Episode 291: Why you drink too much when you’re alone (and what to do about it)

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What if I told you that your drinking habit isn’t just one habit? It’s like a hundred habits and most of them have nothing to do with alcohol. So today we’re talking about what happens when you’re starting to make progress changing your drinking. Maybe you’re not drinking every single day anymore.  Maybe you’re doing great when you’re in social situations.  And even when you do overdo it, you’re not spiraling into shame. You’re genuinely proud of how far you’ve come.

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But there’s still a context where you’re getting tripped up. Maybe it’s when you’re home alone on a Sunday afternoon and you’ve got nothing planned. Or a Tuesday evening when it’s been a stressful day. You pour one glass and then somehow you end up drinking the whole entire bottle like you’ve not even tried to make any changes. And what everybody wants to know is, will this just eventually go away on its own? Or do I actually need to try harder? And so here’s what we’re diving into today.

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Change is not linear. Habits are contextual. And I’m going to explain exactly what it takes to transform  those last stubborn patterns. We’re going to talk about the difference between shame and disappointment and why staying busy isn’t actually a solution. And also how the language you use to describe the problem and the solution is actually keeping you stuck. I’ll explain how to change your language

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in a way that supports a new reality. So if you feel like you’re halfway there and you’re wondering how to get all the way there, then this episode is for you.

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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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I want to talk about how change is a nonlinear process and also that habits are very contextual.  so something that I see all the time  and is part of overcoming the obstacles to continuing to move forward  is when you’re, let’s just say like halfway there, you’re making progress on your drinking. Maybe you’re no longer drinking every day.

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or at least your overall consumption is way down. Maybe you have fixed your behavior like in social situations. You’re able to go to events, you’re able to drink like a normal person without going overboard, and you feel really proud about that because you’re doing the work, you’re  listening to the podcasts and you’re journaling and you’re going to the calls and you’re building your own awareness and you’re becoming a better friend to yourself. But,  and,

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There’s still some other context where you still get tripped up. Maybe it happens on a Sunday afternoon when you’ve got nothing planned, or it’s a Tuesday evening when you’re home alone and it’s been a stressful day. And in those contexts, you’re still  stuck in old patterns. You pour one glass and you end up drinking the entire bottle. And so now you’re struggling to know what to do about that.

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You got the memo that you shouldn’t be shaming yourself or beating yourself up, but you would like to continue making progress. And so the question that I get a lot is, if I just keep doing what I’m doing, will this eventually go away on its own?  Or do I need to do something else? Do I need to try harder? And here’s what I want you to understand. Big picture, your drinking habit is not one habit. It’s 100 habits.

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And most of them have nothing to do with alcohol. It’s the habits you have of how you talk to yourself and how you think about yourself and the world and your life and your future. It’s habits like always having a sense of urgency or feeling like there’s not enough time or money or resources.  It’s habits like second guessing yourself or ruminating over things that have happened in the past. It’s a

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lack of skills for how to deal with feeling stuck or feeling bored or feeling lonely or feeling like you want more for your life. And this is why I talk about the solution to alcohol use disorder as being emotional sobriety, because the goal is to become a person who is aware of her feelings at all times and who spends more time checked in than she does checked out.

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Because when you’re checked out, by definition, you’re not aware of what’s happening in your body. You’re ignoring uncomfortable emotions. You’re ignoring your own needs. Running on autopilot, which means you’re not paying attention to what’s happening in the present moment. You’re just running on assumptions and biases and unspoken rules that you followed in the past. So the big picture is that the real goal is not reduce your drinking, fix your drinking problem.

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That’s a side effect of becoming more emotionally sober. And so when you focus on being more emotionally sober, then you can just be curious about what’s going on that you’re still falling into a bottle on a Sunday afternoon or a Tuesday evening. And the good news,  if you are quote halfway there, is that you already have evidence.

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that you are capable of expanding your capacity, your capacity to stay present, your capacity  to make mindful choices, your capacity to go against the flow of your old habits. You’ve already got evidence  and you know that you’re capable of change because even when you are slipping up, you’re not slipping back into that cascade of the shame spiral that used to keep you down for days or months or even years. So yes.

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If you’re doing the work and you continue to do the work, you will continue to expand your capacity. But  if you still have a context in which you are struggling and you still want to change, then it would be kind of passive to just keep sending yourself into the same situation and expecting different results. Because you already know what’s going to happen. You already know that maybe it’s when you’re home alone for an unscheduled day.

