is that once addicted to alcohol one cannot safely be trusted with anything. 1 drink is too many and 2 are never enough and they go into a downward spiral develops where their whole life revolves around the next drink.

Nobody wants to be enslaved or addicted to anything so it is with alcohol. A fundamental premise, therefore, is that all alcoholics want to quit. If you are enslaved you want to be free. But quitting is not easy. Most people who try to quit smoking fail because the craving is stronger than their will power and it is will power that one needs to learn how to train so that the desire to quit becomes stronger than the craving.

There are many programs available to assist and how to stop drinking 101 is one of them. It works off the premise that there is a way to train oneself into being strong enough to quit. In order to enable one to manage it involves a 7 step approach in which each step is taken steadily and logically and does not attempt to make the person who wants to stop go "cold turkey".

The steps to follow are:

Train oneself in self belief

Become a detective in investigating yourself into why you are addicted

Make a list

And so on. Each step should be followed to a conclusion while at every step of the way encouraging yourself not to consume any alcohol. This should not be regarded as a standalone program but as a help and a reinforcement of each day without alcohol.