Thanks Tetrax. I agree, they are very easy to watch. I watched the one I referenced above - the Illusion of Emotional Relief - again this morning. I needed some inspiration to keep me on the straight and narrow! I thought I'd write a bit more about what they said on the subject because I did find it helpful.
They say the subject's important because if you believe that you get emotional relief in any way from drink or drugs, that's a pretty powerful motivator to get drunk or high. They show that substances can't affect emotions although they can if you believe they do. So it's belief based. So when they say "Substances dont pharmacologically relieve any negative emotions, not even temporarily." they are being very precise and saying that if you belief that drugs or alcohol have some magical power over your thoughts, anxieties and traumas etc. then you'll behave in a certain way and your expectancies will affect that.
They quote from their book (I don't know if this is original to the book or a quote from somwhere else) that "the idea that drugs such as alcohol and marijuana provide relief from emotional pain might be one of the most dangerous myths ever concocated." When they talk about pharmacology they are talking about what happens when drugs/drink are ingested. They aren't denying that there are no physical effects, e.g. there's a "buzz" sensation and it affects they way we process thought. But they are saying that it can't change the contents of our thoughts i.e. what we think and how we perceive things. Substances can't mysteriously go into the very specific circuits of your brain that are to do with a thought about a certain anxiety or rice pudding (my example!) and then pharmacologically, chemically, change those thoughts. They can't target your thoughts and magically change them.
So what the model says is that maybe we are the one who is giving permission to leave or escape our anxieties or worries for a little while. And the way we do that is that we concentrate on the buzz, on the physical sensation of the substance, and that becomes our distraction. And it's us making the choice to do that.
They say that our emotions result not from the substances we take but entirely from how we look at things and how we interpret what's happening in our life. Obviously a lot of people are worried about Covid 19 but if you drink in response to this is it going to make us think that it is no longer a threat? Is it going to change the thought "Covid 19 is a risk" to "Covid 19 is harmless"? It doesn't have the power to do that.
There is a lot more even just in this one video but I don't want to make this too long. It's main point I think is that if you change your perpective of alcohol in this way, you won't crave it anymore, because it has no usefulness anymore. Without the illusion, alcohol and drugs become a fun sort of tickle in the body or a little bit of a ritual in some social situations and no more than that, and certainly nothing that we need. We don't need it to self-medicate our problems away because it's never done that for us. It it ever seemed like it worked, it was actually us!
It's a great video. One of the guys says at the end "We're stripping away all the reasons why you like to get wasted!" and another says "People will be like, wow you're really wrecking this for me. But in a good way!" Which is just what I needed
