This Naked Mind by Annie Grace
A different way to understand your relationship with alcohol
By Annie Grace
About This Naked Mind
This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life explores why alcohol can become such a powerful part of our lives—even when we consciously want to drink less or stop.
Annie Grace looks at both the conscious and subconscious beliefs surrounding alcohol and examines psychological, neurological, cultural, and social influences on drinking. She combines research and science with her own experience of questioning and ultimately changing her relationship with alcohol.
Rather than focusing primarily on deprivation or willpower, the book asks readers to reconsider many of the assumptions they may have about what alcohol provides—relaxation, pleasure, confidence, stress relief, connection—and look at those beliefs differently.
Why I Recommend It
One of the things I appreciate about This Naked Mind is how it focuses on changing the way we think about alcohol. That’s much better than simply trying harder not to drink. Annie Grace points out the beliefs we absorb about alcohol and encourages readers to examine whether those beliefs are actually true. I didn’t discover this book until after I had already stopped drinking. I discovered it when I was researching writing Quit Drinking Plan. And I was astonished at how close to my own philosophy her belief about alcohol and quitting drinking are.
That is why her ideas fits particularly well with the Quit Drinking Plan: understanding your thoughts, questioning old assumptions, and deliberately building new ways of thinking.
Key Ideas You’ll Encounter
- How conscious and subconscious beliefs can influence drinking
- The role culture and social conditioning play in our ideas about alcohol
- Why willpower alone can feel like such a difficult way to change
- Examining beliefs about the supposed benefits of drinking
- Changing your relationship with alcohol by changing how you think about it
How It Connects to Quit Drinking Plan
This Naked Mind pairs particularly well with the Reprogramming and Self-Talk work in Quit Drinking Plan. Both encourage you to notice the beliefs and internal messages surrounding alcohol instead of simply accepting them as facts.
Related QDP Topics
- Reprogramming
- Self-Talk
- Drinking Voice
- Building Your Alcohol-Free Identity
About Annie Grace
Annie Grace is the author of This Naked Mind, The Alcohol Experiment, This Naked Mind: Nicotine, and other work focused on changing people’s relationship with alcohol. Her approach emphasizes understanding the psychological and neurological processes involved in drinking while reducing shame and judgment.
Everything I have learned about her is that she truly cares. Her work is a labor of love. She has done so much to change the culture around drinking.
Ready to Read This Naked Mind?
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