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and  you’re telling yourself a story that it’s long and boring and it doesn’t matter anyway.  And so if you’re going to do the housework, your brain’s like, well, you know what pairs nice with housework? Wine. And because that’s how you’re thinking about the day and that’s how you’ve treated that  feeling in the past, then until something changes, you’re going to have the same experience. And there’s one thing that I want to pause and say here, and that is,

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You know, when we’re cleaning our house, so to speak,  you get to design it how you want. And so I want to be clear that there’s nothing wrong. If  you’re working your ass off and you’re doing well in all areas of your life and you want to spend the afternoon drinking and doing housework,  that’s okay. Like you have to decide, is this something I want to change? Is this worthy of my attention and my effort?  Or is this just how I want to roll sometimes? There’s no

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Problem there’s no right way to spend your time. There’s no right amount to drink But what’s happening in a situation where you’re struggling is that you are giving yourself permission? It’s a long boring Sunday So I’m gonna pour some wine or I’m home alone on Tuesday might as well have a drink You’re giving yourself permission to make that choice in the moment The problem is that then you’re taking it back later and beating yourself up and using your drinking as evidence

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that uh you can’t really trust yourself. And I want to be clear that the pattern you need to break is not how much you’re drinking when you’re home alone. The pattern that you need to break is giving yourself permission and then taking it back. The disconnect is in your relationship with yourself. And often when I coach to this, what  my clients will report is that

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All right, I’ve made a lot of progress and I’m not in shame anymore, which is why I don’t slide back into a shame spiral, but it’s more like I’m just disappointed, disappointed that I did it again, disappointed that I haven’t changed yet, that I’m not completely where I wanna be. And I wanna acknowledge that moving from shame to disappointment  is legit progress, that is growth. But here’s the next piece. When you process,

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that disappointment, what do you want to do with it? Do you want to turn it into evidence that you’re a failure, evidence that you can’t control yourself yet? Because here’s what you need to understand. Alcohol use disorder in whatever contexts you’re still experiencing it is the disease of perceived failure. Alcohol use disorder by definition means you drank more than you think you should have drank. And you’re seeing that as a failure.

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But the work isn’t to stop failing. The work is to change your perception of what failure even means.  Drinking too much on a Sunday or a Tuesday does not mean you’re failing. It means you had a day and you made choices and there’s pros and cons to those choices.  You chose to shut it down to go back to an old friend and now you’re dealing with the consequences.

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But the shift you need to make is to see those consequences as neutral data. Here’s what happens when you see the consequences of your actions as data instead of failure. You can process the disappointment, allow yourself to feel it, acknowledge that you wish you had made a different choice. You can process your disappointment without abandoning yourself, without turning on yourself.  And when you are on your own team,

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Then you can move into curiosity. Like, all right,  if I was going to run that day again, which you will next week, if you were going to run it again,  what would you do differently? What would you like to see change? What is your ideal outcome? What would you be doing if you weren’t drinking when you’re alone? What other activities would draw you in and capture your focus and attention?

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What would you have to be doing in order to feel so complete and satisfied and present that it doesn’t occur to you to pour a drink? The reason it’s so important to learn how to process first shame and then up level to disappointment, it’s so important to process it  because if you get stuck in that emotion,  oh, I’m disappointed, something is wrong, and you start ruminating on the fact that it’s a problem instead of just a piece of neutral data,

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then you can’t be curious about it. And until you can answer those questions of what else you would be doing and  see yourself and feel yourself  having a different experience, until you can clearly identify that in your mind, you’re not gonna manifest it in reality.  Nothing is going to change until you know what it is that you wanna change into. You have to know where you’re going before you ever expect yourself to get there.

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just saying,  don’t want to drink as much when I’m alone, you’re wishing for the absence of behavior. Your brain can’t help you get the absence of a behavior. You have to tell your brain clearly what it is you do want, and then your brain actually magically will help you achieve that. You just have to ask better questions. Instead of, why do I keep doing this? You would ask, how do I move the needle by 10 % next time? How do I expand my list of options?

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for things to do  on a long, boring day. If you want to transform your long, boring day into a pleasant and relaxing day, you’re going to have to have a vision for that. But I want to be clear that your first impulse might be, well, I just need to stay busy. I need to be productive. If I’m not busy and productive, then I’m going to want to drink. But filling your schedule doesn’t solve the problem.

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And I want to acknowledge that, of course, maybe it can a little bit. Building social connections is really important. Creating structure and routines, very important. Having activities that you’re looking forward to, also important. But staying really busy so that you don’t drink is a temporary plan because it doesn’t solve the real problem, which is that you really don’t know what else to do and you don’t know how to just be with yourself. The bridge to freedom.

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is being able to trust yourself on a day when nothing is planned or scheduled and not having to populate it with all these other activities.  Because as long as you have to run away from being alone with yourself, then you’re going to want to reach for something to make that time more bearable. And I just want you to imagine you’re in a relationship with yourself. How would it feel to have another person who’s got a cope?

