EP 217: What is really means when old habits resurface
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Yesterday, I did a one-on-one coaching call for a gal that’s been in my program for 10 months. And even though she’s been very active in the program and has made tremendous progress in her mindset and her behavior, but for a variety of reasons with some things going on in her life right now, she’s been drinking every day for the last two weeks. So in this episode, I’m gonna explain what that means and why that happened.
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and how the way you respond to a setback determines whether you’re moving forward or backwards. So that you can walk away from this episode with a clear understanding as to why this is a thinking problem, not a drinking problem. So that you can set realistic expectations for yourself about what needs to change and how to make those changes so you can fully recover.
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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.
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Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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All right, so before we dive into today’s topic, I just wanna give you an update about what I am doing today. It is Monday, May 26th, Memorial Day. And so if you are listening to this in real time, yeah, I am doing my podcast less than 24 hours before it needs to be live tomorrow. And the reason it is so last minute is because I thought that the episode I’d be releasing tomorrow was my first in-person, like video recorded interview.
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So far, all of the interviews that I’ve done have been on Zoom or Riverside. They’re virtual. And it’s been great because that allows me to meet with people all over the world, get fabulous experts or guests to come on the show. And I don’t have to go anywhere. They don’t have to go anywhere. Maybe I’m wearing pajama pants on the bottom. Like it’s really fun and easy to record interviews that way. And when my team suggested that we do Carly’s story,
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in person, I was like, what do you mean? That sounds like a lot of work. Carly lives in Wisconsin and we had to get cameras and set up a studio and get all dressed up and then do it in real time. And while I do interviews all the time, it was kind of amazing to watch myself. I was nervous, Carly was nervous. My assistant flew in to set up and run the cameras and we had sound and lighting and it was like a real professional production and it was nerve wracking.
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and expensive and I questioned how important it was to do it that way. But once we got it done, like I am so excited to bring it to you. And the good news and the bad news for me is I thought I’d be spending my whole weekend editing the video and the audio, but no, it’s a professional production and I am good at a lot of things, but it was beyond my scope of ability. And I was so excited when we did get it all done. You know, it took multiple hours to set up.
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and then record and then who knew like five, eight hours just to upload the raw files into the cloud wherever those things go. I was so excited to know that it wasn’t my job to figure out how to turn two hours worth of recording into a 45 minute or an hour podcast. That was a real relief. The whole reason why they wanted to do this in-person professional production is because we’re trying to grow on YouTube.
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and video quality really matters. And we’ve been sucking wind on YouTube. Like we do okay with reels, the same reels that I put on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. We put those reels, the short form content on YouTube and it does okay. But our longer form content, these podcasts, like the videos that we record on Zoom or Riverside, they get like single digit views.
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One week we even got zero views, which I’m like, I feel like we won something there. I’m just not sure I like what we won. YouTube is a hard algorithm to crack, at least for us so far. Nothing has really worked. And so we decided to take it to the next level and produce a high quality video content that talks about Carly’s story. And just to give you a little preview, Carly joined my program last July and was a very heavy drinker.
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on the far end of the spectrum of women that I know are a good fit for my program. And as you might expect, she didn’t get instant results. She didn’t come to a couple of meetings and listen to some of my awesome content and reduce her drinking by 80 % in the first month. Because as you might imagine, there were reasons that she was drinking as much as she was. And that’s what we’re gonna get into today. You know, the drinking habit is an adaptation. It’s how you’ve learned to cope.
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and until you unpack all the things that you are coping with and make changes to your lifestyle so that your life is no longer something that you need to escape. And as you’ll hear when we get this production done, there were a lot of things that Carly was having to escape. She was a full-time nurse and caseworker. She has four kids. She’s the breadwinner in her household. And she’s a person who truly believes that it is her job.
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to help everybody, to be the person that other people rely on, family, friends, clients and patients, her kids. And as you’ll hear in the interview, her drinking could not, would not change until she finally grasped the truth that her own needs are not actually negotiable. For years, she has been running on a deficit of sleep and space and peace.
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because she believed that she was simply doing what was required of her to be a good person and a good mother and a good worker and a good daughter and a good friend. She was living under a set of impossible expectations. And the painful part of the change is realizing that the expectations were not only terribly unrealistic, unfair, and impossible to deliver on,
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but then also possible for her to change. She’s had to change and learn how to see herself and also take full ownership of the fact that the reason she’s been operating this way is not because of the external pressures that life and other people are putting on her, but because of her own unresolved trauma and unprocessed emotions like shame and fear and guilt.
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that we’re keeping her stuck on a hamster wheel. She’s running a hundred miles per hour and therefore not taking the time to question her thinking or her beliefs or the way she was operating. When you hear her story, you will understand that focusing on trying to change your behavior without dealing with the reasons why that behavior exists, both the internal beliefs and the external life design doesn’t work.
