Pep category: Maintain

• Planning everyday

  4 sectionsin Maintain

  

  As you progress through the Peps, you’ll probably notice that your drinking has changed or is changing. This Pep looks at how planning each day will protect our gains, build resilience and move us closer to the life we want to live.

• Building confidence

  4 sectionsin Maintain

  

  If you’re a seasoned user of Peps or are following one of the curated courses, you may have already come across the Reliance Bag. In short, I give the moniker to the place we record or store our accumulated alcohol reliances. This Pep invites us to address what’s inside our bag to build confidence and maintain our recovery.

• Feeling change

  4 sectionsin Maintain

  

  In The pros and cons of drinking Pep, we encouraged you to consider the benefits and costs of drinking and mark them as either short-term or long-term. It was a helpful exercise, but it only tells half the story. This Pep looks beyond the pros and cons and explores the deeper motivation for changing relationships with alcohol.

• Unexpected bonus

  1 sectionin Maintain

  

  In the Evolving motivation section of the Feeling change Pep, I talk about using the feeling of early AF wins to help drive us forward. This Pep is also about wins, but this time focuses on the unexpected bonuses of changing our drinking.

• Handling emotions

  5 sectionsin Maintain

  

  Alcohol gets tangled up in our emotions, amplifying both positive and negative feelings, and it unbalances our mental equilibrium so much that separating natural from alcohol-influenced feelings becomes difficult.

• Mind garden

  1 sectionin Maintain

  

  The mind garden is a well-used metaphor within the recovery community. When I first heard it, I rolled my eyes and thought, ‘here we go’. But over time, I’ve riffed with it, and it has become a valuable tool I return to. Try it and see what you think. Hopefully, it can do the same for you.

• Being you

  3 sectionsin Maintain

  

  Peps are not here to change you; they’re here to change your drinking. They simply encourage you to scratch through the veneer alcohol creates to enable you to reconnect with your genuine self.

• Flourish

  1 sectionin Maintain

  

  At the top of the last Pep, I said, “Peps are not here to change you; they’re here to change your drinking.” But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evolve. After all, we’re not the same people we were as children or teenagers, and we’re unlikely to remain the same forever. So, now you’ve changed your drinking, how will you flourish?

• The life you want

  2 sectionsin Maintain

  

  Planning your new life and contemplating who you are becoming is exciting and a powerful motivation for change. However, when we visualise it in our mind’s eye, we tend to position ourselves at the centre of something and imagine a linear direction of travel towards our future. Here’s an exercise to help you experience it from other perspectives.