You wake up feeling less than stellar again, and in a moment of clarity, you decide you just need to give yourself the night off. No drinking tonight. It’s not even that big of an ask. Not drinking requires no physical effort. It doesn’t cost time or money or add anything to your to-do list. In fact, just the opposite. Which is why the idea feels like such a relief in the morning. You’re only 24 hours away from feeling truly better. But you already know how that story ends. By the time you run through the marathon that is your day and cross the threshold into happy hour, you pour that first glass of wine like that was the plan all along. You have discipline and grit and stamina in every other area of your life. So why can’t you keep this one tiny promise?
You can’t follow through on not drinking tonight because not drinking isn’t the hard part. Doing nothing is. When your nervous system is stuck in go mode, sitting still feels like danger, and alcohol becomes your off switch. More willpower can’t fix that. Learning how to relax on your own can.
Why you can’t follow through on not drinking tonight
If you’re willing to suspend criticism and judgment of yourself for a minute and move into curiosity, this is going to make a lot more sense.
Here’s the bottom line. If you didn’t actually need that drink, or more specifically, if you didn’t need what that drink is doing for you, then it wouldn’t feel so damn near impossible to tell yourself no.
Before your brain turns that into a worst-case scenario, here’s what is not happening. You are not an alcoholic who can’t control herself. You are a woman who is doing the very best she can to keep up with the demands of her life. A woman who is chronically short on personal space and decompression time, and has come to rely on alcohol because it’s the fastest and most efficient tool readily available to at least temporarily bridge the gap.
This has nothing to do with alcohol. It has everything to do with the fact that you’ve trained yourself to ignore the signals from your body that you’ve had enough and need to slow down.
Why you can’t relax without alcohol
It’s not that you don’t have an off switch when it comes to alcohol. Alcohol just is your off switch. Your body, your nervous system, has literally forgotten how to relax on its own.
Think about what “not drinking” actually asks of you. You’re not even doing anything. But that’s the trigger. It’s the not doing anything that you can’t tolerate.
If you sit down for even five minutes, your brain automatically starts bitching at you about everything that still needs to be done. All the things you could be doing right now to get ahead of the game, so you have even more time to get even more done tomorrow. Taking a break triggers guilt and laziness and agitation. You’re a perfectionist and a procrastinator at the same time.
When you live that way, the evening drink isn’t a lack of discipline. It’s the one thing that reliably shuts the noise off. (internal link: post on nervous system regulation)
Why you can’t stop at one drink
Of course one drink isn’t going to be enough to tame all of that. One drink is just a tease. It lures you in with a genuine felt sense of okayness. That first drink turns the pressure down, and for a moment it feels like you’re finally present for the first time all day.
But you can’t stay there. The longer you try to stay with that sense of ease, the louder the alarm bells sound. You must be wasting your time. You must be falling behind. So of course you keep drinking, because it’s the only way to drown out that never-ending noise.
Your nervous system has been running so hard for so long that it’s now wired to keep you in motion. Under the threat that if you stop, everything you’ve worked so hard for is going to come crashing down. Which is why sitting still doesn’t feel like rest. It feels like danger.
Why trying harder to drink less only makes it worse
Trying harder just increases the pressure on yourself to do more with even less support.
Most of the women I talk to say the primary reason they want to cut back is so they can get more done and be even more productive. But the less you drink, the more you fill your schedule, because you’re subconsciously trying to distract yourself from the temptation to let your guard down. When what you really need to do is lean into the temptation to let your guard down.
This is why willpower doesn’t work. You’re misdiagnosing the problem. It’s not that you want to drink. It’s that you don’t want to feel bad about the fact that you really do need to fucking relax.
That’s not a weakness or a character flaw. It’s your biggest strength working against you. You will always go the extra mile and drop everything the second anybody else needs something from you. But when the someone who needs something from you is you, you can’t let yourself receive the same support and grace and ease you work your ass off all day to deliver to everybody else. That’s why this isn’t a drinking problem. It’s a putting-yourself-last problem. (internal link: EP357 post, your drinking isn’t self-indulgent, it’s self-denial)
Somewhere along the line, you decided that your personal needs either aren’t real, don’t actually matter, or should at least be flexible if somebody else needs something first, or more than you do. That comparison rule doesn’t just live in your head. It’s embedded in your nervous system. Which is exactly why it’s so uncomfortable to just be with yourself. You’re not seeing yourself. You’re comparing yourself.
