Episode 264: The hidden habit that destroys your willpower to drink in moderation
00:00
I had been drinking every day for over a decade when suddenly the stars aligned and somehow I found the motivation to stay sober for an entire weekend. It was actually easy and it felt so good that I took the whole next week off. And I remember feeling giddy, like, oh my God, it’s over. Apparently, I just don’t have to worry about that anymore. But sadly, habits don’t just disappear overnight.
00:29
and I was soon back to drinking every day, wondering why I couldn’t just snap my fingers and go back to being that version of myself who wasn’t obsessed with alcohol. What had happened to the willpower I found that week and why couldn’t I get it back? In today’s episode, we’re talking about the hidden habit that keeps you stuck in a cycle of over drinking. And I’ll explain what actually causes alcohol use disorder and why staying sober
00:58
doesn’t fix it. This isn’t about willpower or even how much or how often you drink. It’s about how you respond to yourself when you make a mistake. We’re going to talk about why beating yourself up after a bad night locks the pattern in deeper. And how do we train your brain to treat your hangovers with compassion instead of shame? And what happens when you set realistic expectations
01:27
and learn how to fail forward. This episode will give you a foundational perspective shift so that you can finally make sense of why trying to rely on willpower doesn’t work and what actually does. My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%.
01:54
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. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
02:21
Let’s talk about the way alcohol use disorder develops and then also the problems, the habits that perpetuate it. Alcohol use disorder does not occur because you drink too much. has nothing to do with how often or how much you drink. Alcohol use disorder by definition is the belief that you are drinking more than you should because you either want to
02:51
or you have a high tolerance, or you need to because of stress or sleep or social anxiety, or because you have to because of your partner’s habits or your friend’s habits or whatever. But there’s a conflict inside of you that you want to, need to, have to drink more than you should. The conflict is that you believe that you should be drinking less. You drink too much.
03:20
Too much is a subjective statement. And now your brain has decided that because you’ve gotten on the CDC’s website and decided that you’re drinking more than seven drinks per week. Or over time, you notice that you’re drinking more than other people. And so you conclude that that means you drink too much. Or the elephant in the room, you’re sick awake and hungover and tired and not sleeping well.
03:48
and not remembering what happened last night, or you’re noticing that your brain is constantly thinking about alcohol. You’re waking up with shame and embarrassment or regret and guilt. And then you are pushing through your day trying to make it right, make it better, suppress all that, fake it till you make it in your real life, do your day job. But meanwhile, in the background, you feel distracted and anxious.
04:16
and not focused because you’re thinking about how much you drank last night and how much you’re going to drink tonight. And do you have enough? And maybe you should stop. And why are you like this? Like, all of this is going on in your brain, kind of like too many tabs open on your computer. And it’s blowing your emotional circuit breakers and robbing you of joy. And yet, by the end of the day, you’ve survived all of that stress.
04:41
And now you’re in the habit of using alcohol to reward yourself for a job well done and you don’t have the tools or the skills or the bandwidth to figure out a different way to reward yourself. And so you just get sucked into this habit that’s being perpetuated by stress. And the more you drink, the worse you feel and the more you worry about it. And then the more you drink and the worse you feel and the more you worried about it. And that’s the hamster wheel that you want to get off of.
05:10
and you’ve diagnosed the problem as being the fact that you just drink too much. That’s the problem. But every time you promise yourself that you’re gonna change or promise yourself that you’re not just gonna drink tonight and you fail to follow that through, you’re actually digging yourself deeper and deeper into the hole. The difference between people who sometimes drink too much
05:36
and or even have a bad habit of drinking and decide to just knock that shit off, either stop for a while or just cut back. Everybody’s got a different approach, but the difference between people who are able to change and the people who get stuck here for extended periods of time, welcome to the next chapter. By the way, hello, you’re in good company. But the difference is the response to the hangover. If you think back,
06:05
to your early days of drinking, the first few times that you realized that you had a hangover and that this wasn’t good. The way you responded to yourself is to beat yourself up. Whereas the jackass down the hallway in the dorm was like, oh shit, I just had too much to drink. You decided that something was wrong with you and you beat yourself up. Why?
