Episode 276 How to Rewire Your Brain to Drink Less: 8 Core Principles of Self-Directed Neuroplasticity
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Picture this. It’s been a stressful week. You’re running on fumes. Too little sleep, too much to do, no time to frickin’ pee, much less breathe. And by Thursday night, you’re fried. And even though you promised yourself you’d only be having one glass of wine, you finish the bottle. And the next morning, the shame hits. You fucking failed again. Except, what if you didn’t fail? What if your body did exactly what it’s designed to do?
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when you’re operating on a deficit. In this episode, I will teach you how overwhelm affects your nervous system and also your ability to think and stay on track with your goals. And then how to use the eight core principles of self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire your brain so that drinking less or not drinking at all doesn’t feel hard. What you need to understand is that you don’t need to fix your drinking problem.
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You need to build a nervous system that has the capacity to provide you with energy and motivation without getting stuck in survival mode.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again.
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Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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So today, I’m going to give you the principles of self-directed neuroplasticity. How to actually rewire your brain to support the changes that you want to make so that you have the capacity to live the life that you want to live. We’re going to start with why your current approach to changing your drinking isn’t working. And then we’re going to end with a clear roadmap for what does work. By the time we’re done,
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you’re going to understand the eight principles that make lasting change possible, and you’ll know exactly what to do differently starting today. So let’s first just get clear on what alcohol use disorder actually is. At its simplest, alcohol use disorder means that you’re drinking more than you think you should drink. That’s it. It’s not about how much or how often you drink compared to other people.
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It’s the gap between your intention and your behavior. But what most people don’t understand is that alcohol use disorder is not a lack of willpower or a character flaw or a moral failing or evidence that you’re broken. It’s a stress response pattern that has become a habit. And that habit lives in your nervous system. And that means
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that this lives in your body, not your brain. You can’t think your way out of a drinking problem. There’s nothing to figure out. Well, except there is something to figure out. It’s just, it’s not personal to you. It’s the same thing that happens for anybody everywhere who drinks more than they should. What you’ve been trying to figure out isn’t going to help. You know, why do you love to drink so much? Why do you lack self-control? That has nothing to do with it.
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The reason that you keep over drinking is that because you’re operating from a nervous system state that’s known as the trauma response. But I want to get really clear about what that means. When I say trauma response, I’m not talking about all the bad shit that happened to you in the past. The trauma response is a state of the nervous system. There are three states of the nervous system. The first state is your parasympathetic state where you feel
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calm, safe, relaxed, alive, and capable. The second state of the nervous system is your stress response. That’s where you are fueled by adrenaline and cortisol. You’re in problem-solving mode. And the stress response can be both good and bad. Every time you get that burst of energy and clarity, and you’re motivated to get your ass moving forward or to go do something.
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That is a stress response, and we’ll talk deeper about that in a little bit. But then the third level of your nervous system is what’s called the trauma response. And if you don’t like the word trauma, you can just think of it as overwhelm. My favorite analogy to describe the states of the nervous system is basically green light, yellow light, red light. Your green light is when you can go forever at the pace that you’re at.
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It’s good. You’re happy. You’re engaged. You’re capable. The yellow light. Think about approaching a yellow light. What do we often do is we speed up the yellow light. The stress response is like a sprint. Your body flips into sport mode. Think of like, you know, normal mode and sport mode on your car. Your body’s physiology alters to maximize your energy and focus on whatever problem you’re focused on. When you’re in the stress response,
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Normal everyday processes kind of come to a halt or take a back burner your digestion your immunity all of your hormone function You’ve got blood rushing into your muscles so that you can fight or flee the situation Your heart rate increases your core temperature goes up stress is Energizing whether it’s negative or positive to you in the body. It’s just one thing you are in sport mode and then
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The trauma response, the overwhelm is the red light. It’s when your body switches operating modes for survival strategy and completely shuts down your access to that adrenaline and cortisol because your body has perceived that you don’t have the capacity to handle whatever’s happening. The trauma response is your freeze response, red light.
