Episode 239 Minisode: Somebody put a vape in my car
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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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Okay, so super personal episode here, and I haven’t hesitated to share it with you. And in fact, I meant to share it with you when I was in the middle of it. Turns out I’ve already worked through this, but I wanted to share how it is the way you respond to where you are at, not where you are at, that
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dictates how you move forward. And so here’s the deal. And I know many of you will relate and you’ll probably hopefully be super thrilled that I’m sharing this with you. I have always liked nicotine and I’ve gone through periods of my life where I didn’t use it at all. You know, probably 10 years where babies and breastfeeding and moming, know, and cigs are gross, right? And then at some point,
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kind of when I was, my kids were a little bit older and I could sneak and get away with it, I found myself back with the cigarettes. And I wasn’t like a normal smoker, nobody knew I smoked, but there was hilarious stories about the lady in the bushes with the Kroger bag over her head and the dishwashing gloves with the cigarettes. And I thought it was funny. I saw This Is 40, that movie, and I was like, oh my God, I’m not the only one doing this.
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and all of my girlfriends, like nobody smoked, but we all had cigarettes in our purse. Do you know what I’m saying? And so in early 2000, I don’t know, 2013 or 14, I switched to vaping. Cause you can do that in bed, hello. Like I still don’t understand people that actually smoke cigarettes because you can do fruity pebble flavoring that was back before they regulated it all. And you could get super fun flavors.
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and I was just in. And for probably five or six years, I had a hand, but there was an attachment on my hand and there was just always a vape in it. And this was before I quit drinking, you know, when I quit drinking, cause it was so much and I just always did it. And I knew, and I remember thinking like, I’m not enjoying like 90 % of this. I’m not even knowing, noticing that I’m doing it.
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but I had this belief, I have an addictive personality and I’m all in, know, so if I’m vape, I guess I’m gonna vape, you know, a thousand puffs a day or whatever. And then after, you know, I started to get my shit together, quit the drinking, and if you followed my story, you know I was sober, perfectly sober, almost three years, and then reintroduced alcohol and got to see, you know, that’s where this program was born because three years of sobriety didn’t prepare me for...
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you know, half a glass of wine my first time, waking up the next day with all the thoughts in my head, and then navigating kind of back into the on-ramp of just being normal, being able to trust myself, deciding that I was a less is more person. And I want to say something about that decision. I promise you, no matter how cray-cray you feel, there is equal evidence that you are an all or nothing, go big or stay home person.
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as well as a less is more person. And what I began to notice is with the substances that I be prior to struggled with or gleefully skipped into addiction with, that as I became more regulated and more balanced in my body, I had less and less desire to throw myself off. I didn’t want to be
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in an existence where I constantly needed something to feel okay, whether it was a bunch of coffee in the morning or whether it was Adderall or Xanax or vaping or alcohol in the evenings. Like I was tired of being a dancing monkey who was always solving the problem of me not being okay, me not feeling regulated by titrating my...
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my substance use of whatever it was. Some of it was good. I have more supplements in my cabinet. I could start my own health shop. You know, I was always taking something because, and this goes back to the belief that started in childhood that I believed I had to hack my body. I believed that my brain was smarter than my body and that I had to manipulate my body to maximize my
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experience in life. So whether it be manipulating my appetite, you know, I had 20 plus years of eating issues, where I thought that left to my own devices, I would just fucking put stuff into my face until it stopped. And that I had to try to control myself. And so I pull out that belief for you to just examine, do you have the belief?
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that you have to hack your own motivation, your own body chemistry, your own desires that left to your own devices, you would be a fucking fat drunk train wreck. And so you have to try. Well, that’s a brain thing. That’s an idea in your brain. As I became more regulated, where I moved through the world based on my experience, do I want less or more?
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Is this better or worse? Instead of getting attached to these truths, these ideas that I need at least two cups of coffee before anybody even fucking makes my eardrum buzz with the sound in your face. I thought that I needed that and I needed an Adderall and I needed my vape in my pocket and I needed extra juice or extra pods or whatever phase I was in. And I needed a certain amount of wine on standby in the evenings.
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I had all these rules that I had made up because one day in time that worked for me. And so I spent the rest of my days trying to get back to whatever joy I felt from behaving that way and completely disregarded my own felt sensation. know, for all the times that I enjoyed drinking, I also had just as many times where I was like, fuck, like, can we quit doing this? You know, but we get so attached to an idea
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that we are an all or nothing person or this is what we need to be okay, that we miss the fact that we’re humans in this body. And I had this belief that I had to hack. If I wanted to be skinny and pretty and energized and peppy and positive, that I needed certain things to assist that. So that was the belief. So as I moved into a balanced body,
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I began to notice that I was a less is more person. Again, equal evidence on any given day. This is where you gotta like expand your data set. Like what you were yesterday or what you were last month or what you’ve been over the last year. Like always zoom out. I am seeing that I do get out of balance, but I spend less and less time out of balance. And when I realize I’m out of balance, I have a desire to correct.
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because my personal definition of being okay is just being okay. I don’t need to go get or to swallow or to manipulate my external world. I’m okay as I am and that is the skill that I feel is now, that’s the one I value. And I’m not judging my former self and maybe I won’t be this way forever. This is what I teach though, emotional sobriety, that you are okay based on the thoughts in your brain.
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and how you respond to the feelings in your body, that that’s what makes you okay. You have the power to be okay no matter what. Okay, so I consider myself a pretty balanced person and less is more. And so I live with, I have lived with two of my adult children and they have struggled with nicotine and specifically vaping.
