How to Learn to Love Life Sober with Christy Osborne

Published Sep 24, 2024, 12:43 PM

In this episode, Christy Osborne discusses how to learn to love life sober! She shares her deep and personal understanding of the societal pressures that often intertwine with alcohol consumption. Christy’s journey to sobriety offers a candid exploration of the “mommy wine culture”, challenging its pervasive influence. Through her personal experiences, she provides valuable insights and practical strategies for navigating an alcohol-free life that prioritizes mental wellness. Christy’s perspective offers a compassionate and empowering approach for individuals seeking joy and fulfillment in an alcohol-free lifestyle.

In this episode, you will be able to:

  • Discover the surprising benefits of embracing an alcohol-free lifestyle
  • Uncover effective methods for breaking free from the mommy wine culture
  • Learn powerful strategies for conquering Dry January and beyond
  • Explore the profound impact of alcohol on mental wellness
  • Master the art of building a strong support system for a fulfilling life of sobriety

To learn more, click here!

The dopamine that you get.

The reaction from the glass of whatever you're having is actually between twenty and thirty minutes, and then your body is desperate to get back to homeostasis, so it pumps you with this downer called dinorphan, and you cannot replicate that feel good feeling with the second class.

Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Christy Osborne. After passing the California bar Exam, Christy relocated to London and assumed various roles in law, public relations, and business development, including working for the UK Parliament and founding a popular website for American expat women. But Christy discovered her true calling when she chose sobriety and discovered a passion for helping women on their own journeys. As a highly trained senior sobriety coach, she empowers women throughout the US and UK to redefine their relationship with alcohol. Today, Christy and Eric discuss her book Love Life Sober, a forty Day Alcohol Fast to Rediscover your joy, improve your health, and renew your mind. And for any listeners that don't already know, I'm very happy to say that we are now on YouTube officially, so you can watch your favorite interviews as well. Find us at the one You Feed pod on YouTube.

Hi Christy, Welcome to the show.

Hey Eric, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here today.

I'm excited to talk with you about your new book, which is called Love Life Sober, a forty day Alcohol Fast to Rediscover your joy, improve your health, and renew your mind. But before we get into that, we will start in the way that we customarily do, which is with the parable. And in that parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with your grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops think about it, for so can they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Yeah, thank you so much for the question. I was actually thinking about this obviously knowing I was coming on today, and I was coaching a lady this morning who I coach women who want to break free or take a break from alcohol, and we were talking a lot about this idea of.

Creating more space.

And I think when we're talking about alcohol, or any addiction, or any negative behavior or habit we want to change, we focus so much on not feeding right the bad wolf, and we don't focus so much on feeding the good wolf, but also what to feed it right? And so, for example, with this lady this morning, when we were talking about space, it was the space to joyfully move her body and to eat healthy, and to have time for herself and to begin in enjoying music and all of these things. And so when we're talking about this and the scheme of I think alcohol, right, it's what can you feed the good wolf with to make yourself feel better and the person that you end up wanting to be. And so, yeah, that's what I thought of today when I was preparing for today.

Yeah.

I really love that response because one of the things that I got out of your book that I thought was useful was when you hear forty day alcohol fast, it's easy to think of like a sober January or a I don't know how many months now have a dry version of them, associating with them, right.

All of them.

And while that's a lovely idea, mostly what people do is just not drink for that month. And your book is really saying, let's use this time that A. Yes, you're ideally not going to be drinking, but let's explore your relationship with alcohol during that time. Why are you doing it, what are you getting from it? What might the benefits of not doing it, and your book does a great job of walking through a lot of those things, and that's why I think it's a really useful addition to this sort of dry January movement, which again is valuable. But if you just don't drink for thirty days, nothing's different. I mean, you're probably healthier in many ways at the end of it, but the way you think about the world may not be that different. Whereas your program gives you an opportunity to do that.

Yeah, I talk about in the book that I did all of those things right. I did the dry Januaries, the sober Octobers, and it's exactly what you said. I ended up drinking. Nothing really changed as far as the behavior of drinking. And there was one particular dry January where February ruled around it. I drank even more because I kind of had proven to myself that I didn't have a quote unquote problem and so that I could continue on. And there was no real look at the reasons behind why I was drinking. It was just this white knuckle figure out how to not drink for thirty days and get through it as fast as possible. And that didn't work for me, and so I obviously wanted to try something different. What I really really wanted to do when it got to the point where I wanted to seriously look at my drinking is I wanted to lose the desire to drink. I didn't want to have that desire. I wanted to have freedom from alcohol.

I've thought before about what did I get out of twelve step programs that helped me get sober, because I have drifted away from them over the years for a variety of different reasons. And one of the things that I got out of them that I thought was like, this is a critical component, is a method for changing the way that we view the world and think about alcohol, and that's what the twelve Steps ideally will do. And so again this is a different version of that, but there's a very clear path here to walking through that, and so I'd like to get into some of that. But first, maybe just tell us a little bit about what brought you to the point. Yeah, what life was like when you wanted to change your relationship with alcohol.

Yeah, I grew up not drinking a lot, Like I went to USC for college in southern California, a big Greek school, I was in a sorority, but even then it was very measured. I wanted to be very much in control, and as I kind of look back, there was definitely upticks for various reasons. I went to law school, it kind of became this way of reward at the end of a hard day of studying. And then I moved to the UK right after I graduated law school, and it was the thing that everybody was doing over here to connect to meet new people. Then I became a mom, and then it was the thing that all the moms were doing as again the reward aspect of it a long hard day with babies, and I was alone in a foreign country with no family, and every mom that I looked at was using wine as the reward for being a mom.

And so it was an.