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The trauma response happens when you feel trapped, powerless, and alone. When you suddenly realize this isn’t going to work. You can’t handle it. That’s when the stress of whatever you’ve been dealing with suddenly feels inescapable. And in that moment, your physiology flips from survival mode, which is the higher level functioning on all levels,
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into the trauma response, which is the shutdown. You may think in your mind that, oh, I just don’t care. I give up. But in reality, you can’t care because you don’t have the energy to care. And then, of course, that impacts your ability to make good decisions about whether or not you’re going to drink or how much you’re going to drink. And here’s where fear and shame come in. Every time that you drink more than you intend, your brain
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registers that as failure. There’s a part of your brain known as the habinula that’s constantly keeping score of how well you’re doing or how bad you’re doing. And the more failure you perceive, the more times you’ve tried and not followed through on whatever promise you made to yourself, the more shame you feel. And the more shame you feel, the more that triggers a trauma response in your body, which is why
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you feel stuck and overwhelmed and kind of helpless. Like, can’t change. It’s just not happening. And when you perceive failure, when you think that you’re failing, when you think that you’re not capable, that shame actually has physiological responses in your body. If your dopamine gets down-regulated, dopamine is your motivation to do something different. And serotonin, which is your feel-good
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connected chemicals, so you have no motivation and you don’t feel good about anything. That’s all happening biologically because your brain has decided that you’re a lost cause and it’s pointless to invest energy into something that clearly is not going to work. And that is why shame makes change neurologically impossible. So here’s what the pattern looks like in general.
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You’re stressed in general. You’ve been operating in survival mode. You’re running on too little of sleep. You’re jacked up on caffeine. You’ve got too many obligations and zero time to recover. And your nervous systems job is always to be calculating how much capacity you have to meet the demands you’re facing. And when it determines that you don’t have the capacity, then it switches you
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from sport mode into emergency brake system. There is no speeding up to make it through the yellow light. You are hitting a red light. It’s a stop. Let me quickly explain the five step process that your body goes to when it’s moving from stress into overwhelm. And this is a game changer. And I have to give full credit where it’s due. I’ve had Dr. Amy Apigian on my
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program like three times now. She is the biology of trauma podcast and then she also just released her biology of trauma book which is a frickin game changer. It’s changing my life. It’s changing my program. It is amazing. I highly recommend the book or you can go back and listen to the episodes the interviews that I did with her. But she teaches that there’s a five step sequence that happens in your body and understanding this is like somebody giving you a map.
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of your own nervous system. The five steps are instinctual, meaning they happen below conscious level. You don’t get to decide if you are stressed or overwhelmed. It’s just your nervous system measuring how much capacity is versus the demands that you have. And this is what happens to everybody. And you will go through this multiple times every single day. You will go into stress and out of it and into overwhelm and out of it.
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So understanding this process is like having a map and that way you know which direction you need to go. Okay. The five steps are the startle, the stress, the wall, the freeze and the shutdown. So here’s how it unfolds. The startle is just when something triggers you. It’s like you sense something is off or something catches your attention. You know what the startle feels like. And for me, I’m a big startled
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like if you walk up behind me, I will scream like I’m being murdered. It’s so weird. But that’s not the only time you get the startle. Like the startle is just any time you feel that surge of adrenaline or cortisol or awareness of hyper, all of a sudden the stress response kicks in, you’re getting hyper-focused and you’re no longer just cruising through life. Now you’re dealing with something. The startle is when you got to deal with something.
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Okay, and then after the startle comes the stress response. Your heart races, your temperature rises, adrenaline floods your system, you are activated, you are on point, and you are looking for a solution. And in normal everyday situations, you can go into stress, solve the problem, complete the stress response, and go back into a parasympathetic state. Except those of us that are running around with like a chicken with her head cut off with her damn pants on fire all the time.
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We’re not actually ever completing the stress response. We’re not going into stress solving the problem and then coming back into a parasympathetic state. We are stuck in the stress response. Okay? And that’s like doing a sprint. You can only sprint for so long. And so at some point, you’re going to hit the third step of the process, which is the wall. This is your resistance when suddenly all the problems feel too big. The stress...
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is inescapable and you feel like you’ve run out of gas. You can’t do all of this. It’s too much. We call it the wall because it feels like a wall. You hit a wall. And then depending on how you respond to that, then you go into the freeze and the freeze response is interesting because all that adrenaline and cortisol that’s been coursing through your body, when you freeze, it’s
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doesn’t go away. It’s kind of like flooding the engines and all the gases in there. Like the freeze happens and your body switches modes from go, go, go, go, go to stop, like conserve energy. But all of that energy gets locked in your body. Your muscles are tense. You feel frozen or paralyzed or stuck. The urge to fight, flee, fix it, figure it out is just
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gone. It’s like the deer in the headlights moment. Then depending on how you respond to that, the fifth step is shut down. And that feels like depression. feel heavy, disassociated, out of body, exhausted, no matter how much caffeine you’re drinking, like it’s in your bones. And it feels like that because your body has gone into energy conservation mode.