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And in fact, it only makes it worse because it is impossible to change. If you don’t have the bandwidth to choose something different when you are running on autopilot, you are just doing the same thing over and over and your thoughts or habits to the way you think, the way your opinions operate, your perceptions of what’s happening. Those are what has to change. And it is not that drinking less.
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or taking care of yourself is actually hard. You just have to have the bandwidth to go against the autopilot. And when you are running 100 miles an hour and operating in a chronic stress response, stress by definition activates your default mode. When you are stressed, you’re not taking the time to think. You think you’re thinking because you hear some stuff going on in there. But stress by definition
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causes you to think in very short-term ways and to rely on the habits and strategies that have worked for you in the past. Think about a simple, benign example. Like, let’s say you’ve decided you want to eat with chopsticks. Let’s imagine that there’s been a study that came out that said, you know, eating with chopsticks is healthier, eating with a metal fork is bad, and you’re like, okay, I’m going to eat with chopsticks. But you’ve been eating with a fork for years. You can do that.
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without thinking. Your body knows how to eat with a fork. You don’t have to focus. You don’t have to try. It doesn’t feel hard. That’s just what you do. You eat with the fork. So imagine trying to learn how to eat with chopsticks when you are running 100 miles per hour and you’re not sitting down at the table and enjoying your food. You’re trying to eat while you drive and trying to eat while you’re in meetings and you’re trying to eat around other people and engage and talk to them. Like that would be really hard. Inherently, it’s not
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hard to eat with chopsticks, billions of people do it every day. That’s their default. They can eat rice, they can eat soup. In fact, if you handed them a fork, they would find it hard to eat with a fork. And until eating with chopsticks feels natural to you, it is how you see yourself as a person who eats chopsticks, and you believe that it’s possible and better and easier, and you’ve got lots and lots of practice, thousands of hours practicing eating with chopsticks, until you’ve got the experience and the muscle memory.
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of eating with chopsticks, then the more stress you have, the more distractions you’re experiencing in your life, the more your brain is going to bug you to revert to eating with the fork, because that’s just easier. And your brain is trying to help you solve problems and get through your day according to whatever you think you need to be doing. And if you don’t think eating with chopsticks is your highest priority,
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meaning it’s more important than everything else that you think you need to be doing, then it is impossibly unrealistic for you to expect yourself to always eat with chopsticks. And you will notice that there are some times when it’s easier to eat with chopsticks. You’ve slowed down, you’re being mindful, you’re reconnected with your goals of eating with chopsticks. But when life takes over or you give over your attention and focus to other things,
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then your brain’s gonna revert back to old habits that just help you get it done. And that’s why changing the way you drink starts with changing the way you think about yourself moving through life and also changing the way you think about alcohol and what role and purpose it serves for you. And you can’t just think and make a decision that you’re going to change without your body being involved. Learning your brain changes
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from felt experience. You have to do things in order to know things. You can’t just think about things and know things. You may have a good idea, but until you execute it and practice it and build out the neural pathways that allow you to perform whatever thought processes and drinking habits and all of your other habits that actually make your life better. And this is why my program, The Next Chapter,
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for women who want to reduce their drinking by 80 % is a year-long program. Because no matter how dedicated you are, it not only takes time, but a lot of intention that goes against what you think you should be doing. You think that you should be focused on eating with chopsticks and just trying harder. But the harder you try in a state of stress, the more frustrated you get, the more you perceive yourself
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as a failure, the more impossible it feels to actually make the changes, which reinforces your attachment to alcohol as a solution. And this is why my program goes against the grain of every other program. And I don’t have you quit drinking because in the beginning and for a while alcohol is your solution and taking away the one thing that actually does help you cope that actually does get you a sense of relief.
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ultimately does more harm than good because again, it reinforces the belief that you can’t or you want to drink more than you should or that alcohol somehow is something that you desire. And it’s those beliefs that have to change before you can experience long-term change. And as you’re going to hear with Carly’s story, shifting the focus to reducing your stress and changing your beliefs that are causing that stress.
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giving yourself the tools and strategies that allow you to heal past traumas, unpack your emotional baggage, while also intentionally designing new neural pathways that set you up for success, makes the change process, dare I say, fun and easy and sustainable and extended, ongoing, because life is ongoing. You’re never gonna get there.
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You have to learn how to deal with yourself here. And you will always go through phases where you get a little bit out of balance or where life gets more stressful. You’re taking on a new job. You’re going through a relationship change. You have to take care of a parent or a child. Or you go through a transition where you’re no longer taking care of a parent or a child. Like no circumstance lasts forever. And it will either kill you or it can make you stronger. But having the tools.
