Episode 47: The willpower workaround

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I hope that it’s getting to be spring wherever you are. It’s kind of spring where I’m at. Today is a rainy, dark day, but I did put on my rain jacket and me and my dog still did our loop through the woods that we like to do every day. And I tell you what, I can’t say it enough, getting outside every single day, no matter what the weather is, really changes your relationship with the weather. And cold, dark,

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rainy days for me can still be just as beautiful and when I spend a little bit of time outside, I find that my experience inside and for the rest of the day is just different, better. So I hope it’s spring where you are, but regardless of whether it’s spring or not, get your damn shoes on and get outside.

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And before I dive into the topic for this week, I wanted to let you know that I’m hosting a free live masterclass to explain how you can accelerate your recovery with emotional sobriety. This masterclass is the best way to learn how to think differently about your struggles, not just with alcohol, but any craving driven behavior that you feel like you can’t control. You know, when your approach to a problem isn’t working

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hard and unsustainable, the solution is always to pull back and look at the big picture. Ask different questions. Figure out where you’re making assumptions that aren’t true and try something different. I’ll put the link in the show notes, so get registered and come for a light bulb hour.

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of perspective shifting information that can literally change the course of your life. And I will stay and do a Q&A when it’s over and you’ll be able to ask me anything you want. So today, I’m going to give you a personal inside look of what it looks like to override an urge and not even need willpower to do it. Here’s the thing about willpower. It is a limited resource.

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And the more stressed you are, the less willpower you have. Because when you get stressed, you are more emotional, your subconscious takes over, you go to instinctual, habitual reactions that have worked with you in the past. Because when you’re having a stress response, your executive function, your cognitive processing kind of drops offline. And it’s not black or white.

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It’s not like you either have stress or you have the ability to think rationally. But think of it kind of like a toggle. The more stressed you are, the less rational and the less access you have to willpower. Willpower is just your ability to override the urge to seek immediate gratification. And the definition of stress is that you’re moving into survival mode. And of course, there are.

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a thousand shades of stress and you’re not always technically in survival mode. But anytime you’re experiencing emotions, you know, your nervous system is activated and low-grade anxiety or low-grade agitation or frustration or just you got a bunch of thoughts running in your background. The opposite of stress, that would be easier to describe, is when you feel calm and centered and focused. You’re not

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rushing around, you’re just OK in a very satiated sort of way. And you don’t overreact. You’re not graspy. You’re just looking at the big picture, and life is good. So that’s the opposite of stress. So when you’re dealing with urges and cravings, the first thing you need to do is zoom out and realize that your belief, the thought in your head,

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that you want or need something is not an accurate reflection of what you actually need or want. It’s just words that have popped into your head. So last night, here’s what this looks like. Last night, I had had a big, busy, stressful day. I mean, it wasn’t a bad sort of stress, but I was really engaged, didn’t really take any breaks. And by 8 o’clock,

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I decided after I took a walk that I was going to sit down on the couch and watch a show. Somebody had told me about a show that I should watch and I was like, okay, I didn’t have anything else to do. I wasn’t quite ready to go to bed and read. So I was like, yeah, I’m going to watch a show. It’s Thursday night. That sounds fun. And the show I chose was fine. I was trying to get into it.

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And one thing I noticed as I was watching is everybody in all the scenes was drinking red wine. And they were making it look really fun. And as the longer I sat there, all of a sudden, I realized that I heard the thought pop into my head. Hmm, maybe I should have some wine. That sounds fun. And given my recent reintroduction of alcohol, that’s a legitimate.

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question for me, like do I want some wine? And I’ve shared before that my approach to alcohol is to treat it like birthday cake. I don’t eat much. I don’t eat it very often. And usually, I’m a no. But sometimes if grandma makes the cake, or if it’s my daughter’s birthday, or something like that, then I will make an exception and eat some sugar in a cake. But it’s not something that’s a regular habit.

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I am setting out to be with alcohol. But I also don’t want to live by rules. If I want to have something, I don’t want to be thinking, oh, well, has it been enough time since my last drink? I mean, of course, I don’t want to drink two nights in a row for reasons that I laid out for you in the episode called How to Fix Your Dopamine Deficit. I don’t want to stress my body out with alcohol. And

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I don’t believe that very small amounts of alcohol have a huge negative side effect. I no longer believe that alcohol is healthy, but just like birthday cake, sometimes there’s a time and a place for it. But I do want to remind you that I did have a rule of zero alcohol for almost three years because a period of abstinence is absolutely a strategic approach to not just rewiring your dopamine.

