Change Your Brain Every Day - Could You Go One Year Without Beer? – Part 1 of an Interview with Andy Ramage

Episode Date: June 20, 2017

In today’s society, it seems like there is no escaping the social pressures of drinking alcohol. But cutting drinking from your daily life, it can play a major role in increasing performance and energy. In this episode of the Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by founder of ‘One Year No Beer’, Andy Ramage, who changed his life via a unique personal challenge.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Well, today we have a very special guest, Andy Ramage, and he's actually joining us from across the pond, right? So from London, and this is really fun. This is called One Year No Beer. And Andy Ramage is a former professional athlete turned oil broker. Sort of interesting. And he is a former, what we would call soccer player, what they call football. Currently runs Alpha

Energy, part of the OTC Global Holdings, the largest independent commodities brokerage in the world. And he's also a master practitioner of NLP, something very near and dear to my heart, which I absolutely love, a mindfulness-based awareness coach, currently studying for master's degree in positive psychology and coaching psychology. He has a love of well-being and peak performance. And this led Andy to stop drinking alcohol in the face of massive social pressure, as you might imagine. He runs a brokerage in the city, so not drinking is almost unheard of. But from this experience, he realized that there were probably millions of others out there

that were desperate for a break from alcohol who could not overcome this pressure. So he wrote a book and co-founded a movement with her, hopefully I say this correctly, Rory Fairbairns, very Scottish, called One Year No Beer, a 30, 90, or 365-day alcohol-free challenge to change people's perception of alcohol. So this unique background, education, experience of running One Year No Beer make him one of the world's leading habit change experts. And we are so blessed to have you with us today. So welcome, Andy. Thank you for that lovely introduction. Delighted to be here and see how sunny it is over there. Yes, you probably don't see quite as much sun where you're at. Which means vitamin D is less in England, for sure. We love this topic.

And, you know, the podcast called The Brain Warrior's Way, because we know you're in a war for the health of your brain and your body. And this is part of the war, which is alcohol. People think of it as a health food. If you're not drinking, there's something the matter with you. Tell us your story. How did this evolve for you? Yeah, well, really, it probably starts when I fell into the city. As you mentioned, I started out life as a professional soccer player and I played till I was about 23 years old and unfortunately as happens to many young men injury cut my career short and I loved it you know it was my passion it was my everything in life and then I found myself bumming around

traveling meeting new people experiencing new things and eventually I ended up in the city of London in a broken job in oil specifically and that culture that community is very much a social environment and that being social involves alcohol it's how you entertain and at that stage of my life I built this persona around me it's how I met my friends how I met my wife it basically everywhere in my life this whole this whole thing called alcohol and it really started to take over but i hadn't really noticed it you know at this point i was you know outwardly very successful like lots of people are in the city and had all those obvious trappings of that success but something was missing something was missing we

stopped there shoot dropped off again i couldn't quite put my finger on it i was just sort of it's perfect it's not it's something was missing we're having little issues tech issues no problem again it looks fine this end but anyway let's we'll keep going um and something was missing so i was this sort of six out of ten when really i wanted to be an eight or nine out of ten and that's all led me on an adventure really to look at all things well-being from mindfulness to nlp i started to look at my diet i started to look at exercise but nothing would really stick because i'd go out on a wednesday lunchtime or a thursday night and go and drink too much and

wake up the following morning hungover, lethargic, tired, and all those great plans would go out the window. So I just couldn't get a good run of anything. And then one day it just dawned on me. I've got to address the elephant in the room, which was alcohol. And that scared the life out of me. How much were you drinking when you decided it was a problem? Yeah, I mean, not excessively compared to my peers or most people in the city. And I think that's an important message to get across here, that there was no problem, as it were. This was me actually taking a proactive stance because i think there's so much mythology around alcohol especially that anyone who wants to stop

there's an association they must have a problem and that's actually not the case at all especially for me i didn't have that classic problem i just wanted to be fitter faster better at my job healthier and more productive more dynamic and alcohol wasn't helping you right i mean you came to the realization it wasn't helping you but so how many um drinks were you having in a week yeah i mean let's say on a daily basis four or five drinks during the week four or five more yeah and then. Four or five. Essentially more. Yeah. And then a weekend.

So not a lot. Yeah, that's not considered technically a lot of alcohol, but you noticed it really slowing you down. Oh, yeah. And then obviously that could blow out at the weekends, but it's just that constant grind of lack of sleep, lethargy, tiredness that was actually holding me back. And the bigger problem was a psychological problem of actually taking that away, my character of losing that, you know, that part of me.

