Managing Cravings with William Porter

My guest today is William Porter

William is the author of a book called Alcohol Explained and hosts a FB page of the same name.

He's a lawyer and previously served in Iraq as a member of the Parachute Regiment. 

In this episode:-

• William started drinking and smoking back at the tender age of just 14 and it evolved over the years
• He became curious about alcohol dependency and started delving into the science and discovering just how harmful it is. Like many of us the more he learned about how harmful it was the less he wanted to drink it!
• He explained how we end up with hangxiety after drinking. Hangxiety is the term for a hangover with a good dose of anxiety mixed in, caused by chemical changes in our brain which becomes oversensitized after a drinking session.
• If we drink a bottle of wine every evening, we'll develop a tolerance.  So that when we have our first glass of wine, our brain will be registering that the rest of the bottle will be following soon. And that's why it's so hard for us to stop at one glass, and why so many of us say we just don't have an off switch.
• William talks about cravings, which can be intense, but actually it's a matter of fantasy. You have a thought of a drink, and then you start fantasizing about how it would be, how it would look, how it would taste. And that's why quitting altogether, and not even entertaining these thoughts, is so much easier.  He explained that it can take quite a few years to become dependent, but the problem starts when you learn.
• Either consciously or subconsciously, we learn that after a drink we feel a bit low and then we need another drink to feel better. And by the time we've got to that stage, it becomes very difficult to moderate. Because every drink is giving you a desire for the next one. And once we've realised that another drink will quell the anxiety caused by the previous drink, then we will struggle to moderate.
• William explained the fascinating concept of FAB. Fading Effect Bias. That tends to happen when we're a few months sober, and we start thinking back fondly to those good old drinking days.  We actually forget how bad we were, and how things went horribly wrong sometimes. We just focuse on the good times instead.
• FAB is really dangerous, because that's when we start having those thoughts Oh I wasn't that bad. Maybe I could just have one glass now and again. Because we feel that we've now proved we're not an alcoholic,. But the trouble with restarting due to fab is that we'll just go back to the previous problematic drinking levels that we were at before.
• Maybe we can manage to moderate for two or three weeks, but then inevitably we’ll get back to over drinking. William suggested that rather than asking ourselves are we an alcoholic, we should consider whether alcohol is taking away more than it is giving to us. And he came up with a great analogy which described alcohol as a bit of a loan shark.
• We discussed sober socialising, which we agreed is tough at first, but William reminded me that feeling awkward is normal. Just think of children's parties, where the kids are hiding in their mom's dresses at the beginning and then tearing around the room screaming a couple of hours later. We decided it was a matter of feeling the awkward and doing it anyway.
• Socializing also becomes easier if we get curious and observe those drinkers. Be an anthropologist. Watch how animated the drinkers are during their first hour of drinking. And then they start talking too loud, standing too close, and of course repeating those stories.  Another bonus of being an anthropologist is that we realise that we don't actually want to be like this, so it can be a valuable building block in the wall of our sobriety.
• We talked about sleep, William's a bit of an expert on this topic and his books cover it in great detail. He explained about how alcohol damages the quality of our sleep. It reduces seven cycles of our valuable REM sleep  down to  about two.  He talked about REM rebound, which is fascinating and explains all those drinking dreams that we get in early sobriety.
• It's such a myth that alcohol helps you sleep, because in fact it's such poor quality sleep. When you quit drinking, you may well struggle to get to sleep at first, but eventually you will sleep and you'll sleep so much better, and you'll wake up feeling great, which rarely happens in your drinking days.
• William's advice to anyone struggling to get started was to write a list of all the reasons they want to keep drinking. And then when you analyze those, you'll find that they're actually false beliefs, and you can reverse them.
• We cover mindset and how you can deal with these kind of limiting beliefs in our Masterclass 
• The easiest and gentlest way to make a start on changing yo