Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Premium: How Josh Quit Booze

Transcript

Premium: How Josh Quit Booze · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
• 0:04
  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
• 0:11
  G'day, humans. Welcome to the space space for dangerous ideas and what idea is more dangerous
• 0:16
  in contemporary society and the idea that booze alcohol actually does nothing for you.
• 0:24
  And all the things that you think it's doing for you are functions of the fact that you're
• 0:28
  mildly addicted to alcohol. As a general rule, not for everybody. Some people have one last
• 0:35
  of champagne a month, not talking about them. I'm talking about you who has considerably more than
• 0:41
  that, maybe. One of the questions that I get asked the most on our Ask Me Anythings is why I don't
• 0:48
  drink and how I quit. And I don't think I can do justice to that question in five minutes
• 0:55
  amid other questions on an Ask Me Anything show. So I thought I would dedicate an entire episode
• 1:00
  to it in case you're interested. In case you think maybe you drink a bit too much or maybe you drink
• 1:08
  just the right amount but you wonder what it would be like to quit. Maybe you've tried to quit in
• 1:12
  the past and you've whitenuckled it through a month off and then you've just blissfully and
• 1:17
  blessedly gone back to booze on the very first of the next month and thought, ah, my old friend,
• 1:24
  I no longer have to deal with life without you. Some background. As long as I can remember,
• 1:32
  I loved drinking. I never classified myself as an alcoholic. I'm not sure that those terms are
• 1:38
  particularly helpful unless you're someone who has hit rock bottom and needs that identity in order
• 1:43
  to clamber your way out of a hole. I was never quite there. It was just one of those things that
• 1:51
  you did. I mean, my grandfather, my maternal grandfather was an alcoholic who I didn't know
• 2:00
  and my family are of Irish, English, Australian, New Zealand descent and drinking is just woven
• 2:09
  into the fabric of life. You get home, you pour a glass of wine, you have another one before
• 2:13
  dinner, maybe you have a whiskey after dinner, you know, alcohol was just a round and neither of
• 2:19
  my parents are heavy drinkers, but they drank, they were daily drinkers and at school we drank to
• 2:26
  excess as one does in one's teens, but I found that my drinking was just a permanent backdrop to
• 2:33
  relaxation in my life. Throughout my 20s and most of my 30s, I would come home, I'd look at the
• 2:40
  clock, I'd feel a sense of relief when it was after 5 p.m. once I was living in New York City where
• 2:46
  I've spent the majority of my professional adult life, that is a town that depending on what
• 2:52
  circles you roam in is soaked in booze, especially the gay community in New York City where boozy
• 2:59
  branches and cocktail hours and happy hours are the currency of the community, they're how you lubricate
• 3:06
  social gatherings and being an Australian, it's woven into the fabric of our lives here. It certainly
• 3:12
  was, I mean, I think there's something of a change, but certainly 20 years ago, it was
• 3:18
  inconceivable that you would go out to a bar and drink a non-alcoholic beer or be off the booze,
• 3:24
  it's how you connect. And there came a point at which I thought, is this really something that I'm
• 3:32
  doing because it's giving me a lot of benefits? I guess, let me back up, at the time I thought that
• 3:37
  it was giving me lots of benefits, but I also thought that it had downsides. I thought that
• 3:42
  the downsides were, that I found it hard to quit. At any time I feel like I'm being bossed around
• 3:47
  or being puppeteered by some other force, some other phenomenon, I resent it. I'm just a
• 3:53
  ferociously independent person, I don't like being told what to do, even if the person who I'm being
• 3:57
  told by is myself or rather some little addictive characteristic or behavior inside myself.
• 4:07
  And so I thought that this was something that I might want to want to experiment with dealing with
• 4:14
  at some point, but I thought that the losses of not drinking would be just too high. I mean,
• 4:20
  how would you celebrate with friends? How would you relax? How would you make yourself feel like
• 4:26
  you're getting a reward? How would you celebrate? What would console you in the dark times? And
• 4:34
  then reaffirm the good times, it seemed like there would be a huge loss for not drinking.
