I want to start by saying I highly recommend this book to everyone, whether you are a drinker or non-drinker.
Holly Whitaker explains how alcohol affects our brains and bodies in a way that makes you never want to even glance at a bottle of alcohol again. The most sobering fact is that the nasty effects that she writes about are not just seen in the heavy drinkers they are seen in light to moderate drinkers as well.
She stresses that there are no such thing as alcoholics and “normies” or people that can drink normally. She recognizes that alcohol can turn into a problem for people but not because that person is inherently lacking something, that they can’t handle alcohol, but because the toxic substance that we are ingesting is the problem. Our bodies are NOT made to be able to tolerate this poison. The moment anyone takes a drink their bodies are fighting to bring them back to homeostasis. What I found interesting is that alcohol lingers in the body for a few days so if a person drinks a couple times a week they are never fully rid of the toxic substance. The liver is constantly hard at work trying to eliminate the alcohol that it has no time to worry about any of the other toxins within our bodies at baseline, which means those toxins end up sticking around making us even more sick and miserable.
This is not about deprivation. Its is not a privileged to be able to ingest a substance thats sabotaging your health and spirit and life in 100 different ways. Being able to tolerate a poison and all its nasty effects is not something to envy. No one gets to drink, they are duped into it.
Holly writes about her own experience with problem drinking and recovery from it. She explains the history of cigarette culture and outlines the parallels we can see within the alcohol culture today. She writes about why AA didn’t resonate with her and how she created her own school for people who want to recover the truest versions of themselves. She outlines the 5 theories of addiction she uncovered through her research. I was surprised by the level of research in this book and I admire Holly for the extensive and insightful detail she has carefully placed in this book. She states that, to break an addiction you have to fix the things that lead you to the addiction. And these are life things such as trauma, depression, anxiety, lack of purpose, failure etc.
One of the theories I found interesting is the dislocation model by Bruce Alexander:
Addiction stems from a increasingly dislocated capitalist society, not from medical pathology. Addiction is the direct or indirect outgrowth of society. Humans are becoming increasingly addicted not because some mutant addict gene is flooding the pool or because alcohol is increasingly available but because we are becoming more disconnected from our purpose, nature, culture and each other.
There are so many nuggets of wisdom like this, “we all suffer some degree of addiction. All human beings suffer and all seek something outside of themselves to manage that suffering and all get stuck in feedback loops that run through the same wiring in our brains that addiction runs through.”
Life is not asking us to becoming anything that isn’t already seated in us. We are born with all the truth. It’s not out there, it’s in us. But then we encounter a world that tells us that we are wrong and the voice from within, that knows everything that we actually need to know, gets written over by a society that wants us to become something else. To fit in, follow the rules, conform. By the time most of us get to adulthood, especially those of us who come from a history of societal oppression, we have lost all capacity to listen to ourselves, to trust ourselves. We seek answers outside ourselves because we are told time and again that our inner-most intelligence is wrong.
Much of the second half of the book is focused on recovery for problem drinkers. Although that is not why I picked up this book I still felt that many of the suggestions and routines on how to develop healthy habits were very simple and helpful. I have heard about morning and evening routines ad nauseam from self help gurus, however the way it was explained in this context actually made me feel much more motivated to start one.
Holly explains, that typically we start the day in hyper-arousal which is living in a fight or flight response which leads to overstimulate. Eventually we spiral to hypo-arousal in the evening, which is burnout, in which we cant do much of anything except plop on the coach and do something very passive like watch TV.
Starting the morning off with intention allows us to better preserve our energy throughout the day and essentially make better choices.
Morning routine example:
- wake up at the same time
- keep phone off
- start with lemon water before tea or coffee as a detox
- meditation
- mind candy – read something for inspiration for the day
- eat a good breakfast and do a “joy practice”
Evening routine example:
- bath
- reading
- journal
- meditation
The last chapter of the book made me just want to yell, “preach! Holly preach!” There is so much truth and soul behind Holly’s mission and I can not recommend this book enough. I feel that it is worth a read for any man or woman, drinker or non-drinker.
preeti reads 