NLP Master Practitioner Jonathan Conway offers advice on avoiding excess drinking this Christmas
There are a number of reasons people turn to drink over the festive period:
- Time away from work to think about your life – realisation that work and relationships are not going the way that you want them to go.
- Money problems causing stress
- Feeling lonely
- Feeling angry/anxious about the future
- Going into an altered state through alcohol to run away from facing up to problems and challenges.
It can be helpful to talk with a counsellor or therapist about these problems to try to think in a different way about them. By doing this problems can be traced back to their origin. For example, a link to unresolved childhood issues – maybe there was a culture of drinking in the person’s family.
Instead of being hard on yourself, which can be destructive, it could be positive to sit down and work out your strengths. Visualisation and NLP anchoring of these resources can be helpful*. It can also be helpful for the rest of the family to help the person come to terms with the situation and help by not drinking in front of them.
To cut back on alcohol, take a glass jar and place the money you would have spent on drink into the jar, enabling you to spend the money on something bigger that you’ve wanted for a long time. ‘Future pacing’ yourself to a time in the future when you have resolved the problem can also be helpful and visualising yourself being healthy and having a greater sense of wellbeing.
This can also be reinforced by practising self hypnosis*. Finally, be compassionate and forgiving to yourself. It is the season of goodwill after all.