• 4:41
  Now it's been about four years, I think, three years, four years. I mean, not being an AA person,
• 4:48
  I'm not counting the days. And it doesn't feel like I'm just trying to get through the day without
• 4:53
  a drink at all. I have absolutely no desire for alcohol. So how did I get to that place and
• 5:00
  what is this strange universe like? To be honest, the main switch in my thinking came from
• 5:07
  the Alan Carr company, not the English comic, but the bloke whose little books you might have seen
• 5:14
  in airport bookstores to help people give up smoking. It's called Alan Carr's easy way.
• 5:21
  Now it's not immediately easy, it's very easy for various, depending on who you are,
• 5:27
  some people read his easy way to quit smoking and they never have another cigarette again,
• 5:30
  other people need to go to one of the seminars that this organization runs.
• 5:35
  But they've expanded that empire from smoking to drinking and overreating and drug addiction.
• 5:42
  And this organization is a company that has a completely different outlook on how you address
• 5:48
  addiction than the mainstream medical establishment does and then 12 step programs do.
• 5:55
  And the basic philosophy is that there's no point in talking about all the reasons why you
• 6:01
  shouldn't be taking the drug that you're taking, whether that drug is nicotine or alcohol, sugar,
• 6:08
  or meth. We all know the reasons why we shouldn't be taking those things. If we were amenable to
• 6:16
  rational persuasion, then we probably wouldn't be drinking as much as we do in the first place.
• 6:22
  So instead, the Alan Carr philosophy is to look at the reasons why you think you do do it
• 6:30
  and really pay attention to what the experience is of ingesting this substance.
• 6:36
  And notice how much of it actually is only feeling good because it's topping you back up
• 6:44
  to a level, a sensation of normality that is caused by the dip that is caused by being addicted
• 6:53
  to the drug. Does that make any sense? Use the analogy of a really hard drug, which might make
• 7:02
  it easier to see. The heroin junkie sinks the needle into their arm and feels like,
• 7:08
  ah, now I can cope. But to the person who's not addicted to heroin, it's obvious that the
• 7:15
  injecting of the needle is the thing that's causing the problem. The problem wasn't that the person
• 7:20
  didn't have enough heroin in their system. The problem is that the person habitually uses heroin
• 7:25
  and needs to then use heroin to get out of the hole of feeling so terrible, the hole that
• 7:30
  taking heroin in the first place caused. You can see this maybe more clearly with nicotine than
• 7:36
  with alcohol. You know, the smoker stands there puffing on a cigarette and non-smokers don't walk
• 7:42
  past going, gee, I wish I could have the hire that that person's getting from the cigarette.
• 7:46
  It's obvious to the non-smoker that the good feeling that the smoker is getting by ingesting
• 7:51
  nicotine is just a way of getting them back up to a state of normality that the non-smoker enjoys
• 7:57
  all the time. The reason the smoker was feeling itchy and irritable and cranky and like they
• 8:03
  needed a cigarette was because they're a smoker because they go through their lives ingesting
• 8:08
  nicotine and when that nicotine level gets too low, they need to top themselves back up.
