The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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It’s easy to think that alcohol harm is inevitable. It isn’t. This report looks at alcohol in the UK today, and makes the case for key changes we must all work towards if we are to end serious alcohol harm. The sad thing with that is you’re just putting off the joy of being sober. You’re just putting off the feeling of freedom and happiness and contentment of life in full color without hangovers. That is out there for you. I spent so many years trying to hang on to drinking, and didn’t realize how good I was going to feel once I finally gave it up.

It definitely made me reevaluate some of my attitudes towards alcohol. The way she spoke about “a spectrum of dependency” rather than healthy/unhealthy drinkers made the book very accessible. I drank a bottle or more of wine a night, 365 nights a year. So I was basically smoking 10 cigarettes a day, every day! If you want to hit refresh on life, you need this book. Consider The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober your healthy new addiction.' - Kate Faithfull-Williams, former health editor of Grazia, co-author of The Feelgood Plan and Hey, Where Did My Day Go? blogger Our brains have learned to drink to this level to become addicted to this substance. And they’ve now placed it on a survival in a survival region of the brain that normally you would have, you know, eating, sleeping, you know, running away from lions, things like that. He says it’s all about the bounty-hunting, rather than the actual finding. ‘It’s not finding gratitude that matters most; it’s remembering to look in the first place. Remembering to be grateful is a form of emotional intelligence.’ As the brain gets used to seeking out the positives, it becomes more efficient at finding them, he explains. ‘Then, it simply takes less effort to be grateful. Everything is interconnected. Gratitude improves sleep. Sleep reduces pain. Reduced pain improves your mood. Improved mood reduces anxiety.’ It’s a daisy-chain of benefits.”I keep promises to myself and to the people around me. Cancelled breakfast dates and gym classes are a thing of the past. If I say I’m going to be there, I’m there. Both for myself, and everyone else.

Drinkers in a 2013 study in the UK were found to have much less brain activity than non-drinkers. The good news was that abstinence reversed this process. It changed my views on alcohol and my own drinking habits. I do not class myself as a heavy drinker but could definitely see how easy it is to slip in to bad habits and rely on drink to help ease the stresses of a busy life. If I quit eating cake, would people make jokes about me ‘not being able to handle cake’? No. I don’t think so. If I quit imbibing cheese because I wanted to commit suicide after eating cheese, would people ask, ‘Can’t you just have a little bit of cheese? Just one piece of cheese?’ *Pleadingly offers up the cheese* HAVESOMECHEESE.”I think, well, it’s a very clever way of then saying, well, hang on, you know, we’re we’re promoting a zero proof brands. Let’s still promoting that. That name, you know, when people see zero, I won’t mention names, but you know, zero proof, whatever beer brands, they they’re still marketing that beer. Yes. It’s not like it’s not like them marketing, say for instance, Seedlip, which doesn’t have an alcoholic version of it. They’re not in enhancing that brand awareness. Just little things like when I was three weeks in, I think it was, I started sleeping through the night, which just had not been a reality for me for so long. Because halfway through the night, the alcohol would start leaving my system. And that wakes you up because basically, you’ve gone into withdrawal. She talks about how to re-engage in social situations and compares her sober-self with her previous self- these include weddings, work drinks, birthdays and the dreaded romantic dates. She provides her take on strategies that have worked for her, but also other strategies that would work for others.

