Episode 237: Why sobriety programs don’t work (and what to do instead)
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If you’ve ever done an alcohol-free challenge for 30, 60, 90 days, maybe even a year, only to fall back into old habits when you started drinking again, this episode is for you. I’ll explain why behavior-based sobriety models actually keep you trapped in the very cycle of drinking that you’re trying to escape. I’m gonna unpack the neuroscience of habit change and walk you through your default mode network, your reticular activating system,
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and the habinula, which are three key parts of the brain where your habits live so that you understand what it really takes to reprogram your subconscious mind. I’ll explain why sobriety programs are a psychological bait and switch because there’s a difference between behavior change and identity change. You’ll learn why restricting yourself sets you up for future binges and also what it really means to build trust with yourself.
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I’m gonna make it clear why you should stop counting your sober days and redefine success in a context that has nothing to do with alcohol.
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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. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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Welcome back to the show, everybody. I want to start with just a quick and simple favor. So I recorded today’s episode in video for my YouTube channel. And so if you’d like to listen to it here, great. But if you could do me a solid, get in the show notes and click the link to go to my YouTube channel. Even if you don’t stay there, subscribe to my channel. Maybe leave me a comment. Maybe share it with somebody you know, because I’m trying to grow my channel on YouTube, because it’s the go-to platform for people that are looking for help.
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And as I’ll explain in this episode, sobriety programs are just not the long-term solution that they’re cracked up to be. And we have an obligation, and by we, I mean, I’m talking to you, we have an obligation to leave the light on at the end of the tunnel for our fellow sisters who are looking for a road to recovery that’s based in common sense, neuroscience, and emotional sobriety. And I’m on a mission to let women and everybody know that
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Getting into the weeds with alcohol is normal and that having a drinking problem in the past does not define you. And it sure as hell does not define your future. So if listening to my podcast has given you strategies and tools as well as hope and optimism, then please take a moment right now to pay it forward. Go do the thing on YouTube. I appreciate it. But either way, I appreciate you.
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So let’s dive in. In this episode, I’m gonna explain exactly why sobriety programs don’t work for most people in the long term. In fact, sometimes they make things worse or at least they keep you on the hamster wheel of restriction and overindulgence. I’ll explain the difference between behavior-based change and identity-based change and how to reprogram your default mode network and reticular activating system to work for you instead of against you.
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so you can actually start moving the needle on your drinking. By the way, if you are new to my channel, I’m Colleen Freeland and I’m the Hangover Whisperer. I help high achieving professional women cut their drinking by about 80%. You don’t have to quit. You do have to learn how your brain works. The performance-based strategies that have made you so successful in other areas of your life are officially working against you. You need to work smarter, not harder. And that’s what I will teach you.
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So be sure to subscribe to my channel if you are ready to change for real. If you have done Annie Grace’s program or Sober Sis or Casey Davidson or any other sober support program, or maybe you’ve just done Sober October or taken some sort of sobriety challenge. You downloaded the worksheets and did the journaling and maybe you made it 30 days or 60 days or 90 days or even a whole year. And then at some point when you felt safe, confident, like,
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This problem was behind you. You went ahead and decided that it was safe to drink, and then somehow, for some reason, you eventually just fell back into your old habits, and all your progress just seemed to evaporate. I wanna tell you what nobody else is gonna tell you. There’s nothing wrong with you, and there’s nothing wrong with your brain. The real problem is that you were given a framework for change that set you up for failure.
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and you tried to follow rules that somebody else handed you because you lost confidence in your own ability to make good decisions and know what’s best for you. To be fair, you probably never actually wanted to stay sober forever. You just wanted the bullshit to stop. You wanted to feel better. You wanted to break the habit of over drinking. And more importantly, you wanted to stop thinking and worrying about how much or how often you drink. You wanted to be free of the obsession.
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and you just wanted some help and good for you. You got some help. You did what they told you to do. And for a while, it felt great and powerful, but they set you up for failure by giving you a definition of success that was conditional on you staying sober. Success, real success, the best success means not drinking at all. And your ability to feel confident was tied to restrictions and rules.
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that a truly confident person wouldn’t need to think about or follow. Which is why I say that sobriety programs are a bait and switch. Even the ones that market themselves as not AA, they say that you don’t need to call yourself an alcoholic and you don’t need to quit drinking forever. And that sounds amazing, especially for high achieving, high functioning women where that addiction language just doesn’t resonate, but you do want to feel more in control. But then what happens?
