Alcohol And Your Brain, Plus Tips to Stay Sober — Talk Sober at YouTube.com
Disclaimer: Marcus is NOT a doctor or a trained addiction counselor. The information in these videos is provided as a resource only, and is not to be used or relied on for any diagnostic or treatment purposes. Nor is it to be used as a substitute when professional diagnosis and treatment is needed. Please seek professional help when needed. Alcoholism is serious… DON’T mess around! Visit www.TalkSober.com/help or get professional help.
Here is a quick but effective sobriety tip.
When you drink, it takes anywhere from three days to two weeks for alcohol to leave your system. Most people don’t realize that it takes this long.
This is known as detox, and it’s a very dangerous part of alcohol recovery. Before you begin to detox, I highly recommend you go to a doctor and get checked out, and you tell them what you’re doing.
After those first two weeks, the alcohol leaves your system, and the cravings are all mental from that point on.
So, if you can get past those first two weeks, whether it’s going to a doctor, rehab, a detox center, or something 
like that, you can actually get past that part where the physical symptoms, withdrawals, and cravings all disappear. And then from that time on, it’s all mental.
Once you know that this challenge is in your mind, you can start to combat it. If you focus on that, and realize you don’t actually need it, then you can start to heal and get better. And once you realize this, you don’t need to give in to it anymore.
You can realize that it’s just your mind telling you that you need something you don’t really need. You can start to get sober one day at a time.
Your mind wants to drink for two reasons:
- Drinking was a solution that used to work (but you know it doesn’t really work anymore).
- You really want to be like normal people who can just have a few (but you’ve proven to yourself this doesn’t work).
When your mind cries out for a drink, don’t listen to it. Think about something else — take a walk, read, or listen to something.
I know the ultimate despair that drinking brings. I know what it’s like to wake up and have the guilt and the anxiety and the pain. This was hard for me to come to grips with at first, because I thought I’d mastered my mind. I thought I was the captain of my mind. But I realized that my mind had been tainted by the very thing I was using to cope with everyday life. And I don’t want that anymore. So, I won’t listen to my mind when it tells me I need another drink.
Stop listening to your “inner drunk.” Once you realize that alcohol has warped your mind, you 
can start to get better. And you don’t have to listen to those thoughts anymore.
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