A riveting, raw, yet humorous memoir with actionable advice.' - Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind So it’s clear that it’s beginning to die out just like smoking did. And we’re just really early adopters. As Annie Grace says, ‘We protect alcohol by blaming addiction on a person’s personality rather than on the addictive nature of alcohol… The concept of addictive personality lets us close our minds to the fact that alcohol is addictive, period.” Now she wants us to start being honest with ourselves about our own relationship with booze. How many of us are actually drinking the recommended maximum of 14 units or less a week of alcohol, and how many of us are drinking 14 on a Friday night without even trying? I mean, a lot of us will see the term childhood trauma and think oh, that doesn’t apply to me, that applies to people who’ve had a really rough time, you know, that’s not me. But if you actually do the test, the adverse childhood experience test, you might find that it does apply to you. It did apply to me.This book is a gamechanger. Everyone deserves to have Catherine hold their hand as they navigate the new world of not drinking - whether exploring alcohol-free periods or going for full-on sobriety - and this book enables just that. Wise, funny & so relatable.' - Laurie, Girl & Tonic blogger Catherine Gray is an award-winning writer and editor. She has worked on staff for magazines such as Cosmopolitan , GLAMOUR and the Sun 's Fabulous supplement. She has written as a freelancer for publications like Stylist , Marie Claire , YOU , Women's Health , Grazia , the Guardian , Shortlist , BBC Earth , Emerald Street , Heat and the Daily Mail . I have deducted a star because there was very small part of the book that I found quite judgmental, a moment in which the author pointed out a drunk lady to someone who was questioning her on being sober at a party and She said something along the lines of “ look at Her and look at me, I’d rather be me” not very kind. However I still very much enjoyed the book. We’re here to talk about all things drinking, quitting drinking, the joy you can find in life without alcohol and her new book, Sunshine Warm Sober: Unexpected Sober Joy That Lasts . Staying sober is about so much more than putting down the alcohol. It’s about recovering and reclaiming your best possible self.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist and author of 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, says, ‘When you gossip about another person, listeners unconsciously associate you with the characteristics you are describing, ultimately leading to those characteristics being transferred: to you. So, say positive and pleasant things about friends and colleagues, and you are seen as a nice person. In contrast, constantly complain about their failings, and people will unconsciously apply the negative traits and incompetence to you.” The eternally epic Anne Lamott says, ‘There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you’re waiting for an organ. You can’t buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. But it’s an inside job.’ (Watch Anne’s TED talk on the 12 truths she’s learned, it’s glorious.)” Oh, but what about the red wine studies, you say? They found it was healthy, right? Actually, resveratrol, the same substance for which they declared a glass of red wine is “good for you,” is found in much higher amounts in other foods, including dark chocolate. Not only that but the amount of it in red wine is tiny anyway! It’s just not worth the toxins. Lesson 2: With exercise, your weak sobriety muscles can become strong. Let me start by saying I love this book. However I did struggle with some of the writing style and sentence structure, having to reread several passages only to still not get it, which was probably just me. I gave up alcohol, with the aid of another book on the subject 7 weeks ago, and have decided to regularly read other people’s journeys as encouragement. After reading Catherine Gray’s experience, and the first book I read, I’ve come to realise that maybe my relationship with alcohol wasn’t as bad as I thought it was, but I identify so much with some of Catherine’s thought processes during her time of addiction. Her experience emphasised for me that alcohol addiction/dependence is a spectrum, which I was clearly on, and I would probably have got a lot worse had I not stopped drinking when I did.

Everyone should just try everything, and keep what works, and they’ll find their 30 tools that will help them. But also you even in the first 30 days, you start to get the limits of what it’s going to be like later on, you get these kind of little surges of euphoria. Yeah, well, I think that’s really common. I would if I could guess if I could pin, as guesstimate at the median age, I would say it’s probably about 37 or 38. I was 33. But just just circumstances, I mean, I think if my life had if things had been different than I probably would have drank for longer, you know, I suddenly found myself in a situation where I was freelancing in a terrible toxic relationship and could drink all they ever wanted to. And it just, you know, just the circumstances around it created almost like perfect conditions for my addiction to dig its cause and really take hold. But if I hadn’t been in that situation, if I’d continued in full time work and been in a happy relationship, and that kind of thing, I could totally foresee that I would have drank into my 40s and beyond. It just depends when it all comes to a head, you know, The limbic system is responsible for anxiety itself, but the pre-frontal cortex provides the worry scripts, formulating potential problems. When our mind races and catastrophizes, that’s the pre-frontal cortex.” A nd so I flipped that and made most of the book about the light that comes after the dark. There’s still you know, a lot of gritty stuff in there, but most of it is about the, you know, the the dawn rather than the darkness.



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