06:35
Do you do this? Why can’t you hold your liquor? You felt embarrassed and ashamed and started worrying about what other people think about you and what this means about you. And your brain came to some conclusions. Your brain said, you can’t control yourself. And instead of processing that shame and sense of failure, you internalized it.
07:04
Instead of being on your own team and asking why someone as smart and powerful and capable as you could behave in whatever way that you’re feeling so shameful about drinking too much, doing stupid shit, being the drama or the crying queen, going home with somebody that you shouldn’t have, whatever, instead of asking, how did that happen? What’s the external influences?
07:33
that created that behavior, you internalized and diagnosed yourself as the problem. In reality, what I can tell you now is it’s perfectly understandable what happened, especially in those early days, especially if you were really young, and even if you weren’t. I mean, I have women in this program who never even had a drink until they were 40 or after or later because, but then they had bariatric surgery and they...
08:03
weren’t eating food and using food to cope with their emotions. And then suddenly a little bit of alcohol gets rapidly absorbed into their body. And they’re on the fast pass to addiction because they’re new to the party. They don’t know what alcohol can do. I mean, it doesn’t matter when you start drinking. Learning how to drink is an experience of how it affects your body. And it is the response to how it affects your body that determines whether you’re going to perpetuate and fall deeper into a problem.
08:32
or whether you’re going to self-correct and believing that you’re the problem and not the strategy or the information. know, alcohol is a drug. Nobody ever gave you dosing instructions. We’ve all been raised in a culture of binge drinking where, you know, the person who can drink the most is the coolest. And when your little 16 or 18 or 22 year old self was showing up in these environments,
09:00
Your goal was to handle your liquor, stay above the buzz, drink as much as you can or as much as the people around you without showing weakness. Your desire was to perform as the most fun and making sure everybody else had fun. And if somebody wants to have another drink, you’re going to have another drink with them. And if somebody wants to keep going, God forbid you leave your wing man, I’m going to keep going. And so
09:26
All of these mindsets, these perfectionistic, performance-based mindset where you were already in the habit of disconnecting from your own felt experience of what you like and don’t like, what is good and bad, what you want more or less of. You were disconnected from your body because you’re living in your head, counting your drinks, looking at the looks on other people’s faces and trying to go along to get along.
09:55
and maybe win the trophy for best performance as a popular fun person. And so in the moment that you would wake up with the hangover, you didn’t understand that it was your response that actually continued to perpetuate the behavior because you would wake up and you would feel, let’s just go shame, and you would feel like you’re a failure. And you thought that the only way
10:23
to not feel that way was to not behave that way. So you beat yourself up and then set your sights on, I’m gonna do better next time. You told yourself a story, I’m not gonna drink tonight or I’m only gonna have two. But every time you didn’t stick to the plan and you woke up, no matter how much you drank or didn’t drink, that shame then reinforced the belief that had already formed that for whatever reason, you,
10:52
can’t control yourself. And so you took that to mean that then you need to try to control yourself. You are the type of dumbass that needs willpower and effort to not drink too much. And so as you already know throughout your life, when there are external guardrails on your behavior, you absolutely can and do control yourself. The problem is,
11:18
Youth have come to believe that when left to your own devices, if there’s no babysitter or there’s no reason to not continue to drink, that you’re the type of person who can’t control herself, who doesn’t control herself, which means that when you get distracted and stressed, whether that be work stuff or people drama or good stuff where you’re just distracted and having fun and paying more attention,
11:48
to how other people are feeling and what they are thinking when they look at you and see you kept you from paying attention to how you feel and what you think and what you want. And so the habit developed that when you’re not paying attention, that belief took over, I can’t control myself unless I try. And so when you stop trying or forgot to try or got distracted from trying,
12:17
then the behavior would happen. You would drink too much. And every single time this has happened, it’s deepened the subconscious belief that you can’t control yourself unless you try. And then the harder you try and fail, the deeper you get into alcohol use disorder. The harder it is to control yourself because you have truly come to believe that you can’t control yourself without effort.