Incremental, slow uptick in the drinking. And I never did have this massive rock bottom moment. I've heard you tell your sobriety story, and I don't think I necessarily blew up my life. I could have gotten there, don't get me wrong, like it could have gotten there. But it was this slow, incremental uptick in the drinking and using it for various reasons and giving the wine, various jobs, and then my own mother passed away in twenty eighteen. And growing up she didn't drink, but in the last kind of ten years of her life she.

Discovered alcohol and it changed her.

It kind of wrecked our relationship, and so her death was very traumatic for me because I was mourning the loss of this mother who was my best friend growing up then who we had this great chasm of distance between us when she passed, And so what did I do to manage all those really hard emotions. I drank And people always ask me, were you, you know, at home on the couch drinker or were you the going out drinker? And I was both, But at the same time it looked very similar to my friends. I didn't know anybody that didn't drink. I knew that everybody you know, or at least I thought I did. Thank you social media, thank you Instagram, that everyone was having the wine at the end of the day because the homework was hard with the kids, or to let loose on a Friday night, and so it didn't feel like it looked any different, And so that was one of the things I think that kept me stuck right a little bit longer. But also this idea of maybe my drinking is not bad enough. I could never ever have pictured myself walking into an AA meeting and saying.

Hi, I'm Christy, I'm an alcoholic.

I just couldn't picture it because I thought, Okay, that feels like it could be a lot different than the way that I'm drinking. And so I felt really alone. I felt really really alone and lost, and I honestly didn't feel like I had anyone to talk to. And this is in twenty twenty, when the sober curious movement, I think, is just then gaining traction, and so thankfully there was that all lot to read and learn about over the course of the pandemic when I started my work, but it was very isolating and feeling very alone and feeling like is this something I even need to address if nobody else is, And so yeah, that's kind of how it all started.

It's interesting you bring up my addiction story because there's two parts to it, and normally part one is what I reference. Part two is I stayed sober about eight years and I began to drink again, and I never went back to doing hard drugs, but I was drinking and I was smoking marijuana, and my bottom was not the bottom. Like I was doing well on all external measures. I've been just promoted. I had the best job I ever had. I had a nice home, I had a nice car. I mean, all these things were okay, and yet I sort of knew I was dying inside. And yet it was hard. It was harder for me because there was a voice that was like, oh, it's not that bad time. There was no sort of like if that voice had tried even that, I'd have been like everybody knew, like, Okay, that's ridiculous. This time around though, however, from the outside it didn't look that bad. And yet inside, yeah, was really where I was so sick. You know, I was lucky to be able to recognize I was as sick that time as I was the first time. It's just that circumstances had been different. But when it comes to your own recovery, Let's talk a little bit about that idea of alcoholic because I think this is one of the things that sober Curious movement has been of the most service to the world, I think, which is to get people away from having to think of identifying as alcoholic. Yeah, as the way to get better. So what was it that you identified in yourself that made you say, Okay, I may not be alcoholic, but I need to do something about this.

Yeah, And I want to always start this conversation by saying that, like, I know absolutely nothing against AA and the people that find that label empowering, like that is awesome. It's just that it doesn't work and it doesn't feel good for everybody. Right. And so to your point too, of everything kind of looking good and you heard just promoted, you know, the morning that I stopped drinking, I was looking through my Instagram feed and I had a really popular blog for expat American women living in the UK. I had just been on Sky News to commentate for the royal wedding of Harry and Megan, and everything was like really.

Glossy and pretty and all of this to the point that.

You said, it just didn't feel real or authentic, Like I didn't feel like I was representing how I really truly felt inside. And so it was really that of just looking in the mirror one morning after a night out and just saying, I don't want to do this anymore.

I don't want to feel this way.

There's got to be something some paths to get me to feeling better, and I automatically knew that the first thing that had to at least go. And I never said forever. In the beginning, I didn't know what it meant. I had no idea. I didn't know if it was going to be thirty days, sixteen, I didn't I had no idea. I just knew that I needed a break. And so it was just kind of this again, like a slow burn of this feels awful.

I knew I wasn't being the best mom I could be.

I definitely valued like at the end of the day, the glass of wine over a bad time story or hanging out with my kids, because that felt like the thing that was mine and like, let's get those kids into bed as fast as possible so I can sit on the couch and have the wine. And it was just one of these slow things and I just woke up and I'm like, this is not who I am.

This is so inauthentic.

That's not the really that I'm portraying, And I've got to do something.

Yeah, you talk a lot in the book about sort of this mommy wine culture, the room that's out there, share a little bit about what that is. I think a lot of people will know. I mean, you go anywhere and you just see these clever little signs that actually don't seem that clever about moms and drinking, but talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, and my mommy wine culture is the pervasive messaging right that we as mothers need wine in order to parent because they're really hard work. And when I really drilled down on the fact that that was the message that not only I was sending my kids, but to the other people that were following me, for example, on social media, that was not the woman that I wanted to be, right, And all you have to do is literally stroll through Target and see you see mommy wine culture everywhere on the tumblers and the baby onesies, and it's all about you know, the baby wines, whie.

And so I wine wny.

If you look at sc I think there's at the time of writing the book, there were seventy thousand products on etc. Promoting kind of this wine culture and mommy wine culture. Yeah. And I was also the one, by the way, that gifted these tumblers and like thought these were really cute and had the cocktail napkins and I had all of it, but it was just really drilling down to like is this true? Also, is alcohol helping me be a better mom?

Is that true for me? And it wasn't.