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It’s not cranking out the stress hormones to support you. It shut your shit down. It’s called red light. And while this applies to every single aspect, every single day of your life, you go through these five steps many, many times in and out of them. Let’s just keep it in context of drinking. You’re gonna reach for the alcohol when you’re somewhere between the wall and shut down. Because alcohol is the fastest way you know how to interrupt.
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the cascade of the overwhelm, the trauma response. Alcohol becomes your emergency exit plan, if you will. The problem is that alcohol doesn’t complete the stress response. It just numbs it. So the next day, you wake up with the same depleted capacity that you had before you started drinking on it, plus a hangover. uh
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plus the shame about drinking too much and being frustrated with yourself for not following through. And that further depletes your capacity. And then the cycle repeats. And this is why I teach that the biggest mistake people make when they’re trying to control their drinking is trying to control their drinking. Because you’re doing that from a state of overwhelm. It doesn’t feel natural to drink in the way that you want to be able to drink or not drink.
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Right? You feel like you have to set rules. You have to keep yourself extra busy. You have to apply all this willpower and white knuckle your way through cravings. But you can’t expect more of yourself until you give more to yourself. You can’t change your brain in a state of overwhelm. You can’t do self-directed neuroplasticity, which I’m going to explain in a minute. You can’t rewire your habits.
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when you’re in a trauma response because you simply do not have the capacity to do so. Your brain literally does not have access to the circuits required for behavior change when you’re stuck in survival mode, which is why you have to stop believing that the way you’re going to change requires willpower. I mean, it does require willpower, but you’re applying it to the wrong thing. You don’t need willpower to not
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drink yourself numb and dumb any more than you need willpower to not hit yourself in the head with the hammer. And the more you focus on trying to recruit your willpower and fight yourself, the more it induces a stress response in your body, which keeps you stuck in the very thinking habits that are driving the drinking. It reinforces the neural pathways that you need to break. So you end up stuck up in your head.
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trying to understand why that you are the way you are before you can change. But again, there’s nothing to figure out. You’re going to have to feel your way out of this one. And that’s what I’m going to get into. But taking the time to dig into your past traumas, because you think that’s what’s causing you to drink, before you have the actual nervous system capacity to process whatever past pain and emotional baggage that you have.
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If you’re trying to do that in a state of overwhelm and stress, it’s just creating more overwhelm and stress. Real healing doesn’t start with controlling your drinking. I like to say controlling your drinking is the side effect of you feeling like somebody who’s in control of yourself and your life and your time and your future. Controlling your drinking starts then with building your nervous system capacity so that your body
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can tolerate the discomfort of change so that you know where and how to apply willpower to upstream things and behaviors that actually allow you to operate in green light instead of yellow light, red light all the time. Healing requires you to learn how to operate your nervous system. And when you find yourself in a state of stress, which you will 100 times a day, building the habits
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to complete the stress response, bringing yourself back into a parasympathetic state, going back into green light mode, instead of burning your damn adrenal glands out so that you’re blowing through all your nutritional reserves and all of the brain chemicals that we need to have dopamine and serotonin, like you’re blowing through all of your gas when you’re in the stress response. So healing requires you to learn how to recognize a stress response.
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and then manually override the physiological reaction when it is not needed. And if you have to stop and think about it, then it’s not needed. If you’re really running from somebody, then you don’t have time to stop and think about it, and the question becomes mute. But we tend to exist in this state of stress constantly all day long. And so healing is going to require you to become aware of your own body and start to care for her.
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giving her what she needs to complete the stress response so that she’s not operating in a state of urgency and rushed and late and behind and overwhelmed at all times. Also, healing requires that when you are in a state of stress, if you haven’t completed the stress response, that then you catch yourself noticing when you’re approaching the wall, that moment when stress is going to flip into overwhelm, and then pausing, giving yourself a break.
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taking a breath before you cross into freeze and then go into shutdown. And it’s pretty simple. It sounds like, oh, I’m having a stress response right now. Oh, my body is trying to protect me. This is a survival. I’ve not done anything wrong. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong out there. My body is just reacting. And I don’t need to feel this level of stress right now.
