The way we think dictates the way we live. The things we think about, what we give importance to in our mind—they become who we are. So when we’re being negative or hard on ourselves all the time, we’re not really helping ourselves.

This is something I struggle with, and it behooves me—and you too, if you want to live a life in charge of yourself—to learn about this part of ourselves that we habitually allow to sabotage us … without a second thought. Learn about, and let go.

I’m not even sure what I need to learn—I just know that I don’t know enough to be doing enough right!  Maybe it’s the self talk that needs to disappear, or perhaps I need the skills for being able to really look clearly at a problem, or a myriad other issues.

I certainly understand the need to break out of bad cycles, but in my heart of hearts I think it should be easy—and I haven’t found that yet. I think it should be something as simple as thinking, “The way I’ve been doing this isn’t good for me. I’ll change to a better option.” Full stop. End of story. Done and dusted.

It should be that easy. It could be. It’s just a case of finding the golden thought, or the piece of magic, that will make it happen.

Yeah, I know. I’m too old to believe in the tooth fairy. But some people have discovered a higher consciousness. Some people don’t have mad urges that that they give in to and which ruin their health. Some people have worked it out perfectly. And if someone else has, I can too. It’s getting to that part of the world’s evolution where the hundredth monkey is going to know this stuff, and then suddenly we all will.

Keep on plugging away at this. Read books, learn the skills, keep your mind open. Anything can happen when you believe.

I know it seems that I’m a proponent of doing things the small way rather than a jump-in-and-make-a-big-splash kind of way. I don’t get scared off so easily if I divide a big project into tiny increments and then follow my incremental plan to see an improvement, albeit small and perhaps painfully slow.

Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that sometimes this simply does not work. It’s playing around in the shallows and all it does is muddy the waters. Sometimes you just need to face the big project or the hard decision with an all-of-you-against-all-of-it type of determination.

For people who drink and are either alcoholics (or believe they are, or are hovering on the edge of what they believe is being an alcoholic), it can be pretty hard to incrementally improve. I’ll just have one sip less every day until I’m only drinking one glass of wine, or one beer or a scotch right before bed.

Yeah, right. Most people who have a drinking problem know that although they’d like to be able to have ‘just one drink’, the before-one-drink decision and the after-one-drink resolution are generally diametrically opposed. Perhaps once you haven’t had alcohol in your system for a while you can make that call, but a lot of people simply find it impossible.

If you are a habitually heavy drinker, perhaps you can do this for one night with pure willpower. The next night, however, might be of almost binge proportions so your body can ‘make up’ the alcohol it lost the night before. This looks very unlikely in print but that is the way many of us respond to a night without our normal serving of alcohol.  So, back to the  point. Some things are actually easier to cut out completely than to limit, and many of us find that alcohol is one of them.

I remember that years and years ago I gave up smoking by using non-nicatine cigarettes for a couple of weeks. They tasted pretty foul but they allowed me to keep the habit while breaking the addiction. I was just 20 and thought it was a pretty smart idea back then—just do one hard thing at a time. Decades later, I still think it was a pretty good idea, because it worked for me. Of course, I wanted to give up smoking and that’s the number one consideration in anything like this. For drinking, a similar method can be used. Firstly, you must really want to stop being a slave to alcohol. Commit to that. Commit to the feeling of freedom you will have when you no longer have to even think about alcohol, let alone have it rule your every day. Go back in time in your mind and remember when you were young and alcohol wasn’t even a consideration in your daily life. You lived fine without it. You had fun. You coped with any bad times and didn’t need it. So you know it is possible to live a good life without it, because you’ve done it before.

Wine is my alcohol of choice. Weirdly, alcohol-removed wine, which we can buy in the supermarket (alcohol is not sold in supermarkets where we live), is actually dearer than many bottles of ordinary wine. My response to that is, hang the expense. It will work out cheaper (and of course better for overall health) in the long run.