And so it was challenging this idea. And during the pandemic, actually Tropicana, the Orange juice company, came out with this ad and it was a bunch of actresses I'll leave their names out of it, but hiding in bathrooms or the garage in order to make a mimosa. And they showed them like hiding from their families and their kids, and it was like, yeah, the tagline of the campaign was take a me moment like as a mimosa. But for me, I remember thinking and I was very early into my sobriety at that point, and I was just thinking, this is not the message that we need to be sending to mothers during a global pandemic that you should hide from your kids and drink in your closet to survive.

Hiding your drinking is generally a bad sign, just right right across the board like that, that's a pretty good indicator that call yourself what you want, but you may need, you may need to examine but I do think that is really true that. I think the message that's being sent there is too. First is that kids are so hard that you need a real way to cope with that, And there's some truth in the fact that parenting is difficult. Right. The second message is that the way to cope with any difficulty is through alcohol, and we tolerate it in that sense, But there's lots of other places where if we said it that explicitly, you might people might be like, well, hang on a second, Like if I was like, I have such bad depression and the thing that I do is I turned to a white claw hard Seltzer, right, Like, most people would look at that and be like, dude, that's a bad idea, But to say it taking care of my kids is a little bit different.

Yeah.

And the other side of that, too is what if you switched up the drug right, Like what if you said, I just need that line of cocaine or that right or that little bit of a heroine in order to get get me through these kids because they're really hard work. And then that of course opens up the whole thing of well, why are they different, and why is alcohol so socially acceptable, and why is it pushed on mothers as the thing that we need in order to parent?

Yeah, I find the whole I'm going to celebrate. I want to be careful, not to be judgmental. Here to each their own right, but I have found this whole. I'm celebrating my near dependence on alcohol to be a strange thing. Maybe it's that when I started, I was underage and the last thing I wanted the world to know was that I drank all the time.

Yeah.

Now, this was a long time ago. Maybe the culture was very different. I don't know, But to me, it was never something that I was going to like outwardly proclaim.

To the world.

Yeah. Yeah, oh my god, this is my thing. But that is very much the culture. You see it certainly in the wine mom culture. I see it a lot in the retired woman culture. Also, I see a lot of it there. It's probably lots of other places. You talk a little bit about how pervasive alcohol is in our culture, and it really is.

Everyone, Yeah it is.

And to your point of that this becoming this almost point of being loud and proud about I recently saw there was an Instagram post and it was a gal using a tumblr to go to her son's soccer game, filling it with vodka, but then putting a tea bag like label hanging outside the YETI or whatever. So that and the line was where, yeah, where my soccer mom's at. And it literally has, of course, millions of likes and all these people being.

Like, yeah, that's what I do. And I was just like, when did that happen?

Because I don't remember going to my brother's soccer games and moms having yetti tumblers of white claw or whatever it is on the sidelines.

Yeah, it is very interesting. And the flip side of it is shame perpetrates this, right, So it's a strange thing that's sort of happening, which is, on one hand, we're celebrating being this way, and yet on the other hand, the people who are really struggling with it. They may be so p officially buying that message, but inside they feel shame about how much they're drinking it. So it's this weird contradiction.

It is this weird contradiction.

And it also means that you know, women have to kind of want anyone really, but I say women because I coach women have to almost live up to this thing of keeping alcohol cute and making it look fun. But if you get hooked on it, oh my gosh, no, then you are other and there is something wrong with you. And then you have you know, all the things that come with that, the stigma and all of that. And so that's where obviously the shame kicks in. And the shame part is so important to talk about because when we're stuck in shame, we are in our survival part of our brain and we are not in our prefontal cortex. We can't make good decisions, and so we want to get out of that place.

As fast as possible.

And from personal experience, I know that the easy way out is wine when you're stuck in it, because it shifts the emotion real fast.

Yeah, it is such a pernicious situation once you're in its grip, right, because you have alcohol, which is actively damaging your prefrontal cortex and your executive function, your ability to make good decisions. So you've got that happening, and then, like you said, you've got the shame happening, which is further shifting away from your prefrontal cortex and the ability to make decisions. And you have a great emotional strain, and the way you cope with that emotional strain is you drink. And it's easy to see how this just once you're in it, it tends to be no direction but down. Yeah, And again that's not for everybody, right, plenty of people moderate just fine. And so this is not, at least from my perspective, not an alcohol is a bad thing. It's just that I think there's a lot more people struggling with it than we might know.

Yeah, one hundred percent, And we're in a day and age now right where we also do know so much more about it, and there is so much research on gen Z and the upcoming generation is not drinking as much as we did because they know the health ramifications of it and they've probably seen parents struggle with it. There's the whole idea that they also have smartphones, right, so the reason that we're using alcohol maybe to connect or to have fun, they just have to open up TikTok. And so we're seeing I think this shift from the younger generations using it as much. But I think a lot of that has to do with everything that we're learning about how it does. It is hard, It is hard, and moderation plenty of people can do it, but it can be tricky. Once you've given alcohol jobs, once you've leaned in, it's hard.

I want to come back to that giving alcohol jobs thing in one second, but I want to ask a question, because you're closer to the recent search on all this than I am. Are we seen in gen Z a drop in using substances overall, or are we seeing a drop in alcohol with marijuana maybe making up more of that gap. I'm just curious.

Yeah, definitely less alcohol, and there is research to suggest because marijuana is legal in a lot of states now and more prevalent, that that's had an uptick. I don't know the exact data on that, but I know that a lot of kids are drinking a lot less. You're drinking a lot less in college, which is a good thing.

Okay, let's come back to this line. You just used giving alcohol jobs. What does that mean when we are giving alcohol jobs.

Yeah.