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to understand how your mind works and how stress works and learning how to respond to the real problems, which is how you are responding to the problem. You know, it’s never the problem itself, it’s your ability to cope with the problem. Problems are a matter of perception and it is the mindset that sees the problem that creates the problem. It makes it worse. And if you learn how to address your internal experience,
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of your perceived problems, then you will always have the capacity to deal with them. The women in my program aren’t just learning to reduce their drinking by 80%. That is a side effect of learning how to manage their minds so that their emotions are no longer controlling their thinking and they are able to examine their thinking with an observer consciousness and evaluate the thoughts and beliefs that are working against them.
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and then choose new thoughts and beliefs that work for them so they can escape the trajectory of whatever autopilot they’re running on. And this is a superpower. Have you ever heard the saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears? Many of my clients want to give me credit for being their teacher. And while I’ll wear the teacher hat, the truth is that I’m not the teacher. Their drinking problem was the teacher. As Carly and I were talking about,
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Vodka was her teacher. Vodka was what woke her up to the pain so that she could understand that the way she was running her life was not in her best interest, it was not sustainable, and it was not bringing her joy. And if her drinking problem had been a little less bad, let’s say 25 % or 50 % bad, to where she was able to keep going with that habit, she wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity
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to learn how to connect with herself, how to manage her mind, how to choose her life so that instead of living the life that she thought she should or that was just handed to her, she was able to wake up from the dream and step into her power. And that’s what I teach women in the program, how to see whatever problem has finally gotten bad enough to wake you up to get your attention, how to see that problem.
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as your teacher, as the opportunity, as the portal to transformation, to level up, to become a version of you that you didn’t even think was possible. Today is Memorial Day, like I said, and I’m getting ready to go do a walkathon. So in addition to creating this video podcast with Carly’s story, which you’re just gonna love, my team also said, we gotta get some reviews, we gotta get some social proof.
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that your program actually works. And people who are thinking about joining your program need to hear from the women in the program. And the problem with that thus far has been that asking for Google reviews is difficult because Google requires you to put your name in. And the nature of my program is very discreet. I’ve got elected officials and lawyers and judges and doctors and surgeons.
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And people in my program that is proud as they are of being emotionally sober and as open as they are to the idea that this isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity, there are very real consequences and public perception matters in some careers, many careers. And leaving a review on Google, leaving their hearts and truths and being vulnerable on Google is just not something my clients really want to do.
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We found another way to collect reviews that’s even more respected than Google reviews, and it’s called TrustPilot. And the slam dunk decision maker for us is that it verifies the identification of the people who leave reviews, but those people can leave the reviews anonymously. Their identity doesn’t have to be shared and isn’t able to be tracked by somebody in the public who wants to know who that was.
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And so as we’re building a new website and integrating or embedding TrustPilot into it so that the reviews are clear, we did a challenge this past week to get reviews from our clients. We posted it in Discord every single day, and I agreed to walk one hour for every 10 reviews that were submitted. And I thought maybe we’d get like 10 or 20. Well, I’m going to be walking for over four hours today.
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because more than 40 reviews have come in. And while I’m grateful that today’s a beautiful day and my German Shepherd and I are getting ready to head over to where I’m gonna do the walk, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was raining cats and dogs and I had to do this on my treadmill. It has been so touching to see the reviews coming in. And I wanna stop and share some of these reviews with you so that you can hear from actual women.
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what their experience of being in the program is and addressing their drinking problem through the lens of emotional sobriety. Because I’m gonna be realistic, it might take a couple months for my new website and all the changes we’re making to be available to you. So I’m just gonna give you a sneak peek. Here’s one, Mandy B left a five-star review and said, I was a very heavy blackout drunk for over 30 years. I didn’t know I could become a
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quote, normal drinker. I thought alcohol controlled me and my options were AA or rehab. I also thought I was too high functioning for those options. But the truth was I was too afraid to live my life without alcohol. I didn’t know who I was or what I would do without it. This course has completely changed my life and possibly saved my life. Alcohol is no longer an issue for me. With this freedom, I wake up every day thinking
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What else can I do? My world is filled with unlimited possibilities and I am so grateful. Here’s another one titled, Happy Customer, Left a Five Star Review. Community plus science-backed ways to change your mind plus just the right amount of woo woo equals life-changing magic. Highly recommend this program for anyone that is searching for ways to change not only your drinking but also your deeper rooted relationship.
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to how you show up in life. Here’s another one by a gal named Sheila, or is her name Sheila? I don’t know. She says, over the past 60 plus years, I have lived with a mindset of negative thoughts, self-criticism, perfectionism, and so much more, which eventually led to my over drinking. As a high achieving and successful woman all my life, I couldn’t understand or believe how my life had come to this. The shame and blame that I placed on myself
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was so excruciatingly painful. I felt deeply afraid and worthless. It was an unexpected gift to myself when I found Colleen on Instagram almost one year ago and reached out to her for support and coaching. She has truly touched my life in a most significant and impactful way. Her course content, podcasts, resources, coaching skills, books, and so much more have been a wealth of knowledge to me.
