If You Hate Getting Sober, This Is for You
My friends, if you hate getting sober, this is for you. I am now almost nine years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. I tried so many times to quit drinking before and finally got to a point where I said, I'm never quitting again. I hate getting sober. Being sober sucks. It's depressing. It's not as fun as drinking. I can't live my life like that. There's no point in trying. If you think getting sober is awful, that's just because you don't know how to do it yet. Being sober is awesome, and it's natural, and it's the way to reach your highest potential, and it's an opportunity to help other people.
The world has tricked us into thinking that alcohol makes life better when it doesn't. There are just booze companies making a fortune off of selling you a substance that's cheap to produce, and then the system collectively benefits from you being more compliant and easier to control when you're drinking and using other things to alter your mind. I know it can be difficult to get sober, but it's worth it. Being a drunk is much harder than living sober, and yet many of us are just used to the pain, and we even have an identity around it. We have deep-down beliefs that I don't deserve a good life, that I have to pay a price to have fun, that I am an awful person and I should suffer. We have these beliefs, and for me, going to Alcoholics Anonymous has been a place to surface those, take inventory of those, look at those beliefs, and get rid of them.
If you hate getting sober, just know that you might never have to do it again. I love not having to get sober. It's so nice to wake up in the morning and have gotten a full night of sleep. My body feels great. I can go to yoga, make five videos a day for all my different YouTube channels, and spend time with my kids. I go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and help someone, have sex with the wife every other day, go visit my mom and watch Star Trek every night with her. Man, I have a great life today. People want me around.
When You're Drinking, People Don't Want You Around
One of my challenges being sober is having to say no to things. When we're drinking, people often don't want to be around us. I remember my friends would try and leave me out of plans to go to dinner, and I'd feel so hurt and upset and try to creep on them and make sure they weren't sneaking out without me. That's what happens when you're a big downer on everybody else. You don't have to live that way. You are the creator of your life. You've gotten where you're at because of the choices you've made in the past, and the benefit of that is motivation. Motivation to make different choices.
I couldn't get sober until I had a lot of motivation and a lot of evidence that there was no better way to live. I was scared when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, because I started drinking in 2003, and by 2009 I'd lost a job, wrecked a car, nearly ended my life and others' lives, and caused plenty of chaos and property damage. So many hangovers, so many regrets, so many dumb drunk conversations. By 2009, I said, I'm never going to quit drinking again. Just six years of drinking, because I tried to get sober and every time I hated it. I hated sitting at home wishing I could go to the liquor store, trying to stop myself, and then if I made it through the day sober, thinking, I'm going to have to just go do the same thing again tomorrow. And then if I did get the bottle, feeling the remorse, feeling the regret, and then just surrendering, being like, screw it. As soon as I have a desire to drink from now on, I'm going to just go get a bottle of liquor, and you know what, I'm just going to plan ahead and make sure I've got handles of vodka in case I ever feel like having a drink.
If you have to control something, then it's out of control. If you're drawing lines on bottles, if you're telling people you won't drink again and then you're relapsing, if you're going to AA and then drinking right after the meeting like I did after my first meeting, you're an alcoholic, and it's much easier in life when you're honest. But we've been lied to and programmed so much in our society that if you are like I was, I couldn't even tell what was the truth to myself. I couldn't even hardly tell how I honestly felt about something. I couldn't even honestly look at myself and say, I'm an alcoholic. I'm an alcoholic, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get sober. My life has been so much better since I came to AA, but it didn't feel like it at first. It actually felt like things were getting worse.
Why Sobriety Feels Worse Before It Feels Better
The reason many of us love drinking and mind-altering substances, regardless of who gives them to you, is that they numb the pain, they put a fog down on our sober reality. When you've built up a bunch of problems, shame and guilt and remorse, which society very much programs you to do so that you will just bow down and do what you're told instead of thinking for yourself, when you've built all this stuff up, being sober gets to suck. When you feel like you've been a good boy or a good girl at work all day, and you hate your job, you're just going there to get money, and then you get home, you feel like you deserve a little bit of time off of feeling bad. But really, it's all a trap. If you hate getting sober, just think how much you're going to love never drinking again.
