Willpower

trouble initially. Most people don’t enjoy their first taste of alcohol or tobacco. Most people are scared to put unfamiliar drugs into their bodies. It takes real self-discipline to inject yourself with heroin the first time. Teenagers will disregard everything—their own fears, their parents’ warnings, physical pain, the possibility of going to jail or dying—because they’re convinced that social acceptance requires them not only to take risks but to do so in a cool, seemingly unconcerned manner. They exert self-control to overcome their inhibitions and more self-control to hide their negative feelings. When the young Eric Clapton went with friends to a jazz festival in rural England, he drank enough at a pub to start dancing on tables—and that was his last memory until he woke up the next morning by himself in the middle of nowhere.
    “I had no money, I had shit myself, I had pissed myself, I had puked all over myself, and I had no idea where I was,” he recalls. “But the really insane thing was, I couldn’t wait to do it all again. I thought there was something otherworldly about the whole culture of drinking, that being drunk made me a member of some strange, mysterious club.”
    That’s the negative side of peer pressure. The positive side comes from craving acceptance and support from people with different desires, like the members of the AA groups who helped Clapton and Karr stay sober. The people at those meetings may ultimately matter far more than the twelve steps or the belief in a higher power. They may even be the higher power.

Heaven (like Hell) Is Other People
    One of the newest and most ambitious alcoholism studies involves a group of men in the Baltimore area who were in therapy for alcohol abuse. Many had been ordered by a court to choose between receiving professional treatment or going to prison, so they were hardly the ideal population of people trying to quit. They may have only been going through the motions as an alternative to prison. The researchers, led by Carlo DiClemente of the University of Maryland, measured a large assortment of psychological variables and then tracked the men intensively for several months to test a variety of hypotheses, many of which didn’t work out. But the researchers did isolate an important external factor that predicted whether the men would remain sober and how serious their lapses would be—whether they’d go on a binge, or stop at a drink or two and then get back on the wagon. The drinkers were asked if they contacted other people for help and social support for their efforts to avoid drinking. The ones who were better at getting support from other people ended up abstaining more frequently and doing less overall drinking.
    Social support is a peculiar force and can operate in two different ways. Plenty of research suggests that being alone in the world is stressful. Loners and lonely people tend to have more of just about every kind of mental and physical illness than people who live in rich social networks. Some of that is because people with mental and physical problems make fewer friends, and indeed, some potential friends may shy away from someone who seems maladjusted. But simply being alone or lonely leads to problems also. A lack of friends tends to contribute to alcohol and drug abuse.
    Still, all social support is not the same. Having friends may be great for your mental and physical health. But if your friends are all drinkers and drug users, they may not be much help in restraining your own impulses. They may directly or indirectly pressure you to drink as an integral part of socializing. In nineteenth-century America, for example, there was a social convention called the “barbecue law,” which meant that all the men who gathered for a barbecue were expected to drink until they were soused. To refuse a drink entailed a serious insult to the host and the rest of the party. More recently, many studies have found that people drink more when they’re encouraged by their friends. People struggling with an alcohol or drug problem need social support for not drinking, and that’s where a group like AA can be vitally helpful. Alcoholics have spent so much of their lives surrounded by drinkers that they can’t imagine the benefits of a different kind of peer pressure. It wasn’t until Clapton was stuck inside Hazelden that he began looking for help from other people trying to stop drinking. Karr dutifully took herself to some