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I don’t need to fix everything in this moment or push through this. I just need to complete the stress response. I need to give myself some time and space to calm myself back into that parasympathetic state. so healing doesn’t look like changing your drinking. It looks like giving yourself permission to rest and to set boundaries and to learn how to tolerate the disappointment of other people when you’re not willing to
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burn your adrenal glands out 23 hours a day on behalf of making all the people around you happy. You got to stop with the perfectionism and the people pleasing. You have to do less. And I can tell you that’s going to be really uncomfortable as you’re learning how to do this because your brain is going to be screaming at you because it’s the thinking habits that are driving your drinking. Your brain is going to be telling you, go, go, go, push, push, push, because that’s how you’ve been operating.
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for the last few decades. You’re going to have to learn how to talk back to the bully in your brain. I’m not lazy. I’m not weak. I’m actually powerful and strong because giving myself the support I need to run the marathon that is my life is actually a brilliant strategy. And right now, my nervous system needs safety and calm and quiet, and that’s what I’m going to give it. So healing.
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looks like building new habits in microdosing safety and peace. I like calling it microdosing because what I’m talking about is like 30 seconds to two minutes of habits throughout your day where you are just microdosing stillness and calm in short, simple, gentle practices that feel easy and soft and rewarding and kind.
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rather than trying to overhaul your entire life overnight. It sounds like I’m not gonna force this. I don’t need to force this. What I need is to feel like this is easy because the easier it feels, the more you’re gonna do it and the more automatic it will become. And the side effect of doing that, of healing, will be that you will drink less or not at all because instead of
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white-knuckling your way through cravings and pushing yourself through overwhelm, you are building a nervous system that has the capacity to expand to levels that previously you couldn’t even dream about because you wouldn’t have had the energy and you’re too stressed out. You’re building a nervous system that has the capacity to carry you through whatever obstacles and struggles you decide are worthy.
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of your energy because you have the energy, because you’re not stuck in burnout and overwhelm. So let’s get in to the eight principles of self-directed neuroplasticity. And just to make sure you are clear on the term, first of all, neuroplasticity is always happening in your brain. Your brain is always changing its shape and structure and function in response to your environment.
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your experiences, your brain is always changing. Self-directed neuroplasticity means that you are changing your brain according to how you want it to change. Basically, it’s just a fancy way of saying that you can rewire your brain on purpose. Self-directed neuroplasticity is basically the difference between riding shotgun in a self-driven car
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that somebody else programmed or that has been programmed over the course of your life inadvertently and unconsciously and being an active driver, taking the car off self-driving mode and taking control over who you are and where you want to go. And I’ve got eight principles that will help you understand what it means to truly take control of yourself, to truly self-direct your neuroplasticity. So the first principle,
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is to understand that what you really want is always just a feeling. You don’t actually want to lose 20 pounds or stop drinking or stop drinking after two drinks on a Friday night at the party so that you win for most moderate drinker. You don’t really want to get married or get a divorce or build a successful business. What you want is how you think achieving those goals will make you feel. So you can skip the middle part, right?
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You want to feel confident. You want to feel proud. You want to feel in control. You want to feel free. You want to feel loved. You want to feel peaceful. You want to feel connected. The external goal is just the pathway for how you think you’ll get there. But here’s the problem. If you attach your emotional well-being to an external goal that you have not yet achieved, then you’re going to be living in a state of stress
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until that goal is achieved. And as living in a state of stress is a habit, funny thing will happen. Your brain will always be moving the bar. So even when you accomplish the goal and you drive the new car off the lot, within a couple days, if not five minutes, your brain will be pointing out problems or telling you that it could be better or now you want more or it’s not gonna last because
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how you feel, the state of your nervous system is how you think. How you feel is how you think. It’s a feedback loop. So if you’re in the habit of living in a state of stress and or overwhelm because you think that you can’t feel better until or if or when or after the external goal is achieved, then you’re gonna be running on a hamster wheel. So self-directed neuroplasticity starts with getting clear
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on the emotional outcome that you are after. Because here’s the brilliant part, your brain will help you get whatever you think you want. It is your personal assistant. And so if you think that you want to feel peaceful and calm and powerful and in control and all those things, it will help you solve for those problems. When you start asking better questions,
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you’ll see how your brain responds. Your brain will try to answer any question that you feed it. So if you ask it to help you feel more safe and calm, then it will solve problems for you in that way, because that goal will be like your compass, and everything else is just a litmus test, yes or no, more or less, better or worse, and then...