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And there’s been cycles where people start and stop, but when everybody in the house, it’s kind of like girls all menstruating together. One person gets back on the vape pretty soon. Other people are just, well, I’ll just get my own. I don’t want to suck on yours all the time. You know what I mean? And so my family, we have experienced nicotine being present and different levels of addiction to that where we are thinking about it and wanting it.
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bottom line, I’ve had a lot of experience with quitting nicotine. I’m really good at it, which is hilarious, right? Because that then indicates that I start again. But I’m also like, okay, well, that’s that’s okay. It’s it’s okay. Like, there’s no right or wrong, I get to live my life. So I’m actually really good at quitting. I know it’s not that hard. And what I also have learned is that the more I get into addiction with anything,
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Like that’s really fun, right? It’s really fun to get addicted to things where you’re like, oh, this feels good, I should do more. And then that feels good. And you’re like, oh my God, I should keep doing this. And then pretty soon, it feels less and less. You hit the wall of diminishing returns because now you’ve normalized your dopamine, you’ve normalized the behavior, and you’re not getting the big bang for your buck. You know, like especially with cigarettes, but also alcohol, you’re not.
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using to get high anymore or to get the hit, you’re using because not using, there’s a dopamine deficit there. And because I’m aware of all of this, I watch myself and I see that I can do something for a certain period of time and enjoy getting the high from it, but then it goes away. And that’s where my desire to live in balance and to not
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Operate on a dopamine deficit that I’m constantly trying to fucking fix. That’s where that desire has come from So I know that I get out of balance with things because it’s fun to get out of balance And then I know that the desire kicks back in when it’s no longer fun So I it’s been two years since I carried around a vape for any length of time I think I started again. It was a summer situation
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And it was all around me. I ended up buying one and it took me about six weeks to pull back. And I have done this many, many times. So here’s the story. Over the last really four years, minus the six weeks where I had my own, I’ve had a policy where if there’s a vape around, I’ll take a hit. I don’t want to be obnoxious. That asshole that’s always sucking on somebody else’s vape, but I enjoy it. I’ll take a hit. I hand it back. The rule that was working for me, that has worked for me, is I just don’t have my own.
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And over the summer, my daughter has had one, my son has had one, and my frequency of taking a suck on somebody’s vape increased. I knew that because I was enjoying it less and less, okay? Then when my daughter left for college, somehow she took her vape with her. And after she was gone, in the middle of all of my life was, you know, I’m thinking a lot and there was just a lot of stress.
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Somebody bought calling in a vape and all of a sudden I was carrying it around. And here’s the moral of the story. I did not let that bother me. I did not make it mean anything because I knew, I know how this goes. I don’t need to worry about it. This is a short burning candle. It will burn itself out. And sure enough, I had a vape in my hand for about two weeks after she was gone.
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And I noticed the thoughts, I’m not even enjoying this. Oh my God, I’m feeling a little dehydrated. Oh my God, I can’t go to sleep because I’ve been sucking on a vape for two hours where I was reading this book and I wasn’t even paying attention. And then I did same thing I did last time, which is I was like, all right, sweetie, I’m not gonna take it away from you. No need for that. It’s not that big of a deal, but I’m gonna have you put it in your bathroom. Like, we’re not gonna carry it around anymore. And so I did that.
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and quickly and easily went back to it’s in my bathroom, I can go get it if I think about it. And I’m like, ooh, yeah, I’m gonna do that because I probably should be doing something else, but a walk to my bathroom sounds more fun. I would have some. And it’s self corrected, my friends. I do have a vape in my bathroom. And this weekend I noticed, oh shit, I went the whole weekend and I forgot about it. Like it was amazing. And so I wanna counter
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The idea that you’re on a slippery slope, that thought that comes into your head that sparks fear into your body, what if when you realize you’re at a balance, you calmly said, oh, it’s OK, I’ve been here before. I know how to self-correct. I know that my desire to be well and to be free and to be happy will win, because I’m going to feed that more without
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making this a big damn deal, like something has gone wrong and this just proves that I can’t stick with it. Like there’s equal evidence that you can stick with it and also can’t. It’s what you pay attention to that determines what happens next. It’s the kindness and compassion that you treat yourself with when you find yourself a little out of balance. I realized how I got out of balance. It was hard to take not one, but two girls to college.
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I was going through a lot. I don’t even remember getting the vape. Like it just showed up in my car. I probably was getting gas. I had a thought process that was a habit of, I should just go ahead and da da da. Like I don’t need to go through withdrawal. Like whatever, whatever the story in my head was. It wasn’t really a conscious decision. It was a subconscious decision. I didn’t catch it. I didn’t interrupt it. And I’m not even fucking sorry about it. Two weeks later, I was back in balance.
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What if you treated yourself with the same dignity and compassion and trust that of course you want to be happy and free? Of course. And you’re a human doing the very best you can. And sometimes you realize somebody put a vape in your pocket or somebody bought extra alcohol and you already drank it. That was yesterday. And now the way you respond to yourself, whether you freak yourself out,
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and live in a dysregulated nervous system and go up in your head and try to figure out why all this is happening or whether you just like let go and relax and say with complete confidence, I completely trust myself. I completely trust myself to self-correct, to learn, and to be the very best version of myself that I can at all times. And then to give myself grace as I gently, kindly, lovingly move myself.
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back into balance.
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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.