It’s approaching midnight on New Year’s Eve 2017 and I’m standing in a group of near-strangers around a campfire on a beach in Mexico.

We’re each clutching a piece of paper on which we’ve scribbled habits and tendencies we want to leave behind in 2017. One after another, we step up and toss our paper into the ceremonial flames.

After a year of unnecessary purchases, I’ve written “materialism”. But in hindsight it would have been more appropriate if I’d written “drinking”.  Some step up to the fire sheepishly and mumble under their breath, but a larger-than-life Californian
proudly announces “pornography” with a lewd look at a nearby girl and throws his paper in the fire.

Everyone had a good laugh at that.

This wasn’t like my usual New Year’s Eve. By this time, I’m usually 20 drinks deep with a very long night ahead – sometimes a long night, a longer following day and another long night after that too.

The beach ceremony was part of a week-long meditation retreat I’d come to for some quiet reflection and to avoid the usual raucous shenanigans.

I’d just turned 40, was single and very much in midlife crisis mode. I’d discovered meditation a few years earlier and had been moving further and further away from my partying past but would still indulge in big bouts of drunkenness.  

My 40th itself was still hazily fresh in my memory, complete with half a dozen shots of tequila, dancing on tables, a 6am finish and significant patches in my recollection of events.

On the retreat, I opted to share a room and ended up with three other guys – all 40 that year, all single, all searching for something like me. We clearly all got the midlife crisis memo.

There was a strict no-alcohol, no-caffeine and only limited internet policy. I’m no good at moderating, even with internet access, so was thankful the wifi was so bad it wasn’t worth the hassle.

My relationship with alcohol had been changing over the previous few years but I hadn’t yet come to the realisation that quitting completely might be a good idea.
Alcohol was so ingrained in my life up to that point that I hadn’t seriously considered getting rid of it completely.

On the beach it was materialism I was throwing in the fire, not alcohol. That year I’d been on a bit of a spending frenzy – a perk of being a 40-year-old with a well paid job and no dependents. I bought lots of things I didn’t need, including a drone and three guitars to add to the three I already had. The purchases themselves weren’t the problem, but the craving that went with them and the endless time researching them. Time I knew could be spent more productively.

It wasn’t until I got back to Sydney where I live and faced the prospect of a day at the pub on my first day back that it occurred to me that not drinking was a serious option. But we’ll come to that.

Getting out of my mind
I’ve always been an over-thinker, an over-analyser. I come from an academic family where I’m one of the least qualified with only a master’s degree. Thinking is something that was highly rewarded in our family as it is in society in general and the school system in particular. But there comes a point when our greatest strengths become our greatest weaknesses.

There’s a point where thinking tips into overthinking. Over-thinking becomes endless speculation about the future or what other people think. This can cause stress and anxiety to build up.

In my teens growing up in Bristol in the UK, I found a way to calm my overactive mind – a way to help me switch off, get out of my head and be more relaxed in social situations. That way was alcohol and I quickly made myself an expert in it.

At school, I was twice sent to the headmaster for being the drinking ringleader on foreign exchange trips.

On both occasions, I was given a “final” written warning and they seem impressed when I pointed out it didn’t make sense to have two “final” warnings.

My first job after leaving school was in a cocktail bar.

At university in Birmingham, there were only six days in the whole three years when I didn’t have at least several drinks. This was for a week-off alcohol challenge where we didn’t even make it to day seven.

In the week I graduated, with no real plans of what to do next with my life, I was offered an audition to play bass in a band signed to my favourite record label and duly got the gig.

This would be the start of a decade in and around the music industry, touring the UK and Europe with the band, running my own record label, DJing and organising club nights. It was all very small time but that didn’t stop me acting the part. There’s a photo somewhere of me behind the decks with a lit cigarette in each hand trying to light another one in my mouth. When it came to getting a proper job I landed a role as a music journalist working for Channel 4 in London.

I was surrounded by people who drank – and not just drank, but celebrated drinking. At our London office, there was a “hangover hat of shame” given to anyone coming into work still steaming from the night before. But it was more of a badge of honour than a punishment.

I would interview musicians who were lauded for their excessive consumption.
If everyone around me was using this great tool called alcohol, why shouldn’t I? The more alcohol I had, the merrier I would be.

It didn’t sink in then that those who drank the most – I would write stories most days about Amy Winehouse causing a scene outside one pub or another – seemed anything but merry. It shouldn’t be surprising that the more of a depressant you have, the more depressed you get.

In the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, I moved to Australia and it was business as usual. Australia draws on a mix of British and American influences, but with alcohol they definitely follow the British.

I switched from music to lifestyle journalism and found myself invited on booze-soaked press junkets.

I covered week-long vodka festival in Queenstown, New Zealand where the welcome pack included a litre of vodka for each of our rooms – in case the breakfast, lunch and dinner cocktails weren’t enough. A four day jolly to review bars and restaurants in Las Vegas sponsored by a travel company led to me slurring my way through an editorial meeting a couple of hours after I landed back home and saw the editor in chief ban people coming straight into work after red-eye flights.

Early midlife crisis
My 35th birthday was a turning point – coming about 20 years into a dedicated drinking career. If you need 10,000 hours to become an expert in something, I had long been an expert in drinking.

My birthday coincided with a seedy illegal warehouse party that I organised with some friends that acted as a wake-up call for me. It was in a venue usually used for sex parties and there were actual conversations with the owner about who would get a cut of the in-house drug dealers’ profits (not us).

I was DJing music I’d become bored of and was no longer getting what I used to from the alcohol. In the old days, I’d lose my inhibitions, but as time had worn on, my anxieties and self-talk managed to worm their way back into my drunk experience.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but this is a common experience among drinkers getting older.

