Alcohol and Sobriety. Alcohol is a WHO Group 1 carcinogen. Not a lifestyle choice, not a grey area, a carcinogen. This is where I talk about what it actually does to your body and brain, why quitting is the single best decision you’ll ever make, and how to do it without the 12 steps, rehab, or labelling yourself for life. Real talk from a bloke who drank for over 40 years and walked away without a programme.
I Quit Alcohol. Why Has My Brain Found Another Dealer? At half nine one evening, I found myself standing in the kitchen eating biscuits like the police were on their way to confiscate them. The drinking had stopped. I had survived the raw beginning, got through the evenings when every internal alarm seemed to be…
THE BOOZE INDUSTRY HAS FOUND A WAY INTO MIDLIFE. IT IS USING YOUR RECORD COLLECTION AS A HOUSE KEY. Nostalgia and Alcohol Cravings. Bars are reportedly turning their attention towards Gen X with earlier events, eighties and nineties music, retro nights and enough carefully packaged nostalgia to make a fifty-eight-year-old man believe his knees might…
By Ian Callaghan, author of Under Load and creator of the Emotional Observation Method Why do I forget how bad alcohol makes me feel?The blunt answer: You do not forget the facts. What fades is the emotional and physical force attached to them. As your body recovers, the misery becomes harder to feel from a…
You quit drinking, wait for your magnificent new life to arrive and discover the courier has apparently fucked off to Narnia with it. The booze has gone, and the hangovers are going. Yet Tuesday evening now lasts nine days,s and the most exciting event ahead is deciding whether the magnolia needs another coat. Then Bob…
Most people do not keep going back to alcohol because they are stupid. That is the lazy version, the one people reach for when they want the world simple and everyone else neatly filed under weak, selfish, reckless or broken. It lets them feel clever without understanding anything. It also keeps the drinker trapped, because…
Why Can’t I Moderate My Drinking? The Real Reason Every Rule Breaks There is a particular kind of drinker who rarely gets spoken to properly. Not the person in the dramatic public collapse. Not the cautionary-tale version with sirens, court dates, lost jobs and everyone gathered around the kitchen table looking grave. That version exists,…
If you are searching how to stop drinking every night, there is a good chance you are not looking for a lecture. You already know the pattern. You finish work. You tell yourself you deserve a drink. One drink becomes two. Two becomes the bottle, the cans, the top-up, the “just one more because tomorrow…
This article was written by Ian Callaghan, creator of the Emotional Observation Method (EOM), a whole-system framework for breaking addictive behaviour patterns by regulating physiology before attempting identity change. Ian is the author of Under Load and Fix Your Metabolism, has 40-plus years of food and nutrition knowledge, including City and Guilds qualifications and diplomas…
The Death Certificate That Never Says Alcohol Quick answer: Alcohol rarely appears as the named cause on a death certificate. The document records the final medical event, the heart failure, the cancer or the fall, not the substance that built it over decades. In 2023, the UK registered 10,473 alcohol-specific deaths, the highest number on record,…
Boredom in Sobriety Anyone can put down the bottle. It is the after that gets hard. Boredom in sobriety is not a relapse risk waiting to drag you back under. It is your nervous system running clean for the first time in decades, without a chemical spiking it and crashing it on a loop. The…
By Ian Callaghan. Qualified Chef · Diplomas in Nutrition · City and Guilds · NLP Master Practitioner · Reiki Master · British Army Veteran · 25 Years Technical Architect · 40 Years of Food and Nutrition · Author of Under Load · Creator of the Emotional Observation Method. Here is the short answer, because you…
There are two photographs of me that tell the whole story, taken about eighteen months apart, and the entire weight-loss industry is quietly hoping you never lay them side by side and ask what happened in the gap. Same man, same face, except one of them is carrying five stone the other one isn’t. Not…
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