So, when I looked back at the reasons why I was drinking, it was for connection. It was for coping, for example, for the loss of my mom. I also really believed that wine was helping me sleep because listen, if I had two glasses of cabernet. I fell asleep, I passed out, I didn't actually fall asleep.

So I was giving alcohol all these jobs.

And when I looked at my why, and when I started talking through this with clients, that was one of the questions that really resonated with them. I would say, well, why are you drinking? But when I said to them what is the job that you are giving to that glass of wine? It was all all of a sudden, just a lot more clear of the reason, kind of behind the why and all of that. And another way to ask that is what is the unmet need? What do you actually need when you're pouring that glass of wine?

Is at rest? Is it connection? Is it fun? Is it coping?

Is it because there's a really hard emotion that you don't want to feel because you weren't taught to feel it. And so I just think it's a really good way of getting behind the reasons. And then you get to ask the amazing follow up question, right of is that true? Is alcohol doing that job? And I know that this is a really blanket statement and you can feel really untrue to anybody that's stuck in the drinking cycle, But alcohol actually does all the opposite things of what we're drinking for, right, disconnects us, makes us more tired, zapps our energy, spikes, our cords, all the things.

Yeah, I always talk about addiction and substances because there's this strange nuance to them. Right. The first is that when we first started using it, it may have done those jobs semi well. Right, that's thing one, right, and that this gets to the learning model of why we become dependent on substances, is that we learn over time. But the other thing is that if it didn't work at all, this would be so much easier, Like if you took a drink and you didn't feel temporarily a little bit better, it would be easy to see through this. But the fact is it continues to do something that, at least initially, and my experience is that initially gets smaller and smaller, and the benefit gets smaller and smaller as the costs go up and up and up. But it's the fact that it does do something that makes it hard, because it again, it would be easy to see through if it did nothing. But I think you're right. If we look honestly at anybody who's got some degree of dependence on alcohol or any substance for that matter, because I think they're all essentially the same in this regard the thing that we wanted it to do, the perfectly good reason that we may have started it. It doesn't fix that anymore. And like you said, it makes most everything worse over time.

Yeah, and that is so true. And this is the reason that people get stuck on it, right. And what I did the research around dopamine and dinorphan and all of the ways that our body actually chemically reacts to alcohol, this is one of this massive light bulb went off for me, and I was like, oh my gosh, everybody needs to know this. And that is that that feel good feeling the dopamine that you get the reaction from the glass of whatever you're having, is actually between twenty and thirty minutes, and then your body is desperate to get back to homeostasis, so it pumps you with this downer called dinorphan, and you cannot replicate that feel good feeling with the second glass. Sometimes really feels like you can, but scientifically, looking at the way our brain works, you can't. And so that was I was like, Okay, so yes, it did the thing for twenty minutes but then it wrecked three days after.

That, precisely, and you keep chasing it. That's the thing, right, because again, if you'd had one drink and afterwards you were like, oh, okay, well that was a good feeling, it's gone. I'm not going to get it from the second drink, and you just said okay enough, right, Well, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast because you'd be a normal human being probably, But those of us that relate to this go, oh yeah, but one moral do it, one moral do it. I'll get there, I'll get there. I'll get there. Right. You just keep going and the cost keeps escalating.

Yeah, one hundred percent.

And so when I kind of learned that, I was like, well it became a no brainer.

And when you factor in cortisol and adrenaline.

And the fact that that can stay raised for seven to ten days, then after you've even had a small amount to drink, then it's like, yeah, it's the twenty minutes really worth it if you're making yourself more stressed a week later.

No, I mean, that's the question I have to ask myself, not that often because it doesn't come up very often, but every once in a while, I have to do that calculus in my head. Yeah, oh yeah, one drink is the best day and I depress that I've ever had, and like you said, it's twenty minutes and then wreckage.

Yeah yeah, Okay.

So we've established the problem clearly enough here. I think let's turn ourselves to some of the things that we can do that help us to change our relationship with drinking. So we've sort of talked about the core one, which is to understand what jobs we were giving it. Where do we go from there?

This is the thing with all of the asking of the questions is there's so much that you can read and learn, But what I think really ends up making the change is when you do it and you feel it, when you have that experiential knowledge of Okay, I know that alcohol is going to hijack my irim sleep. You know, I can read all about how that works in the brain, but when I actually sleep not drinking, I can compare the two. And I think, if you're a regular drinker and you haven't ever taken a significant break before, we have a lot of data right of what it's like to be a drinker. But we're making a lot of assumptions about what it's like being a non drinker without having tried it. So first ask the questions and then do an experiment. Try these things. What are you assuming? You know, if you've labeled.

The jobs, are those jobs really true?

And the thing about finding freedom from alcohol is it obviously takes work, and it doesn't feel really good the very first time. And I've heard you talk about this on another podcast where you know, thirty days might not do.

It right right where sometimes it gets worse before it gets better. It can be the experience for some people. Some people start feeling better right away, but some people feel worse, you know.

Yeah, yeah, and then it becomes okay. So I'm using that glass of wine for connection. So that's my need? How do I get that? And there's a lot of women that I've coached that don't know how to get that thing that they need. Fun, for example, is a really big one. It's like, the only way I know how to have fun is by drinking. I don't remember what I even like to do. I coach a lot of women with that, you know. I had a gal recently who went back to a pottery class or a dance class because that's what they enjoyed in high school, pre drinking, and so it's really about getting to know the things that then can fill those unmet needs that you're using for wine. And if you keep doing that in a way where you're giving yourself a ton of grace and a ton of self compassion. And by that I also mean if you're on a break from alcohol and you're looking at your relationship and you have a drink, you don't necessarily have to go back to day one. If counting days doesn't work for you, Let's figure out what you learned from that growth point. And so that also is super super important because, like we touched on shame briefly, that's not going to help us at all. But if we can come to a place of grace, compassion, curiosity of just would my life be better without this? What I feel better? How do I want to feel? How is alcohol playing into that? Asking the questions and doing the experiment and getting to the truth of all of it as just that's what helped me so much.