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response system in your brain, but also your default thinking patterns and how you react to urges and cravings and your ability to decide if and when alcohol is appropriate. So I don’t want to understate the importance of a period of abstinence. This is more what it would look like once you’ve once you feel comfortable and confident that you can undergo a thought process.

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to role play for you. So last night, the thought pops into my head. And I consider, do I want to open a bottle of wine? And when I caught that thought, it alarmed me a little bit. And so what I’m going to do here is I’m going to pull back the curtains on my own emotional processes and my own thinking. It may not match yours. You may have completely different knee-jerk reactions and thoughts.

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This is mine. So you can see how I’m going to break this down. So when I felt the thought, do I want to open a bottle of wine, that also triggered a small alarm bell, because I was home alone. And to me, having wine would be appropriate, like when I was on vacation a few weeks ago, and my husband and I were out to dinner alone. And.

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We were at a nice fancy restaurant, and the wine was special and from a certain place. And my husband and I had the whole evening, and I was like, yes, I want to have a glass of wine. But it triggered in me, because I have a belief that I don’t want to ever go back to drinking alone or just drinking for the hell of it. And so when I thought the thought, I had a little bit of anxiety. And I didn’t quite notice it, so I ignored it.

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I’m telling you this in hindsight. I had the thought that I kept watching the show. And then I had the thought, well, if I get a bottle of wine and open it, I might drink the whole bottle. And my internal alarm, my emotions alerted me with anxiety. Thank you very much. Anxiety is your friend because it’s telling you something’s going on in your mind that you need to pay attention to. And this time, the alarm sounded.

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sounded louder, and I put the show on pause. And I said, OK, what’s really going on here? And I realized in that moment that, first of all, the thought, do I want or the first thought was, maybe I should have some wine too because it looks good. And then when the internal anxiety came up, I tried to argue with that thought, where the internal anxiety was no.

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that tonight’s not a night. I wasn’t planning on drinking, and I’m not just going to do that. The internal argument was, but I can do whatever I want, and I don’t follow rules. And I follow my own intuition. And if you read my Instagram feed, you understand what one of my inside voices has to say. And some of that can be used against you in your own court of law. So my inside voice mildly argued that I can do whatever I want. I don’t follow rules.

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Once I turned off the show or put it on pause, I thought, okay, what’s really going on? And I realized that the thought, if I open a bottle of wine, I could potentially drink the whole thing. And that led me back to, but wait a minute, I’m the type of person who can trust myself. But yet I recognized that, you know, there’s a slippery slope. If I open a bottle of wine and I’m unconscious about the drinking, then-

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For sure, I could end up making a bad decision and I didn’t want to do that to myself. So here is the tool that I used and call it emotional sobriety, call it simple awareness. First of all, I want you to notice that I paused the show and I handled my shit. I didn’t let my mind run in the background where I wasn’t really paying attention to my thoughts because often all of this is kind of happening in the background.

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We’re watching a show, maybe I also am checking my phone, and in my mind, there’s an internal abate about alcohol that I’m trying to ignore. I’m trying to use my willpower. You know, like, I’ll just try to pretend this isn’t happening and I’ll grit my teeth and white-knuckle through it. But when I turned off the show and looked directly at it, it was no longer the monster under the bed. Like, let’s do this, is what I thought. And so the first thing,

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that I used was an awareness, and this is the premise of emotional sobriety that I teach, that none of your thoughts are true. And so I’m not talking about facts like I think the sky is blue, or I think the earth is flat, or round, or whatever. I’m not talking about facts in the real world. I’m talking about the thoughts that pop into your head don’t actually mean anything. You don’t have to react as though it’s true.

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So the question, do I want some wine? And the thought, if I open a bottle, I could drink the whole bottle. Those are just words. So the first thing I did was not buy into my own bullshit. And I recognized that those are just thoughts. And instead, I shifted into my body and asked, OK, body, do you want some wine? Is this something that you’re actually craving?

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And my body immediately, my inside voice, I got a lot of those in there that like to answer questions. And so the first voice that answered was, no, I want to go to bed soon and I want to sleep well. So those are also words in my mind. OK, so all of this is just like kind of imaginary conversations, but we are having conversations inside of our head. And so I thought.

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no, I don’t want to have any wine, and let’s just go with that. Let’s just entertain that. If that one is the one I wanna listen to, then why am I having these thoughts about wine? Why am I suddenly experiencing this urge to go get a bottle of wine and have some? And then worrying about if I do have that, then I won’t be able to stop. And what I realized was that I’m not really enjoying this show.