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You join the program and they teach you how to view alcohol as a toxin, a poison, a cancer causing carcinogen. And then brainwash you to believe that real freedom means never wanting to have a drink. And there seems to be a status in these programs where you are measured and rewarded by how long it’s been since you’ve had a drink. Am I right?
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And the problem with this is that if and when you ever decide that you do want to partake or imbibe, however mindful and intuitive you’re being about it, you’re going to have a lot of cognitive dissonance. And if and when you make a mistake, meaning you drank more than you intended to, you perceive yourself to be back on that slippery slope. Or maybe you even have friends that are telling you, you’re making a mistake. What are you doing? Are you sure about this? Because
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you have inadvertently put yourself into a box labeled, I’m the type of person who just really shouldn’t drink. And so if you’re drinking again, something must have gone wrong. You’re off the wagon, you’re off track, you’re not in a good place. And at the very least, you are putting all the progress that you’ve made at risk. And if you’re not careful, you’re gonna end up right back where you started. And that’s the trap. That’s why this is a thinking problem, not a drinking problem.
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because you see yourself as somebody who is different than other people. You see yourself as less capable of making good decisions, whether you’re drinking or not drinking. You see yourself as somebody who doesn’t really know when you’ve had enough. And it is the all or nothing perfectionistic mindset that sees not drinking as a success and drinking as a failure that’s the real problem, not alcohol. It is the duality of success and failure that’s causing the problem because
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Perceived failure has real biological consequences in your body. When you think that you have failed, your brain down regulates dopamine and literally blocks the motivation you need to learn from your mistakes so you can do better next time. Because your brain’s job is to conserve your energy. And so you’re not going to feel like trying again if your brain thinks there’s really no point in trying. Instead, you’re going to feel like giving up.
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because evidently you’re helpless, it’s hopeless, there’s no point, and nothing works anyway. Here’s what I want you to hear. You don’t need to become a non-drinker or define yourself within the context of alcohol at all. In fact, science shows that identifying as a drinker or as a non-drinker, as an alcoholic or as a sober person in recovery, exponentially increases your risk of binge drinking in the future. The number one predictor of alcohol abuse is not
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genetics or childhood trauma or your past history with alcohol. The number one predictor of alcohol abuse is the belief that there is a difference between a normal drinker and an alcoholic. The belief that some people just don’t stop once they start and for whatever reason, you’re one of them. You need to learn how to see yourself as somebody who is emotionally resilient, someone who takes care of herself.
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who values her mental health, someone who believes that she is capable of learning and growing and dealing with her problems, someone who prefers living in balance and therefore has a less is more attitude with anything that can knock her off of balance. It’s pretty simple. If you believe that you are someone who learns from her mistakes, then you will drink naturally like somebody who has done learned from her mistakes. What’s keeping you stuck is not alcohol.
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It’s the perfectionistic all or nothing mindset that can’t handle making a mistake. And if you think about it, it’s not even possible to be a person who never makes a mistake. That’s not a thing. We’re given the gift of hindsight for a reason. That’s where our wisdom comes from. Have you ever been around somebody who thinks that they can’t or don’t ever make mistakes? Yeah, they’re not the brightest bulbs. This isn’t about changing your behavior, performing perfectly as the role of non-drinker or drinker.
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The change that you’re looking for is about your self-identity. It’s about having a learner’s mindset, where instead of trying to get everything right on the first try because you cannot tolerate failure on any level, you become someone who values learning and thus values your own experiences, both good and bad. You enjoy learning from what went well and what didn’t go well, what you liked and what you didn’t like, what you want more of and what you want less of.
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This is called an iterative mindset. When you see yourself as somebody who is always learning and you’re always learning because your needs are always changing. Yesterday’s truth is tomorrow’s bullshit. The strategy, the guy you hear is not going to get you there. And there is no right way to drink or good way to drink. There is no healthy way to drink. There’s just what you do and what you don’t do and what you learn from that. So,
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you don’t need to follow rules. You need to start following your intuition. And when you’re not happy with the results of any given situation, instead of wondering how you failed, you start examining the strategy that failed. Let me say that again. It is impossible to fail at learning, which means you never fail. Your strategies can fail though, that’s true. Which means that you will never have to start over once you become somebody who’s always getting smarter.