What drinking a bottle of wine every day taught me
I know this because I lived it. For 15 years, I drank at least an entire bottle of wine every single day. I had a really high tolerance. I wasn’t stumbling around drunk. I could walk, talk, and toddle around in four-inch pumps and never miss a beat, because I really wasn’t feeling much of anything.
I had four kids and a full-time job. I taught hot power yoga and ran marathons on the weekends, and I took care of everything. From the outside, my life looked like I was crushing it. From the inside, I felt like I was being crushed.
Here’s the part that matters. I thought the dumpster fire of anxiety I lived with was telling me the truth. That I just needed to keep giving more and taking less and being better and working harder, so I could finally earn or justify taking care of myself. But that day never arrived. Every time I crossed one thing off my to-do list, five more things appeared.
Which means my to-do list was never the problem. It was my relationship with my to-do list. My relationship with myself. I was hardwired to see my own needs as inconvenient at best and as weaknesses at worst.
Eventually I hit the wall, and I did what a lot of exhausted, high-functioning women do. I went cold turkey. And it only took me three fucking years to realize that being perfectly abstinent hadn’t fixed a damn thing. I was still stressed. I was still anxious. I was still driven by this vague sense that I needed something I could never quite get. I was never done. I was never good enough. I had a picture-perfect life, and it all felt hollow.
That’s because I hadn’t learned how to actually relax. I didn’t know that relaxing is a feeling, not an activity.
Why self-care doesn’t help you relax
This is where most of us who are really intellectual get it wrong. We think self-care is one more thing you have to do. And yeah, it kind of is. You have to exercise and eat right and get your hair done.
But that’s only half of it. If you’re not enjoying those things while you do them, if you’re not tasting and touching and smelling and connecting with what you see and feel because you’re not comfortable staying present in your body, that’s the problem.
Your brain is always skipping ahead to the next thing. That’s why it feels like your mind and body are out of sync. Because they are. And that is the reality alcohol is helping you cope with.
How to stop drinking to relax
Changing that reality doesn’t start with using willpower to force yourself to drink less. It starts with retraining your nervous system to stay present.
You don’t get to skip the part where that’s uncomfortable. You go through the discomfort, not around it. That discomfort is just your autopilot telling you it isn’t okay to be where you are, and that you need to kick it back into high gear and keep running.
We made decisions in our 20s and 30s about what we wanted and what we were willing to do to get it. We plugged the coordinates into the GPS of our brain and let autopilot run us into the ground. Only to wake up to the reality that we never actually got there, and we’re never going to, because all time is now and you are only ever here. But your nervous system doesn’t know how to let you just be here.
So it feels like a hamster wheel. Always more to do, more to fix or figure out. But those are feelings, not facts.
This kind of self-abandonment is death by a thousand paper cuts. Every time you tell yourself that what you need right now doesn’t matter, or can wait, you’re voting against yourself. Your body keeps the score. Which is why at the end of the day it’s so much easier to pour the glass of wine. One more drink, one more day, doesn’t seem to matter.
Why more discipline doesn’t fix your drinking
The mistake high-achieving women make is thinking they need more willpower so they can act like the woman who has a healthy relationship with alcohol. You don’t need to act like her. You need to feel like her.
It doesn’t take willpower to control your drinking any more than it takes willpower to not hit yourself over the head with a hammer. It takes mindfulness. You learn how to be present.
Happiness and joy and validation and security are not trophies you win for being best in class. Those are feelings too, and you need to experience them on a daily basis. If peace were actually the reward for stressing yourself out, you’d be the most relaxed woman alive instead of a hot mess express just trying to get through one more day so she can wake up and do it all again tomorrow.
It’s not your drinking that needs to change. What needs to change is waiting to give yourself what you need in the present moment. Instead of wanting more from yourself, you start thinking like somebody who wants more for herself. That’s how you become the woman who can take it or leave it, because she’s comfortable with herself right in the middle of whatever is going on in her life.
This isn’t about your relationship with alcohol. It’s about your relationship with yourself. The pain that brought you here, the broken promises and the glass you didn’t plan to pour, isn’t proof that something is wrong with you. It’s information about what you’ve been going without.
After coaching hundreds of women through this process, I can tell you the drink is almost never the thing that needs fixing.
If you want to know what’s actually driving your drinking, take the 3-minute quiz. You’ll find out which of the four drinker types is running your nervous system and where to put your focus first.
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
EP356: The real reason you can’t follow through on your promise to “not drink” tonight.
It’s Not About the Alcohol podcast