I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family who considered alcohol one of the five food groups. Members of my family would numb themselves with alcohol in good times and bad, and the bad times would get worse because they couldn’t handle the intoxication.
Rather than forgetting your failures by numbing the pain with alcohol or other drugs, it is far more effective to etch your failures into your brain so that you can ensure you learn from them. When you turn to an external chemical every time things don’t go your way, you will not give your brain a clear opportunity to learn from that experience.
And as an additional bonus, not intoxicating yourself can improve your health, sleeping cycles, focus, willpower, and your bank account.1