12:44
You have come to honestly believe in your body, the habit of thinking and believing this is a habit. This lives in your body. You can’t outthink yourself from this. This is a felt experience. You have a felt experience with shame that drink more than you should drink. And so you designed a faulty strategy to change that. You thought that you couldn’t feel better. You couldn’t get rid of this shame and sense of failure with alcohol.
13:14
until you proved that you could control yourself 100 % of the time. But as you already know from running the experiment lots and lots of times, there’s not enough willpower in the world for you to always feel perfectly in control and perfectly manage your drinking. As long as the belief exists that you have to try to manage your drinking, that you need extra doses of willpower.
13:43
because you just like to drink more than other people. And the reason why behavior-based change, just working on how much you drink and focusing on reducing the amount and all of that, the reason why that’s not going to work as an overall umbrella strategy, certainly you’re going to want to use a willpower to reduce how much you drink. Of course, that’s possible. But the reason why that’s really just
14:12
One of the small tools in the overall toolkit is because when you fail, which you will fail because the habit that needs to break is not the drinking. The habit is the belief that you there’s something wrong with you and the response to evidence that you drink more than you intended to triggering that shame and fear of failure.
14:37
That is what has to change. The reason this doesn’t work is because every time you decide and diagnose that something, that you are a failure, every time you think that about yourself, that you failed to stick with the plan, it triggers a part of your brain known as the habenula. The habenula is your internal scorekeeper. The body keeps the score, right? Every time you log something as a failure, it
15:07
down regulates your dopamine and your serotonin, which makes it impossible for you to feel comfortable enough to really look at a situation objectively and have the energy to tinker with or change the strategy that didn’t work. As long as you think you’re the failure and not the strategy that you had or the environment.
15:35
on which you executed the strategy, as long as you diagnose yourself as the failure versus the strategy or the environment that you were in as being problematic, then you are destined to repeat this behavior. And as you already know, even doing it right, getting good results for a short period of time, maybe you stay sober for a week or a month, or you’re successful with
16:04
limiting yourself to however many number of drinks you think you should be drinking. Again, this is all subjective. But even when you meet your own expectations, you’re not taking into account the environment that you’ve created that’s allowing you to meet the expectations. So you’re taking full credit. I am good. I have solved the problem. And I remember that feeling. I remember after drinking every single day for 15 years, having
16:33
one week of sobriety and thinking, oh, thank God I solved that problem. Like, whoa, that’s behind me. I had no idea that everything I thought in any given moment wasn’t fucking true. And there’s a 100 % chance that you cannot break a behavior pattern that you’ve had for years or maybe even decades overnight. You do not change, break a habit.
17:01
A habit by definition is what your body is programmed to do when you’re not thinking. so bringing your best thoughts and your willpower into any given situation is wonderful. But when the situation itself exceeds your capacity to think in the way you want to think, to focus on what you want to focus on, to apply your willpower, when the situation exceeds your capacity, you’re under a lot of stress or there’s a lot of chaos around you.
17:29
or there’s just a lot of fun, awesome distractions, then you’re not gonna be able to perform that behavior in all the environments. I want you to think of like training a puppy. You’re gonna have to retrain your brain like you would train a puppy to sit. Where do you start? You start in the kitchen with a treat. We are inside. There is no grass or squirrels or other dogs or a bunch of people. You are in close proximity.
17:58
You teach the puppy to sit. The butt hits the ground, the tail wags, the treat is delivered. Boom, you can sit. Your ability to control your drinking in an environment where you are safe and not stressed and all of your willpower is available and on standby is not the same as, let’s say, taking the puppy right after it sits in the kitchen to the dog park.