• 8:13
  Now the analogy to alcohol is not perfect because unlike nicotine, alcohol actually does do something
• 8:20
  to you, right? It is an anesthetic, it is a disenhibitor. It influences your consciousness,
• 8:28
  changes your state of mind, to a degree that nicotine certainly doesn't, and not to a degree
• 8:33
  that heroin does. But the idea here is that the principle is sort of the same, that if you actually
• 8:40
  pay close attention to what it's like to start getting drunk, it's not actually objectively that
• 8:47
  pleasant. It's pleasant because you're someone who does it a lot and therefore you've coded all
• 8:54
  of these biological reasons why your body rejects being sober and all of these psychological
• 9:00
  associations that you have between drinking and having a good time or relaxing. So just starting
• 9:07
  with the big psychological monster I suppose that resides inside our head, which is shaped by
• 9:16
  culture, shaped by advertising, shaped by our own past experiences. What I started to notice when
• 9:24
  I paid attention and I did a seminar in London with Alan Carr's company that helped me open my
• 9:30
  eyes to this. I got work man. I got so booze work was you pay close attention to the experience of
• 9:40
  getting drunk and you notice that the reason why it feels good, one reason why it feels good
• 9:46
  is that it has historically piggybacked on experiences in your life that were otherwise
• 9:52
  independently good. Like when you're socializing with friends, you socialize with friends,
• 9:59
  you have this mnemonic sort of memory marker, this association between conviviality,
• 10:06
  friendship, warmth, relaxation, good chats and booze. You do that over and over and over and over
• 10:14
  again and you throw into the mix the times when you're feeling lonely and sad and the booze gives
• 10:21
  you an opportunity to wind down or to feel less anxious and the times when you're celebrating and
• 10:27
  the booze gives you an opportunity a kind of a somatic marker to say this is a celebration. So we're
• 10:33
  having a beer or a glass of wine or a gin and tonic or a glass of champagne and you realize that
• 10:40
  booze is doing a shit ton of piggybacking here. It's piggybacking on experiences that would be fun
• 10:49
  without it and we know this to be true even if you don't spend a lot of time having a lot of fun
• 10:54
  without booze yourself because we can look at the fact that Hindu weddings last for days and everyone
• 11:01
  is dancing and having fun without a drop of booze and there are a billion Muslims in the world
• 11:06
  who don't drink and their lives are just as full of fun. Well appropriate caveats inserted here
• 11:14
  about the Taliban not being fun but moderate Muslims who live lives of joy and fulfillment and
• 11:21
  don't drink are testament to the fact that there's nothing intrinsic about the consumption of alcohol
• 11:26
  that links it to a good life. Non-drinkers are just as happy as drinkers are on the whole they may
• 11:33
  be happier. That poses a bit of a conundrum to the person who drinks habitually and thinks that
• 11:38
  every time they go out they wouldn't be having fun if they weren't drinking and the reality is
• 11:43
  you probably wouldn't if you retain the mindset that the alcohol is giving you a gateway into
• 11:50
  having fun. As long as you keep thinking that way you're going to be white knuckling it
• 11:54
  clinging on for dear life trying to have fun in the absence of this thing that your convinced
• 11:59
  gives you fun but that's just an illusion. That's a hallucination. As soon as you're
• 12:06
  disabused of the connection between alcohol and fun you can actually look at the experience of
• 12:10
  starting to get a buzz on with more objective eyes. There were a few eye-opening examples for me.
• 12:19
  I was a host of Half-Post Live living in New York and I was hosting three to five 30-minute
• 12:28
  television segments every single day a huge churn. It required enormous spontaneity clarity of
• 12:36
  mind, breadth of thought, nimbleness and deafness and conversational repartee. We never knew when
• 12:46
  during the day my segments would be allocated. The senior producers would allocate various hosts
• 12:52
  to various segments and sometimes all of mine would be done by one in the afternoon and other times
• 12:57
  they would be back ended towards the end of the day. One day mine ended up one in the afternoon
• 13:03
  and I did what I liked to do in New York without responsibility, without a mortgage, without kids,
• 13:10
  live in the life, live in the dream, baby, which is I would go to a nearby restaurant, a fancy
• 13:17
  restaurant. One of the great upsides of New York City is that a lot of the fancy restaurants that
• 13:21
  might cost $150 for dinner will have a set price lunch menu to get the business crowd in and it might
• 13:29
  be like 30 bucks. Maybe this isn't the case anymore but it certainly was five years ago.