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What she has taught me over this past year is too innumerable to describe. But the greatest one for me so far is she helped me rewrite my story. She has provided me with the wisdom, the power, and the perseverance to heal my relationship with myself, to trust and believe in myself, to reclaim my purpose and identity. She has taught me that it isn’t about the alcohol. It is so much deeper than that on so many emotional levels.
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She has helped me to embrace a positive growth mindset to face my challenges with confidence. I have met the most extraordinary, supportive, and courageous women through the program Colleen has created. We are a group of women from near and far, spanning many different countries. Some of us have met in person, but most of us have not. The sense of belonging and connection is a unique experience to say the least. Finally, I had the privilege of meeting Colleen in person
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and spent the weekend with her at the first retreat held for a small group of us in February titled The Alchemy of Storytelling. In my opinion, Colleen is a rare gem and the real deal. She is authentic, genuine, passionate, compassionate, as well as witty, sarcastic, and just fun to be around. I will be forever grateful to Colleen for helping me to rewrite my story as she calls it, my comeback story. And here’s another one from someone that may or may not be named Sam.
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Learning with Colleen has been truly life-changing. I came in struggling with habits that didn’t serve me and a deep sense of self-doubt. Through compassionate guidance and practical tools, I’ve started to overcome my vices, but more importantly, I’ve learned to trust myself again. I feel more grounded, clear, and aligned with my path. If you’re feeling stuck or ready for change, I can’t recommend this enough. This course is helping me to come home to myself.
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And here’s another one from someone that may or may not be known as Meredith. If you’ve been looking for support and or program to help you cut down on how much you drink, run, don’t walk to book a discovery call. Within the first week of signing up for emotional sobriety coaching, I felt a confidence and self-compassion that are worth every penny paid. For years, I’ve been beating myself up after I’ve had too much to drink. I would criticize myself when I would overindulge.
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I experienced my first hangover a few days after accessing the course content, and let me tell you, that was the best hangover. The difference was the access to the course content and the coffee with Colleen’s, because Colleen offers the compassion and bridge thoughts that I wasn’t able to come up with on my own. I have wanted to reduce my alcohol consumption, but felt like the only way was to get completely sober. I wasn’t sure I could do that, as drinking felt and feels like such a part of my social steam.
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and a way to connect with my partner and friends. I commend those that make that choice, but giving up alcohol completely didn’t feel like something I wanted to do. Yet, I struggled with self-discipline, all or nothing thinking, hyper-focus, feeling like I deserve that extra drink as a burnt-out stay-at-home mom of young kids, et cetera, et cetera. I wanted to make a change, but felt powerless and full of shame. There is such a wide variety of tools and avenues to receive support.
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and make connections that have empowered me to be more mindful with alcohol. Moreover, there is a community of women that make the program materials digestible and manageable. There is something to be said for a safe place to be able to talk about exactly how much or what you drank without feeling judged. And I have found that within the emotional sobriety community. In the two months since I joined the program, I’ve gained more self-compassion and confidence.
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than I have through my own personal development or other programs I’ve done. I believed Colleen’s mantra that it’s not a drinking problem, but a thinking problem for when I first heard it on an ADHD podcast. I’m so glad that I dove in and took the leap by signing up because I’ve already felt the benefits of fixing some of my thinking. And I’m so energized to keep going through the next 10 months and beyond. Oh, you guys, these are so touching.
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I’m gonna do one more and then we’ll move on with the episode. So somebody named Megan, may or may not be your name because you don’t have to leave your name, said, for the past five years, I have been on a quest to reduce my drinking. However, the more I tried, the worse it became. Then I stumbled upon Colleen when she said, it’s not a drinking problem, it’s a thinking problem. I had an aha moment. I joined the program and haven’t looked back. In just eight weeks, I am amazed at my progress.
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the incredible people I’ve met and the tools and strategies I’ve learned. After all the books, podcasts, courses and programs I’ve tried, I can tell you there is nothing out there like this. As these reviews have come in, I just tear up with every single one, which is why I’m so excited to do my four hour walk today. I mean, I am a person, but I kind of feel like a dog who’s wagging her tail with every single one. It is nice to hear from your people.
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that all of the work that I’ve done to create this program is actually not only changing their lives, but having a ripple effect into their families and careers and their plans for the future. Each of these women could have gone to AA and surrendered their power. Instead, they came to my program and took it back. The world needs women to take their power back, not surrender it even further.