So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode integration reminder. Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration it can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it. If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise, i'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life, and they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at oneufeed dot net slash sms and if you don't like them, you can get off a list really easily. So far, there are over one hundred and seventy two others from the one you Feed community on the list, and we'd love to welcome you as well, so head on over to oneufeed dot net slash SMS and let's feed our good wolves together. The phrase you just use their growth point is one that I really like. What you mean by growth point is Let's say I'm trying to do a forty day alcohol fast and on day seven I end up having a few drinks. Right, Instead of looking at as a failure, we look at that as a growth point. It's a chance to learn something right. And I think that is really important because I think most people, if they're trying to change their relationship with a substance, are going to have lots of quote unquote what look like failures, right, like, even everything you do up to the last time when you get so like I think about it, like there was a day, you know, fifteen years ago was the last time I had any substance. But there were lots of things that I tried before that that didn't quote unquote work, that actually were part of getting me to whatever magic puzzle pieces clicked together fifteen years ago. It was those times that I tried and it didn't work that were part of the solution. They were part of the answer. And I think that that's so important, and I think you do a great job of really highlighting that because if we take failure to either mean we're bad people, so we feel bad about ourselves and the way we cope with that is to drink, or we take failure to mean we can't do it. I've known so many people who just go, I can't. You might have been able to, but I won't be able to. I can't. And the lens to get through that is at least that I think is you just haven't figured it out yet. We haven't figured it out yet. What's your combination, what's your puzzle pieces that come together that are going to lead to you having more freedom? I just love the way you talk about that, and I love that idea of growth point.

Yeah, I mean I always use the example A couple examples. One is if you fell at like the twenty mile marker of a marathon. I'm not a runner, but would you go back to the starting line? No, you would get up and you would finish the race right. Or for the moms out there, your little toddlers learning how to walk, they keep falling down. Do you say you're horrible at this, stop trying. No, you say, get up and try again. And for some reason, with the drinking thing, we feel like we have to make it perfect and if it's not, then, as you said, we're somehow failures that we're not going to be able to do it. And then for a lot of people this idea of you are then this alcoholic, You're never going to be able to have any fun, You're going to have to go to meetings for the rest of your life.

That kind of.

Narrative can be really scary. So exactly what you said, it's about figuring out what works for you. And that's what I love so much about your story. And also this podcast is you get to pick and choose right because right push comes to shove. It's about choice. And it's also this is beautiful work that we get to do it. We don't have to do this, we get to do it. And sobriety is a gift and a blessing. It's not something that I had to do with something I got to do and like, I'm so worrateful that I got to do it.

That's a really lovely reframing and you do that a lot in the book, sort of the reframing from deprivation to what am I giving myself? Right, I'm giving myself good health, I'm giving myself better sleep, I'm giving myself more clarity instead of I'm taking this thing away from me. I always share this story because I think it's such a great one around these growth points, and it's from a client of mine. She figured this out. I did not figure it out. But she was having trouble getting to complete abstinence, and so she started this thing where every day she sober, she put a marble in a jar. And it was amazing because what we got to see was this jar just filling up and filling up and filling up right. And so instead of looking at the one day, let's say it was one or two days a month that it didn't work, what we saw was this accumulation of sober days. We were focusing on the good there, not the bad. And I think that can be a really important thing to be able to do, is to recognize, like, Okay, I'm not perfect, but wow, I had twenty two sober days last month. That's better than the month before where I had zero. Yeah, And that's the way some people get there a progress like that. Other people are able to sort of just stop, but lots of people it's more a process than that.

Yeah, and progress can look so many different ways. Like I was chatting with a client recently and we were talking about she had had a few days drinking that week. But what she did was she stopped before those drinks and she actually took out her journal, right and she wrote down why and she and she journaled through cravings that she then would overcome in all of this.

And so I said to her, she he know.

She came to the call and she's like, I wasn't perfect and I drank forties this week or whatever it was. And I was like, wait, can we talk about that journal situation that you just read to me? Because that progress of getting behind of the why and figuring out why you're doing this and delaying the craving and all of that, that is such incredible progress.

And to your point with the marvel in the Jar, I love that so much.

Sometimes what I do with clients is I have them print out a calendar and then we highlight the days and then we take the percentage at the end. I've created a fun little celebration tracker to go along with the book, kind of similar where let's figure out, like let's celebrate the winds as opposed to focusing on being perfect.

So I love that so much.

Yeah, it's so important. Let's talk about thoughts. You talk about taking every thought captive. What do you mean by that?

So even if when we're talking about the whys, right, that's the thought like I'm drinking to relax or I'm drinking because I want to connect, And so the battlefield of all of this is going on in our minds, and we are not used to listening to our thoughts. We're like very used to thoughts kind of calling the shots and going along with what they say. And it's so funny because we're having this conversation relatively close to when the cute Pixar movie Now It's just Fallen out of my Head Inside Out Too, has just come out, and I went with the kids, and it was just a really fun way of kind of showing what's going on in your brain, but looking at your thoughts, and your thoughts don't necessarily have to be true. We have been conditioned for a number and number of years to believe various things about alcohol, but also various things about lots of things in our life, and so it's taking those thoughts captive and asking whether they're true or not. I work a lot with women who come with a list of like shoulds right, I should be doing this, I have to do this, I should be doing this, I need to host this party, I have to run all these committees. And it's like, well, let's take that thought out and let's put some light on it. Ask ourselves, is this really true? Or are you putting that on yourself? And if you're putting this expectation on yourself, how is that serving you? And so it's just getting really really clear about what we're thinking, yeah, and which is something that we're not trained to do right and something that takes practice, and asking ourselves if that thought is true and if it's serving us or not, and if it's not serving us, why are we thinking it? Why are we holding onto it? Why are we letting ourselves mind spiral on something?

