How to Stop Beer Cravings

Once you have identified your craving for beer, you can work towards alleviating yourself of those cravings by changing your behavior to include healthier cravings and changing your mindset to focus your goals around your real objective, controlling your cravings. While the physical craving for alcohol subsides first, the long-term psychological craving can remain with you for the rest of your life. But you can free yourself from your cravings and learn to overcome your addiction.

Instructions

• 1

  Introduce yourself to your addiction by studying the reasons for your cravings. Ask yourself if your desire to drink is connected to your emotional feelings regarding your life or if it is a social habit that you developed from hanging out with your friends. Analyze the emotional feelings that you have when you feel your craving getting stronger. For instance, if you feel a craving coming on while you are feeling bad about your job or place in life, you may be experiencing an emotional craving or a desire to evade an emotional situation.

• 2

  Address your craving directly by focusing on specific solutions to your unique addiction. Remove yourself from social events if you find that these events trigger your cravings. Use alternatives to beer if your believe your addiction to be physical, such as hard candy as a substitute for the sugar you normally get in beer.

• 3

  Confront your emotional cravings first by asking yourself what you dislike about your cravings. Ask yourself how they make you feel about yourself and if they are something that you want to overcome. Then, review your life for those emotional issues that seem to negatively affect your mood and desire to drink. For instance, you may decide that your cravings make you feel controlled and that you want to overcome them for your own sense of freedom. You may also realize that your desire to drink is linked to your feelings about your job.

• 4

  Alter your mindset to help curb your cravings by changing the words with which you think. Select words that are more positive, but still true, about your place in life or things that are bothering you. Choose words to describe your cravings that express how you really feel about them. As an example, if you are unhappy with your job, begin thinking about your job as stable employment or an environment where you can grow from, while thinking about your cravings in terms of controlling or imprisoning you. Force yourself to use your new words both in your mind when you think about these things as well as the words you use when you talk to others.