I know our mind has these stupid thoughts, like, well, am I going to get to drink at my kid's wedding? Never mind, I didn't have any kids at that time, and I'm thinking that. But our mind has all these dumb thoughts that are just old programming. If you grew up like me, I saw tens of thousands of beer commercials watching football as a kid. If someone tells you something ten thousand times, it's kind of amazing if you don't believe it. Especially when you're a kid, that programming often just sinks in, and then it's sunk in for other people, and you drink with other people. But the whole alcohol thing is just a lie. You don't need alcohol to have fun. Alcohol sabotages and screws over your life. That's the truth.
Now, if you're someone like my wife, she has a drink and she gets a little tiny bit tipsy. She gets a little more loose with the tongue. She gets a little more spontaneous. Really, she could do that without a drink, but she occasionally, once or twice a month, goes out with her friends and has one or two drinks. I've only seen her get drunk once in twelve years. Now, if you are trying to tell me you're not an alcoholic because you haven't gotten drunk in the last week, in my experience you're an alcoholic and you need to get honest with yourself. I remember telling the doctor that I didn't drink when I'd had two weeks without drinking. That's called lying.
Taking the Edge Off Is the Trap
If you've only been sober for a little while, things seem to get worse because you're used to living in a fog. When the fog clears, now you're operating with all the pain, and the misery, and all the things you don't like, and there's no taking the edge off. The short-term, instant-gratification approach that seems perfectly logical is to take the edge off. In my experience, that's a stupid thing to do in the long term. Just like if you want to feel wealthy, the logical, smart thing to do would be to learn how to earn more money, learn how to invest the money you're earning, and spend the least amount of money possible to have the lifestyle of your dreams. That's how I've come to believe you become wealthy. If you want people around you who are working on exactly that kind of change, the best way to work with me on it today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family.
Now, compare that to how people operate with, I want to feel wealthy, so I get a credit card and spend on it, I go get a payday loan. In the short term, you might feel a sense of wealth. Like, wow, look, I just got this new car because the bank paid for it, and now I owe them. I got this house and the bank paid for it, and now I owe them. And I went out and bought all these other things. I feel wealthy, but deep down you're more poor than you've ever been before. That's the same thing that drinking is. It's taking something in that provides an illusory, temporary relief from something that you could eradicate yourself.
When I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, what I learned how to do was fix my sober life. If you are having a problem with alcohol or drugs, in my experience, your sober life is a disaster. Your mind is not working properly. Your body is probably not doing very well. You know how I know that? Because that's how mine was. My mind was so screwed up, I could barely tell how screwed up it was. My body was fat. I had all kinds of health problems that I didn't even want to look at, and I've gotten really sick. In nine years sober, all the problems I came in with to Alcoholics Anonymous are gone. That's how much better it is to be sober.
Find Someone Who Has What You Want
So if you hate getting sober, then don't drink again. It's super obvious. And yet, if you're an alcoholic like me, making that initial change will be difficult. This is why it helps to have other people's mentorship and support who've already been there and done that, and that's why Alcoholics Anonymous is so helpful. Now, Alcoholics Anonymous is obviously full of its share of BS and stuff you shouldn't listen to and things that are not applicable to everybody. People saying, don't date in your first year. Crap. Sometimes you should date in your first year. Sometimes it might help a lot with your sobriety. Sometimes you should get rid of your toxic relationship immediately. There's not a one-size-fits-all approach to getting sober.
This is why it helps to go to AA and get lots of help and lots of different opinions and see people who have what you want. What I did is I looked at the people sitting in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and said, who has what I want? This guy that has 30 years sober, that's made it through hell sober, that has an open, loving heart, that people love him and embrace him. I want to be like him. So I went to him, Ty, and I asked him, and I shared my fifth step with him, and I went out to lunch with him, and I listened to him, and I learned to be like him. And my sponsor, Bob, same thing. My friend, Bill, same thing.