18:24
and letting it run off leash and be 50 yards away separating you by all of these external stimuli and triggers and distractions, you’re not going to be able to call to that puppy and say, sit, and expect it to sit. You know that. Your brain is the same way. The skills that you need to acquire from alcohol use disorder, think of them as a spiral. Right now, you’re in the center of this spiral. You need to learn how to sit.
18:52
in a controlled situation. That’s why we do the mindful drinking experiment. So you can learn how to feel and drink and think at the same time. This is a skill. And not only do you have to learn the skill, you have to unlearn all the other skills. So there’s a lot of learning that has to take place. And you’re perfectly capable of learning. You’re perfectly capable of creating new habits that will become the default. Like I can tell you from this side,
19:23
I don’t ever get to a point where I’m somewhere between two and three drinks and I’m over served at two drinks. That’s a true story. And I know that it doesn’t feel good, but occasionally I get a little distracted, but I never get far enough away that I’ve gone back into the patterns that I had from the past where, you know, one bottle of wine was nothing. Like now, well, the thought of one bottle of wine, drinking a whole bottle sounds awful. And so I have developed these skills.
19:52
I have clients who have developed these skills, but you do this over time. The only thing you can change overnight is your damn perspective, your diagnosis of the problem, your ability to see that the strategies you have been using, that you’ve been trying to change your behavior and beating yourself up every time you failed to meet your own expectations. Once you can see that that is perpetuating the problem.
20:20
And that the real change that needs to be made is how you respond to yourself, because it is the belief that you cannot control yourself that has to die on the fire. It is this fear of failure. It is the illusion of failure, as well as the illusion of success, that is keeping you stuck in this binary mindset of perfectionism, of performance. What you need to adopt now is this mindset that you can learn.
20:49
You can teach this puppy new tricks. You can teach an old dog new tricks and every experiment that you run, whether it’s one where you’re drinking or you’re decided to stay sober, every experiment that you run, there are no successes or failures. There’s just the results. The results are always neutral. How did we do? And the response to yourself the next morning has to be, what have we learned? Both from the good.
21:19
and the bad. And for a while, part of your response will include self care for the habitual feelings of shame, embarrassment, guilt, frustration that come up where your internal narrator is beating you up. You are in an abusive situation with a voice in your head. Anytime you are experiencing shame,
21:49
You stop, drop, you put your hand on your heart and you say, I am not defined by how much I drank last night, ever. Whether I didn’t drink or whether I drank all the drinks, that does not define me. This is one moment in time and who I am is so much bigger than my behavior. I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes. I am capable of holding space for the shame and this fear of failure.
22:16
and this guilt or like whatever the feeling is, I’m capable of holding this energy in my body without allowing my brain to jump on the bandwagon and tell me that it’s all true and that I suck and that I’m never going to change. I am capable of holding empathetic space for my body so that when she is experiencing these feelings of shame, I am right there, not abandoning her. I will hold this feeling for you.
22:45
my sweet, body friend, it is not your fault that this habit has been ingrained in you over time. This shame response as well as the drinking response, these are habits. Habits take time to change. It takes at least three months before a habit kind of has some legs. It can kind of walk around by itself. But then it is from the three month to the one year mark.
23:10
that the new neural pathways, the new habit, the new response to whatever the trigger is actually gets cemented in your brain. It’s actually called myelination when your neural pathways start to be created into permanent structures. no habit, like it is a total falsehood that you can change a habit in 21 days or even 60 days. You can create new habits, but they are not permanent.
