The Best Books to Help You Stop Drinking

If you are thinking about quitting drinking or moderating your alcohol intake have you thought about using self-help methods to get you started? Self-help can be a powerful tool for many to assist in their journey to wellness so we thought it was worth talking about the 10 best books to help you stop drinking.

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How to Stop Drinking With Self-Help Books

I know you might think to yourself “how can a book help me?” but self-help books can be powerful tools when it comes to changing thought patterns or unhelpful behaviours. They can make a difference because:

You are getting a different perspective to your own.
They give you strategies you haven’t thought of.
Stories of others recovery can be inspiring.

They help to boost your motivation and willpower.
They help you understand other people like you have made positive changes.

The self-help industry is huge and people are not buying these books looking for help to change. While they may not be the answer for everyone for others they can make a real difference. Plus a book is a relatively inexpensive way to start your journey. Remember if you still need help from someone such as ourselves that is still an option at a later stage. We also have a FREE drink less quick start guide to help you on your journey to drinking less for you to download.

Drink Less Download

Sobriety Books

There are of course thousands of books to help you stop drinking or change bad habits. Deciding which books to choose can be confusing when you are confronted with so many titles on the market. So we have compiled a list of our top ten books to help you get started drinking less.

Our stop drinking book choices will hopefully give you some guidance on what to choose if you are looking to help yourself. We recommend that you read around the subject so one book may not have all the answers. Find two or three that speak to your needs and find the time and headspace to absorb what they tell you.

Best Books to Stop Drinking

Let’s start with one of the most popular self-help authors for addictive behaviours. Allen Carr started his career out advising people how to quit smoking before moving on to other addictive behaviours. Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Control Alcohol was written after his stop smoking methods were a huge success.

In this book Allen gives you step by step instructions to help you escape from what he calls the “alcohol trap”. Interestingly Allen’s methods do not rely on the use of willpower and he claims that there are no withdrawal issues either using his methods. Instead, he makes you think about things in a different way so that your psychological need for it is removed.

Mindful Drinking Book

We can’t have a list of books to help you stop drinking without talking about mindfulness. Mindfulness is a relative newcomer to the self-help scene and has really exploded in the last ten years. The premise of mindfulness is concentrating on the here and now rather than allowing your mind to focus on the past or future.

In terms of drinking less mindfulness is there to help you focus on increased awareness of what you are doing to your body, how many drinks you are consuming and why you might feel the need for alcohol. Most of us are unaware of why we are choosing to drink because our brains have learned the “habit” and continue to repeat the same behaviours over and over again. As our brains work at a super-fast speed we’ve don’t notice what we are doing until its already happened. Mindfulness slows the thought processes down so we can examine our behaviours and make changes to our unhelpful drinking patterns.

How to be a Mindful Drinker is a book that is designed to help you start to pay attention to what you are actually doing. It is designed to help you moderate your habits, track what you are doing, deal with triggers, address stress and stay on track.

Sober Books

The books that are out there on the market are often written by men but increasingly women are starting to tell their sobriety stories as well. We have noticed a huge upsurge in enquiries from women at our clinics to get help to drink less. This is without a doubt fueled by stress and increased acceptance of drinking in the home or after work.

Our average female client is not a traditional alcoholic who is barely able to look after themselves. Instead, they are high powered executives or middle management employees who are trying to run a home and work long hours. Juggling the two is hard work so wine o’clock in the evenings is seen as wind downtime. The drug of choice of course to wind down is a bottle (or two of wine).

Claire Pooley in The Sober Diaries is very similar to our average client. She is a Cambridge graduate and was a managing partner at an advertising agency. The only problem is that she was also an overweight, depressed, mother of three drinking a bottle of wine a night. This is her story of what she did about it and her advice on how to handle living a life without a glass of wine in your hands.

Quit Lit

Our list of books to help you stop drinking wouldn’t be complete without a celebrity in the mix and who better to write a book on addictions than Russell Brand.

If you are unaware of Russell Brand he is an English comedian and raconteur who found minor fame by being in some Hollywood films and marrying the singer Katy Perry. Yet before his stardom, he had a well-publicised problem with addiction.

