Motivation Daily by Motiversity - STOP DRINKING ALCOHOL - Eye Opening Motivation

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Countless people including Jordan Peterson, Theo Von, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Mike Thurston, Tom Bilyeu, Andrew Kim, and Chris Williamson explain why you need to not touch alcohol."At least one in ten Americans meet the criteria for either alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence; which we now call 'alcohol use disorder'."Special thanks to our partner Tom Bilyeu: https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeuSpeakers:Tom BilyeuJordan PetersonChris WilliamsonTheo VonChris PalmerMark MansonMike ThurstonBrentwood MDAndrew Kim MDThe TODAY ShowDr. Andrew HubermanMusic:Soundstripe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The link is in the description. Talk to me about your relationship with alcohol and how it's changed. I pretty much barely drink anymore. I used to drink numerous times per week. There was always at least one extremely heavy blowout at the weekend. What is going on here? When you're having 15 or 20 drinks a week, you're pretty much constantly in a state of being either drunk or hung over.

If you really like alcohol, it does two things. to you. It makes you more extroverted and enthusiastic and more full of positive emotion. And the second thing it does is reduce anxiety. Alcohol targets mitochondria. Alcohol poisoning is due to mitochondrial disruption and impairment. There were times I was like, man, I could never be a sober person. It was just alcohol for me always, if you took something fun, alcohol made it more fun. And if you took something boring, it made it less boring. So when somebody dies of alcohol poisoning, the cause of death is poisoning the mitochondria. The one thing that always knocks me off track the most, it's always alcohol.

Most people are drastically underestimating its impact. Right now, as we speak, at least one in ten Americans meets the criteria for either alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence, which we now call alcohol use disorder. We were on to like two or three glasses a day, then half a bottle, and it just went really fast. Alcohol is a hell of a drug, man. When it comes to quitting drinking, one of the challenges many people face is the influence of their social circle. If someone's friend group consists of heavy drinkers, it can make it incredibly difficult

to maintain sobriety. The peer pressure, normalization of excessive alcohol consumption, and fear of missing out on social activities can create a constant temptation and undermine an individual's efforts to quit. Breaking away from such friend groups or finding new, supportive social networks becomes crucial in providing the necessary environment for sustained recovery and personal growth. If you're trying to get your life together and your friends get in the way, that's actually real useful for you because you've now identified who your friends aren't. And you might think, well, I can't give them up.

It's like, oh, yes, you can. And not only can you, you should, and it would be better for them. Because if they're aiming down and they want you going down with them, there's nothing good about what's happening to them. And there's certainly nothing good about that for you. Similar to quitting smoking, the body can heal, but it takes time. In this next clip, Mark Manson, author of the subtle art of not giving a fuck, addresses his

relationship with alcohol. Despite being a heavy drinker for most of his life, he made the decision to quit completely. While attempting to moderate his alcohol intake, Mark experienced prolonged negative effects, feeling physically and emotionally drained. Effects that are common after a blackout night, but were surprising to him after a simple glass of wine or two with dinner. You know, if you've been a heavy drinker for multiple years, it can take six to 12 months for your system to actually entirely reset,

for your brain to go back to the way it was, your internal organs to go back to the way they were. And I was like, God damn, I've been doing this basically since I was like 18. Half my life, almost two decades. Yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible. It was, I'd say, within a few weeks, waking up with more energy, sleeping like a baby.

You know, and one of the things, you know, I'd cut back quite a bit before I quit completely. I'd say I'd cut back to drinking maybe two, three times a month. month and when I drank it was like just two or three glasses of wine. And it's funny, like something, I feel like something you notice when you cut back that you don't notice when you keep drinking heavily. Like when you drink heavily, you just expect to feel like shit. So when you feel like shit, you're like, oh yeah, well, of course, I drank. I drank a lot. But when you drink very moderately, it actually showed me how much it affects you. Like I would go out and have two glasses of wine with

dinner. And not only would I feel maybe 20% worse the next day, I would feel 10% worse the day after that. And that was shocking to me. I was like, whoa, this is actually, it's not about hangovers. It's about just general lack of energy and motivation on a day-to-day basis, and it lasts for multiple days. There's no hiding the fact that alcohol is a drug. It's a legal drug, accepted by society that rakes in billions of dollars a year. It's also well known that alcohol is harmful. especially in large quantities and over long periods of time. Why do millions of people continue consuming a poisonous substance?