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with spending time with you, who can’t bear to just be alone and be still with you. That doesn’t feel good. And that’s why this is your invitation to heal. And when I coach to this situation a lot, I often am met with limiting beliefs and language that sounds like, yeah, but I’ve always struggled being alone. I’ve never been very good when I’m by myself. I just don’t know how to

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be by myself. What you need to understand is that as long as you are still speaking in that language, you’re not going to be able to change your experience because that’s the truth that you’re butting up against. I don’t know how to do this. This is just who I am. This is how it’s always been. And I guess this is how it will always be. What you need to understand is the way you describe your reality is what’s creating that reality.

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As long as you believe that it’s hard to be alone, then it will be true that it’s hard to be alone. That belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and also acts as confirmation bias. Even if you had an okay time when you’re by yourself, if you believe it’s hard to be by yourself, you’re only gonna notice when it was uncomfortable. And then the next time you’re gonna be alone, you’re gonna be bracing yourself. This is gonna be hard. This is gonna suck. You prepare.

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to be uncomfortable. You expect that it’s gonna be long and lonely. And so it will be. You know the word abracadabra? It means I create as I speak. So if you expect that it’s gonna be hard to be alone or that you just don’t like to be alone, then your brain’s job is to say, abracadabra, your wish is my command. Sorry, your day sucks. Would you like a drink? So in addition to creating a vision for what else you want your day to be,

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You also need to adjust your language. When we do rewrites in the program, we teach you that your new truth has to still feel true, but it would also feel better. So if it feels true that  you’ve always struggled when you’re alone, then you would want to upgrade,  use language to create a new truth that feels true, but also better, such as I am learning how to enjoy

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being by myself. I look forward to the day when I spend a whole day at home alone and absolutely love every minute of it. I can’t wait. That’s going to feel so good to know that I can rest and relax with myself. And then you begin to adopt that as your truth. You repeat that to yourself. Every time you hear yourself say, I’ve always struggled by myself, you switch. I’m learning to enjoy being alone. I  love the idea of

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being able to relax  when I’m by myself. And as you adopt that new truth, now your brain will have confirmation and self-fulfilling prophecy  working in your favor. You can begin to watch it happen.  Watch it happen that, wow, I just spent an hour reading a book and was thoroughly absorbed. I loved it.  Or watching it happen that you can just lay on the couch and watch a show and not

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battle the urge to run laps to the refrigerator or to the wine cabinet. And you have to set realistic expectations here. It’s not like the first Sunday or Tuesday night that you go into, this is all going to be executed flawlessly. You want to start noticing smaller periods of time where you got lost in yourself, where you were relaxed and feeling complete and not distracted by intrusive thoughts.  And that might happen five minutes.

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or one hour at a time. But the most important thing is that you notice that it’s happening because this is how dopamine works in the brain. When you notice something that you like, your brain drops a dopamine pin on it. It marks it and says, I want to repeat that behavior. I want to do it again.  This is how your brain learns. You have to notice what you like so that you can consciously cultivate the desire to keep doing it.

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versus the alternative which is  noticing what you don’t like noticing that you feel bored and lonely and Pinning that with dopamine as I don’t want this and of course That’s a problem your brain can’t solve because it can’t solve for the absence of something So learning how brain chemistry works learning how to think about what you do want instead of what you don’t want and then start to notice tiny little

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Baby examples of oh my gosh. I just spent five whole minutes and I felt complete I wasn’t distracted  what caused me to be able to do that and how would I continue to expand that capacity to be present and unbothered by intrusive thoughts and this is the benefit of seeing whatever you’re dealing with as Neutral data because now you can look at upstream the variables that are contributing

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to the reality in the moment? Were you jacked up from work? Did you not get enough sleep? Have you not eaten or have you eaten too much?  Are you telling yourself a story that you’re gonna be lonely and bored all day? Again, there’s a hundred habits that you have to look at, that you have to learn how to pull the levers,  that if you make this change upstream, this is how it affects the downstream consequences. And you just do that over and over, iterating your way.

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into creating more and more time and space for yourself that you feel relaxed and complete alone. But you just have to be clear that that’s what you want. It’s not that you don’t want to drink on a Sunday or a Tuesday. It’s that you want to be able to feel unbothered and complete when you’re by yourself. You have to decide that the most amazing thing that you want is to feel seen and validated.

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And like you’re a person that you want to spend time with. You are worthy of your own attention and presence. And while that may be hard because you don’t have that habit built up, the commitment that you make to yourself is that you’re not going to give up on yourself. You’re not going to use an unplanned Sunday where you sent yourself into the same situation and expected different results and that didn’t happen. You’re not going to use that as evidence.

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that you just can’t be alone with yourself. You’re going to take that as data that says, I need to focus here on this situation.  I want to evolve and grow in this situation. I want to show up on an unscheduled day and ask myself, what do I want to do with my time?  What would feel good? What would feel meaningful? How would I be proud to spend my day?