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You know that sometimes you learn things the easy way and sometimes you learn things the hard way and that’s all good. That’s normal. That’s life. You have to start using every single experience with your drinking as data because trust me when I say that your brain doesn’t learn by thinking. You can’t think and know how something’s going to go. You can’t think and know how something’s going to feel, which means you have to try and do.
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and then allow yourself to feel everything, but the good and the bad. Only then will you know what you should do next. Let me take you under the hood of your brain for a second, okay? What happens when you stop drinking for 30 or 60 or 90 days? Well, you’re overriding your default habits with a pattern interrupt, and that’s great. But behavior change doesn’t actually rewire your identity. The deep part of your brain that says, feels so good,
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but I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up because it’s not who I really am. And your identity, the deep down version of you that exists when you think nobody is watching lives in your subconscious programming. This is called your default mode network. The default mode network is the part of your brain that runs the background script. It’s your inner narrator that tells you who you think you are and what you think you’re capable of.
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It’s the part of you that thinks that you’re an anxious person or that you have an addictive personality or that you have an inner rebel that sometimes you just can’t control. It’s the part of you that thinks you can’t really relax and enjoy yourself without having a glass of wine or the part of you that thinks that you’d need to drink way more than other people because you can’t even feel like one or two drinks. It’s the part of you that feels like you’re holding your breath when you’re being good.
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and that eventually you’re just gonna revert back to your old habits. And this is why, of course, you can change your behavior for a while. But if you don’t see that behavior as a natural expression of who you really are, then you’re always gonna need willpower to override your cravings and urges that you believe are just your default way of being, which is why...
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you’re gonna have to do the work to change those identity level scripts because willpower is a limited resource. It will fail you when you’re stressed or distracted because your default mode network is your autopilot. It’s how you think and what you do when you are not actively trying to be better than your real self, which is why you tend to slip back into old habits when life gets hard or busy because you’re not paying attention. You don’t have the focus and energy
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to control your behavior and go against your default mode network. And so the reason that sobriety programs don’t work is that they are teaching you to focus on the wrong thing. They train you to believe that you will feel so much better when you don’t drink, which of course is true. But that also means that you’re gonna feel bad by default when you do drink. And let me explain why that is, because I remember when I reintroduced alcohol.
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I knew that I had changed. felt good and confident in my ability to control myself. I had no desire to drink an entire bottle of wine anymore. I was in a really good place and my conscious prefrontal cortex knew that there was absolutely no reason to think that I would not be able to control myself. But the subconscious mind is emotional, not logical. It will show you evidence for whatever you believe is true.
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deep down. And if and when it can’t find the evidence to support those theories, it will just go create it. Literally, just start making shit up. Think about it. If you think, believe that someone doesn’t like you or that they are mad at you, it doesn’t matter what happens or how many people try to convince you otherwise. You will find reasons that support what you believe that they don’t like you or they’re mad at you. And you will completely ignore
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all evidence to the contrary. The person themself could come up to you and say, it’s not true that I’m mad at you. In fact, I really like you. And you wouldn’t believe them because you know what you know. And that is what is called your reticular activating system. It’s the part of your brain that filters for whatever you’re looking for, whatever you expect to see. So if you believe that alcohol is your nemesis, your weak spot, or even that it’s just bad and unhealthy,
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And if you believe that success, true success means never drinking again, then anytime you do drink, your reticular activating system is gonna start screaming at you. You’re gonna think things like, God, I knew I shouldn’t have done that. I totally blew it. What the hell is wrong with me? I was doing so well. Why did I have to go screw it up? I knew I was bullshitting myself. I knew I hadn’t really changed because people don’t change.
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I’m such a fool to think that I could. Clearly, I’m just not capable or competent with this. Like, something must be wrong with me. And that type of internal narrative creates a lot of shame and anxiety in your body. And shame and anxiety are not learning tools. They are shutdown mechanisms. There is a tiny almond-shaped structure in the brain called the habinula. This is your internal scorekeeper. It lights up.
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whenever you fail to meet your own expectations. And when you slip or when you make a mistake, your habinula blocks your access to dopamine. It’s the kill switch on the energy that you need to learn. The habinula shuts down your motivation so you just stop trying, which of course is gonna give your reticular activating system even more evidence to support the belief that something is wrong with you.