Yeah? I love that what you just said about that, you know, is it serving me? One of my favorites is with thoughts to look and say is this useful? Right? Is this actually useful in getting me to where I want to go? Because truth it could go either way, right, you can be like, well maybe I don't know, right, But then it's like is it useful, and I think so often we're making up the stories about things, we're giving things their meaning and interpretation. And if we can, like you said, take our thoughts out and really examine them and say, okay, you know, is this true? And also is it useful right or is it serving me? To use your phrase? We're not trained to do it, and it's really hard to do, and the mind is really slippery. You have a lot of journaling in this book, and I assume that's why, because things in our head are slippery, yeah.

One hundred percent.

And pulling it out, putting it on paper so that you can actually see it and examine it is a really important I think exercise.

For sure.

Talk to me about one thing at a time? What do you mean by that?

So I think the idea of one day at a time could potentially have this twelve step stigma attached to it. Right where you're white knuckling, you're going to have to be in this forever. This is going to feel hard and heavy, and you're going to be in this deprived place for the rest of your life.

It can be really, really overwhelming to people.

However, in the beginning of an alcohol free journey and alcohol freedom journey. It can be really really helpful because these hard things that we're talking about, examining our thoughts, managing cravings, all of that are actually temporary, and a good night's sleep fixes a lot of things. And so in the very beginning, one day at a time, while you're also doing this work of discovering the reasons behind your drinking and grace and capassion, I think can be really really helpful. But then what happens is, or at least happened for me, is the one day at a time then just became I don't think about alcohol anymore.

I've lost the desire to drink. I don't struggle with.

This, And so I think one day at a time can be really helpful in the beginning, but it can also feel heavy depending on how you're.

Looking at it right right, And I think that's the big promise, which is that there is a way in which it seems impossible right now, but there will come a day where you don't want a drink. And again that seemed impossible to me in the beginning too literally, I mean, I would hear that and I would think that there's no way, like all I want is a drink, right, and I want it so bad. And yet the problem, like for most of us, if we're able to stay sober for a period of time, it goes away. It just disappears, which is bizarre. It's bizarre to me the level of non reaction to alcohol that I have. Right before this interview, I'm in a studio here and they entertain here, and so I went, I had a sandwich, and I went to the refrigerator and I opened it up and I put the sandwich in. And since they do have events here, it is just stocked with beer and hard seltzer and all kinds of stuff. It might as well have been a fridge full of like cow piss. I mean, it just didn't have any like. It didn't gross me out.

I guess it was.

It was a fridge fulliss. I would have a stronger reaction than I did. I didn't think about it. I wasn't like, oh that's alcohol, that's careful, I better not have it. It just like didn't even really think about it.

Yeah, I love that so much. When you were saying that, I was thinking.

Last summer even I took my daughter to Taylor Swift in LA and I was like very aware of like the mom's drinking and thinking to myself, oh my gosh, they're not going to even get to like the third era because going.

To be feeling awful. And then I just took her this last weekend because she came to London.

Then here a year later and it was everywhere and I got in the car and I was like, oh, I didn't even really notice it this time.

Yeah, you know.

Yeah.

I always find it a little bit for me of a warning sign if I start noticing it right, Like if I suddenly am like noticing like people's like, oh there's a glass of wine over there, and there's someone else's got tequila, and like if it starts pulling my attention even subtly, I usually just ask myself like, Okay, what's going on inside because that is almost non existent for me most of the time, which I I think we're both sharing this in a message of hope for people, because if I had to live the way I felt early on with this feeling like I was torn into like half of may being like you can't do it, and the other half of me being like you have to do it. Like if I had to live the rest of my life that way, it would be awful. It's an awful feeling, yeah, yeah, but it goes away, which is the good news, or none of us would actually probably manage to stay sober if you felt that way all the time.

Yeah, one hundred percent. That's cognitive dissonance at its finest, right. I was just gonna say, it's just yeah.

I really want it, but I don't want it and all of that.

And that's why if you get under the subconscious conditioning, under all these reasons, under these assumptions, under the jobs, whatever you want to call it, and kind of call that stuff out, but then also feel it and feel the difference, that's when you get to start, I think feeling this hope and I love that so much because that's all I want, is this to be a conversation of hope and freedom and all of that and for people not to feel alone. If you feel like you're drinking, looks like everybody else around you, but you know in your soul that it's not feeling good, yep.

And that's the ultimate measure, right. It's not about how often you drink, or what time of day you drink, or whether you've had a dui or those are not the thing, right, The thing is how do you feel about it? And most people know how they feel about it, right if you ask yourself that you know there's something in you that goes, oh yeah, right, doesn't feel right. That doesn't mean you get sober. I mean I didn't feel right for a long time. I ignored it as best I could. But you know, it wasn't that far into my substance use career where I noticed, like something feels wrong.

Yeah, one hundred percent.

I talk about in the book about values and how drinking just moved me really far away from those values that I held really dear, like you know, dependability and honest and learning and all of these things that had been something that was really important to me. And just the little ways that alcohol kind of chipped away at that not being so dependable because maybe I would cancel because I had a hangover, or just totally like not learning, not reading books because who has time to read when you're just down and wine every night. And so that moving slowly and slowly away from the person that you feel like you want to be or what you hold as values was something that when I kind of looked back I was like, oh, okay, yep, it wasn't a massive du why it wasn't all these things, It was this, and that is enough to look at it in a filled way.