23:38
until you approach the one year mark. That’s why I do this course over the course of one year. Because there is a hundred percent chance that you will fall back into your old pattern of behavior, both drinking and thinking. And it is how you respond to that moment in time when you realize you did it again or you’re doing it again. is changing how you respond to that that then allows you
24:06
to move forward in a different way than how you’ve been in the past, which is internalizing it, promising yourself it’ll be different, and then going right back into the same situation and expecting your brain to perform differently. Like that’s just not how habits work. You have to feel in order to build out those neural pathways. You have to feel both the good and the bad.
24:32
You have to feel the experience in your body of alcohol and be honest about what you like and what you don’t like and stop shooting on yourself and shaming yourself. You don’t have to worry about your brain chemistry regulating and your tolerance falling. If you are honest with yourself in any given moment about how you’re feeling and you’re willing to feel the negative stuff instead of numbing it and dumbing it,
25:02
And the reason you’re willing to feel it is because you know that is the truth that you need to bring into consciousness so that you can decide if you’re keeping it or if you’re setting it free. Like it is not the truth that sets you free. It is you that set the truth free. And anytime you’re experiencing a negative sensation in your body, there’s a truth there that needs to be brought up and let go of.
25:28
I don’t want to keep drinking, but I guess I can’t stop. Like that’s a truth you don’t want to have in your body anymore. And the only way to find that truth is to feel it and to allow the situation to show you what is causing and triggering that belief and then bring it into consciousness and give yourself space to process those feelings. This is how you cause change in your brain by changing your relationship with yourself.
25:57
with your thoughts and feelings by reconnecting the mind and the body so that you are aware in real time of what the body is feeling and you are paying attention and tending to those needs. You respond to emotional pain as though it is information telling you that something needs to change. And that might be an external circumstance and it might be a thought process. Whatever, you’re curious. You are on your own side.
26:25
The way you repair your relationship with yourself is not to prove that you are always perfectly capable of drinking exactly as whatever the story in your brain is today about how much alcohol is good or bad. That is not how you repair trust by managing your behavior. You do not have to trust yourself to behave. You have to trust yourself to respond to yourself with compassion and kindness.
26:55
and attention and focus and curiosity and optimism. Oh, hey, baby, this is a bad day. This is a bad feeling. I’m going to feel it with you. I’m going to hold it with you. And then we’re going to go back to the drawing board and see what needs to change so that it makes it easier for you in the future to achieve the goals that are so important to you to drink in a way that allows you to perform at the highest levels of your life and
27:25
to pursue happiness. And you cannot access the curiosity and the optimism that you need to change the thinking habits that will then lead to different drinking habits. You cannot access that as long as you are beating yourself up and diagnosing yourself as a failure. So your takeaway from this episode is I want you to understand how alcohol use disorder develops and what perpetuates it.
27:54
It does not develop from how much or how often you drink and changing how much or how often you drink isn’t going to fix it. The problem, the root cause of alcohol use disorder is the belief that you can’t control yourself unless you try. And the solution is for you to start trying differently, not harder. You have to try differently to respond with kindness and compassion to yourself.
28:25
In any present moment you find where there’s shame or fear or anger or guilt or frustration, you have to respond with kindness and compassion to yourself. Be on your own team and take the position team yourself that it is not your fault that this has happened, that this habit, these habits exist. It is not your fault. It just is what it is in this present moment. These habits.
28:54
The behavior habits, the thinking habits, they exist in your body. You’re going to have to unlearn them. And the only way to unlearn them is to learn a different way of being, to respond to your body that’s carrying these habits, doing the best she can with kindness and self-compassion and attention and focus, and then strategizing for how you’re going to move forward and design the environment.
29:23
design a strategy, and then execute that strategy in an environment using your willpower to set yourself up for success, using your willpower to cause the behavior that you want to cause by recognizing where you’re at in the spiral of expansion instead of the downward spiral of addiction.
29:46
But you don’t wake up one day and have all of these skills. It doesn’t happen overnight. You change your perspective overnight. And that is a puppy can sit with a treat in the kitchen, don’t take her to the dog park, and expect different results. You can still go to the dog park and let her jump all over. You can still go to the bar and drink too much. You can choose to do whatever the fuck you want. You can choose your pace of change, right?