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You end up ashamed, discouraged, and even more convinced that you can’t change. If you hear anything that I’m saying, hear this. Alcohol is not fueling the cycle that you are stuck in. Unrealistic expectations of yourself coupled with shame and anxiety are fueling the cycle. And that’s where you need to place your focus. This is what needs to change. This isn’t about your behavior. You don’t need to prove.
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that you’ve changed. This is about your self-identity. You need to become somebody who doesn’t give up when you have a setback. You need to be safe with yourself so that no matter what happens, you can learn and move on. And this is where neuroplasticity comes in. Your brain is plastic. That means it’s moldable, it’s shapeable. And the truth that we just discovered in the last 30, 40 years is that the structure and function of your brain is always changing.
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every single day with every new experience until the day you die. And you can consciously direct those changes, or you can be directed by unconscious beliefs that it’s not really possible. Either way, your brain will still continue to always be changing. If you wanna direct the change, you have to understand what it is you’re actually changing. That’s not your drinking behavior, but it’s actually your internal belief system. And then you have to understand that change requires repetition,
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and practice and also emotion. If you allow negative emotions to direct your change process, then your changes are going to feel negative. But if you can learn how to be okay with yourself, even when you mess up, if you can learn how to be your own best friend instead of your own worst enemy, then you can iterate and learn your way towards any goal that you want to achieve. Which means even if you drink, even when you mess up,
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Even if you make the same mistake 10 times in a row, as long as you are willing to reflect and learn and consciously with intention continue to work on rewiring your brain, then you will always be moving forward and you will no longer be somebody who panics and beats yourself up when you overdo it. Instead, you will be somebody who’s open-minded and willing to learn. This is why I don’t teach women to get sober.
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Because while sobriety is a great way to escape the shame and the anxiety that you think are being caused by your over drinking, what you need to realize is that your over drinking is actually being driven by the shame and the anxiety, which means you’re gonna have to learn how to process and deal with and cope with the shame and anxiety instead of just trying to avoid it with good behavior. Because if you don’t get the skills and the tools to process negative emotions,
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they will be back to bite you in the ass the first time you make a mistake. What you need to do is learn how to process your negative emotions instead of bypassing them with perfect behavior. I teach women how to reclaim their power. And real power is the ability to be okay, even when things aren’t really that okay. Resilience is not about never making a mistake. Resilience is the ability to quickly bounce back and learn from.
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your mistakes. I teach my clients how to process their shame and anxiety around alcohol. This is why I call myself the hangover whisperer, because the change you need to make is not how much you drank or did not drink last night. It’s this morning and your response to yourself. I also teach my clients how to recode their default mode network. So they see themselves as somebody who actually prefers drinking in moderation because they no longer have any desire to escape themselves.
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I teach my clients how to control their reticular activating system by setting emotional goals that allow them to feel good now, even when they’re hung over, not if and when they prove that they’ve gotten everything right. And I teach my clients how to heal their relationship with themselves, not with alcohol, so they can truly trust themselves again, not to be perfect, but to learn from their mistakes.
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because the real goal has nothing to do with abstinence. The real goal is alignment, getting your mind and body on the same page so that you actually want what you need, so that you’re no longer being held hostage by your ever-changing mind or feeling like there’s some internal battle of good and evil, like there’s some inner good girl fighting the inner bad girl and good luck. The real goal is emotional freedom from
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all the internal chaos. And the good news is that the side effect of emotional freedom is that you are no longer being controlled by your negative emotions. You’re no longer afraid of your own damn feelings, which means that anything is possible for you. Can you imagine if you were no longer afraid of how you were going to feel, you’d have the courage and the willingness to try anything. And when your subconscious mind starts to believe that anything is possible for you, trust me,
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you will start to drink like somebody who believes that anything is possible for you. Ain’t no need to numb and dumb yourself into a wine coma anymore. So if you have tried staying sober or tried all of the programs and you felt really, really good right up until you had a drink and then it all kind of seemed to fall apart and unravel. And if you are tired of starting over, you want to get out of your head and on with your life so that you never have to worry about this again.
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no matter how much you do or don’t drink, then I want to invite you to try something different. My program is not about restriction or rules. The only rules that you will ever need to follow again are your own intuition. I’m just going to teach you how to listen and follow it. You have to learn what real intuition is and what it means and what it feels like. And I’m not going to bullshit you. This does take time. Rewiring your brain is a lot of work, but it’s work.