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When you become somebody who lives in a state of calm and peace and confidence and power and in control, you think like somebody who feels that way. And then all of the things, the external goals that you want are just a natural side effect of you living in that emotional state. So here’s a reflection exercise for principle number one. I want you to think about one goal that you’ve been chasing and ask yourself,
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How does it make me feel to know that I don’t have that goal yet? Notice. Your brain will answer the question for you. And then ask yourself, what would achieving that goal allow me to feel? And then, is there any way I could access that feeling right now without waiting for the external goal to be achieved? Because the more you can access the feeling of the external goal, the easier it is. That’s called manifestation. You’re going to manifest it.
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But you have to start thinking differently about what you want. What you want is always a feeling, and all of the feelings are available to you right now. Kinda. Let’s talk about principle number two. Before you can feel how you want, you must have the capacity in your nervous system to actually feel that way. This is the part nobody tells you. You can’t just decide to feel confident or peaceful or free if your nervous system is stuck in survival mode.
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When you’re in overwhelm, when you’re between the wall and the shutdown, your body is in energy conservation mode. All non-survival functions in your body have shut down, including your ability to access positive emotions. I want you to think about your capacity, like a bank account. Deposits build capacity, quality sleep, good food, healthy relationships, movement, play.
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emotional processing so that you’re not carrying around years of fucking baggage, right? And then you have withdrawals that drain your capacity. The stress, the perfectionism, the people pleasing, the lack of recovery time, the chronic unmet needs, not to mention all the shitty food, excessive amounts of alcohol, and environmental toxins that we slather on our face and our body and in our hair and put in our food.
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and breathe and drink and touch all the environmental toxins. Not to mention all the digital distractions that are robbing us of a regulated nervous system because it’s ding ding ding ding ding all the fucking time. All of that depletes your capacity. So with your capacity account, you’ve got deposits and you’ve got withdrawals. And when you’re overdrawn, when you’re operating on a deficit, your nervous system
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simply won’t allow you to feel the way you want to feel. You’re not in control. And it’s not because you’re broken or depressed or an anxious person. It’s because you don’t have the energetic reserves to sustain those emotions. This is why you can’t willpower your way to your goals. You can’t willpower your way from over drinking or make yourself go to the gym, push yourself through another fucking grueling day because
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You’re trying to access motivation and self-control from a nervous system that doesn’t have the capacity to access it. You’re running on empty. And that leads to principle number three. Building capacity requires learning to recognize where you are in the five steps of the stress response and choosing to pause before you cross into overwhelm. Remember the five steps. Startle, stress, the wall,
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freeze and shut down. There is no self-directed neuroplasticity in overwhelm. There’s neuroplasticity. You’re learning that you can’t do this. And you’re right. You can’t. The strategies that got you here, got you here. They’re not going to pull you out. Building the capacity means learning to recognize when you’re approaching the wall, which is the pivotal moment when stress
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starts to feel inescapable and then pausing. And the key word there is feel. You’re going to have to start paying attention to your body. Your body is brilliant and it’s designed to support you and keep you alive. And the more you live in your head and completely disconnect, unplug your brain from the body, the harder this is going to feel, which is why even just listening to this episode, you might feel overwhelmed.
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But that is what I teach. That is what we do in the next chapter program, where over the course of a year, you learn how to feel good again. You learn how to listen to your body and to respond to it like it’s telling you something important and not just in another annoying rock in your shoe. When you learn how to live from the inside out, when you learn how to drive your body like a high performance race car, your
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Your to tolerate bigger and more difficult problems. One of my favorite sayings is that you can only rise to the level of problem you’re capable of solving. And I am watching myself expand to heights of previously unconsidered territory in terms of what I am capable of doing with running a business and doing things around the world.
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It’s amazing, but I’ve built the capacity in my nervous system to allow me to do that because I refuse to operate in a dysregulated state. I choose to pause before I move into overwhelm because I know that once I hit overwhelm, it’s out of my control. I just have to wait for the reset to happen or worse. I go back into old patterns.
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Because once you cross the critical line of overwhelm, once you hit the wall and keep going, you lose access to your prefrontal cortex. You lose your ability to make conscious choices. You forget why you want to change. You don’t have any more give-a-fucks. Your body takes over and starts running the old programs that have kept you alive in the past. But if you catch yourself at the wall, or even sooner,
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that regularly completing your stress response with 30 seconds to two minutes of just self-regulation, your light stays green. You’ve got the energy and the tolerance and the clarity and the focus and the motivation to accomplish amazing things when you’re in green light. I think the biggest misunderstanding that I’ve always had is that in order to operate at a highly
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at a high level with awesome nervous system regulation means that I have to sit on my yoga mat and meditate for an hour every day and then work out for an hour and do all these things. You guys, I’m talking about 30 seconds to two minutes that is coupled with just a general ongoing sense of connection and awareness to your own body. That’s all it takes. It’s not complicated. It’s just you signaling to your nervous system.
