If alcohol has started to become your "friend", it may be time for you to examine how you work with your emotions. For many alcoholics, emotions are a scary thing, and you may be the sort of person who has not learned to deal with them (or perhaps, as a child, been taught to suppress them).

For many people with drinking problems, dealing with their emotions is a far greater fear and challenge than dealing with the alcohol addiction.

If you want to learn how to stop drinking alcohol, you will need to learn to deal with your own emotions. People tend to learn that emotions are not under their control, and that belief becomes true - not because it must be so, but because it's believed.

Amazingly, with a little training and some persistent practice, it is possible to learn to take hold of your own emotions and state of mind. Some people who have practiced for long enough now "design" their states of mind, which means that they can be comfortable and happy in any situation (barring extremes such as death).

Designing your own state of mind must start, initially, with the realization that it is possible. A woman once said about one of these people, "But can he really be so happy all of the time? No, of course not." That woman had the belief that it was impossible, and so she will continue for the rest of her life feeling feelings that seem to be outside of her control. She cannot control what makes her happy or sad, and so her life is just "luck".

Once you have realized, the next step is to find out how. It is a process of growth, but the good news is that the first steps can be learned quickly. Those first steps, which can be learned with the help of mind specialists such as hypnotherapists, experts in NLP (neurolinguistic programming) and similar, allow you to take control.

After that, it is just practice and persistence. That doesn't mean, of course, that you should stop learning - far from it. Once you have learned to take control, continued learning means that you can start to learn to design your states of mind.

The ultimate (and it's easier than it sounds) is, in any situation, to ask yourself, "What state of mind would serve me and the people around me best?" Then, in just seconds, create that state of mind. For example, I used to panic in emergencies. That didn't help anyone. Now, no matter what the emergency (and I've dealt with a few), I keep a cool head with clear thinking powers. That serves both me and the people suffering in the emergency.

How soon will you start to learn?