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The world needs women to see themselves as capable and trustworthy and intelligent. The world needs women to love themselves because you can’t love other people truly and authentically unless you love yourself. And we talk about this often. What does it mean to break the generational cycle of trauma? It means to overcome the internal oppression that is a result, to learn how to process the shame,
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and fear and guilt so that it no longer lives in your body. Because as long as it lives in your body, you are projecting it into your life. And you are passing on, maybe not the physical abuse, but you are passing on the limitations of a woman who believes that she is powerless. That is what we have to break the cycle of so that our people, our children, our families no longer run on the fuel that is perfectionism.
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and people pleasing and performance and approval seeking and needing validation from the people around us because we don’t feel like we can trust ourselves because we don’t even know ourselves because we’re seeing ourselves from the outside in. more concerned with how things look than how things feel to us. The next evolution of humanity is an evolution of consciousness where you plug your brain.
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back into your body so that you can experience the truth, all of the truths, so that you no longer have to hide your own feelings from yourself. This is the skill of emotional sobriety that I am teaching, how to integrate your subconscious into your consciousness so you are aware of everything in your body and you have the power to release anything that no longer serves you. Instead of
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pushing it down and wondering why you feel like you’re living in a pressure cooker. Because when you feel like you’re living in a pressure cooker, self-sabotaging habits come up. Because ultimately, if you’re living in a pressure cooker, you have thoughts and beliefs like, I can’t do this, this is too much, this isn’t fair, but I don’t have the power to change it. And if you believe that you don’t have the power to change something, then your brain’s gonna help you solve that problem of how to cope
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with where you’re at and make the best of it. And that’s where alcohol comes in. And that leads us into the conversation I had yesterday with a client who’s been doing great for 10 months, so pleased with the changes she’s made and feeling so confident that alcohol use disorder, the symptoms of alcohol use disorder, the hyper-focus, the obsession, the drinking too much, feeling like you can’t control yourself, were behind her. That’s what she thought.
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And that’s why I’m doing this episode because how you respond to a set of symptoms, like it’s not the drinking that came back. The drinking is a symptom of the fact that she slipped into old ways of thinking. And when she explained what was going on in her life, to me, it made perfect sense. But before I set the picture for how this happened, I just want to hold space.
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for the raw vulnerability that she presented with. She asked for kind of an emergency session. We’re on a holiday weekend, so we’re not having a group coaching call tonight. And she reached out. And of course, yes, I was available, so I could. And the tears as she shared with me her thoughts on what was going on, her brain’s diagnosis of the situation. She was saying, I just...
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want to be a different person and I feel incongruent. Like I haven’t been telling myself and everybody else the truth. I’ve been so pleased with the changes that I’ve made, but I’m just fooling myself. I just can’t get out of my own way. And the way I’ve been drinking is not within the realms of emotional sobriety. I feel like a failure. I should be farther along. This shouldn’t be happening to me.
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and I’m embarrassed and ashamed of myself. So this was her internal environment when we started the conversation. And what I teach with emotional sobriety is how to see that what you’re thinking is actually causing the reality. The truth is you feel everything you think. Your body is a person in real time experiencing this negative, toxic, downright abusive
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language because if you were saying something to someone else like You should be a different person. You are completely incongruent. You’re not who you say you are You’re a complete failure and I’m really frustrated with you I mean, we all know we would never say that to someone we love even if some of it was true We are frustrated you are failing you are falling short We wouldn’t say that to somebody we don’t love somebody that we work with we all know
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that if you want to inspire better behavior, you don’t go in and hit them below the belt. And so in the beginning of the coaching session, the first thing I did was to hold space for the feelings and just use my own language to help her see, expand her perspective that these are thoughts in your head. They’re not true. They’re not the whole truth. The first step we had to take during the conversation was to allow these feelings
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to take up some space, but not to consume her, not to define her. It’s possible to feel this way without identifying yourself with these feelings. And this is how my strategies with emotional sobriety is different than just talk therapy or using positive affirmations, you know, to just start thinking better things about yourself. Because when your body is in a stress response,
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You’re thinking with your amygdala. You can’t see the bigger picture. That’s the definition of a stress response. It hijacks your brain with a very myopic focus. The only thing you see is the problem right in front of your face. You slip into very negative, worst case scenario mindset, and then that creates a feedback loop because you think how you feel, and then you feel what you think, and these thoughts are just pouring fuel and gas on the fire that is the anxiety in your nervous system.