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that you’re in control, you’ll be calling the shots, and that you’re safe. You don’t have to live like you’re in constant danger and threat mode. And the only thing that’s going to block you from doing that is the belief that being stressed, being overwhelmed, is what makes you a valuable person. We do that so much in my Next Chapter program, where
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Somehow as little girls, we all got programmed to see our value as a human being as being directly tied to our productivity and our ability to run through a thousand point to do list without breaking a sweat and appear that we are doing everything better and faster and while also looking hot and being nice.
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and serving great meals and bringing the perfect hostess gift and all of the things like the unfucking realistic expectations that are tied to perfectionism is a whole other episode. So let’s just move on to principle number four. And that is what you think you want, which is a feeling, right? Has to be compatible with who you think you are. What you think you want has to be compatible with who you think you are. So as long as you see yourself as a stressed out
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hot mess, just a person who thrives in survival mode, that’s gonna be a problem. Your identity determines what your brain will allow you to do. So I want you to think of an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, what’s above the water, five to 10 % of the iceberg, right, is your behaviors. Underneath the iceberg are your thoughts, and then your feelings, and then your beliefs.
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And then your identity, the foundation of your iceberg is your identity. And you’re not going to do or not do or think or not think or feel or not feel or believe or not believe anything that doesn’t align with who you think you are. And good news, you can be whoever the fuck you want. You can decide that you want to start seeing yourself as someone who is learning to regulate her nervous system. You can think.
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that you are a person who lives with ease and abundance. You can believe that you are powerful, or you can believe that you are learning to see yourself as powerful. And your brain works for you. Whatever you say you want, it’s going to help you get. And so you have to clearly define who you are becoming so that your brain can start supporting you, start looking for ways
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to make that identity true. And this is why labels like alcoholic or addict or even ADHD or bipolar or generalized anxiety, these labels put us in a box. They can be so damaging because they lock you into an identity that makes you believe that change would be impossible or it would go against your natural state. Here’s the thing, your natural state is simply
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who you have practiced being. It is the behaviors and thought processes and beliefs that you have learned and repeated over time to the point where they feel true. True isn’t true. True is just familiar. Anything is possible for you if you believe it. Your natural state is just what you do on a regular basis. This is the power of self-directed neuroplasticity. You simply have to practice repeating to yourself
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because your body hears everything you say and the more you repeat something, the more familiar it sounds, which means the truer it will feel. So saying statements like, I’m someone who is learning to feel safe in my body. I’m becoming somebody who has no desire to use alcohol to cope with my stress. I’m the kind of person who prioritizes her nervous system capacity because I understand that that is my superpower.
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your brain will work tirelessly to make your identity real. As it already has, you just need to consciously choose an identity that serves you. And this leads to principle number five. The secret to change is not fighting your old habits, but building new habits. Every time you focus on not drinking, you’re activating the neural pathways associated with drinking.
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You’re reinforcing the very circuits that you’re trying to break. You’re focusing on the problem. You have to start focusing on the solution because the brain doesn’t understand negatives. If I tell you, don’t think about a red fire truck, what do you see? A red fire truck. Real change happens when you stop fighting the old habits and start building new ones. Instead of thinking, I’m not going to drink tonight, you practice
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I’m going to take a walk after dinner. I’m going to call a friend when I feel stressed. I’m going to lay down on my bed and do a 10 minute reset and see if that changes what sounds good for the rest of the evening instead of coming in like a hot mess and going right to the liquor cabinet. You don’t need to eliminate your old pathways. You just build ones that sound and feel inviting and rewarding.
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This is self-directed neuroplasticity in action. You’re using your own attention, which is the power that you have. What you choose to pay attention to is what makes you a human. It’s what gives you the ability to go and do and create whatever you want. It’s what you pay attention to. So you have to start paying attention to solutions.
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instead of focusing on the damn problem that keeps you stuck in the state of stress and overwhelm. And that leads to principle number six. The brain rewires through consistent, repetitive experiences. So what doesn’t change your brain, what doesn’t rewire it is reading books, listening to this podcast. I’m sorry, it’s an amazing episode, I know, but it’s not.
