The brain associates alcohol with relief from certain ailments.

Drinking helps manage pain or feelings of fear, anger, and hopelessness about your body.

This archetype commonly appears when it feels like your body has let you down.

The Remedy tends to show up when:

• • Feeling constrained by physical limitations.
  • Coping with chronic pain or recurring injuries.
  • Struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep.
  • Experiencing hormonal shifts.

When The Remedy is activated, saying no interferes with your desire for relief, making it hard to abstain or moderate.

“A drink is the only thing that helps.”

Instead of offering relief, drinking increases inflammation, disrupts hormones, disturbs your sleep cycle, and diverts energy away from healing.

“The Remedy teaches the brain that alcohol is the only way out of suffering.”

Humans have a long history of using alcohol for medicinal purposes.

But when you repeatedly turn to alcohol to help with what ails you, you’ll end up creating more stress on the body.

Here’s an example of the thoughts, feelings, and actions associated with The Remedy.

Together, they create a learned behavior and influence your relationship with alcohol.

Circumstance: You’re in physical pain.

Thought: Drinking is the only thing that helps.

Feeling: Desire

Action: You start drinking to numb the pain. Notice what you’re not doing:

• You’re not distinguishing pain from suffering. There’s a difference between painful sensations in the body and the suffering created by fear, anger, despair, and hopelessness. Separating the two won’t magically erase all pain, but it can make it more manageable.
• You’re not challenging catastrophizing, all-or-nothing, and black-and-white thinking. So much additional suffering is caused by unconscious thought patterns that tend toward extremes: I can’t take this… I’m falling apart… What if x happens… I’m never going to feel better… etc.
• You’re not listening to your body’s signals. You may try to override your pain by pushing yourself too hard, overworking, or ignoring signs you need rest.

Result: Short-term: alcohol numbs the pain. Long-term: alcohol increases inflammation in the body, diverts energy away from healing, and increases your anxiety about your situation.

Here’s why:

• Alcohol doesn’t actually decrease pain. Rather, it changes the way the brain processes information from our senses. By depressing the central nervous system, alcohol blunts your senses so that you experience painful sensations less sharply.   
• That said, a single serving is usually not enough to create the relief you seek, which is why you’re more likely to overdrink. 
• The more you drink to cope with pain, the more you start to believe—whether consciously or unconsciously—that alcohol is the only thing that helps.
• Meanwhile, alcohol increases inflammation in the body. And because the body must expend energy to process alcohol, it also diverts energy away from healing. Both of these can worsen what ails you. 
• Over time, your brain learns to expect a high-value reward when you experience pain. The brain is now incentivized to interpret sensations as painful or negative because doing so leads to a reward. 
• The more you drink, the more you increase the likelihood of developing a tolerance, which leads to drinking more in a sitting. Now, you need more alcohol to achieve the same dulling effect. The more you consume, the greater the toll on the body. 
• Additionally, your suffering also expands because you aren’t challenging the what-ifs, all-or-nothing, or black-and-white thought patterns that lead to fear, anger, despair, and hopelessness about what ails you.  
• Meanwhile, you’re not practicing healthy or sustainable coping mechanisms that can lead to feeling better in the long run.  
• As a result, you keep believing the thought, “Drinking is the only thing that helps,” which reinforces The Remedy archetype. In reality, alcohol is making your situation exponentially worse.

 The Remedy often uses fear to sabotage rules, drink plans, and Dry Januarys.

Keep in mind, not all obstacles will apply to everyone with this archetype:

• • Once the pain starts, you just need to find relief.
  • You were planning to cut back, and then you got sick or injured yourself.
  • To you, drinking is preferable over taking meds.
  • You feel scared or hopeless about your condition.
  • If there’s no cure, then why not drink?
  • You poured the drink because you can’t afford not to sleep tonight.
  • You poured the drink because you don’t want to lie awake worrying.
  • You’re angry or find it unfair that this happened to you.
  • You blame yourself for not doing more to protect your health.
  • You feel frustrated and down about your physical limitations.

The Remedy’s deeper desire is balance.

The deeper desire is what the drink represents.

Balance is about discovering how to navigate your body’s inevitable ups and downs.

Here’s what it sounds like:

• I take my body’s needs seriously.
• I know how to get out of a spiral when I’m sick, in pain, or unable to sleep.
• I never put off feeling grateful for my body.

Without this skill, pain, discomfort, or disruption in the body can quickly spiral into suffering.

The more you focus on how your body should behave, the more at odds you are with your body.

This is why, with The Remedy, it’s essential to develop balance alongside managing cravings.

 “Alcohol is a costly bandaid that leaves me worse off.”

Letting go of The Remedy will help you find peace.

Here are some of the superpowers waiting to be unlocked:

• • Knowing how to befriend your body even when it’s not at its best.
  • Navigating your body’s ups and downs without unnecessary suffering.
  • Learning how to set boundaries, manage stress, and respect cues from your body.
  • Feeling calm and unbothered when you struggle with sleep.
  • Feeling thankful for your body even when it’s not cooperating.
  • Finding the wisdom hidden inside physical ailments, injuries, or discomfort.
  • Tending to your needs before they make themselves known.