You saw the headlines. Women on GLP1 drugs are losing weight and losing interest in wine at the same time. The food noise goes quiet. The 5 p.m. pull toward the fridge goes quiet. And some part of you thought, that’s it. That’s the part I want. Not the weight loss. The quiet.
Because you have tried to want less. You’ve counted the drinks. Moved the goalposts. Promised yourself that tonight you stop after one. And the wanting is still there in the morning, running in the background like a tab you can’t find and can’t close.
GLP1 drugs reduce alcohol cravings because they mimic a hormone your body already produces in your gut. GLP1 signals satiety, fullness, and a sense of emotional completeness. When you feel gratified, your brain stops demanding instant relief. When your own GLP1 is low, alcohol becomes the fastest available way to feel satisfied. The drug supplies the signal. It does not supply the source.
Why GLP1 drugs make you want to drink less
People on these drugs report something they didn’t expect. They’re not just less hungry. They’re not even thinking about food. And a lot of them are drinking less and smoking less without putting in any effort at all.
That feels like a return of sanity. They’re getting their bodies back and their brains back, and it feels like freedom.
Here’s what’s actually happening. GLP1 works alongside oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Together they manage the habits you form around your cravings for connection, belonging, and stress relief. When you have enough of both, cravings for instant gratification quiet down on their own. Not because you resisted them. Because your needs are being met. You feel gratified.
The drug doesn’t give you willpower. It gives you the feeling of already having enough.
What happens when you stop taking GLP1 drugs
The drug only works while you’re on it.
Most people who stop end up right back where they started, and often somewhere worse. Now they’re more convinced than before that they can’t change on their own. That the version of themselves who is living her best life is something she has to buy from a pharmaceutical company.
And the side effects are not nothing. Nausea. Gut issues. Hair loss. Loss of muscle density and bone density. Some people have died.
I get just as geeked up as anybody else about a magic drug that fixes all your problems. But what nobody is talking about is that your body makes GLP1. It has the whole time.
Why you’re deficient in the hormone that quiets cravings
Here’s the part that matters.
We are deficient in GLP1 because in this culture we do not prioritize bonding and community. We prioritize winning and productivity. And that has put every one of us on the hamster wheel.
The harder you work, the more isolated you get. The more disconnected you feel, the more repetitive your self-destructive behaviors become. And they start to look and feel like addictions, because they are.
But all addictions are just survival mechanisms. An adaptation to living in an environment where your needs aren’t being met. Every addiction starts as a simple coping mechanism, and that is well documented in the scientific literature. [INTERNAL LINK: EP152, Dr. Kyra Bobinett]
You don’t have a drinking problem. You have an unmet needs problem that alcohol has been solving faster than anything else available to you.
The part of your brain that decides how hard change feels
Dr. Kyra Bobinett studies a part of the brain called the habenula. It either generates your cravings or suppresses them. It’s the gas pedal for your motivation, or it’s the brake.
The habenula determines how hard it’s going to feel to break a habit. Not how bad the habit is. Not how much you want to change. How hard it feels.
When you’re running low on the signals that tell your brain your needs are met, the habenula turns down your dopamine. And dopamine is your source of interest and motivation to go find other ways to get your needs met. Good ways. Positive ways.
So you get stuck. You keep doing the same thing and hoping for different results, and you already know what we call that.
Why trying harder makes your cravings worse
High achieving people have learned to thrive under pressure. It’s the one thing you all have in common.
But where is the pressure actually coming from? Pressure is a feeling, not a fact, unless somebody literally has you in a vice grip. Pressure is the sensation in your nervous system that comes from the shame you feel when you make a mistake and the fear you feel about not being good enough. The need to get it right no matter what it costs you.
You can get away with that deal for a long time. Then you hit your forties and fifties and things start breaking down. And the first thing to go isn’t your physical health. It’s your mental health, because your habenula is running all day reminding you of everything you’re doing wrong and how far behind you are.
The mind-body connection is real. You think how you feel and you feel how you think. Being an asshole to yourself just makes everything harder. And the harder it gets, the more you lean on shame and fear to shock your system into action.
Running from shame is not the same thing as moving toward what you want. [INTERNAL LINK: blog post on the cycle of shame]
Real motivation only runs on positive emotion. When something feels good, you want more of it. That’s not complicated. But for something to feel good, you have to feel like it’s working. You have to have hope that if you keep going, you’ll get more of that.
As long as you insist nothing you do is working, that is the hill you’re going to die on.
Why sitting down and resting feels harder than pouring a drink
I raised four kids of my own and three stepkids. I didn’t pee with the door closed. There was no such thing as alone time. My ex and I had a lake home, so on top of a full time job there was house shit, yard shit, and a fridge stocked for everybody’s dietary preference of the week. Vegan, gluten free, carnivore, paleo, junk food, whatever. I had a to-do list longer than my arm, and as soon as I crossed one thing off, five more got added.
So it makes sense that I never learned how to be happily unproductive. Taking time to rest meant adding to tomorrow’s pile. Not being busy felt lazy.
But here’s the part I want you to hear. It wasn’t that I never stopped. I spent a lot of time sitting on the dock with a glass of wine or a bottle in my hand.
