Annie GraceThis Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life

The writer’s goal “is to reverse the conditioning” in your mind to “eliminate your desire to drink”. At first, before starting to read, I thought no way just a book could do that… but oh yes, it can! If you read every word, starting on page 1 and read in order, by the end, you will not want to touch alcohol again! She speaks from experience. Great book, highly recommend, no matter what your stage might be (no drinks to thinking you cannot stop, whether it’s beer, wine or spirits). Please read this book and save your life!

This book has SAVED MY LIFE. I purchased “The Naked Mind” about 2 months ago in a last ditch effort to “moderate” my drinking. I’m 30 and have been drinking since I was 14. I am otherwise one of the healthiest people I know. I eat very healthy and exercise vigorously 5-6 days a week. I’m self-driven and highly motivated as well as financially successful. I work in healthcare and have intimate knowledge of the human body, health, and disease. However….. I obviously had a deep physical, emotional, and psychological relationship with alcohol.Whiskey was my drink of choice until last year when I finally decided I couldn’t control my intake and instead would drink wine since it was “healthier” and easier to sip for hours without getting wasted too quickly. Even as I started reading “The Naked Mind” I was wary she would tell me that I had to stop drinking forever: this terrified me!!! How would I endure social functions or holidays “coping” with my family, or have fun with my friends without alcohol?! I only wanted to learn to moderate. I thought alcohol was the key to relaxing after long days or stressful times.Before this book I would only admit that I had a “problem” when (about 6 months apart) I woke up piecing memories together of fights with my family and friends, or random strangers in bars, and wondering what I said or did. Or after realizing I drove home with no recollection of driving. During periods of stress my drinking increased dramatically and I got to a point where I couldn’t relax without it. I’ve woken up on a stranger’s porch after a night binge drinking. I’ve thrown up and passed out in my own vomit.Yet, I tried to justify my drinking or find reasons why it got out of control….pms, dehydration, low food intake that day, or family stress, to name a few. I wasn’t an “alcoholic” because I could go weeks without drinking and didn’t have any “withdrawal” symptoms. I “liked the taste” and just it helped me relax. I was lying to myself. My family and closest friends could see it but any attempts to change me were met with hostility and denial. It’s amazing the man in my life stuck around after all I put him through.I could go 6 months between these binging episodes, but a bad episode was inevitable. Every time I tasted success I would eventually let my guard down, drink too much, and wake to a self-made nightmare worse than the last. 15 years of this! I wondered what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I drink responsibly like normal people? It had to be a genetic flaw. Before this book I was afraid I could never be a successful moderate drinker like everyone else. And the thought of living without it hurt my heart.I didn’t want to kill someone on the road or cheat on my fiancé without even knowing it. Or physically hurt a friend or coworker. But, without a doubt, that’s exactly where I was headed. Too many times I woke up knowing I drove and shouldn’t have. BUT, this book gave me the freedom that I have lived without for the last 15 years! Never before in my life have I gone on a vacation that I didn’t drink too much and wake up with a hangover or worse. But this weekend I spent 5 days in Miami at a food and wine festival and was completely free from the hold that alcohol had on me. I was able to abstain easily and never once felt deprived.The point of this book is that it makes it easy. It stops making you rely on willpower alone, which WILL eventually FAIL. My choices are now easy and pleasurable. Dinner with 14 girls (some of which I don’t enjoy) last night was a breeze. I’ve now attended my first music concert (Norah Jones) without any alcohol and enjoyed it so much more! I truly can’t convey how grateful I am that “The Naked Mind” came into my life. I would recommend it to EVERYONE: abstainers, casual drinkers, binge drinkers, and alcoholics all!