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So step one is always to shift your perspective enough to realize these are thoughts and feelings, they are not truths, and to bring your body back into a sense of calm and safety in the present moment so that you can return your body to a parasympathetic state because again, you think how you feel and until you feel curious about what’s going on,
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and optimistic about your ability to handle what’s going on, then you can’t change your mind. You can’t do mindset work in a state of stress. You have to clear the stress response from your body. And this is the power of coaching. This is why you can’t think your way out of your own thinking problems, because it takes somebody else holding non-judgmental space of acceptance for where you’re at. Somebody to hold your hand and say,
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I see you, you’re not okay right now and that’s okay. The first step to being okay is to allow yourself to not be okay, to stop trying to fix or figure everything out and just feel what’s going on in your body so that you can process those emotions, especially when you’re dealing with emotions like shame, because shame is like the autoimmune disorder of emotions. It is self-attacking self and the only way to truly process it
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is to allow yourself to be seen, to be safe, dealing with what you’re dealing, fully transparent, vulnerable, as you are, where you are, not when you go get it all right. And this is why not quitting drinking proves to be such a benefit because the alternative is getting sober, which of course can make you feel better, but what you’re really doing is using good behavior to avoid
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your bad feelings, you’re not actually solving them. Your self love is conditional on your performance, on your good behavior. And this is why I think my program is so effective because being able to talk about how much you drank, when you drank, why you drank from a neutral perspective where nobody’s thinking that the drinking was wrong or bad or a problem. That’s the only way you can move from shame
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into a mindset of curiosity, like what happened and optimism, how can I learn from this so that I can do better next time? Everybody in my program knows that they’re not supposed to beat themselves up when they’re hung over. So often, including on this call yesterday, everybody gets on and they’re like, I haven’t been beating myself up. I’m just really disappointed and frustrated and I feel like a failure. Well,
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That is still beating yourself up. So we have to start by getting honest here. The drinking that you did was not the problem. The problem is that the old thought habits of something has gone wrong and that you should be farther along than you are, and this shouldn’t have happened. Those thoughts are the problem. And let me explain why. Because when you beat yourself up and the language in your head feels abusive and accusatory,
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and insulting to your body, it elicits that shame response. And when you’re in a state of shame, you can’t learn. And the only way to improve your behavior is to learn. The reason with alcohol use disorder, you keep repeating the same mistakes over and over is because you haven’t learned from those mistakes, which isn’t even accurate. You have learned, but you’re learning the wrong thing. You’re teaching yourself to think of yourself as a failure.
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And the perception of failure is an insidious mind virus. Because first of all, failure is a mental construct. There is no success or failure in the outside world. Humans inject meaning into everything. Meaning is made in the mind. And so if you decide that drinking every day over a two week period is a failure,
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because you shouldn’t be doing that, you should be farther along and you already solved this problem and now it’s come back and that just proves again that you’re a failure. That triggers a part of the brain known as the habinula. The habinula in the brain is your internal scorekeeper. And so when you decide that there’s a good way and a bad way, a right and a wrong, a success and a failure, then your brain keeps track of that. And the more you perceive,
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that you’ve tried and failed so many times, then the less energy and resources and optimism your brain is gonna grant you, because it doesn’t like to invest in lost causes. You know, it’s like the reason why none of us get up in the morning and go see if we can fly, because we’re all surely convinced that flying is not actually possible unless you get in a plane. You know what I mean? Nobody’s jumping off the roof because, well, some of us did with umbrellas when we were little. I’m not saying who that was, maybe it was me.
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But once you learn enough time that gravity is going to suck you down, you don’t devote any more mental resources to trying to get creative to figure out ways to fly. So it’s a biological survival mechanism that when your brain perceives something as a failure, then you’re going to stop trying, which is why we end up feeling so hopeless and stuck and powerless. It’s actually learned helplessness because we’ve been perceiving our drinking as evidence.
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that we have failed. And this is what makes it a thinking problem, because there is no such thing as failure. Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you run a six-minute mile, and somebody else runs a five-minute and 50-second mile. The two of you may collectively agree that you failed to win. You failed to beat the other person. But in truth, you still ran a six-minute mile.
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So that’s not a failure except in the mental framework and context that this is a competition and it’s winner take all. But all I want you to do is see that the concept of failure is something that you must agree to. And in order to change your drinking, you have to change the way you see your drinking and when there is a reemergence of symptoms or there’s a setback in your behavior. If you see it as a failure,
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instead of an invitation to look at the big picture, to see what caused you to fall back into old habits, the stress response to the problems that you are perceiving that you need escape from, that you’re trying to cope with. And the way you are trying to cope with them is exceeding your capacity. You’re trying to do more than is physically possible. You’re putting unrealistic expectations on yourself. You are agreeing to things that are not fair or
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are not respectful of what you need in any given moment. Like just imagine that you looked at an episode or a period of time of over drinking with the lens that you’re doing the very best that you can. And that if you’re not getting the results that you want, it’s because you’re not setting yourself up for success. And I want to explain
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what was going on in this gal’s life so that you can see that the core of her drinking doesn’t have anything to do with the alcohol. So she joined the program 10 months ago at a time when she was in a career transition. So she wasn’t working as much. She had time to be mindful and to get into the coursework and join the community calls and to learn about herself and learn about the skills of emotional sobriety. And she has done so well.