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that is worth doing because not taking the time and energy to rewire your brain is also a lot of work. Please pay attention to what’s going on for you now. I will just say that you don’t have to do this alone. In fact, science shows the fastest way to change your mind, which is what needs to happen. The fastest way to change your mind is to join a group of like-minded people who are working towards the same goals. And if you’re in a community where the goal is to stay sober and
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you don’t see yourself doing that for the rest of your life, then those programs are not gonna give you the emotional freedom that you’re looking for. And I will be totally upfront. My program is not about sobriety. Our goal is to get happy, not sober. I can teach you how to become the version of yourself who prefers to drink in moderation. Because again, you no longer have any need to escape yourself. So if that sounds like something that you’re interested in and
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you are ready to commit to change, you’re ready to do the work, then get in the link below and apply for a discovery call. And I’ll just leave you with this. You’re not broken. You don’t have to go back to the beginning and you don’t need to be perfect to feel better. You don’t need to make decisions about how much your future self will or won’t drink because you completely trust yourself to learn and know who you are and what you need in any given moment. All you really need to do is start practicing to think
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and feel like the version of you who is living her best life. All right, that’s it for this week. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this helped. Please reach out to me and let me know whether you leave me a comment on YouTube or whether you find me on socials. I’m at the Hangover Whisperer on all the majors. So come and find me and follow me there and let me know how my strategies, thoughts, tools, frameworks are working for you.
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And then if you have gotten to a point where you decided that just listening to the content, which is amazing, but it’s only one pillar, and you are ready to add community and also direct coaching with me, then get in the show notes and click the link to apply for a discovery call. Taking that one single action, whether you decide to join my program or not, can lead to a ripple effect of change in your life.
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Just having a conversation with somebody, a true, real, raw, honest, vulnerable conversation about what is going on for you can shift things. What changes your truth is speaking your truth. And trying to figure all of this out in your head is what is keeping you stuck. That’s the magic of community and coaching, because it helps you get rid of and move through the shame.
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that is associated with trying and failing to change your behavior over and over and continuing to repeat the same mistakes to the point where you start identifying as your mistakes. And I remember that. I remember thinking, I can’t really control this. I can just manage this. And I would put more things into my evening schedule, like obligations or teaching a yoga class. And then I’d...
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make myself get up and go running at five or six a.m. Just to try to curtail my drinking. I was just trying to manage it because I had truly become defeated to the point where this is just who I am, this is how I roll, and I guess hangovers are just a cost of doing business. You don’t have to live that way. There is a solution, but I’m not gonna bullshit you. For most of us, if it’s gotten to a point where you’ve been doing this for years or even decades,
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It’s not enough to just expose yourself to the good ideas and the strategies. Again, you need some coaching. so getting in the show notes and clicking the link to apply for a discovery call guarantees that you’re going to get at least one hour of somebody that can listen to you, that sees you, that understands where you are and can give you practical, real advice and expectations for what you need to change this once and for all. So you can stop.
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worrying about it. You can stop worrying about falling back into old habits or being on or off the wagon. This really is a thinking problem, not a drinking problem. It’s how you’re thinking about it. It’s how you’re looking at the situation. It’s the stories that you’re telling yourself. All of that has to change. And again, it’s not going to change overnight. That’s why my program is one year, because it takes six to 12 months to actually rewire your neural pathways.
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It takes repeated exposure and practice and experience and feedback and guidance and accountability and all of the things. And you don’t have to do it alone. In fact, science shows that changing your mind, which is what has to change, stop thinking about changing your drinking, start focusing on changing your mind, but science shows that the fastest way to change your mind is to do so in a group, to join a tribe of like-minded people with like-minded goals.
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so that you are not doing it alone, so that you can see yourself in the process of change, people who have gone before you, people who are newer than you. And you can relax and just trust the process and follow the directions. You don’t have to figure all this out on your own. In fact, it’s downright damn near impossible. Habit change is complicated. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, and identity also complicated. So if you’re ready to do the work,
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or at least see what the work entails, get in the show notes, click the link, and I’ll see you soon. Everybody else, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being a part of my community. I do this for you. So go have a kick-ass week, and I’ll see you on the next episode.