Putting The Lizard Brain To Sleep

 Yesterday I pondered going to the beach (this is Florida, after all), but then I remembered it was the Saturday after the 4th of July.  I might have considered it anyway, but A) too hot, B) too crowded, and C) I had the weirdest thought while browsing the coolers at Sam’s Club.

Kinda like...

 

I wasn’t looking for a cooler, but there it was, small and compact and lightweight. It was a little insulated box with a handle and lots of clever little compartments for holding stuff. 

This would be perfect at the beach, I thought, an innocent enough conclusion to arrive at. 

But then, for the first time in a very long time, a sly little voice reached me from somewhere deep in my reptilian brain stem: Hey, look, the voice whispered, It’s perfect for holding a six pack of beer. Or, even better, TWO of those little 4-packs of minis I used to pick up at the gas station. Me, the beach, and this little cooler. That would be fun. 

Not today, Satan.

Which is interesting, because I’m not much of a beach guy. I’ve been maybe half a dozen times in the 12 years I’ve lived in Florida. 

As I said, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard from my reptilian brain stem. Thanks, but no. I put the cooler back on the shelf, moved on, forgot about it. 

Except that here I am now, thinking about the beach. And that nifty little cooler. And realizing it’s probably not a great idea for me to start hanging out alone on the beach. 

* * *

Look, I’ve made real strides in my recovery, starting with the fact that I can say the word recovery without breaking out in hives. Like most drunks, oops, alcoholics, wait we don’t actually use that term anymore, I meant people with substance use disorders (yes, this is the new terminology, get it right you slackers) I had reached a point where I had to either stop or lose everything, up to and including my life. 

And, like most addicts, I did not want to get better. Not really, not at first. Oh sure, I wanted to not feel the hangovers and the shakes and the withdrawal and the existential agony that my addiction had become. But actual recovery?

Meh, not so much. That ol’ lizard brain had ideas of its own. It had dopamine receptors that were hungry, and synapses that needed firing, and inhibitions that needed lowering. The lizard brain had neeeeeeds, BABY. 

You learn in recovery that you can’t kill the lizard brain. If you have a genetic propensity to addiction, you will always have a genetic proprensity to addition. The best you can do is put the lizard brain back to sleep, like it was before you woke those genes up with that first drink.  

* * *

I feel lucky in that I haven’t had a craving for alcohol in well over two years. Before that the cravings would come and go, crashing over me like waves, but each time becoming shorter, less intense, dying down. But they never entirely went away, not for a long time. 

You might have thought the DUI, the night in jail, the court date, the legal fees — all that should be enough to make someone swear off alcohol for good. But no. 

You could rationally assume that a two-week stint in rehab, nine hours per week in an IOP that went on for months, and ongoing group and 1-on-1 therapy would be enough to turn someone off of booze. But no. 

Some people, upon sobering up enough to see the damage they had done to themselves and others, to their careers, their relationships, to their very lives would never want to see alcohol again. 

But not me. 

Despite all of that, the first two years of my sobriety were a constant struggle not only to manage the daily cravings, but also to unlearn the thinking and behaviors that were part of my addiction ritual: find the hit, use the hit, hide the hit, recover from the hit. 

She was an idiot. 

It wasn’t a question of “just saying no” to the cravings (have I mentioned that Nancy Reagan was an idiot?), it was about unlearning all of the choreography that had supported my habit, and had been reinforced over the course of decades. 

Weirdly, and for reasons I still can’t entirely explain, the last of my cravings disappeared after my last relapse -- But only because I took what felt like a radical and desperate step: 

I had a breathalyzer installed on my car. 

It seemed like an extreme move to take, to be honest. I had gotten better, after all. And I had relapsed before. I had been sober for a full year again, before my parents had marched off the GOP cliff and refused the Covid shot, because Sean Hannity said the virus was a hoax and the vaccine was dangerous. 

When they died of Covid that August, I fell off the wagon and landed pretty hard. I pulled myself back from the brink, redoubled my efforts, and then picked up another drink. The cycle repeated itself a couple more times. This had been my fourth or fifth slip up in the six months since they’d died. 

But there’s no such thing as a “slip up” in recovery. People tend to think of a relapse as an incident, like it’s just an event that happens: You picked up your drug of choice, and you used. 

But relapse, I’ve learned, is less an “event,” than a process. The cravings don’t start when you pick up that drink, they actually start much, much earlier. “Slip ups” are an indication that you’re already well into that process. 

It's not an "event," it's a process.

And if you’ve slipped up after a long period of sobriety, that little slip up has the potential to reactivate all of those booze-loving genes that are sleeping in your DNA. That slip-up has the potential to wake up that thirsty lizard brain.  

Fortunately, there are all kinds of warning signs, all kinds of ways interrupt the process or relapse before the event occurs. I’d been trying to be more vigilant, to identify when that cycle started for me. And I kept moving the goal posts: did it start when I walked past the beer & wine aisle at the grocery store? Was I already engaged in the process at that point? 

It was with no small horror I realized that the process for me often started in my car. I had promised myself I would never feel the shame of my addiction again, no matter what it took. If it meant taking more drastic action, so be it. I would put this device on my car, and if that didn’t work, I would go back to that fucking rehab. 

What I wasn’t going to do, was drink again. And so, in keeping a promise to myself, I had the device installed, and started blowing into a tube each time to start my car. 

It was humiliating at first, blowing into a tube in any given parking lot, in broad daylight, right in front of god & everyone. I was convinced every time I blew into it that the world had stopped, that people were pointing and staring: Hey look everyone! The town drunk is starting his car!

But no one really noticed. And I got used to it. 

* * *

This poor guy is addicted.

It’s now two years later, and I haven’t had a craving for alcohol since. Not one, not even a glimmer. I have no idea why this worked, no clue how putting this device on my car finally made the lizard brain go back into deep sleep. 

Is it a crutch? Fine, crutch me. All I know is that it worked. 

Anyway, I had been planning to take it off at the end of this cycle, for a number of reasons. See “crutch” above — sooner or later, the training wheels have to come off, right? Also, there’s the cost. It’s a 6-month lease period for the unit; it’s not a ton of money, but still. And I want to see if the lizard brain wakes up when the device is gone — or if it’s in a long-term coma. 

But mostly, it’s time. I’ve been blowing into this fucking tube for two years. Enough already. I got this! Let’s do it! 

But the lizard brain thinks about that little cooler, with its clever compartments for holding beer. The lizard rolls over in its fitful sleep, and mumbles to itself. 

Nice little cooler, it says. Perfect for the beach. All alone, baby, just you and me…