For the most part, people consume alcohol in order to get the net effect on the brain. The overwhelming majority of people who consume alcohol that's to help unwind or, you know, celebrate the end of a day, or it's hard to deal with the stress at the end of the day. It's usually a mechanism to take you out of a less ideal place and bring you into a more relaxed ideal place. Alcohol really is a good drug for coping with anxiety. That's why people use it. So it does two, if you, if you really like alcohol, it does, it does two things to you. It makes you more extroverted and enthusiastic while you're on the ascending limb of the blood alcohol curve, which is why you have to keep drinking once you start, because if you plateau, that goes away. So you got to keep drinking.

Okay, so that's one thing. It makes you more enthusiastic and more full of positive emotion. And the second thing it does is reduce anxiety. Yeah. And so if you are a bit more socially anxious, And you also have that positive response to alcohol, which everyone doesn't have, by the way. Then it's a great drug. But the problem is it's, well, it's a great drug for the moment. Right. Right. There's consequences.

Yeah, this sounds when it's not great. Well, alcohol is an interesting drug because it actually doesn't make people stupid. This has been tested. Like, alcohol, people who are drunk will take far more risk. And you might say, well, that's because they're too stupid to understand the risk. It's like, no, they're not. If you ask them about the risk when they're drunk, they can outline it perfectly. What it stops them from doing is caring about the risk.

During the healing process of sobriety, withdrawals are inevitable for people that maintained a heavy reliance on alcohol. Symptoms vary and the intensity can often make it harder for some people to stick with it. As with smoking, those cravings are powerful and can often push people back to substance abuse to escape from the discomfort of withdrawal. Increased stress when people are not drinking. Diminished mood and feelings of well-being when people are not drinking. And changes in the neural circuitry that cause people to drink.

even more in order to get just back to baseline before they ever started drinking in the first place. You feel uncomfortable, you feel distressed, you feel anxious and distressed, and you basically start noticing you have more cravings and urges to go back to drinking more alcohol to make these signs and symptoms get milder or go away. So basically you're self-medicating and kind of perpetuating the cycle because you don't want to feel this way and you don't want to feel this discomfort from alcohol withdrawal. Now, in milder cases, these mild signs and symptoms may go away in one to two days. In more moderate cases, it could be three to five days, okay? But bottom line is, it's these withdrawal symptoms, even though they're mild, which may continue to perpetuate

somebody's drinking because they say, I don't want to feel this way. And I notice that when I start drinking, it kind of goes away. And it may just kind of continue the cycle of problematic drinking. Unlike other nutrients, cannot be efficiently metabolized by the human body to extract energy. Instead, the body treats alcohol as a toxin, triggering a cascade of processes to eliminate it. From the moment alcohol enters the bloodstream, it affects not only the liver, but also the entire body system. It disrupts the balance of neurotransmitters, impairs cognitive function, compromises the immune system, and places strain on various organs, leading to a wide range of negative health consequences that extend far beyond the liver. When you take a step back, when you look at the big picture of life, cells in the human body

are all there to perform a function, but they all need nutrients. They need nutrients to replace the parts that need to be replaced. Without nutrients, you're dead. In order to understand why cells in the human brain or body malfunction, we have to go all the way. We have to go all the way to the basics of biology, which is every living cell at the end of the day depends on metabolism or energy. And it's the only way to connect the dots. This is a gross oversimplification of nutritional biochemistry. Essentially, we can look at most of at least macro-nutrition, not micro nutrition, but macro nutrition. In other words, the things that we consume that give us energy. And there are three primary sources of macronutrients that are protein, fats, and carbs.

And the challenge with ethanol or alcohol is that when alcohol comes into our nutritional equation, there's nowhere for it to go. The liver is responsible for detoxifying the alcohol that we ingest. Could it really be? Could it really just be that the last thing to go is the alcohol, that it could be that impactful? I dare you to try.