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Well, it just so happens that about three weeks ago, a week before she started returning to alcohol again every day, she accepted not one, but two jobs, two new jobs. One of them requires her to travel to different countries, and another one requires her to learn a completely new skill set and be available at all hours of the day. So she went from.
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having the time and the space to move through life at a pace that was sustainable, doing the program, also looking for a job, healing, reconnecting with herself, all the good stuff. She went from that to having two full-time jobs because when it rains, it pours. I think she might’ve even said there’s a third job on the line and she was gonna try to juggle all three. And in hindsight, it only took about a week for her to start noticing cracks or flaws in her capacity to cope.
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You can only hold your breath so long when you’re running in a deficit before old coping mechanisms start coming back. It’s just like trying to eat with chopsticks when you have lots of time and then suddenly realizing it would just be easier to grab a fork. And the reason I say this isn’t about the alcohol is because when we broke it down, the thoughts that were problematic for her were not the thoughts that alcohol sounds like such a good idea right now.
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It was actually the old thinking habits like, I don’t have enough time. I can’t do all of this. This is too much. I’m so overwhelmed. I’m exhausted, but I can’t stop because I don’t want to let anybody down. I don’t want to disappoint. I don’t want to say that I promised more than I can deliver. So I have to keep going. And for her and many of us, those are the thoughts that the brain once learned how to solve the problem.
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with alcohol. The desire to soothe yourself with alcohol often comes from the belief that I don’t have enough time to get everything done that I need to do. And if I can’t, then I am a failure. So there’s that negative self-talk just in another context. These are the thinking problems that drive drinking problems, which is why we didn’t spend our time talking about her beliefs about alcohol.
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She’s already demonstrated that she has no desire to drink every day. She’s self-reported. It wasn’t even fun. I’m not enjoying myself. I just can’t seem to stop myself. She said, I know I could just pause and take a breath and relax and reset. I know just taking five minutes would have interrupted the drinking and slowed me down. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted any, or maybe I would have just had one or two and it would have been fine.
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She’s like, I know I should have taken a break and checked in with myself. I’ve built that habit up over time, but I wasn’t able to do it. And this is what is called the no-do gap. I know what I should be doing, but I am not doing what I should be doing. And this is the definition of a stress response. The amount of pressure she was putting on herself simply exceeded her capacity to cope with that stressor.
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because going back to work with not one, but maybe two or even three jobs also brought back old thought habits of I don’t have enough time to get everything done. I don’t have enough money to buy a plane ticket that’s more direct. I need to take four flights instead of one so I can save $100. It’s been 10 months since she has had to cope with how she used to cope with corporate pressure. And so she slipped back.
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into her old way of coping with that, which is to push herself to the point where she either does get it all done or she breaks because she couldn’t and didn’t get it all done. So the only thing that happened in this situation is that she has the opportunity to now transfer her new way of being of self-care, nervous system regulation, positive self-talk.
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She’s now having an experience where she gets to apply it also in the corporate environment and show up as this version of herself that she has become and that she wants to continue being. But because she didn’t recognize the old thought patterns that were the problem, the, don’t have enough time and I can’t do this, but I have to keep doing it or die trying. She didn’t recognize what was going on in her head because she was moving too fast and putting so much pressure on herself.
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telling herself she didn’t have time to take care of herself because then that would mean failure in her new jobs, she fell back into the old way of coping with that mindset, which is to pour a drink. Like it makes so much sense when you look at it from that point of view. And thank goodness she had the wherewithal to send up a smoke signal, ask for help so that I could help her reframe to see why this happened.
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And it has nothing to do with her being a failure. This in fact was an opportunity for her to level up her mindset. And so where we went with the conversation wasn’t let’s revisit your alcohol beliefs. Instead, we challenged the deeply held core belief that there’s not enough time for her to do everything that she has to do. And I want to pull that belief out because so many of us fall prey to it, right? And I want you to think about how
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When you’re telling yourself you don’t have enough time to get everything done, then the sound of a drink makes sense because screw it, you might as well have a drink, do the best you can. At least if you’re gonna fail, you might as well have fun while you’re failing, right? That’s the logic that seeds alcohol use disorder. If you don’t believe that you have enough time to get everything done, then of course you have time for a drink. Why the hell not? Which is why the thought process that has to be introduced here
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is that I have exactly enough time to get everything done that I need to do. I will organize my schedule. I will pace myself. I will take care of myself. I will set realistic expectations to the people I am with so that I can move through my life at a sustainable pace. And when you adopt a belief like that, what’s amazing is when you have exactly enough time to get everything done that you need to do, you actually don’t.