30:16
But the only thing that has to change is your perspective that when you wake up the next morning, you’ve failed. It is not your fault that you’re waking up with a hangover. It is your responsibility, 100%. Only you can cause different results in the future. And what causes new results in the future is changing how you respond to yourself in the present moment. And takeaway pro tip, when your brain wants to tell you you’re blowing smoke up your own ass,
30:46
and pretending and kidding yourself that you’re actually not changing because you’ve woken up once again, recognize that is the perfectionistic performance-based mindset that’s causing the problem. It is the illusion of both success and failure that will hold you back from change. And so whether you did well or whether you done fucked it all up, you put your hand on your heart in the present moment and you say, how much you drank last night.
31:15
does not define you, both good and bad. does not define you. You are worthy of my love, my dear body, no matter what. You are worthy of my attention, no matter what. You are worthy of my support. You, my friend, do not have to prove anything. I am responsible for designing a life that you can feel peaceful and confident and abundant and joyful.
31:45
and playful in. I am responsible for designing that life. And I am not going to be able to do this all overnight. So we’re in for a bumpy ride, my friend. But I’m focused on where I want to go. I’ve got the tools that I know will get me there. And I’ve got the energy to apply a little bit of effort every single day, even if the only thing I do is put my hand on my heart and say, it is OK for me to not be OK in this moment.
32:13
It is okay for me to feel what I’m feeling and to be where I’m at. I accept where I’m at. I love myself where I’m at because I’m finally ready to accept that that’s the only way I’m gonna get where I’m going anyway. Okay, that’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. And if this lit something up inside you, if you feel that quiet, yes, this is my path, then I want you to hold on to that spark.
32:43
Imagine what your life will feel like when you can enjoy an evening without drinking or when you can enjoy a glass or two of wine without worrying you’re going to finish the bottle. Imagine what your life will feel like when your mind and body finally work with you instead of against you. This is the work we do inside my year-long coaching program called The Next Chapter. And it’s not a bait and switch sobriety plan. I promise you it’s a science-backed holistic path
33:13
to heal your relationship with yourself so that you don’t have to worry about your relationship with alcohol. With the right tools and guidance and support and accountability, you can go back to drinking for pleasure instead of seeing alcohol as the source of your soul-sucking problems. We will retrain your brain to regulate stress and to rewrite the thinking habits that are keeping you stuck so that you don’t have to try harder
33:42
you can learn to try differently. If you’re a high achieving professional woman who is tired of managing your whole entire life and everybody else while also secretly managing a drinking problem, this is your moment of clarity. So don’t overthink it. You may not get another moment of clarity for a while. Take action right now. Click the link in the show notes and schedule a free discovery call with either me or somebody on my team to talk about
34:11
where you are at and where you want to be and what specific strategies and tools you’re going to need to bridge the gap. And I want to be clear that these discovery calls are literally a free hour of coaching. They are two way interviews. We don’t invite everybody into the program. So you don’t have to overthink booking the call because you can’t think and know anything you have to do and try and feel and explore.
34:38
And that’s what this discovery call can do for you. It will give you an experience that opens your eyes to what else could be possible for you and what it will take for you to achieve your goals. So if you’re even kind of thinking about it, stop thinking and just click the link, schedule the call. Otherwise, I want to thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being a part of this community. And if you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or post it on social media.
35:06
Your share might be the nudge that another woman needs to start her own transformation, maybe book her own call. The world needs more powerful women, but most of us were raised to play small and then soothe ourselves with the numb and dumb juice. We’ve got to learn how to take our power back. And that is why I produced this show and run my emotional sobriety community.
35:31
And I so appreciate you taking whatever action is appropriate for you to add to the ripple effect and extend the organic reach of this mission. So thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being here. Go have a kick ass week and I’ll see you on the next episode.