*This is a sponsored post. I received a copy of this book to review, but all thoughts and opinions are my own. 

If someone came up to you and offered you half a million dollars, would you take the money and never have another drop of alcohol in your life?

How quickly were you able to answer that? It probably took you a couple seconds to decide. You probably decided that you couldn’t give it up for any amount of money. So, how much do you think about drinking alcohol?

Probably not that much right? First things – I’m not trying to be preachy in this post. It was just going to be a straight-forward review, but along the way as I kept reading, researching, and talking to people, it turned into something more. Let me repeat – I’M NOT BEING PREACHY. If you drink, no judgement. Do your thang.

I decided to read this book because I don’t drink. Wait, what? Why read a book about controlling alcohol when you don’t drink?  I know. Seems a little redundant, right?  I read it more because I wanted to see if what I saw and the things that I go through being sober were reflected in the book. It sounded interesting, and since Andrew does drink, it’d probably be interesting to test some concepts out. (Boyfriend guinea pig, sorry babe!) This book totally blew my expectations out of the water.

I enjoyed the straight-arrow way of her writing. She weaves her own tales seamlessly with fact and statistics. And believe me, those stats are scary.

The premise of the book is to change the way our unconscious mind looks and thinks about alcohol. Since our unconscious mind makes a lot of our decisions, it takes a little more than just thinking I’m going to stop drinking today and actually doing it. We’ve been conditioning our minds to think that we need alcohol, and that alcohol will make our lives better. This book goes about disproving that.

It’s almost been more fascinating keeping note of all of the reactions to this book I get. The first thing out of everyone’s mouth when I tell them the title of the book is some variation of “I didn’t know you had a problem with alcohol”, said in a joking-yet-slightly-pitying manner. You can almost feel people reassessing what they think they know about you. I then go on to tell them about the book. I don’t point fingers, I don’t even reference “you”. I just say, this book is about how our society treats alcohol, and the pressure that goes along when you don’t want to drink anymore. I say, alcohol is bad for you. It’s a legal drug that is addictive, yet is almost socially forced upon you.

The responses vary, but it comes down to a few similar answers – Well, wine isn’t bad for you, it’s been proven to have antioxidants. It’s a cultural thing, Europeans always have wine with dinner. My grandparents/parents (depending on the age of who I’m talking to) always had a shot/glass/alcohol every night and they lived to be 100. People immediately jump to the defense of alcohol, even though I didn’t come out and attack them for their drinking habits. (I didn’t even mention their drinking or if they even drank!)

This book breaks apart all of the defenses that we tell ourselves, strips away all of the pretty marketing to show your brain what alcohol truly is. I think that’s the most eye-opening part about this book – the awareness of the role of alcohol in our society. Something that we take for granted, and is so easily accepted.

Andrew definitely has cut back on the amount that he drinks. He still has a beer every now and then, but he was shocked to see how many people that he interacted with on a daily basis offered him a beer or a drink. I think that just that awareness is something that we should all have a little more of in our day to day life anyways, so just reading this book helps in that aspect. Even if you don’t believe everything that she writes about, and even if all the stats aren’t true (I did some research but she has a lot of stats), she writes in such a common sense manner that it has you scratching your head and really asking yourself ‘Why?’. This can also be used for a multitude of habits we have. Just ask yourself why you do something and see what kind of answers you come up with, until you get to the base reason you do something. Only then can you really make a change to the habits if you want to change them.

And that’s the other big thing I believe in – You can’t make a change until you are truly committed to change for yourself. It never works if you’re relying on an external motivation.

I hope that this wasn’t too controversial, and that I didn’t come across as preachy. Don’t hate! Let me know what you think of this, and if this is a book that you’d ever be interested in reading!