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I was feeling distracted and restless. So when you think about feelings from the point of your nervous system, whatever feelings you’re experiencing, your thoughts are kind of going to match that. So this is how, in the next chapter, I teach you to flip your focus, no matter what you think you think, flip your focus first and solve the problem.

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or solve, deal with the issue from the state of your nervous system. So I recognized and diagnosed that in my body I was feeling a little distracted and restless, which makes a lot of sense. You know, I’d had a busy day, I had a lot on my mind, and now after sitting at my desk the whole day, I had chosen to go sit on the couch. I just switched rooms. And my body was not really getting what it needed. You know, the definition of self-care, we always think...

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Do something nice for yourself. But I really drill down into that is, no, no, no, no. Do what your body needs, what your body needs to feel better. And that, you can count on one hand, what your body needs to feel better in any given moment. You’re either tired or you’re still, what do you say there, you’re stagnant, sedentary, there you go. You’re sedentary and you need to move around.

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or you’ve been moving too much and you need to slow down and take a break, or you’re hungry, or you need some connection with other people. I mean, the list is really not that long of what your body actually needs. So I identified that the thoughts in my head were simply a reflection. That, you know, if you think of thoughts and feelings as energy, your thoughts are an energetic match to the feelings in your body, in your nervous system.

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So had I not been watching a show where they were doing wine, and instead the show was on eating granola or eating pizza or eating sugar, I would have had a thought that I wanted whatever I was seeing. So many of our desires are memetic, memetic. That’s a memetic. Our desires are memetic in that we don’t know what we want until we see it. We see other people having it or doing it, and then...

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we decide that we want it. And this all happens kind of in the background of our mind, kind of at a subconscious level. So the only reason it even occurred to me to drink wine was because I was seeing it on the TV. And the other reason it occurred to me was because that my body was feeling restless and agitated. And in the past, I’ve associated alcohol with reducing my stress. I now know that’s not true, hence the need for this breakdown of a conversation. But.

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That is where the thought came from. So it didn’t mean anything. It was not a reflection of me or what I truly wanted. So right there, I didn’t need willpower to stop myself from drinking because I realized I didn’t actually want to drink. You don’t need willpower to avoid stepping in dog shit. You do that naturally. I didn’t need willpower to, I mean, I wasn’t planning to eat that late at night. I was on my way to bed.

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I didn’t need willpower to not jack up my night’s sleep and introduce a bunch of other thoughts because of course I know alcohol also anesthetizes your sense of fatigue, which is why on a Friday night after a big huge week and you’re going out, you pre-party with a glass of wine or you have another glass of wine so that you can stay longer at the party because it’s anesthetizing the sensation of fatigue. And I was already, it was past eight o’clock, I was already tired.

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So I knew just alcohol is a drug, and that would not be an appropriate drug for me in that moment. It wouldn’t help me meet my goals. So what I did was I shut off the damn TV because if somebody asked me if that show was any good, it was fine, but it wasn’t holding my attention. So not only was it not, was my body kind of uncomfortable from sitting there, but mentally I was unstimulated. I was bored.

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And so of course, it’s completely normal that I might consider having wine, like for all of these reasons. And so when you look at this from a third party objective point of view, instead of taking every thought that you think so damn seriously, all of this makes perfect sense. And I will bridge this to emotional eating, which I’ve also struggled with. And it was in early sobriety when you are.

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a lot more tired. I was struggling with depression and early sobriety, just trying to create a new normal. There’s a lot going on when you first quit drinking after you’ve been drinking every single day for 15 years like I did. And so I was putting on some weight because I had developed a habit, you know, it was better than drinking and okay, you know, it’s okay. It’s okay to gain five pounds because you quit drinking. But I wasn’t happy with that.

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And what happened was, like I said, willpower is a limited resource. So I didn’t struggle with emotional eating when I woke up. I was always really good for breakfast and really good for lunch because I tended to have stuff to do and I could keep myself busy. But the longer the day goes on, the harder it gets to not just allow ourselves, we just need to take our brains offline. We don’t want to think. And then these subconscious suggestions that we should have some wine.

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or some granola, or some sugar, or whatever else it is that we’re using. We’re not consuming that stuff because our body needs it. We’re trying to soothe an anxious mind. And so the litmus test that you might ask yourself when you’re struggling with an urge is, am I having the urge to consume this because it’s something my body needs? Or is it something that’s triggered?

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something in my mind? Am I trying to soothe my anxiety or soothe my anxious mind? That is a really good litmus test. And if the answer is, yeah, no, my body doesn’t want, my body’s not down. My body would not appreciate, you know, me eating or drinking something right now. Then you have to go out of the thoughts of what you’re telling yourself that you want and go down into the feelings and...

