EP 53: Science & Social Conditioning with Annie Grace & Michael Patrick скачать в хорошем качестве

EP 53: Science & Social Conditioning with Annie Grace & Michael Patrick

Annie was recently interviewed by Michael Patrick for the StillFeel21.com Podcast. Annie and Michael discussed spontaneous sobriety, the unconscious mind, societal conditioning around alcohol and whether or not alcohol can truly relax us. There is so much great information packed into this short interview that Annie wanted to share it on her own Podcast as well. Episode Links: http://www.stillfeel21.com/ I found myself drinking more than I ever wanted to be drinking. Spent a lot of time trying to control my own drinking and setting rules for myself. Not drinking after a certain time of day. Not drinking on the weekends. Stuff like that. Every time I did that, I felt very emotionally deprived, like there was something missing. I couldn't have a good enough time. I felt like I was missing out. So I really was wondering why is this? Why was it that I used to be able to not miss drinking, if I wasn't drinking, and now suddenly I missed it so much? This led me to do a ton of research and one of the most interesting things, to your point, about the research. There's something called spontaneous sobriety. It affects 30% of people who have had any sort of problem with alcohol where they go into sort of I guess spontaneous remission, if you will. They make a clear decision. It isn't necessarily that they go to never drinking again. A percentage of those people go to drinking on occasion. Drinking at levels that are no longer effecting their lives. I said, "Okay. Well, what is this spontaneous sobriety and how do I get there?" I don't say for me that I don't drink. What I say is I drink as much as I want whenever I want, but through the work and the research that I've done, I haven't wanted a drink in more than three years now. It's a very freeing approach where I'm not constrained by rules. I don't feel like I'm missing out, which is very counter to how I felt before I kind of started this journey of research. Because every time, even if I was the designated driver or during pregnancies, I would feel very much like, "Oh, the party's going on without me. I'm missing out." My discovery since is really that it's not necessarily that I was miserable because I couldn't drink, but I was miserable because I thought that I was going to be miserable without alcohol. Therein lies the differentiator, right? Let’s hone in on the conditioning piece, the social conditioning that is wrapped up with alcohol in our society. Because prior to reading the book, many have zero awareness of this. It becomes such a light bulb moment to just see the unpacking of this conditioning that's so pervasive in our society. Advertising in general and how we can influence the unconscious mind from an advertising perspective was always top of mind for me for whatever product I was selling. There's two things that play here. One of the things is that we all believe that advertising doesn't work on us. If you ask any single person, they say, "Oh, yeah. It doesn't work." The alcohol industry spends $2 billion a year. They wouldn't do that if it wasn't profitable. Guinness I think holds one of the top records for most expensive commercials of all time, and I think it was $20 million for a single commercial. They wouldn't do that if they didn't sell more Guinness than $20 million worth. We think we are immune to the social conditioning. We say, "Okay. That's ridiculous." We dismiss it. In that moment of dismissal, we don't realize that it's permeating our unconscious mind. I think in that moment of dismissal, we almost give it permission. A better approach is to look at these things and really say, "We know this works. How is this working?" And take a much more mindful approach. I like to say that alcohol, it's the only drug on earth we sort of have to justify not taking. A big reason we have to do that is because of the social conditioning and how pervasive it is in our culture. If you consider this, number one and number two spend from an advertising perspective are cars and alcohol. They go back and forth. Some years it's more in cars. Some years it more in alcohol. Those are the number one and number two categories across the board in terms of dollars spent on advertising. We can't watch a football game with our two sons who are six and nine right now without them seeing at least a dozen commercials for alcohol. If you were to pull out a commercial for marijuana during a football game, everybody would be up in arms. There's never been a proven death from it. Imagine pulling out a commercial for cocaine or heroin and people would go nuts. It would never be allowed. It would never be permitted, yet alcohol kills four times as many people as all illegal drugs combined every single year. That is how prevalent the social conditioning is. Listen to the complete podcast to learn more about the social conditioning and the science of drinking.