• 13:34
  I'd go and I'd sit at the bar, I'd have a lovely fixed price meal and I'd have a few martinis.
• 13:41
  Now if your experience of a martini is anywhere other than the United States, in fact more specifically
• 13:51
  anywhere other than New York City, then let me explain what a martini is because you probably
• 13:56
  haven't had a real one. You've probably had some kind of, oh this is an espresso, give some
• 14:01
  espresso and coffee beers, let's get some blind, let's have a drink. This is two shots of alcohol and
• 14:09
  that's not a fucking martini. A martini is like a fifth of a bottle of vodka or gin shaken up
• 14:17
  with a lot of ice and basically nothing else in a large martini glass. It's a lot of booze.
• 14:23
  So you have a couple of martinis, you're probably talking about 10 standard drinks quite literally
• 14:29
  and so I'm enjoying the drags of my second delicious ice cold gin martini and eating my dessert.
• 14:38
  When I get a text message from the executive producer saying that one of my other host colleagues
• 14:45
  has fallen ill and could I just pop back in to host another segment.
• 14:54
  And I do a mental scan of my mind and my physiology and I think what was a relaxed buzz three
• 15:07
  seconds ago is now a clammy panic. Now I can just notice as I try to focus my mind that my mind is
• 15:17
  impaired and it's not impaired in a good way. It was impaired in a good way three seconds ago when
• 15:23
  I had nothing to do and all I wanted was to drop a veil of fog over life and kind of buzz along
• 15:32
  in a pleasant zombified state but the moment something happened where I needed clarity
• 15:40
  where something was demanded of me I noticed what was really going on. Although maybe it's not
• 15:46
  fair to say that it's what really was going on because all of this my claim is is a subjective
• 15:50
  interpretation of what's really going on. All that's really happening is that I'm slightly
• 15:54
  anesthetized, disinhibited, clumsy and clammy. All of the rest, all of the other interpretations about
• 16:04
  the relaxation, the buzz, the feeling of goodwill, the feeling of life being a little lighter to
• 16:12
  the touch than it was before. All of that is an interpretation my claim is that we superimpose
• 16:17
  onto the fundamental biological biochemical reality of drunkenness. Now I'm using drunkenness
• 16:25
  loosely. I was not staggering around drunken. I just mean the feeling of the effect of alcohol
• 16:31
  to some degree more than just mild mild mild lightheadedness. So all of a sudden the cognitive
• 16:37
  context for the buzz flips from being state of relaxation after work to a state of heightened
• 16:44
  preparation for something that's about to be demanded of me. And I noticed this is not a good
• 16:50
  feeling at all. Now that I'm actually trying to demand something of myself, all that this is
• 16:56
  is sweatiness, heart racing, claminess, dry mouth, inability, incapacity. I didn't do the segment.
• 17:07
  I said I had other obligations and thank God I didn't. But that was one moment where I realized
• 17:15
  okay, I'm raised in a culture whose behaviors are contingent. I could just as easily have been
• 17:23
  born in a parallel universe in which everyone uses cannabis all the time or everyone uses ketamine
• 17:30
  all the time or everyone uses MDMA all the time or everyone microdoses with psilocybin all the time
• 17:37
  and if you're in silicon valley maybe the latter does apply to you. Instead or I could have been
• 17:42
  born in one of the many parts of the world where booze is either outlawed or heavily found upon.
• 17:48
  Instead I was born into a culture where the norm is that to celebrate to wind down to cope
• 17:56
  you drink. So of course there's this connection between this substance and those contexts.
• 18:04
  Anyway, let's just get to the question of how you actually go about quitting. I went to a,
• 18:15
  I remember going to an AA meeting out of curiosity because one of my colleagues at HuffPost
• 18:20
  Live was sober and she went to meetings every week. So I joined her to a few. I thought this
• 18:26
  is interesting just to check out and the sorrow, the desperation, the self-flagulation.
