Daily Sobriety Tip 1: Alcoholic Relapse And Depleated Willpower — Talk Sober at YouTube.com

Today we have a special sobriety tip for you. While I was reading this book, The One Thing by Gary Keller, I came across something on page 67. He says that there was a study done in 2007 to see if there was a correlation between nutrition and willpower.

Now this is very interesting for the alcoholic and the addict. Alcohol naturally depletes your vitamins and your nutrition, which in turn affects the cognitive function of your prefrontal cortex. That’s basically the part of your brain that’s able to make decisions rationally.

So what’s happening is when you drink over a long period of time, your diet and your health isn’t always that great, which means your cognitive thinking isn’t that great, either. This means that it affects your willpower.

Now, what do you do about this? How is this going to help you?

What we need to do first and foremost is realize that this is happening. Realize that the prefrontal cortex is affected by what you’ve been doing to your body. Once you realize it, you can acknowledge it and say, “Well, this is what’s going on. I might not feel the willpower and I want to give in based on how I feel, but I know that my cognitive functioning has been interrupted by something other than thinking.”

So it’s not necessarily a thinking problem or a willpower problem. It’s a problem of what’s going on in your body and in your mind And if you can know these things, you can combat them. Instead of saying, “I’m weak, I’m terrible, I want to drink again,” you could just simply sit back and say, “Well, it’s pretty normal when I shut down my cognitive functioning that I’m going to have weak willpower.”

The takeaway is to understand that this is going on combat it by activating your prefrontal cortex. You can say, “I don’t need to give into this, because I know it’s just something that’s a flaw in my mind and body that will get better over time.”

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