I used to believe the thing that separated people who made big changes from those people who didn’t, was willpower. I also used to believe that willpower was the ability to grit your teeth, dig deep and just work at it harder. I used to say it myself, “I don’t have the willpower for that,” as if it were a fixed trait I’d simply been born short of. I spent ten years trying to win that way.
I believed willpower operated from a place of choice, a considered decision to resist, made calmly, in the moment. But I was spending most of that decade operating from a nervous system that felt like it was in constant threat unless I was drunk. And a brain in threat mode doesn’t make considered decisions. It reacts. Our brains are wired to keep us safe, no matter what, and they can’t always tell the difference between something genuinely dangerous and something that’s just uncomfortable.
Day 88
“My brain is trying to protect me from feeling uncomfortable by remembering how I used to numb that pain with alcohol.”
When I wrote this I wasn’t ok. It was one of the hardest stretches I’d been through. Day 88 put me well into a twelve week CBT drop-in at CGL, going once a week, whilst also seeing a counsellor every other week. On top of that, we were in the final push to finish the cabin. I was still working the tree business full time during the day, and every day I was writing online to create the extra support and connection I needed.
All of that support was real, and I needed it. But none of it had caught up yet with what was actually happening inside me. At this point I was what’s known as a dry drunk. That’s someone who’s stopped drinking but hasn’t changed the thinking or behaviour that drove the drinking in the first place. The alcohol was gone, but everything it used to cover for was still very much there. For me that meant inner turmoil that had nowhere to go. I felt completely trapped in my own body, longing for an escape I could no longer let myself have.
What was actually happening, underneath all of it, was a capacity problem. When things got to be too much, cortisol would surge, and my body would read it as a genuine threat, to the point where I couldn’t function. That surge usually showed up as an outburst, and the outburst was almost never a response to what was actually in front of me. It was an old memory doing the driving, the one built over twenty years, that had learnt drinking was the fastest way to make the danger go away. Once the alcohol was gone, that response didn’t switch off. It just had nowhere left to send the signal, so it went looking for another outlet, and that’s what the outbursts were.
As my nervous system started to regulate, that difference became easier to see. I started to notice when a feeling was responding to something real, right in front of me, and when it was really an old memory firing off a reaction that had nothing to do with what was actually happening.
There was another layer to it too. I was the one who had removed the alcohol. I’d put myself in that state of despair, on purpose, and I wasn’t remotely happy about it. I was angry, and grieving the loss of the one coping tool I’d ever had. In that state, I saw myself as the threat, the direct cause of my own pain, for taking it away. And underneath that was all the shame and conflict that years of drinking leaves behind, the disrespect and self-harm it does to you, still unresolved. It would take another year and a half before I found the tools to actually deal with it.
That’s exactly why willpower and gritting your teeth alone can’t be the things that get you through addiction. Willpower lives in the PFC, the part of the brain that can reason, weigh options, and choose a considered response, and that’s exactly the part that gets taken offline by the time a craving hits, or you’re triggered. You can’t out-reason a threat response using the one system the threat response has already switched off. Psychologist Steven Hayes, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, calls the deeper pattern experiential avoidance, the attempt to escape or numb an uncomfortable internal experience, even when the avoidance costs you more than the discomfort ever would have. You’re not battling a craving for alcohol. You’re battling a brain that’s already skipped past reasoning and gone straight for memory, using the only tool it’s ever trusted to do the job.
Here’s what I actually believe willpower is. It’s real, but it only gets you as far as your current capacity to deal with the stresses of life, no further. What I actually meant when I told myself “I don’t have the willpower for that” was that the demand in front of me was bigger than the capacity I’d built to meet it, and willpower was just the word I reached for to explain the gap without understanding it.
I spent a decade thinking the answer was to force more of it out of myself anyway. Fighting the craving. Outlasting it. Gritting my teeth against the feeling instead of letting myself feel it. It worked for a day, sometimes a week. It never once worked for good. A craving was never something I could beat through force. It was a signal that something uncomfortable was asking to be felt, and it kept asking, louder, for as long as I kept refusing to answer. All that gritting ever left me was exhausted, reaching for the same fucking thing again, an off switch that was keeping me from a future I deserved to enjoy.
What actually worked was the opposite of what willpower had ever asked of me. Not resisting the feeling harder. Letting it be there. Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is built on this: willingness to feel an uncomfortable emotion, without acting on the urge to escape it, is what breaks the cycle. Not because the discomfort disappears. It doesn’t. But because you stop needing it to disappear before you can function. The threat response calms down once it stops being fought.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a fight. But it’s a different one now. Less running at a wall and hoping something gives, more knowing when to meet something with force and when to hold back and conserve the energy instead. That shift, from spending everything at once to protecting what I’ve got, is what actually got me here. Sober, present, able to feel hard things and stay standing.
This is the belief I had to change. Not that willpower doesn’t exist, but that willpower was ever the thing I was actually relying on. What I’d really been drawing on for ten years was alcohol, and I’d been calling the gap it left behind “not enough willpower” because I had no other language for it. Once I understood that, the task stopped being about trying harder and started being about building capacity, learning to sit with the discomfort long enough for the threat response to settle, without needing a substance to do it for me. That’s slower than gritting your teeth. It’s also the only version of it that’s ever actually worked.
This is exactly why coaching that uses positive psychology, motivational interviewing, and CBT-based tools works where willpower alone doesn’t. None of those approaches ask you to out-think the threat response in the moment it’s happening. Instead, they work earlier and slower, building new memories and new evidence for the brain to reach for instead, so that when the PFC does go offline, there’s something better waiting in its place than the old default. The people I work with now aren’t taught to grit their teeth. They’re taught to notice the discomfort, name it, and let it move through them without needing to make it stop. That’s not weaker than willpower. It’s the thing willpower was always trying and failing to substitute for.
If you’re still fighting a version of this, telling yourself you just need to want it more, try harder, be stronger, I’d gently say the fight itself might be the thing keeping you stuck. The real work isn’t finding more willpower. It’s building the capacity you were never taught to build in the first place. The website is where you can start looking at what you’ve actually been avoiding, and what it might look like to stop.
Cam x
Up Next; Day 474
“The bull in my gut”
When the capacity runs out,
the body finds its own way to make the feeling stop.
The decision to stop is just the beginning.
More at camspringett.cloud