I bought this to coincide with doing a dry(er) January. Two chapters in and I was beginning to see alcohol in a whole new light. And now I can’t unsee it. My “need” to have a drink on the weekend or to unwind, is diminishing. I’m about 3/4 the way through with the book and the grip of alcohol on social settings and even unsocial settings is almost gone for me. I would highly recommend this book to people who are trying to limit alcohol or who aren’t. I think at the end of the day, we’re all drinking more than we should. It’s very eye opening and could add vibrant years to your life .

This is a really, very good book, and I'm glad I took the time to read and digest it. I came to it already having decided to stop drinking, which makes me not exactly its target audience. But it did nonetheless change my resolve. I had imagined my abstinence including exceptions for very special occasions like a dinner at a fancy restaurant. I also imagined that in several years I'd maybe be able to go back to drinking in a "take it or leave it" kind of way. Reading this book made me decisively drop those ideas: they were the alcohol talking.I especially appreciated the departure in Grace's book from the usual AA approach. The latter distinguishes "normal drinkers" from "alcoholics" and focuses on the shortcomings of the addict. Grace focuses on the insidious culture and harms of alcohol. In another reversal, she positions the former drinker as a person who has more capacity to enjoy life and make decisions than those who drink. Other approaches position the former drinker as a person who has a disease, weakness, or moral failing.That's what I found to love, and it's a lot. All of that kept me reading attentively right through to the very end, and left me changed.I also had some reservations about the book. I share them not to debunk Grace's approach but, I hope, to demonstrate opportunities to strengthen it. (Maybe she'll come out with a second edition!) They mostly have to do with the author's leading, at every moment, with rhetoric and persuasion. These features are a little too close to the surface of the text, and when they drive the account, it can lead to logical inconsistencies or outright contradictions. Sometimes she says that alcoholism is not a disease. Sometimes she says that it is. Which is it? In her (mostly excellent) chapter on health effects, she criticizes those who have touted the health benefit of alcohol for conflating correlation and causation (see p. 62). Five pages later, she accepts the correlation of alcohol consumption with incidents of cancer as causation. Her larger point stands, but moments like these represent unforced errors that open her account to needless criticism. Moreover, some of the scientific evidence she relied upon was so old as to be questionable. I am skeptical of most science done in 1909 (eugenics, anyone?), so when I noticed that the study finding that alcohol deadens the tastebuds was published in that year, I had to wonder whether and why that was the most recent study she could find.Grace is right about the intensity and breadth of unconscious conditioning we suffer around alcohol. But I wondered, reading this book, how much of her attempt to "reverse" the conditioning by picking apart myths about alcohol would be persuasive to a reader who is in a less-committed place than I am. She devastates the myths in their most blunt form, but more attention could be paid to the deeper and more subtle emotional cues that I think give them their staying power. She also lumps all the negative emotions that people use alcohol to mask under the label of "stress," and then points out that alcohol itself contributes to stress. True, but more attention might be paid to the fact that stress won't go away after one quits drinking: one needs to develop ways to cope healthily and effectively with it. By the same token, a lot of other feelings---emotional feelings---are numbed by alcohol, and I think it would be worth more acknowledgment and exploration of that. Loss, disappointment, low self-esteem, trauma....the list goes on. Grace downplays this because of her rhetoric of persuasion---she wants people to know that they will be happier, healthier, and more fulfilled without alcohol in their lives. But the work to get there involves more than understanding alcohol's insidious harms; it also demands significant emotional labor on the part of the former drinker.I was glad to see at the end of the book that Grace has created an internet community for readers of This Naked Mind to support each other in their transitions to and experience of the non-drinking life. Throughout the text, she makes a big deal of how susceptible people are to peer pressure. Yet speaks of her approach as though the former drinker has to become a go-it-alone maverick. For all its flaws, part of the genius of AA is putting people into a new peer group who will pressure the alcoholic to not drink. I haven't checked out the internet community around This Naked Mind, but it strikes me that the importance of community might be better emphasized in this book.In sum, I'm thankful for this book. I'm sure I'll return to it time and again, and I will definitely recommend it to others.