It wasn’t that I had too much to do and not enough time. The pressure I felt wasn’t external.
Being at rest felt foreign to me. It put my nervous system on high alert. Calm was expensive. I thought I had to earn it, and it was going to cost me either way. Peace was something I paid for, before or after.
If my kids or my husband caught me sitting down, I’d get a surge of guilt, then start listing everything I’d accomplished that day and everything I had to do tomorrow. A grown woman explaining herself to teenagers. Proving I was valuable so nobody would think I was a freeloader.
That’s why drinking an entire bottle of wine at night felt like a guilty pleasure. It wasn’t a pleasure. It was the only thing making an unbearable amount of pressure tolerable for a little while.
What actually raises your GLP1 and oxytocin naturally
Rest. Connection. Joy. Play. Belonging.
That’s the whole list, and I know exactly how underwhelming it sounds. Of course you want more joy in your life. But where the hell do you get it? It’s not a supplement you order off Amazon.
So here’s the order of operations, because this is where most women go wrong.
If you can’t sit still for five minutes without your brain freaking out, joy is not available to you yet. Your body cannot access it. You can’t go around your own discomfort to get to the joy. You have to go through it.
Which means the first goal is not to be joyful. The first goal is smaller and more honest than that.
I want to sit for ten minutes without responding to the freak out in my brain.
I want to be okay with the fact that this does not feel okay.
I want to practice responding differently to my urge to be productive.
I want to start thinking of rest as productive in itself.
Every one of those is an expansion. Each one widens your capacity a little instead of narrowing your life down to the next thing on your list. That’s the opposite of what alcohol does. Alcohol narrows. It shuts things down. It dims the signal. Rest opens things up.
Relaxing is a physical skill. Same as swinging a golf club or driving a stick shift. You work on your form. You teach your body the rhythm. And eventually being okay feels familiar enough that it becomes its own reward. Something you crave the way you currently crave wine or a checked-off list, because right now those are the only relief you’ve got. [INTERNAL LINK: EP348, the stress audit]
How to want more for yourself instead of more from yourself
There are two parts of you.
There’s the dreamer, the planner. That’s your executive function, your prefrontal cortex, making the big plans. And there’s the doer, the workhorse who has to go out and make all those big plans happen.
When your dreamer is a heartless sweatshop owner who insists on everything getting done without so much as a scheduled bathroom break, your doer loses the motivation to go the extra mile. Why would she? There’s no reward. The second she finishes one task, another appears. There’s no relief. It never ends.
You already know that’s not how you motivate people. Not as a boss, not as a parent. That’s not an environment where anyone thrives. It’s an environment people survive.
So here’s the shift. Start wanting more for your doer, not more from her.
The more satisfied and safe and complete she feels, the more motivated she is to show up for you. When the dreamer finally wants what’s best for the doer, the doer has a reason to show the fuck up.
That’s how you get off the hamster wheel. Not by pushing her harder. By wanting her to have what she needs.
Why paying for your own peace feels like a waste of money
Women think nothing of spending a hundred thousand dollars on a kid’s college education, fifty thousand on a kitchen, thirty thousand on a pool. Those feel like high quality investments.
But spending money to repattern their own nervous system, so they don’t have to sedate themselves with a bucket of alcohol anymore, somehow feels frivolous.
Not because they don’t see value in the help. Because they don’t see value in their own peace and joy.
They think the only way to justify it is if the drinking gets bad enough that everyone would agree it’s a problem. And since they’re masters at hiding it, they’ve painted themselves into a corner.
Your capacity is fueled by peace and joy. Not by less alcohol and more pushing. That’s the perspective that has to shift.
You already have what the drug is selling
If you don’t know how to rest, at some point your body will manufacture a brake pedal for you. A reason beyond your control, so your brain finally accepts that you have a legitimate excuse to sit down that nobody can argue with.
I coached a woman recently whose immune system did exactly that. She knew she had to spend the weekend in bed, and she was more anxious about what she wasn’t doing than she was about being sick. It felt harder to let herself rest than to push through the pain.
The only person you ever have to convince that your needs matter is you. Your desire for permission and approval from other people is a feeling, not a fact. The call is coming from inside the house.
This isn’t about your relationship with alcohol. It’s about your relationship with yourself. Overdrinking is not a sign of self-indulgence. It’s a symptom of self-neglect.
After coaching thousands of women through this process, I can tell you the pattern is always upstream of the drink.
The first step is understanding the specific pattern driving your cravings. Take the 3-minute quiz to find out which of the four drinker types is running your nervous system, and get a roadmap built for your specific pattern. If you want to break the pattern, you first have to see the pattern.
Watch the free masterclass here
If you’d prefer to talk to someone who’s been through this, book a free discovery call with one of my certified coaches. Having an honest conversation with a woman you don’t even know–who isn’t going to judge you or tell you to quit drinking–is the fastest way to get clarity on what you really want.
Watch The MasterclassTake the Quiz
This quiz takes about 3 minutes. Your results will reveal which of the four drinker types you are—and what’s really been driving your cravings for alcohol.
No fluff. No judgment. Just clarity.
Take the quiz hereGo Deeper
EP351 How to drink less by adding more joy to your life (instead of discipline)
It’s Not About the Alcohol podcast