The body seeks balance and equilibrium in all circumstances. When you put a depressant like alcohol in the body, it counteracts this dulling effect by releasing hormones that make you more sensitive, more aware. This is a survival mechanism to prevent anything too terrible happening when you’re drunk. It’s usually during hangovers where you notice it. When the anaesthetic of the alcohol wears off, you’re left feeling overly sensitive and anxious the next morning.

But I started feeling the effect even while I was drinking. This is what building up a tolerance means – your body is able to successfully counteract the effects of the alcohol. This left me feeling anxious and overly self-aware even while drinking. By overusing it, I made alcohol no longer able to do its basic numbing job.

At this stage, I was nowhere near ready to quit drinking. Instead, I quit smoking and DJing – because clearly DJing was the problem…

I realised that the partying, hedonistic lifestyle was not something I either wanted or would be able to maintain going into the next phase of my life. So, I started looking for other ways to develop myself and find meaning.

Exploring different states of consciousness is natural
Rather than seeing the drinking phase of my life as a guilty secret to hide away, I see it as my first dedicated attempt to explore different states of consciousness.  I’d been using alcohol and other substances to get out of my regular state of awareness – the
humdrum reality of regular life and day to day thoughts.

In Western society, alcohol is the most readily available and socially acceptable way of doing this, but it’s been happening in human cultures since long before we had pubs and bars on every street corner.

From shamans imbibing ayahuasca to whirling dervishes to kids spinning around in playgrounds until they fall down, people have sought altered states of consciousness. It’s in our make-up and our natural right.

There’s a positive intention behind wanting to get drunk and change your state of consciousness – so if this is something you’ve done a lot of research into in the past, congratulations for being normal.

Your research into this approach will no doubt have shown you the many downsides of this approach and if you’re reading this, you’re ready to explore a new way.

The day I realised things could be different
At the end of the booze-free week of yoga and meditation in Mexico, I felt amazing – full of energy and hope to bound into the year ahead. The was unlike my usual booze-soaked hobblings into the new year, sometimes literally. When I lived in London in the late 2000s, I ended one New Year’s Eve by sitting in the same position with my legs crossed for the best part of eight hours at an afterparty.

When I finally got up, my right foot didn’t work, and I fell over. After limping to the hospital in Whitechapel I was informed I’d done temporary nerve damage and had to take a few days off work with foot drop.

When the plane landed back in Sydney after Mexico I had no intention of extending the abstinence any further. But I soon found that the increased clarity I’d gained from the intense meditation on the retreat helped me make a simple but pivotal decision.

That day, two friends who were moving interstate had leaving drinks at a local bar in Bondi where I live. My gut instinct was to stay away so I didn’t have to drink. But then I was hit but a powerful revelation: I could go and not drink.

This might sound laughably obvious to many people, but not to me. The idea of going somewhere where other people are drinking and choosing not to drink wasn’t something that ever occurred to me. Sure, I’d been out and not drunk before – been designated driver or had a job interview or work the next day. But to choose not to drink on a weekend purely out of preference rather than circumstance had never been something I’d entertained.

As soon as the idea planted itself in my retreat-fresh brain, I knew something had changed. Not only did the idea feel right – it made so much sense.

One of the things I’d heard my mediation teacher Tim repeat many times since I’d met him was: “When faced with a choice, choose both.”

The first few times I’d heard it, it had come across as the kind of “have your cake and eat it” spiritual guff you might read in The Secret. But it was more about combining the best elements of both sides of a choice to get the best overall result.

Outside the bar, I had to swallow my initial hesitation about facing friends who’d I never said no to a drink with before. But I was amazed at how easy it was – there were no more than a couple of mild attempts to get me to drink, which were easy to fend off.

I realised why this time would be easier than when I’d tried to moderate in the past. “Just having a couple” is a weak negotiating position in the face of an enthusiastic drinking companion. It’s a slippery slope, made more slippy by the alcohol eroding whatever willpower there was to start with.

When I was “just having a couple”, my answer was always framed as “I shouldn’t”. “I shouldn’t” is laced with guilt and carries the unspoken “but I’m going to anyway”. This time, my answer was, “I don’t want to”. This is a much stronger, more authentic position and harder to argue with. It has none of the guilt of “I shouldn’t” and instead carries the unspoken but definitive “so I won’t”.

I had a great time at the leaving do and left a few hours later, avoiding a messy after party that would have drowned out my post-retreat natural high.

Instead I went on a sober date with someone I ended up dating for years.

How I used meditation to quit
It took me several years of meditating to get to deciding to give up, but when I decided, it was the easiest thing in the world.

If I’d had the desire earlier I know would have been able to do it sooner. I’ve kept a journal for the last eight years and it covers the end of my crazy party days, through learning to meditate, to giving up alcohol. I recently re-read the part where I learned to meditate.

Within the very first week, my relationship with alcohol had changed. For midweek drinks where I’d usually feel the pressure to drink just because everyone else was, I was able to say no and leave after an hour like I wanted to.

What I was lacking at that point was a clear goal – definitively quitting. If you’re reading this, you likely have a much clearer idea than I did.

I’ve taught hundreds of people to meditate since becoming a Vedic Meditation teacher in 2016. I’m also the creator of Wise Monkey Way, the world’s first meditation program dedicated solely to helping people change their relationship with alcohol.

If you’ve dabbled in meditation before, it’s likely been a mindfulness-based technique. If you struggled with clearing your mind, don’t worry, the technique you’ll learn from me will be much easier.

You can’t fail.

To try it for yourself, download a free meditation here.