One of the things that people often do is they get a little bit of time sober and they start to feel better, and then they survey their life and they see all sorts of other stuff that feels like it suddenly needs to be fixed. What do you caution people to do in that situation.

Well, I think, first of all, if you feel like alcohol is something that you want to look at, start with that and don't do all these other things. I have a lot of women that come to me and they're like, Okay, I want to ditch alcohol, and I want to train for a marathon, and I want to cut glute and I want a laha. It's like, well, let's focus on one thing at a time, right, Because there's so much science about habit change that says if you put too many new things in that they all end up failing. But I actually love that when alcohol then finally is out of the picture, that you do get to look at these other things. And there are things that I don't think at least for me, I didn't see it coming right, things like learning to sit with hard emotions, things like learning how to express and keep boundaries because I supporting the unmet need of being alone or rest or whatever it is. And so again, it's kind of this work that we get to do, and I think it slowly presents itself when alcohol's out of the picture, because alcohol tends to muddy all of this other stuff.

I guess my advice is not to do it all at once.

If you feel like Alcohl hall is the thing that's keeping you stuck, to focus on that and then see what comes up from it. And one of my favorite things about coaching is push comes to shove. It actually never is about alcohol.

It's about so much more about what's underneath it.

Right, Yeah, Yeah, I think it's this subtle balance because I agree with you, like trying to take on too much. I talk about this all the time. Small steps or a little by little, a little becomes a lot, these ideas. And there are also things though that we can do that we could add to our life that make perhaps stain off the alcohol easier. You talk about joyful movement as an example.

Yeah, joyful movement one hundred percent because of also what it does to our brain chemistry, and I think maybe some of your women listeners can relate to this. I had to actually like ditch the word exercise and lean into more calling it joyful exercise because it was about the feeling good and not necessarily about how I wanted to be smaller, skinning, or change my body. That was something that came up in my journey after I did chocohol eating protein because protein balances blood sugar, and if you have more stable blood sugar, cravings aren't going to be as intense, especially you know, as you go throughout the day.

And so there's lots of these little things that.

I talk about in the book bookending your day starting with something in the morning, whether it's a book or a podcast or meditation or journaling, but then also ending your day with something so you have something at either end of the day. And this is all experimentation to see what kind of works for you. One of the things that really help me that also really helps clients is, for example, if a walk is really serving you and it's making you feel really good, and you know that at nine o'clock after you drop the kids at school or whatever. That is something that's going to set you up for success during the day is to actually get out your calendar, whether it's a paper one or your iPhone or whatever, and put that in as a non negotiable and really have that time scheduled. And I also did that, and I have to actually come back to it sometimes right when I'm like busy with clients or kids and everything, it's like, oh, I like I'm running on empty at the end of the day and I look back and I didn't get my walk, and I didn't do my journaling, and I didn't do my things.

And so to put that.

In as non negotiable, especially in the beginning, was super, super helpful.

Yeah, it is interesting the way as we get busy we tend to jettison the things that allow us to perform well enough to remain busy, I guess would be the way to say it, you know, or as life gets more stressful, we often the first things that we throw out are the things that help us cope with stress.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I mean overuse the phrase, but you really cannot pour from an empty cup.

You just can't.

You cannot give to others in the same way if you're not taking care of yourself.

We've sort of covered this a little bit, but I want to hit on it a little bit more directly, which is redefining self care. You say, one of the most pervasive messages we face in our society, especially as women, is that drinking is a form of self care.

Yeah.

Yeah, And again it gets back to that what is true, right is if it's supposed to make you feel better, if it's supposed to serve you, it's supposed to give you something like rest we're coping or connection.

Does alcohol really really do that?

And we're also up against a society of social media where its wine is self care, but also going to get an expensive massage is self care, or anything related to the spa is self care, or shopping is self care. And it's really looking at the truth of all that, right, because self care might just actually be going to bed an hour early, or making your budget or these things that actually set you up for success, that make you feel better and allow you to stick to your goals. But we're up against the conditioning, just like with alcohol, where self care is like let's do more things, buy more things, and it doesn't have to be that and soda. I talk about that in the book of Redefine It, like, what actually do you need for me? Honestly, sometimes it's going to bed an hour before the kids and just saying, you know they're old enough to do this, Now put yourself to bed. And it's not this likely flashy, exciting thing that makes a glamorous Instagram post, But it is true self care for me.

Or saying no.

Right, saying no to the parties, saying no to the committee, saying no to the extra responsibility at work like that is also self care. It's just kind of like flipping that on its head. One of the things I talk about in the book is, for example, one day we waking up the run might be good self care, but also sleeping in might be self care. And a good way to measure that is what do you feel like when you get home from the run. Are you so glad you did it or are you more exhausted? What do you feel like when you get home from that dinner party that you feel might feel like obligatory, Did you feel good that you went or did it feel like a drain? And so figuring it out kind of that way, and again it's just going against all the pervasive social media and messaging of society and getting under the hood of like what's real, what's just not?

Did you and do you encourage clients to change their relationship with social media if the messages that they are getting are are consistently pointing at the wrong thing for them.

It's obviously very very individual. One thing I do say is that if someone is enjoying it and doesn't feel like they need to address it, is at least go in and unfollow the accounts that are promoting for example, mommy wine culture right and the second you do that, right now, the algorithms so smart that'll stop.

Beating that stuff to you.

