I read an interesting study last week that I couldn’t get out of my mind.

It was a study about stress and its impact on our health.

In 1998, a group of researchers asked nearly thirty thousand Americans how much stress they had experienced over the past year.

Eight years later, they followed up to see whether there was any correlation between the amount of stress a person experienced and their mortality rate.

The numbers were alarming: People who reported a high level of stress had a 43% higher risk of premature death.

It’s tempting to conclude that high levels of stress can literally kill us. Except there was one group that, despite reporting high levels of stress, had a lower mortality rate than even the people who reported very little stress.

What made this group seemingly immune to the harmful effects of stress? Everyone couldn’t help but wonder.

It turned out that the secret lay in the second question that the researchers asked: Did the participants believe that stress was harmful to their health?

Only the people who believed that stress was harmful suffered a higher risk of death.

It may not have been stress that contributed to 18,200 Americans’ premature deaths, but their mindset around stress.

That is the power of mindset.

It got me thinking: if a negative mindset can have such a significant impact, even on things like one’s mortality rate, what kind of power can our mindset have on our sobriety?

That’s why, in my work, I’ve always focused on helping people recognize and update the limiting mindsets that keep them stuck in the same relationship with alcohol.

I put together 5 of the ones I see most often, along with a quick mindset upgrade.