His problems were likely to have been caused by his upbringing. When he was young his mother was diagnosed with cancer so he had to live with relatives in his formative years. When he did return home it was only for a short period of time before he walked out because of arguments with his mother’s partner. During this period he experienced bulimia as well as began taking drugs such as LSD, ecstasy, cannabis, heroin and suffered from addiction to alcohol. So if anyone is able to write on the subject of addiction Russell is clearly the man.

Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions is based on what he has learned from his recovery journey. He wants his readers to understand “what pain is your addiction masking”. Dealing with the underlying problem he believes is the answer to the problem. At our clinics, this is something we ask all our clients in sessions. To us, alcohol or drugs are just the symptom but not the full story.

How to Give Up Alcohol Books – Change Habits

We talk a lot to our clients in their sessions about habits and how they are formed. So many people have a series of associations that they have built around alcohol. As an example, you come home from work and you pour yourself a glass of wine as soon as you have taken off your coat. You sit in the same chair every single evening to drink your wine. You pour yourself a glass whilst you are cooking your dinner. Repeat this multiple times and the mind expects the same thing to happen again.

The Alcohol Experiment by Annie Grace talks about habit and its importance in keeping you drinking. She believes that habits can be broken with the right tools and she thinks that her book can help you to crack the code to success. This book asks you to abstain from drinking for 30 days whilst giving you help from mindfulness to help take back control and stop cravings. Each chapter focuses on one day of the 30-day experiment.

Best Books to Quit Drinking

We know from experience that many of our clients dread the thought of trying to quit drinking in group sessions such as AA. They don’t want to expose their lives and hold them up to scrutiny in a group setting and would always rather see a therapist one to one or work on self-help methods alone. This is why this book by Jack Canfield might be the solution as he wrote it with that thought in mind.

If you have never heard of Jack then let me tell you one of his other best selling titles – Chicken Soup for the Soul®! Jack is a New York Times bestselling author and he has turned his hand to writing a book to help you either moderate your drinking or totally quit from the privacy of your own home.

Jacks Books the 30-Day Sobriety Solution is based on his work in self-esteem and success training. This book helps you with practical exercises to help you make more positive choices going forward.

Quit Literature

Many of our clients want to quit drinking many of them also have a worry about what they are going to do without it. For some people, alcohol is almost like a friend. It is there for them when they are upset, sad, lonely or stressed. It is used to help them get to sleep, switch off, forget upsets and to relax with friends. The thought of going without it fills some people with fear even though another part of them is desperate to stop drinking.

Simon Chapple who wrote the next book understands this and spent twenty years drinking too much because of the same thought processes. Therefore he wrote a book of two halves. The first portion of the book is designed to help you start on your journey to quitting whilst the second half helps you to deal with trigger situations when you are sober. Plus he shares his story along the way in The Sober Survival Guide.

Sober Stories

Finally, the last book I want to talk about today is a bestseller called The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Gray. She has had her fair share of bad experiences and decisions made because of drink including being placed in a police cell and getting into a hot tub topless with work colleagues. Yet despite her colleagues fearing for her safety at times she continued to hold down high powered roles in the magazine industry.

Finally, after a series of lows, she managed to get sober and this is her story of how her life has changed without the hangovers. She also wants to talk to you about how advertising and society have pushed the notion of drinking too much into our lives and tried to make it acceptable. The best books to help you stop drinking tell real stories or problems with real people.

My clients will have heard me saying similar to them. Bar cart in the house? Wine fridge in the kitchen? Wine racks, wine cellar, posh glasses, bar signs and so on are invading our homes and nobody has ever stopped to question the negative impact of seeing these around us daily. Changing your thoughts about what is acceptable can help you on your wellness journey.

Other Methods to Help You Drink Less Alcohol

Changing your conscious thoughts is one way of helping to change your bad habits but what if you could change subconscious ones as well. Our Drink Less Self-hypnosis Download is designed to help to change ingrained patterns of behaviour that are hidden below the surface. You can purchase the download in our online store to help you moderate your drinking.

Drink Less Download

We also have a set of drink less worksheet printables which can help you to change your drinking habits by making you more aware of what you are consuming. Our printables have sheets to track your drinking triggers, note down your consumption and tips to manage cravings. These are simple to use and once you have the PDF you can print off as many copies as you need to act as an alcohol tracker.