• 18:36
  I found it so unseemly. It didn't resonate with me. I'm powerless over alcohol. This thing
• 18:44
  controls me. I'm allergic to alcohol. I ingest it and I'm a uniquely broken type of human being
• 18:51
  for whom it grabs me and I can only surrender to God to the higher power of the universe and
• 18:57
  acknowledge my worthlessness in the face of this substance and only through going through the steps
• 19:02
  of repentance. Will I be able to find my own truth? Now, if 12 steps worked for you, great.
• 19:10
  It works for some people. For a lot of people that message doesn't resonate and it didn't resonate
• 19:16
  with me. What resonated with me was discovering this other organization, Alan Carr, which said,
• 19:25
  there is no big issue here. What you're doing is you've been tricked. You've been tricked by
• 19:31
  advertising. You've been tricked by culture into beginning to imbibe something in smallish doses
• 19:37
  and experimenting with it. When you first tried it, it probably didn't taste very nice. In fact,
• 19:43
  think back to your first drinks. It almost certainly didn't. The head spin and the bars probably
• 19:48
  felt weird but not initially fabulous. What you did was you got addicted to a drug that's
• 19:54
  addictive. Alcohol is and you started to associate it with a whole bunch of things in your life.
• 20:01
  Now, again, if you drink one glass of champagne a month, this doesn't apply to you. If you drink
• 20:06
  five drinks a day, it definitely applies to you. To my friends who drink, you know, who say,
• 20:11
  I don't drink during the week, but maybe I have three or four drinks on a Friday or Saturday night,
• 20:15
  does it apply to you? Probably. I mean, only you can answer that, but probably. If you are
• 20:22
  imbibing any other addictive substance with that frequency, then clinically, you would probably be
• 20:28
  said to be somewhat dependent on that thing. It's also worth noticing that things that you don't
• 20:33
  have a problematic relationship with, you don't tend to talk about in terms of like, oh, I don't
• 20:38
  do them during the week. You know, nobody says, ah, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't eat
• 20:43
  broccoli during the week. I just treat myself to broccoli on a Friday and Saturday night.
• 20:49
  Why don't we say that? I mean, we don't say it firstly because broccoli is not bad for us,
• 20:53
  but you would, even if it were bad for us, you wouldn't say that because there's no
• 20:57
  addictive property to broccoli and you don't have to feel proud of not doing broccoli and there's
• 21:01
  no conflict within yourself about doing broccoli. Doing broccoli. I want a bumper sticker that says,
• 21:07
  I do broccoli. You know what I mean? You hear a lot of people saying, like, I don't have a problem
• 21:11
  with alcohol. No, I don't even touch it during the week. Well, okay, good for you. Lardy dar,
• 21:17
  but in saying that you're sort of confessing that you do somewhat have a problem with alcohol
• 21:21
  because you're being drawn to it and you're withstanding the temptation, the urge. The urge is not
• 21:27
  intrinsic to the alcohol. The urge is intrinsic to the fact that you are a habitual imbibre of alcohol
• 21:32
  and therefore you have some kind of problematic addictive relationship to it.
• 21:37
  Now, let me be clear here. I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with that problematic addictive
• 21:42
  relationship. I'm just saying it's a complicated intertwined interplay between your biochemistry
• 21:48
  and this substance that you're constantly taking, which we don't tend to interrogate.
• 21:53
  It's not a freely chosen choice. It's a dance with a substance that has its tendrils
• 22:00
  into your psyche and in your biology. And if you can manage that and you're genuinely just drinking
• 22:07
  your three drinks once or twice a week and that works for you, then great. But I'd also
• 22:18
  wonder whether or not you've ever tried if life works for you without those things as well.
• 22:23
  And maybe it would if you changed your way of thinking about it. See, we tend to think when it comes
• 22:29
  to substances that are addictive, that we are in a struggle without science.