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What sounds fun and exciting, or at least relaxing and soothing?  Maybe it’s just reading a book that you’re excited about. Maybe it’s a project you’ve been waiting to start.  Maybe it’s just sitting with a cup of coffee  and staring at your bird feeders. But the question is not, how do I fill my time so I don’t drink? The question is, what do I actually want to do with my time? How do I want to spend  my one precious day here?  Because.

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When you have something else you want to do and you understand what that is and you’re clear about it, your brain no longer has a problem to solve that in the past it would recommend that you pair this day with wine. So let me bring this to a close. I want to reiterate that wherever you’re at, you want to give yourself full credit for the progress you’ve already made and use it as evidence that you will continue to make more progress if you’re doing the work.

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You can’t change all these habits overnight. And so you have to give yourself full grace and compassion when you wake up and realize you done did it again. You’re not a disappointment, my friend. You’re just a person learning how to do better. And  what is true is that you can only solve  one habit in one context at a time. That’s it. One habit, one context at a time.

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So you have to set realistic expectations  and give yourself a lot of grace. The second thing you need to do is stop seeing a slip up or a return to old habits as a failure. It’s not, it’s just data. You can process your disappointment and then get curious. What do you want to do differently next time? How do you move the needle? Then number three, you got to watch your language patterns. If you keep saying, this is hard, I don’t know how to do this, I’ve always been this way.

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That’s what you’re going to keep experiencing. So upgrade your truth, something that feels true, but also better. I’m learning to enjoy this and I’m making progress. And then number four,  understand that the real work isn’t keeping yourself busy so that you can avoid the emotions that you don’t want to feel. The real work is learning to be with yourself and to feel complete and content and completely in control of yourself and your time so that you never say again,

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that today is a lonely, boring day. Like, don’t sentence yourself to a lonely, boring day ever, even if you decide that, you know what, today would be a good day to just drink and relax. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just remember that if you’re gonna do it, give yourself permission to do it and stop abandoning yourself the next day and calling yourself a disappointment. That’s better than  collapsing into a spiral of shame, but...

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Don’t be disappointed when you give yourself permission to do it. You have to learn to trust yourself. Be a person of your word.  If you are  over drinking on a day, then I guess you’re making plans to deal with those consequences tomorrow. Extra sleep, extra water,  whatever it is. Don’t go back on your word to yourself. Understand that trusting yourself is not  forcing yourself to think that you’re going to behave perfectly.

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Trusting yourself is not about your performance. Trusting yourself is the ability to learn. Trust yourself that when you wake up and you experience some disappointment, you’ve got more to learn. Your disappointment doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. It means  you have an invitation to learn and to keep growing. So that’s it for this week. And if this episode resonated with you, first thing I want you to do, if you know somebody,

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please share the episode, post it on your socials or text it to a friend.  Pay it forward. If you got something out of this that you’re gonna apply and  do better for yourself, then think of that one person who’s also over drinking on a Sunday or a Tuesday and share the wealth, my friend. I’d also  so appreciate if you took the time to either leave me a comment on Spotify  or rate the show on either Spotify or Apple or whatever podcast platform you are,  just taking a moment.

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to extend your appreciation for the show  helps me grow the show organically.  I bring this to you without ads three times a week  and everything that you can do to support me helps me support you. So thank you for doing whatever you can. And then finally, if you’re ready to do the deeper work to change the hundred habits that cause you to land in the same place on the couch with the exact same bottle of wine every night,

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and you’re ready to give yourself the support and the resources and the guidance,  I have the roadmap, my friends, to escape alcohol use disorder, to overcome it for good so that you don’t ever have to worry about your drinking again. And I’ll be honest, this roadmap is a year-long program. It is not a quick fix. It is not overnight, as you can hear.  It takes a lot to untangle all of the habits that go into

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the behavior that you are struggling to change. And so if you recognize that you don’t actually have the bandwidth to figure everything out, to  come up with all of these modalities and processes and strategies and tools, if you don’t have the capacity to do that on your own,  but you’re capable of reading and following directions, then get into the show notes and apply for a discovery call. Trust me when I say that the discovery call is not a sales pitch. We don’t take everybody that applies.

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It is a two way interview to discuss where you’re at, why you’re stuck, what you want to change, and then what exactly needs to happen in order for you to achieve your goal. So the link is in the show notes. I appreciate your time. I’m so grateful that you are a part of this community.  I love doing this podcast three times a week. I love hearing from you about how the podcast is affecting you.  And I just appreciate you sharing in this mission.

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to provide  an alternative to women who are struggling. I struggled for so long.  And had I known that there was a door number three, I didn’t have to choose between  struggling and hiding my bottles  and managing a drinking problem, which is a full-time exhausting job. I didn’t have to choose between that and giving up my party girl and saying goodbye to the fun and good times forever. There’s a door number three. It’s not about the alcohol, my friends.

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So thanks for being here. I’ll see you on the next episode.