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think you have time to drink because you are so focused on moving through your schedule, moving through your to-do list and making sure that you’ve got the rest and the nutrition and the exercise or whatever it takes so that you can keep showing up at that level. Your desire to shoot yourself in the foot with too much alcohol goes away real fast. And while I’m almost out of time and I’m not gonna do a deep dive into your perception of time, your beliefs about time.
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I want you to understand that time is a perception. In reality, all time is now. And so the story you’re telling yourself about how much time you have has a direct impact on the state of your nervous system. When you don’t feel like you have enough time, you end up needing coping mechanisms to continue to push through or deal with overwhelm and exhaustion. And I know this from personal experience.
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Overwhelm and exhaustion are so often self-induced. Maybe, yes, you are trying to do too much and you need to cut that back, but also the story you’re telling yourself about how much you have to do and why it’s impossible for you to take a break and give yourself what you need. That’s a mindset problem. There is no shortage of time. All time is now. You live in the present moment. It is in the present moment that all problems exist.
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And in this case, with that belief, the problem is that your nervous system is dysregulated because you’re under the impression that you have more to do than time to do it. And that for some reason, you have to keep running faster because you’re afraid of your own feelings that would come up if you slowed down. So your takeaway from this episode is to understand that when you wake up with a hangover and you did it again,
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or you’ve been doing it again and you’ve fallen back into old habits, that that’s an invitation for you to take an upstream perspective and look at both the mindset as well as the environmental design that caused you to revert back to old ways of thinking and old ways of drinking. And the sooner that you can get to a neutral place to examine the situation with curiosity and optimism.
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instead of beating yourself up and diagnosing yourself as a failure, the sooner that you can transform your setback into a set up for next level growth and further evolution. It doesn’t matter where you find yourself, my friends. It matters what direction you think you’re going. So I hope that that was helpful. And before I go, I want to bring your attention to a few things.
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First of all, I’ve started doing some Q &A episodes. And if you want to submit your situation and have me answer it on air here, either at the podcast or maybe I’ll do some videos for YouTube, but in the show notes, there is a link for you to submit a question and have me respond to it. Also, if you are struggling to control your drinking and this episode gave you insight to how we operate,
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as a community and what my content is like, and you’d like to combine all that with also having a coach who is not going to judge you, who is going to teach you how to process shame and perceived failure so that you can start learning how to change your drinking by changing your thinking. Then get into the show notes and find the link to schedule a discovery call. And I encourage you to take action now. Don’t wait because your brain will talk you out of it.
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because you’re in the habit of thinking that change is gonna require so much big, dramatic effort. And it’s gonna tell you that that’s gonna be overwhelming. This isn’t a good time for that. You don’t have the money to join the program. But all of those things are brain blocks that are keeping you in the habit and the trajectory that you’re in. If you want to change where you are at one year from now, you have to take one action that will guarantee
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that you will be in a different place. You have to interrupt the thinking processes that are guiding your behavior. And the best way to do that is one action at a time. And that’s what I teach you in the program as well. It is not that you’re gonna make all of these changes. You just work on one thing at a time. It’s like going through a pile of tangled cords and they’re all in a knot. You can only untangle one thought process at a time.
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And then you have to introduce new thoughts. We do a lot of rewriting of your neural pathways and we do it one line at a time. And you just practice one new rewrite for a couple of days or even a couple of weeks until it gets integrated in your body. Because you cannot think your way out of a thinking problem. Every new thought has to be coupled with an action because the structure of your brain, of your subconscious only changes through felt experience.
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You can’t get there any faster. You have to learn how to be here and work on untangling the knots that are your thought cord feelings one at a time and just have fun with the process. Learn to enjoy the process of self discovery and self reflection and challenging yourself just enough that it feels doable. You’re not overwhelming yourself with all these changes. So if that sounds like something you are ready to do, get into the show notes.
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and click a link to book your discovery call. That’s the only thing you have to do today. And then when we talk on the discovery call, if you’re a good fit and you decide to come into the program, I’m gonna lay it out for you one step at a time so that you don’t feel like you have to figure everything out. All you have to do is attend a few calls a week and do some homework every single day that I give you in a podcast form. You just listen and you just practice and you just keep showing up one step.
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one action at a time and it works. I’ve got hundreds of women in my program who can attest to that. So get in the show notes, click the link and otherwise I will see you on the next episode and then be looking and waiting for Carly’s story that hopefully will be out next week. And I just wanna say that whether you’re one of my clients or not, I love you guys so much. You are making this work so rewarding.
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And it is so cool to feel like this has gotten bigger than me. Like I hear women in the program teaching each other. Women are coming into the year two, becoming accountability hosts. I’m launching the new coaching certification program. We’ve got women coming into that because they’re finding the work of emotional sobriety so life-changing, not just for themselves, but for their people. So I’d love to have you join us either way. I love you. Thank you for being here and I’ll see you soon.