But if it feels like that ends up taking place, for example of alcohol, like if you feel like that's the thing that you're using then to numb out, then look at it how it actually is making you feel. If you're scrolling Instagram for an hour, does it make you feel better? Does it make you feel more connected? Does it bring you joy? Or does it do the opposite of that thing? You can apply kind of all the same questions.

Yep, Yeah, I think that's such a useful way to frame up this idea is did it end up making me feel better? Right? Because self indulgence is not the same thing as self care. They could be the same activity sometimes sometimes not. And I think what you're saying is go a little bit deeper and ask yourself, like, did that actually move the needle on me feeling better?

Yeah?

With me, I guess I don't do really any social media anymore. But when I did, I was able to notice this thing that about the first fifteen minutes of it felt enjoyable. I was stimulated and I was like, oh, look I see this thing and that's interesting, and that's like it felt good. But then somewhere around the fifteen to twenty minute mark, if I paid close attention to myself, something shifted, something shifted where it just suddenly it just didn't feel good anymore.

Yeah, so similar to alcohol.

It's real easy to go right by that because you're distracted. That's part of why they work the way they do, is they distract you, but there is usually a subtle feeling there.

Yeah, one hundred percent.

I was just going to say, it's so similar to alcohol, right, because it's the same dopamine response.

Yeah.

Interestingly, I had not heard of dainorphan before let's close with a little bit more about dinorphan, because I've been doing this for a decade, in reading thousands of so many of these books that I can't believe I haven't heard of dnorphan before. Tell me more so.

Yeah, So, I mean we know about dopamine, right, It's the feel good chemical. It's also the learning molecule in the brain, so we learn it feels good, we see met these neural pathways in our head. But when we drink or do any substances, we get this artificial level of dopamine, and since our brains are desperate to bring us back to homeostasis, it releases a counter chemical called dinorphine, which basically brings you down right. It's a sedative, it's a downer. And what ends up happening when you're a regular drinker is your body gets so used to the incoming massive spects of artificial dopamine that it releases more and more dinorphan, and so you cannot get or feel joy or happiness without the massive amounts of dopamine aka alcohol, because you're flooded with this opposing chemical. And how that looks in real life for me as realizing that I would be sitting at my daughter's ballet recital or my son's baseball game, and I was like, this is not fun because there's no alcohol, and that is because of this other thing. And it also ties into how we were talking about twenty minutes. The dopamine hits you for twenty minutes, and then this other chemical, you know, the evil brother whatever, comes in and does the opposite.

And so it's just a really interesting way to understand.

All of the neuroscience of what actually is happening and get to the truth of is it actually doing the job that we're drinking it for.

Yeah, that's one of the other things that makes addiction. I'm going to use the word we don't know. We could use alcohol use disorder, but I'm just going to broadly say addiction. So pernicious is that thing that you're describing there, which is our neurochemicals are all messed up, and so we may not be producing enough of the chemicals that make us feel good, or we may be overproducing the chemicals that tamp down that response. And you take the alcohol away or the substance, and you have the inability to enjoy pleasure. So then somebody says, well, go to a pottery class instead of drinking wine, and you go to the pottery class and you're like, so I care, Like that was stupid, right, Like, okay, that did not make me feeling better. I was uncomfortable. I didn't know anybody. And it's again why I think that having support early on in any sort of sobriety journey is so so important, because just to hear somebody else say that's normal, just hanging there, like, of course you can't feel good, but I felt the same way, and you know what, it gets better. Yeah, Like, whether it's a coach like you, whether it's an online group, whether it's a twelve step program. People often ask me like, what's the one thing that someone has to do to get sober. I'm like, well, I would never boil it down to one thing, because I think it's complicated. But if you at gunpoint forced me, I would probably say help from other people who've been through it. That would probably be. If I had to make one recommendation, I'd say that one is sort of the non negotia on the table.

I think, yes, one hundred percent, community, community, community, all the way. It's because you don't feel alone, then the shame also evaporates because when you speak something that feels shameful in a group, that helps with the shame piece of it. And when you can hear other people saying yes. When I went to that party and turned down the glass of wine, it was so weird and I felt like a fish out of water for fifteen minutes, but then twenty minutes in, I was fine and I was able to be Okay. Then you know it's possible for you too, And so yes, one hundred percent, I totally agree with you. And that can come in different forms, right, whether it is a twelve step meeting or even just connecting with the sober podcast hosts that you like listening to or whatever.

Yeah.

Absolutely, yeah, I think that's the thing. There are a lot of ways to get it. Like when I got sober in nineteen ninety four, there was one place to hear any of this, and it was in a twelve step room. That was it. It just didn't exist in any meaningful way outside of that. I mean, the internet didn't exist. It's so different today. We have so many resources and different ways of plugging in. And that's the other one I always say. We used to say in AA like keep coming back, right, which meant you know, keep trying. And I think that's the other message that I think is so important is you don't have to keep coming back to AA. That's not it. But keep trying, keep experimenting, because there is a way out.

Yeah, one hundred percent, and with all the grace and compassion in yourself, knowing that alcohol is a highly addictive drug and this is hard, but there's nothing wrong with you. There's a lot wrong with alcohol, and you'll get there.

You'll get there. What you said right, the puzzle pieces that work and it will happen.

Well, that is a beautiful place for us to end the conversation on that note of hope. You and I are going to talk a little bit longer in the post show conversation because I want to just talk a little bit about some of the different theories about addiction or dependency out there. There's a disease model, there's a learning model, there's a self medication. I just kind of want to talk through some of the different facets of those. We're going to do that in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd like to get access to that as well as ad free episodes and help support us because we can use your help for sure. Go to one you feed dot net slash join Christy. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you so much.

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