I was that guy that entertained me in the bars. Yeah, and to take that away is huge. It's not only your business. It was my, you know, I'm looking at my wife thinking, is she still going to love me if I'm not that guy, you know? And I think that's where people find this so difficult because it's actually it's so endemic of everything they do yeah I think so I mean socially we we think of it as um it's become the social message of you know we're entitled to go and enjoy a glass of wine or enjoy a drink,

or it's sort of the social message of what we're entitled to. Well, and some people actually feel more social when they drink. It decreases their anxiety, decreases their inhibitions, and so they are less self-conscious. Was that the case for you or not really? Oh, no, very, very much. It's only recently I think I've realized that I'm quite introverted in many ways. Yeah, I used alcohol as this sort of Superman cape.

Almost like a social lubricant? Yeah. You know, it would turn me into this sort of flamboyant extrovert, which really helped. I mean, again, I'm not going to point fingers and say that it didn't because actually it did at that time. But the problem is, and I think that happens to so many people, actually, you almost find yourself self-medicating in some ways to get over that social anxiety. And then actually that becomes the problem eventually. What I really want to know is what was the event or series of events that led you to

the decision to stop? Like the actual very specific thing? Like, was there something specifically? Yeah. In truth, there wasn't. It was a slow slow and that's again another point you know i want to get across there wasn't this wonderful epiphany moment where you know the the gods were singing and i thought hallelujah i'm gonna stop drinking because that was that was really important to me that um it was quite a slow event over time of of experimenting and actually testing whether it was the alcohol that was holding me back. And I think that's another myth that lots of people fall into is they're waiting for this moment, this perfect, almost rock bottom. Now, you're an athlete and athletes

at a professional level are all about performance and optimizing their performance and so were you feeling your performance was not what it could be and you're looking it sounds like you're searching for a way to really elevate your game yeah 100 that's really the angle that i came at this from it was, so there wasn't an epiphany. It was more of, I want to be better. I want to be fitter, faster. How can I achieve that? And I started to look again at diet and exercise, but it was the alcohol really was the gateway, was the key, the cornerstone to unlocking all of these different things. Because suddenly, without hangovers, I could train more. I wasn't phoning

in sick like so many of us do to the personal trainer and making up those embarrassing excuses at the last minute. Why one year? Because it rhymed with beer. Because it rhymed with beer. As silly as that sounds, I just need something big enough that would get people off my back. Again, for me, and this is the same for so many people, if you walk into a room and you say you don't want to drink alcohol, their reaction is normally one of, what? You can't do that. If I went out with a client and said, I'm not drinking tonight, that's just's just not acceptable so i needed an excuse to be able to say look i'm just doing a challenge and this is what i'm doing one you know beer and that would get everyone's attention and that's really sort of spawned the idea for the whole the whole movement and it worked really well because

it was a challenge and people i think they admire a challenge and they like a challenge so my clients then instead of twisting my arm to drink, were actually quite supportive because they couldn't believe that me, knowing my background and my history, could ever survive even two weeks, let alone a year. So it sort of snowballed from there. So the question I have is,

did it influence anyone else to make that same change just because you modeled that behavior? Yeah, exactly, 100%. And the whole reason we're here now is because rury fairbains who you touched on earlier bumped into me six months into my challenge and we haven't spoken about this yet but i lost about three stone which is 42 pounds oh my gosh just yeah just from stopping the beer well again we can sort of dive into this but not just from the calories of beer, but because I was able to train again. I wasn't again calling it sick.

And it's all those different things, the marginal gains. One of the secrets to success, it reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld, you know, the American comedian. And he wanted to be a great comedic writer, but he didn't have the discipline. And so what he did is he said, I have to write for 30 minutes a day. He challenged himself. And every day he did that, he would go to the calendar, you know, when we had paper calendars, and circle the date and put a line through it. I did it.

And after doing it for three weeks, he said, I'm never going to break the streak. So it's that challenge that motivates people to stay with it. I'm not going to break it. This is important to me. And then that becomes more important than the social pressure or what else. So one year, no beer. When we come back, we are going to talk about habit change and what Andy has learned in helping thousands of people change their behavior. One year, no beer. Stay with us. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have a special gift for you. It's an opportunity to win an evaluation at the Amen Clinics. All you have to do is subscribe to this podcast, leave a review, and rate us on iTunes. To learn more about Amen Clinics and the work we do, go to amenclinics.com.

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