No "spiritual awakening" here.
For me, the balance began tipping in favor of not drinking as my life became more and more limited by alcohol. Eventually alcohol became the fulcrum of my existence and I began to see it as a problem and not a release.
That's not to say that it wasn't difficult in the first months after I quit, which has been many years ago now. I had to learn the same lesson with opiates almost a year ago. The recent sense of freedom I feel from the pull of opiate use is awesome.
Few things worth doing are without effort. For me, that has certainly been the case with "my" substances.
FT