EP 216 Minisode: Pursuing Purpose Instead Of “Less Alcohol”

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Hello everyone. So I do a daily podcast called Coffee with Colleen inside my emotional sobriety coaching program. These are short, sweet mini-sodes that either give you an inside look at something I’m going through in my own life or a simple, easy strategy that you can implement or both.  You may hear me reference other content that only my clients have access to.  So if you’re interested in learning more about my program,

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get in the show notes and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.  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.

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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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For years,  I drank a bottle of wine every single night.  And  that was very manageable.  I did wish  sometimes that I took a night off or that I drank less. But in general, I didn’t have hangovers. I was very productive. I was happy.  I  engaged in life. I did all the things.  And I just really enjoyed my wine in the evening and thought I just had a high tolerance.

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And there were times when I’d buy like a mega bottle of wine, you know what I’m talking about,  and end up drinking more than the equivalent of a bottle of wine. And so when I noticed that, I just stopped doing that. I didn’t buy wine in a box. I didn’t buy the mega handles. And so managing my bottle of wine a night habit really wasn’t that problematic. It wasn’t until I started also  stocking vodka  and was able to boost

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my intake either before I started drinking wine you know have a little shot in my water in the afternoon  or when I finished the bottle of wine and I wanted one more drink instead of opening a bottle of wine knew better than to do that I would just have some vodka  and  that was a  slippery slope that took me down that’s when I started hiding my behavior you know the vodka wasn’t on the counter I had no problem blowing through a bottle of wine

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and set in a good example, you if I drank the whole thing, mommy’s not gonna drive, she’ll Uber. You know, I never hid my bottle of wine, but the vodka was definitely on the down low.  And this behavior is what accelerated the disconnect from how I saw myself versus the version of me that I presented to the world. And this is where the foundation of my self-esteem really crumbled. And I developed the belief that I have a problem, I can’t control it.

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And more and more of my time every day was, know, Visine and concealer in the mornings with supplements and water and running off the hangover and worrying about  what I couldn’t remember, what I said and did, who did I piss off, who did I text, what did I promise, where did I say something that I’m going to regret? You know, all of those things just began to take up more and more of my mental space.  And so obviously alcohol use disorder is not just a thinking problem.

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I had a lot of negative physical consequences that were perpetuating the cycle. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was very anxious. My baseline levels of dopamine were in the toilet, so I didn’t feel motivated or energized. I was just pretending  as I showed up in my life. And then, of course, I had very high levels of cortisol. So I was living in a chronic state of stress.  And that then was the bridge to the collapse of my mental health.

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where my internal narrative was just more and more  negative. I just saw a lot of problems with myself and with everybody else. I wasn’t thinking long-term. I became all about just solving the problems of the day, cleaning up the mess from last night,  smoothing the icing on the cake,  and then relieving my stress in the evening. So I was definitely caught on a hamster wheel. And this is why alcohol use disorder  brings you to the point where you feel like you don’t have a

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purpose  and life is losing its meaning because spending all of your time and energy and focus  on the getting away with it  and covering up the fact that you have a drinking problem and making sure nobody around you  knows what’s going on does not give you a sense of purpose and meaning. It’s not a problem that you’re proud to be solving. Victor Frankel is a public speaker, but he’s a Holocaust survivor.

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think he’s very old right now. I’m not even sure he’s still alive,  but he has so many mic drop quotes that boil down, you know, struggle and pain and suffering. And one of the things he says is that a man who knows what he wants  can endure almost anyhow. The what  is the goal and the how  is just the struggle that you have to endure to get what you want. Another one of his quotes is that suffering ends  when pain has meaning.

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So let’s just imagine that you have to sell your big, beautiful house. If the reason that you have to sell the house is because you’re an idiot with credit card debt and somebody took money from you or swindled you or whatever, you’re gonna suffer with the action of moving out of your house. But if your kid needed a kidney  or a liver transplant or something,

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And the difference between their life and death was the money you got out of your house. You would pack your bags with joy,  being so grateful that all you have to do is trade your house for your child’s life. Do you see?  Suffering ends when pain has meaning. And the reason we suffer so much with alcohol use disorder is that the pain we’re enduring to get away with it has no meaning. And so I wanna pull all of this together.

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The reason I was talking about the vodka is I have not had vodka in my house.  I think one time I was making vodka martinis at the lake and I bought a bottle and it got drank. Everybody was there, it was fine.  But I don’t buy vodka. I keep wine, I have a big wine fridge  that in a collection that I got half of in the divorce.  And so if I want to have a drink or have wine, I just have that. And so I’ve just never bought any vodka. Well, last night my...

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son and daughter who are in college and live here.  They were finished with their finals or whatever and they wanted to make some sort of cocktails and drinks.  They asked if they could open a bottle of my wine but as most of it’s like a hundred dollars a bottle I was like,  I ain’t fonding your college evening party. Go buy your own. So they come back with a big bottle of Grey Goose vodka and invited me to join them.

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And I can remember that once upon a time when I was reintroducing alcohol and confronting the thought processes that might have come up for me in the past,  I would have worried about having a bottle of vodka in the house because what if, what if it sucks me back in? What if it’s just too easy to pour a little drink and suddenly I’m on a slippery slope? And those are the thinking problems that lead to drinking problems because the only type of person who would have those thoughts is one who believes

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they can’t trust themselves and that it’s possible for them to lose control. But those are thoughts,  those are beliefs. And I’ve corrected those beliefs. And what was so fun last night is  I did want to join them. I wanted to celebrate with them. I had been working a lot  and I thought it would be fun to have a cocktail. But you know what I wanted to do more? I’ve got this new book by James Dottie.

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He’s a neuroscientist neurosurgeon who’s also worked with the Dalai Lama. Like  I would fall in love with him if I met him in real life for sure. Cause he’s super spiritual and also super sciencey. And he has a new book called  the Magic Mind  and I can’t wait to read it.  And I don’t have a lot of time in my life right now to do things like that. And so when they got back with the vodka, my brain had two  options, path A,

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relax and enjoy myself with them. And path B, relax and enjoy myself with James Dottie. And the one I really genuinely wanted was to read my book and to get a good night’s sleep. It was not hard to say no to the drinking because I could have said yes. I wasn’t telling myself you can’t or that would be a problem or that would be bad or a slippery slope. I fully trust myself and it would have been fine.

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if I would have participated. I gave myself the choice and my genuine desire drove me  to say no to the drink and to go find that book. And so your takeaway today is to begin to build out mentally what it is you want to be doing in the evenings.  And if your primary desire right now, which would be completely normal, is that you just don’t want to be thinking about alcohol.

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then you have to build out what it is that you do want to be thinking about. And it’s perfectly okay if your first, next purpose in life is to find a purpose in life. Like if you truly want to feel like you have a purpose, well, that doesn’t just fall in your lap. So maybe it is spending time every single night reading various books or watching a documentary or just getting out of the house,  trying a yoga class, trying a painting class, going out to dinner at a new restaurant, like,

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It’s okay to not know  what your life’s gonna look like a year from now, but you have to give yourself the time and space to figure that out, to take the uncomfortable action, to simply try new things,  to expose yourself to new activities and ideas and people and habits.  Because you can’t think and know anything. You have to experience  and feel in order to know. Knowing is an experience, not a mental math.

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calculation.  And I’ll leave you with this.  If you want a new pet peeve, start noticing when people  begin a sentence with, I don’t know, but I think,  oh, OK, just stop talking. Just stop talking. You can’t think and know nothing. So your takeaway here is to make a list of some things you would like to experience  in a low bar,  no pressure sort of way, and make it a priority to start experiencing some new things.

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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.