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Actually going to rewire your brain. It’s going to give you directions for how to go rewire your brain But you can’t rewire your brain by having an epiphany or going to therapy once a week those things Inspire you they give you new ideas They make you have a new to-do list or change your perspective of where you think you’re going and what you think you want and who you think you are But all of those thoughts aren’t your neural pathways rewiring
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Your brain changes through felt sensation. You have to feel it in your body, not just think it in your brain. And you have to repeat these thoughts and experiences over and over. So you have to practice thoughts and behavior hundreds, maybe thousands of times before it becomes automatic. I love when somebody gets in the coaching chair in the next chapter and we’re talking.
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And they have one experience, and they’re like, oh my god, I get it. And I’m like, OK, all right, so now I’m going to need you to rinse and repeat on that 1,000 times. And they’re like, huh? And I’m like, yep, it’ll get easier and more automatic the more you do it. But it takes repetition. It’s not a one and done. It’s not an occasional breakthrough. And this is why people get stuck, because they do have the breakthrough. They do understand the concept. They get it.
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and then they expect their behavior to change automatically. But understanding is not the same as rewiring the circuits that drive your subconscious habits. Your subconscious is in your body, not your brain. You can’t think your way into new neural pathways because you can only think as great as you can feel. However you feel is how you’re thinking. So if you’re feeling good and thinking good, that’s amazing.
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But in five minutes, when the stress response kicked in, all that shit goes out the window. You have to practice feeling the way you want to feel, and then repeat that. And that’s the good news. Every single time, you choose the tiniest little new behavior that has nothing to do with drinking. Even if it feels hard and you don’t want to take a break, or stop for a breath, or just go potty without taking your phone.
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It doesn’t matter every time you choose the behavior and experience something positive as a result of, oh, it does feel good to go potty. That is what is strengthening the neural circuits in your brain and building out the neural pathways. No matter how hard it is, the first time, it’s only going to keep getting easier the more you repeat it. And so that is principle number seven. Short, simple, gentle.
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daily practices have a much greater impact than intense, lengthy, or sporadic practices. And this is the principle that changes everything. And this is why, like in my program, we do it over a year. I’m not doing one week retreats and telling you you can come and it’s going to change everything. Because while you can change your perspective and you can have a lot of breakthroughs you can have a lot of great plans about what’s going to be different,
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Old habits take over when you go back into the stress and the overwhelm. Most people think that change requires massive effort, and they try to overhaul their entire life overnight, do a complete habit change. They commit to hour-long workouts and strict meal plans and elaborate morning routines and extensive, you know, sober days, like I’m going to do a 10-day or a 30-day or a year, you know, whatever. And they commit to these things that are so big.
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before they have the capacity to follow through. And that’s why they burn out. That’s why that cycle of getting some wind in your sails and making good new habits and doing it for a few weeks, you putter out and run out of gas. Because that level of effort isn’t sustainable when you’re already operating on a deficit. But here’s what does work. Short, simple, gentle practices.
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that take less than 10 minutes, as little as 30 seconds, practice daily with no expectation that they’re going to feel transformative. They’re just going to feel safe. They’re going to feel soft. They’re going to feel repeatable. If there’s one thing you’re looking for, it’s could I do this again? Could I sustain this? That’s why in my program, I teach something called the low bar method. Your practice, your somatic practice,
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has to be so simple and so not taxing or stressful that you can do it in 30 seconds to two minutes, and it’s easy enough to lay in bed and do it. Somatic work, these little practices have to be, by definition, ah so easy, so simple, because you’re going to repeat it over and over and over. And
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So they have to be things that restore your capacity not to plead it, which is why as wonderful as working out is and breath work is and doing big hard things, when you don’t have the capacity to do those things, you won’t do them. And so what you build for neuroplasticity is 30 second to two minute habits that aren’t transforming you. They’re just something that bring you back into a state of calm, remove the needle on your freak out meter,
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from a 10 to a nine and a nine to an eight and a three to a two and a two to a one. You just get in the habit of these little practices that move you back towards your green light state, your parasympathetic state, moving you out of the stress response. Because your nervous system can’t tolerate intensity when it’s already intense, when it’s already depleted. Intense practices feel threatening.