These people had what I wanted, so I asked them how to get it, and I asked them what to do when I was disturbed. I shared all my craziest thoughts with them, and they helped me dramatically change my life. And now I go to Alcoholics Anonymous almost every day to help others change theirs. When you have one person who is really messed up, you ideally need five or ten people who are not, who can give that person choices and help and support in many different ways. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and every newcomer in AA is like a child, whether they are 20 or nearly 80. Going to Alcoholics Anonymous is a chance to grow up.
If you hate getting sober, then in my experience the answer is to never do it again. Make this time the last time. It is so much better on the other side. You will be amazed how all of this dumb programming can get deleted from your brain. You will be amazed that you just do not want to do some of the things you used to do. I prefer not to watch anything where alcohol is a feature, and that has been true for the majority of my life now. Occasionally I might watch a movie or a TV show with a little bit of drinking in it, but that is not very common.
Protecting My Sobriety
I do not watch football anymore because I am tired of beer commercials. I am tired of seeing whatever light beer sponsors the NFL. I am sick of it. I am done watching football because I do not want to see beer commercials all the time that then have the chance to trigger the desire to drink in me. I stay away from bars because I do not even want to be around the kind of people who sit in a bar. I do not go out with my wife when she goes out with her friends to have a drink. I do not want to be around her when she is drinking. I do not want to be around anyone when they are drinking. My kids have a fantastic time when they are sober, and I hang out with other sober people.
The beauty of it is this: when you learn to fix your body, your body will amaze you with what it can do. I get naturally high now, because our bodies are made to do that. But when we have given them the blunt force trauma of alcohol and drugs, which force them to push out all the feel-good chemicals at a certain time and then leave us miserably depressed once all those chemicals are depleted, then when we try to get sober our bodies take a while to remember that they can do it themselves. Your body can release its own natural version of THC for you. I have had a ton of transcendental, spiritual experiences totally sober, because our bodies normally can do that.
Living Up To Your Full Potential
You cannot see your potential if you keep drinking and using drugs. These things are blocking your potential. And my question is, do you want to live a halfway life where you never know what you are capable of? Are you willing to go all the way to the end, to meet your maker, to do whatever, to reincarnate having reviewed this life and say, wow, what if I had lived up to my full potential? What if I had taken the training wheels off at some point and learned how to actually ride a bike like a grown up? What if I had experienced the fullness of life that is available to me? What if I had helped as many people as I possibly could help?
I know that when my end comes, I will be able to say that was a great ride. I did all I could. I gave all I had. I enjoyed all there was to enjoy. No regrets. And let's do it again. Let's have another run at this game. I am able to be a full-time creator online because of being sober. I had a business online before I got sober, and any good opportunity was just pissed away by my drinking and by the sober mindset that goes along with drinking. When you drink, it also poisons your sober mindset, and this becomes a negative reinforcement loop. The more you drink, the crappier your sober mindset gets. But the longer you stay sober, and the more you actually let people help you and change and grow up and start learning and expanding, the more you continue a positive reinforcement loop where you feel good and you are helping people, which helps you grow, and your growth helps you feel good and help more people.
You will be amazed at what is possible, and you might even be afraid of what is possible, because there is a certain comfort in sabotaging yourself and staying stuck in the same place all the time with the same people, the same problems, the same bar, and the same drink. There is a certain comfort in knowing your surroundings. When I was about 90 days sober, I was shocked at how scared I was of having a sobriety that would actually stick, because I realized I was going into the unknown. If I really got sober and really worked the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I did not know what my life was going to look like. Thank God I took that leap of faith, because my life is awesome today. If you want a place to keep growing alongside people who are doing the same work, I would love for you to join the Jerry Banfield Family and walk this road with the rest of us.
I hope this helps you to never have to go through this process again, because there are a lot of other people out there who could use your help. If any of this resonated with you, I share much more of my story over on my Life playlist, where you can watch these experiences unfold in more detail. Thank you so much for reading all of this.