Gout #11, Help with Alcohol Cravings

Meditation wounded the drinking demon deeply,

And the gout pain smote thine truly

But in the time before that, I was a drink fiend, defeated and under a compulsion. I tried everything and although there were strong willed victories in particular battles, the war was never won until I took the meditation path. On Friday afternoons I would start to “time-travel” and get the feeling of the alcohol buzz that was to come. Particularly as I resented my work, during Friday evenings it was impossible to resist the cravings. 

One good thing I got out of a rehab experience was the acronym that describes the trigger for alcohol cravings, HATE: Hungry, Angry, Tired, Excited. For me, it was always good news that was the most powerful trigger, the E in HATE. I never bought into the 12-step AA manifesto, as I suspected that the solution is within. Relying on external forces as a solution simply transfers the cravings elsewhere, hopefully to less harmful people, places, or things, but does not solve the underlying problem. My independent research, however, found some useful items in combating alcohol cravings:

The first two items are obvious.

PEOPLE: Be careful of people who can push your buttons to get you drinking. Also, other drinkers as that which drinks inside them will love to get you back into the fold.

PLACES: A bit of a difficult one as society is obsessed with consuming alcohol. Obviously, watch the liquor shops and bars, parties and functions.

THINGS: A list of helpful things to take or avoid.

1. Consume Greens – vegetable juice, see gout #10, or powdered supplements. Good quality “Greens Powder” can have 30 different substances including astragalus, milk thistle, eleuthero, spirulina and other goodies (so I have heard).

2. Consume GLA supplements – long term effect but can have an immediate impact. Supplements that contain gamma linoleic acid or GLA are borage oil, evening primrose oil and hemp oil. I came across some evidence that GLA is an important part of the brain chemistry that is consumed by alcohol and maybe permanently lacking in “alcoholics” in Seven Weeks to Sobriety by Joan Mathews Larson www.healthrecovery.com/recovery-resources/seven-weeks-to-sobriety. Cannabis is high in GLA and other brain/nerve oils which science knows little about, which may partly account for its healing effect against alcohol, namely reducing hangovers. Cannabis will stop/slow down drinking while the addict is drinking, so is a powerful agent for reducing alcohol consumption (see gout #9). However, most “alcoholics” will use alcohol first and cannabis second after drinking and will not normally use cannabis first, subverting cannabis’s best effects. There may also be increased urges to drink the next day as cannabis causes addicts to feel better/healthier and more able to drink (see gout #12 Using Good for Evil).

3. Consume Glutamine – this amino acid (food and non-toxic) is a known sugar craving reducer, and alcohol cravings and sugar cravings were almost the same thing for me. Glutamine creates an energy source which the brain can use (see Seven Weeks to Sobriety) which helps counteract cravings caused by blood sugar problems. Interestingly, after using glutamine I knew that it could reduce cravings, so after a while the addiction would bring up negative feelings about taking glutamine, and the strange reluctance to do the right thing meant I would not take glutamine.

4. Consume other supplements – John Gray says Lithium Orate Is useful for drinkers. I found fish oils helped with general health and “brain strength”.

       5. Go for a walk, yoga or other exercise. Helps to get the mind out of its negative mind loop, and sweating of toxins may reduce cravings, but don’t overdo it as blood sugar levels can crash after excessive exercise.

       6. What you eat and when you eat. Watch out for the “H”, hungry, in HATE, it can cause blood sugar crashes which are deadly for cravings. Eat good food though. Sugars and carbs (ice-cream) still feed the demon/monster/stray cat and were a temporary solution that would make the alcohol cravings come back stronger the next day.

 7. Get lots of sleep, avoid the “T”, tired, in HATE. When I first started wilfully trying to stop drinking, one early victory was simply going to sleep at 7pm on Friday evening. I was too active craving alcohol to realise I was exhausted from the weeks work and previous drinking sessions.

8. Do pray, and manifest luck. There are strange forces at work, see gout #8 for an example.

       9. Wait! Not really a technique but the solution. Some other distraction might help. I once did a quit smoking course where the mantra was “the urge to smoke will pass whether I have a cigarette or not” which is cute and helped.

  10.   Do regular meditation. The process of calming the mind and becoming aware induces patience which helps wait out the fire of the negative emotion (frustration/greed/anger/elation) generating the craving. The whole beauty of meditation is that by doing nothing, alcohol cravings will go away like a stray cat that is no longer fed. It takes effort to drink so not trying (doing nothing) is consistent with not drinking, and requires less work. Wilfully trying to stop drinking always backfired for me eventually, which I think explains AA’s dreadful record in curing their designated disease “alcoholism”. The long term and permanent solution is meditation but it doesn’t really work at first if you use it to stop raging cravings in progress, but does work if done regularly before cravings manifest.

This probably meant nothing to me before I started meditating and read some of Roy Master's books, but for what its worth,the reason that meditation works is that, at the bottom of the heap of everything is resentment, (under) represented by the “A”, angry, in HATE. Resentment: the belief in my self-importance, my greater importance, that I AM THE GOD and others must bow to me, or owe me something. If one is swept along by the programs in the human mind that automatically operate when one is not looking/observing, one does not have control of themselves. Anything that “puffs one up” is a sign of lack of control and puffing up is ultimately tied to resentment. The ultimate addiction is emotion, the adrenaline and other compounds that are manufactured to produce the dirty rotten buzz of emotions. Accepting the emotional high is so bad that even poisons like alcohol become preferred to quieten the conscience that points out this uncomfortable truth (see gout #3). Although movies and popular culture glamorize emotions, emotions are symptoms of giving oneself to an external entity, another identity, noting that feelings are different and healthy. (In Star Wars the Jedi search their feelings, not their emotions). Resentment is the foundation of the victim/bully duality, where the internal emotional states manifest as “power” between people. Also judgment (not discernment which is innocent) is a sign of resentment. The “I deserve….[insert any good or bad outcome]” judgments that sabotage the spirit’s plan.