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They trigger a stress response. It’s a problem that you have to solve and follow through and keep going. And that’s exactly what you’re trying to interrupt. Gentle practices, short, simple practices, signal safety. They tell your nervous system, we’re not in danger. We can relax. We can build. Some examples of this are like two minutes of box breathing before bed, five minutes of stretching in the morning, 30 second
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body scan when you notice that you’ve hit the startle and the dopamine and the adrenaline and the cortisol. Just stop and scan. Where do you feel that? Huh, do I need to have such a five alarm alert? Could I drop it down to a three alarm? Like, how could I regulate myself through this? Other examples are like just writing a list of three things you’re grateful for or sending a text to somebody that
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you know is having a hard day and feel the oxytocin of connection squirt in your brain. And then over time, six months, one year, two years, these tiny practices will compound into massive change. So let’s bring all of this together. You can’t change your drinking by fighting with yourself about the drinking. You can change your drinking by building nervous system capacity.
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by choosing an identity that serves you, and by practicing daily, small, simple, gentle behaviors that feel good in your body. That is self-directed neuroplasticity. That is how you rewire your brain so that you have the capacity to live a life that you want to live. It’s not fast. It’s not dramatic or overnight. But it works.
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And the beautiful thing is that once you understand these principles, you can apply them to everything, not just drinking, any habit, any pattern, any belief that’s keeping you stuck because your brain is plastic. It’s malleable. It’s capable of being shaped and you’re capable of shaping it. So that’s it for this episode. And I just want to tell you that
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You don’t have to try to do this by yourself. It is hard enough to actually change and do the change process without trying to figure out how to do it, what to do it, when to do it, and if you’re doing it right, and how long you have to do it this way before you can try it that way. Like, there’s two different things you need to think about. know, can I do this work? And can I design myself a program
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to do this work by myself. And you can. And this is what I do. This is how I help. I have a roadmap with daily protocols that include the strategies and the tools that you need because there isn’t one tool, there’s a hundred tools. Like I say in the program, you’re not changing your drinking habit and thinking of it as one habit. There’s like a hundred habits, at least.
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that have to be built in order to change and have that be a natural side effect where drinking is just not a thing you worry about anymore. And so if you are interested in learning more about my program, how it works, what it looks like over the course of a year, we even have a second year. Like this shit doesn’t change overnight. It takes six months just to become aware of your patterns and then another six months to actually build new ones.
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It’s not until the second year that any of this feels natural and just kind of automatic. You know what I mean? And so if you want to talk to either me or somebody on my team about what it would look like to join a program so that you have support, unlimited one-on-one coaching, multiple live calls every day to tune in from everything from nervous system to leveraging your dopamine to identity-based change and
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the iterative mindset, an emotional goal setting. Like I have created the roadmap that is guaranteed to do the work. And if the thought of figuring all this out on your own makes you feel overwhelmed and stressed, then you need to book a call because you can’t rewire your brain and do all the work when you are stuck in survival mode and overwhelmed. Can you imagine knowing that one year from now,
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you will not be struggling with alcohol use disorder. And the only thing that you need in order to be successful in my program is the ability to follow directions and to ask for help when things get hard or confusing. If you can do that, I’ve got everything else laid out for you. Because if you’re truly struggling with alcohol use disorder, you don’t have the capacity to figure it all out on your own. Not to mention we have a
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kick-ass community and it’s fun and I’m fun also. I’m fucking hilarious and I have made so many friends with the women in my community. know, like it’s part of this whole thing that I built is really just me looking for the community that I want to be a part of, you know, and I couldn’t find it. So I built it. You’re welcome. If you’re interested, get in the show notes, apply for a discovery call. There’s no pressure um on the call. We don’t
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pressure people to come in. I’ve tried that didn’t work all that well. So now we just, it’s very trauma informed. It’s very gentle. It’s very not overwhelming. So um maybe I’ll see you and everybody else. Thank you so much for listening and being a part of my community. You guys, this is why I get up in the morning to talk to you, to hear from you. I love when you respond to my emails or text me or whatever on social media. I love it.
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Thank you for being here. And I hope this episode fucking changes your life because this information since I read Dr. Amy’s book is changing mine. It’s like all coming together. I always think, oh, this is the missing piece of the puzzle. And maybe there’s more missing pieces out there, but Dr. Amy’s book, The Biology of Trauma, huge. But it’s really chewy. And so that’s why I just create content. So I’ll read the book so you don’t have to.
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Not to say you shouldn’t read it, you should if you got the capacity for it. But anyway, I love you. I’ll see you on the next episode.