Mindfulness Equals Awareness
What You Need to Understand About Mindfulness and Taking Ownership of Your Habits
When I teach about mindful drinking, one of the first things I talk about is how important it is to first become self-aware. Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, will ‘Mindful Drinking’ work for you? Because with any mindfulness practice, it’s imperative to be honest with ourselves. Can I be trusted with a bowl full of candy or a box of donuts? Do I have the willpower to turn it away after just one or two pieces? Sugar is one of the most addictive substances in the world right next to alcohol and tobacco, and they’re everywhere - all the time.
It is imperative that you take the time to get to know yourself and to know yourself well enough to recognize where you lack self-discipline. Sweets are a hard one for me, but it has become easier and easier over the years as I have done the hard work towards self-love. Once you start honoring yourself, it becomes easier to make healthier choices, but you have to get their first, and that usually means going cold-turkey — for at least awhile, which makes things like “Sober October” and “Dry January” such great opportunities.
These fasting periods or challenges can be useful tools to test yourself, and see how you react to cutting back on the ‘treats’ you give yourself. Whether it’s sweets, smoking, alcohol, or even too much screen time, you need to take the time to fully recognize how much control they might have on you. And you have to love yourself more than you love those things in order to break away from them.
You have to know yourself, and know what it is you’re really trying to feed by gorging yourself on chocolates or drinking two bottles of wine. Are you trying to numb something or run away from certain feelings? Have you been taught that drinking or eating is a reward to a long days work? We all have a story attached to our habits - good or bad.
The Biology of Addiction
Addiction is real and much harder to deal with than people who have never dealt with it may realize. Drugs or alcohol ( or any addictive substance) uses the hardwiring of your brain against you by flooding the pleasure circuits in your mind with increased amounts of dopamine to make you feel happier. After repeat use, it can activate the danger-sensing circuits in your mind and use them against you when you’re no longer using them. This is what leads you to feeling anxious and frustrated when you’re not using them and makes you feel so much relief after that first sip of beer.
It has tricked you into believing that you are rewarding yourself and then makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong or being punished when you aren’t.
Did you know that the pre-frontal cortex of our brains usually isn’t fully developed until around the age of 25? Meaning that you really can’t make the best possible choices for yourself until then. That is one of the biggest reasons so many people make large changes for themselves around this time. I know I did.
On top of that, addictive substance abuse can damage this part of the brain and make decision-making even more difficult. It’s a scary thought for any of us that were drinking earlier on in our lives, and if you take the time to think about it now, you will realize just how much damage it does.
Recognizing all of this is important when making decisions now about how much you want to drink or if you want to drink at all.
Rewriting Your Love Story
When asking yourself those hard questions about why you hold onto such bad habits or how you got addicted to something in the first place, there are a few different ways to go about it. For me, I recommend writing.
In 2016, I sat down to write my first memoir. Since then, I have written pages upon pages of my life from conception to present day. For me, it has been the best way to truly see myself, and not just me, but my family and those involved in my story too. However, after getting tons and tons of ‘aha’ moments and realizing so much about myself and my upbringing, I was still left with a lot of left over guilt, shame, and fear — no matter how clearly I saw what happened and why.
I had to rewrite the story.
This can be somewhat confusing. I don’t mean that I re-wrote a different narrative in place of what really happened and somehow tricked myself into believing that those bad things never happened. What I did, was send in my savior, and my savior was me.
After recognizing some of the most traumatizing times of my life, I realized that I was still feeling incredibly guilty and shameful over what took place, and that I would never be able to move forward in my life until I gave myself some love and a sense of relief. So, adult me walked in, looked younger me in the eye, took her hands and told her the truth. More than that, I gave her love - which was exactly what she was after the whole time.
It wasn’t until I did that work that I was finally able to be who I needed to be now — for the girl I once was and the woman I wanted to be in the future.
If you are looking to be mindful - to own your habits, to break an addiction, to leave an unhealthy or unhappy situation, you must first face yourself head on.
Who are you? What are you fears? What are you clinging to and why? These are all questions that will need to be answered before you can really make change for yourself. So, if you are questioning whether or not you can be a mindful drinker and cut back on your alcohol consumption, it may take more work than you might expect, but I promise you that it will be worth it in the end.
Cheers,
Jessa