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It’s a simple math problem. Like, OK, I recognized I was feeling bored or restless. What solves that movement and stimulation? Not alcohol, not sugar from the fridge. So if I had gotten wine, which I would have been fine, even if I had gotten it and then drank the whole damn bottle, I would have lived through that. That wouldn’t have meant anything either. It would have just been a learning opportunity for me to go upstream in my process.

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But if I had gotten those things, what I really would have been doing is making it more palatable for me to sit on the couch and watch a show I wasn’t enjoying. That’s really what I would have been doing. And I love this meme on Instagram that says, if you have to drink through an event, or if you have to drink around certain people, maybe you don’t really wanna be at that event. Maybe you don’t really wanna be around those people. And the hard part of self-care is that you

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have to start honoring what it is your body needs. But when you do that, you don’t wake up feeling regret. You feel in control. It is hard sometimes to make a difficult decision that might disappoint other people or help. You might disappoint yourself. But when you start having your first priority be taking care of your body, life gets a lot simpler.

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When you’re in a situation where you are struggling to control yourself, instead of trying to use willpower to control yourself, change the situation. And that was a trick that I did learn when I was inch into six and seven and eight pounds overweight on the scale when I first quit drinking.

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I realized that sitting on the couch watching shows, scrolling on my phone and trying not to eat the granola was not my definition of fun. And so I, at one point made a rule where if I wanna watch a show at night and I am feeling a little restless, I’ll go walk on my treadmill and watch the show instead of sitting on the couch. Like trying to use willpower to change your behavior. No, what you need to do is use the last little bit of willpower you have and change your situation.

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Stop asking yourself, what’s wrong with me? And start asking yourself, what’s wrong with this situation? And don’t believe your own thoughts. Shift out of the story you’re telling yourself, resolve for your feelings, and then go back into the story. Where I was able to win without using willpower was I didn’t believe the thought, I wanna have a drink. Like that’s...

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Not true. I didn’t want to have a drink. And if you’re struggling with alcohol, that is the one belief you need to tackle. If you’re struggling with alcohol, then by definition, you don’t want to be drinking. You don’t want to be over drinking and having the hangovers and thinking about drinking all the time. That isn’t what you want. So stop believing that it is what you want.

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It’s the story that you’re telling yourself that you want a glass of wine and that it’s hard to resist, and that if you do have a glass of wine, you’re gonna end up drinking the whole bottle. Those things aren’t true. And so the second win I had there was I didn’t allow all of this to go on without me paying attention in my mind while I tried to watch a show I was half interested in and let all of this work itself up in the background. Meanwhile,

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those thoughts would have been creating stress. I would have started releasing the cortisol and the adrenaline and I would have created a stress response in my body, which would have then made it even harder if I would have let it go on. I might have just been like, well, screw it. I’ll just have one. I don’t want to think about this. Overthinking is stressful. So I stopped and did some very pointed, calculated thoughts where I.

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where I diagnosed the problem for what it really was, and that was my feelings, and also that the thought wasn’t true. And then I prescribed what I really needed, turn off the damn TV and go to bed. So it was a great night. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t feel like I was denying or depriving myself. I wasn’t frustrated. I didn’t leave the room because I was being triggered and because I couldn’t handle it.

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I left the room because that’s what I wanted to do. I realized I wasn’t having fun where I was. And so I went to bed, got my book, and went to bed within 45 minutes and slept great. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t need willpower. And neither do you. Once you’re willing to challenge what you think and you’re willing to start dealing with how you feel and giving your body what you need, it doesn’t take willpower.

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So if you like this episode and you’re interested in learning more about the big picture framework of the skills you need to practice emotional sobriety so that you can accelerate your recovery, and by that I just mean get to a normal life where you’re no longer feeling like you’re struggling or recovering, you’re just you living your best life, then get in the show notes, click the link, and register for the master class this week. I hope to see you there.

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Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard, please take the time to rate and review the show so that other people can find it. I really appreciate it. And check out the show notes for any resources I’ve mentioned, including links to follow me on Instagram and join my private Facebook group where I connect with my tribe every day. I love it in there and we have so much fun. And finally,

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If you’re ready to redefine sobriety so that you can feel excited about quitting drinking, follow the link to my 10 Days to Spontaneous Sobriety course, where I will help you eliminate, eradicate, obliterate, cancel your desire to drink. Because looking and feeling your best is addictive too. I’ll see you soon.