If you are from a Commonwealth Country, there’s a high likelihood you have a pioneering mentality when it comes to your relationship with alcohol. 

You go hard, or you go fucking home. 

If that sounds like how you’ve approached your drinking to date, first, it’s what happens in bars from Vancouver to Tasmania and you’re not alone. 

You’ve inherited a historical problem that you’ve probably never thought much about. In order to stand the back breaking work that building tunnels, bridges and roads required in the mentality of the early settlers, your forefathers drank, and drank hard.

I don’t know if you got the memo, but you no longer need to drink like you are about to dynamite enough rock to blast out the Milford Tunnel. 

Finding a way to be gentler with yourself and your relationship with alcohol, could be tricky. As tricky as trying to get yourself back to Great Britain in the 1800’s with ships only going one way – out to the colonies. Unlike your forefathers, you can go home.

There is a hack though: try reframing each time you go drinking through this filter:

Is this go hard or go home malarkey true?

Is this helpful?

Is this kind?

Is my unquestioned core belief that go hard or go home is the only way to drink, true? Do I need to ponder that assumption and investigate just where it came from?

To drink without any regard for my well-being? Is that helpful? How am I helping myself drinking without stopping or taking breaks in between?

Is it kind? Am I really going to lose out if I pace myself tonight, if I have a zero beer between each lager?

I’d love to know if you tried this filter on for size. As always, if you’ve had a breakthrough, please send them in.

Go to it!

Maree