So you don’t really like the taste of the drink? Not quite as good as your favourite tipple? Not nearly as good, then? Many’s the time I’ve seen the bottom of a wine bottle when I started out saying I didn’t really like the taste of that particular wine. So what you don’t love the taste? It will either grow on you or you will move to phase two quicker. Suck it up.

Stock enough in the pantry so there’s no way you’ll run out. If it makes you feel safer to have a back-up, keep your normal bottles of wine as well but put them in a different place. The non-alcoholic stuff needs to be in the place you habitually go for your first drink.

Some people say to keep busy, to do different things, to keep your hands occupied. I say just do the same things you always do but drink the non-alcoholic wine instead of alcoholic stuff. Keep drinking out of a wine glass. Keep chilling your bottle to perfection. If you’re a bottle-a-day type drinker, keep drinking that amount. And go to bed when you’re finished your bottle. Tomorrow’s another day.

Just remember that your own thoughts are more likely to sabotage you than your friends. During the day, find a bit of time to read about why alcohol is bad for you. Read stuff from real doctors. Dr Amen, for example. When you go to a party, take your bottle of non-al wine. Tell your friends that the doctor told you not to drink alcohol and you’d appreciate their help. If you’re on medication where you can’t take alcohol, use that explanation. And when your bottle’s finished, go home.

Some people like to quit (drinking, cigarettes, sugar, whatever) by putting it out there for all the world to see, but that doesn’t work for everyone. All that public accountability can actually scare off certain kinds of personalities. Just the thought of failing is enough to decide never to have a go in the first place. Some of us—even extroverts—prefer to undertake this process quietly, for ourselves. We gain strength by keeping the energy, the thoughts, the decision, inside. And that’s a fine way to do it. It’s not anyone else’s business, anyway. It’s ours, and ours alone.

I was thinking the other day about my hearts and kisses game and musing that a lot of people would think it was a pretty stupid idea. Visualisation. Make believe. Fairytales. And I started thinking that it probably was pretty childish.

Yet if the game works, isn’t it worth the silliness? For, in truth, is not our whole life a fairytale? Everyone’s version of reality is different, so you could convincingly argue that there is no true reality because each human makes his or her own concoction. We all see the world through our own glasses, tinted by our particular personalities and contorted by our personal experiences. If there is such a thing as reality, it is ‘out there’ and not truly able to be defined by mere mortals. That means that visualisation has just as much worth as our more established ideas about what is real.

So, on with the game. Anything that helps someone cope with a bad situation and doesn’t hurt anyone else is okay in my book.

I’ve worked out why my fridge works and my freezer doesn’t.

My fridge is often pretty full but that never stops me getting in there and starting a meal because my salad makings and the general vegetables for cooking dinner are both in big, separate containers. I just grab a container, put it on the kitchen bench, and start. The containers are tall plastic bins that fit side by side on one of my shelves. They’re so tall that I rearranged the shelves to fit them and have a shallow shelf above as a result, but it works perfectly. I have vegetables in other places in my fridge as well. In a crisper drawer on the shallow shelf most of my smoothie-making fruits and greens live. Mushrooms, eggplant (aubergine) and not yet opened 1kg blocks of cheese live on the bottom shelf in a rectangular container. Extra fruit and vegetables go into my fridge’s crisper, while milk, drinks and pre-made dishes and leftovers live on the top shelf.

I save my vegetable water to use for making soup, so I have a tall lidded bottle in the fridge door for that. The bottle lives in the fridge whether it is empty or full.

But it’s the two containers for salad vegetables and cooking vegetables that I think my fridge revolves around. They’re always in the same place (they don’t fit anywhere else, so have to be) and always have the correct food in them for the kind of meal I’m planning to prepare. I’ll get extras from other spots in the fridge, but I always have the nucleus on my meal in one of those containers.

So that’s the secret. Find something that works for the long term. For me, it’s containerising items I’ll use together. My salad container also carries cheese, relish/mayo and whatever cooked meat I’m going to use. To make sandwiches, I need to grab bread and butter as well. Easy. Perhaps my freezer  needs a similar kind of fit out? I’ll see what containers I have that might do the job, and make a start.