Annie Grace
Author of This Naked Mind and The Alcohol Experiment
Mediaplanet spoke with Annie Grace, best-selling author of This Naked Mind and The Alcohol Experiment.
What prompted you to realize your relationship with alcohol was harmful?
My relationship with alcohol started to change the things I used to love about myself. Instead of going for a run to decouple from work stress at the end of a long day, I was pouring a glass or two of wine. When I wanted to snuggle one of my kids to read a bedtime story, he refused and told me my breath smelled, and my teeth were purple. I was getting terrible sleep, waking up full of shame and regret at 3:00 in the morning. But what really convinced me was that the more I tried to make rules for myself to moderate or stop drinking altogether, the more I just couldn’t stop thinking about alcohol. I could quit for a period of time, but drinking was always taking up space in my head. I felt like it was the duct tape holding my whole life together and that I needed it to manage everything.
How did you manage to take alcohol’s power away and change your beliefs around drinking?
I had to stop trying to stop drinking. That may sound counterintuitive to some. But, the more we try to flex our willpower muscle and simply not drink, the more desire we create. Willpower is indeed a muscle and it gets tired and ultimately gives up. I had to get rid of my desire and the way I did that was to examine all my beliefs about alcohol and arm myself with the truth through tons and tons of research. My journey truly began when I let myself off the hook for drinking and began the process of exploring all the reasons why I was drinking in the first place and trying to understand what alcohol was really doing to me mentally and physically. Once I knew, I couldn’t unknow and my desire disappeared. And, without desire, there is no temptation.
Why is it important to be aware of the stigma surrounding alcoholism?
The stigma is what keeps people stuck drinking. There’s a notion that people are either normal drinkers or they are alcoholics. In reality, there are people at every point in between those two extremes who are questioning their relationships with alcohol. But, because they fear being labelled as alcoholics or identified as having alcoholism, they continue living in the pain of staying the same. The stigma creates a barrier to entry. But when we strip away the labels and make zero requirements for examining and changing your relationship with alcohol, anyone can find freedom from alcohol.
As the founder of This Naked Mind Institute, what inspired you to help others?
I became inspired to help others when I realized what a ripple we can each create when we share our stories to empower others. This Naked Mind was initially released online as a PDF and was downloaded 20,000 times in two weeks. My journey gave people permission to do for themselves exactly what I had done for myself. If I could do that as one person with one document, I could only imagine what a team of specially trained and dedicated coaches could do to help expand the reach and impact of this information and habit change methodology.
What do you hope people understand about addiction recovery?
I hope people understand that addiction recovery isn’t always about rehab and 12-step meetings. What people tend to refer to as the addiction curve includes everyone from those with alcohol use disorder to those in “recovery” and everyone in between in what is commonly known as the gray area where relationships with alcohol vary wildly. Recovery is as individual as someone’s reasons for wanting to stop drinking. Many people do not even refer to their journey as one of recovery, and that’s OK. Again, you don’t need to label yourself or your path in any way. What’s important is finding compassion for yourself, putting down the weapons of shame and blame, letting yourself off the hook for your drinking patterns (you were doing the best you could with the tools you had), and moving forward with curiosity, not judgment.
Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
I think it’s important to move away from dialogue that blames the person for the addiction and lets the substance off the hook. It’s important to move away from the place where product labels and advertisements advise us to drink an addictive substance responsibly vs. warn us of the true dangers of consumption. The latest research shows there is no safe level of alcohol consumption for humans. It’s time for us to lean into the science and make this a wellness conversation, for both our mental and physical health.
