Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I'm going to find a f*ckton of JOY.
Get back your joy
As humans, we are built to be dopamine hunters. We actively seek it out because dopamine is a neurotransmitter that acts on areas of the brain to give you feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. It makes you feel good! And every single alcoholic drink gives your brain a dopamine boost. It’s like going up a level in Candy Crush. Drinking makes you feel good, and you reach for another.
However, the dopamine in alcohol is artificially high. You don’t get that hit from anything that isn’t alcohol or drugs. It gives you more than you need. And you’ll soon find that the only thing that gives you that joy, is alcohol. (Btw, the dopamine hit from alcohol decreases as your tolerance goes up, so it’s harder and harder to get that hit. So you drink more. Ugh.)
So what happens when you ditch the drink, and you get your dopamine from natural sources? That might be a sunrise, snuggling your kids, playing with your dog, seeing your friends, going for a swim, finishing a good book. Without drink in the equation, these events might feel a bit flat. You might feel slightly empty. You might crave a drink. You might feel like something is missing – nothing else quite hits the spot. Your brain needs ever greater levels of dopamine to feel pleasure, because it’s used to regular hits of alcohol. Your neural pathways are teaching you that alcohol = a good feeling. And also, alcohol = the only thing that makes you feel good.
So you should reach for a drink, right?! Erm, NO! You need to learn what normal joy is, and to do that we need to reset your dopamine baseline, and build new neural pathways in your brain. The good news is that your brain is pretty elastic – you can do this quite quickly. Ditch the drink, and soon enough your brain chemistry will reset, your neural pathways will come up with new equations, and you’ll get joy back in your life. Every. Single. Day.
Don’t let alcohol steal your joy.
Don’t let it take your best moments.