Episode 254 Minisode: Tired Is A Feeling, Not A Fact
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When I quit drinking for a while during COVID, because I finally figured out that alcohol is not an essential food group, I thought I would feel amazing. When in reality, I felt tired. It was like my body was permanently buffering, you know, like Netflix on bad wifi. I woke up exhausted and I slogged through the day. And I really thought this is just how it’s gonna be for a long time. Because all the quit lit books that I was reading said that it takes up to 18 months to reset your dopamine.
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But it turns out that dopamine is either triggered or not triggered according to the story you’re telling yourself. It took me a while, because I like to learn things the hard way. But one day it dawned on me that maybe tired is a feeling, not a fact. And feelings can shift real fast when you know what’s driving them. So in this episode, I’m going to show you why most exhaustion isn’t physical at all. It’s emotional. And once you see that,
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you can stop waiting for your energy to just magically reset and learn how to recharge your own batteries in real time.
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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. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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So one of the struggles that I had when I first quit drinking, and I went completely sober, and I’ve shared about that in other areas where I quit drinking, alcoholed altogether, I quit vaping, I quit Adderall, I was also at the same time 100 % vegan and a dedicated intermittent faster. So as you might imagine,
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My brain chemistry in those early days of sobriety was whacked. And as good as staying sober felt, nobody ever regrets not waking up with a hangover. Once the novelty of quote, not drinking wore off, there’s not a whole lot of purpose beyond that. Not drinking is the absence of a behavior. It does not inform you.
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of what you are actually doing and enjoying and learning and being. And I got sucked into what I now refer to as the post-acute withdrawal syndrome trap. oh There’s this idea that you are suffering a dopamine deficit after you quit drinking. And you are, that’s actually a fact. However, your dopamine can recalibrate
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really within 30 days, beyond 30 days, whether it be 30 days of complete sobriety or 30 days of reduced drinking, beyond 30 days, your dopamine baseline levels have returned to normal. Now there’s always ways to change your normal and boost your normal, right? But you’re not in a dopamine deficit long term. And even the idea that
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ADHD brains either don’t produce or process dopamine in the same way. While some of that may be true, you’re not a victim of your own brain chemistry. research has shown that there is no evidence that a condition for PAUSE, post-acute withdrawal syndrome, actually exists beyond the acute withdrawal phase and maybe a little bit beyond as you recalibrate to a new normal.
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But I got caught up in this idea that I was exhausted and unmotivated because of my own brain chemistry. And the reason for that was because I had rewarded myself with alcohol every single day for over 15 years. And so this recalibration period that can take up to a year, according to some recovery websites, and this is not science-based, can take up to a year.
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I would be punished with this sense of dragging my ass and always being on the verge of tears for up to two years. And it is really hard to accept that, wow, I am more tired and less motivated now as a perfectly sober person than I was when I was drinking half a fifth of vodka every single day. And what I have learned.
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over the last two and a half years since I slowly crawled out of that hole thinking I just had to give it time. What I have learned about dopamine and about energy and about motivation is that there is so much more that you can do about it than you think. And the focus of this episode today is one that I wanna just talk about, the feeling of being tired.
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You know what I’m talking about, kind of tired in your bones. Maybe you’re not sleeping great, but maybe it’s just an emotional exhaustion. And what I want to point out that I have learned from my own experience and working with clients over the years is that this feeling of being tired is primarily emotional. It is the mental resources that are being drained by
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thinking processes that do not feel good in your body. The litmus test for any thinking process is how it feels. You may think you’re solving problems up in there, up in that big brain of yours, but if the way your body feels in any given moment is tired, anxious, depressed, shamed, overwhelmed, heavy, negative, or
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Fearful or whatever if the way you feel in your body as a result of the thoughts you’re thinking Whether you’re asking yourself questions or playing out hyper hypothetical scenarios if the way it feels in your body is not positive and open then you need to learn to respond directly to your body and Understand that it’s the thinking that’s causing the feeling that’s the problem not the feeling that’s alerting you to the
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the truth of the thought processes or the quality of the thought processes. If you start bypassing your brain and trust the little engine that could body that’s been carrying you through all your stupid fucking decisions through life. If you start bypassing your brain and understand that the truth is always in your body, the truth does not lie. And we talk about
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Thousand shades of truth right the truth is whatever you believe the truth is whatever you act upon the truth is whatever you internalize and Make a habit of believing a belief is just a thought you no longer question because you think it’s true And so given that anything can be true the litmus test that you can apply as you look to change and Understand that your thought processes are the problem not the solution you can use your body as the litmus test
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of whether you’re moving in the right direction or not. Do you want more or less? Any thought process that is causing you to feel negative emotions is the problem. Let your body guide you. Live from the inside out. Make decisions in direct response to your body. And so I want to include the emotion of tiredness.
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in with all of the other emotions, anxiety and the depression and the guilt and the shame and the resentment and all that, tired is also a feeling, not a fact. And when you experience your body as feeling heavy and when you are not feeling connected to the people around you or grounded in your routine or looking forward to activities that
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feel like they give you purpose and your life has a sense of meaning. If you’re experiencing tiredness, it is a call to action. It is a call to gentle action. Most of us, I take a lot of private calls from people who are like, I just need a one-on-one because the problem here is that I’m stuck in a hole. I have no energy and I have no motivation. And I want that to change as quickly as possible. The old way.
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We beat our bodies into submission is cracking the whip, pushing through, go and do and get, because that’s the only way we know how to achieve the feelings that we think we want of success and approval and happiness and satisfaction and moral superiority. I mean, that’s a fun one to feel, right? That’s the only way we know how to get those feelings is pushing our body to its limits. The gentle call to action when you’re feeling tired.
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is to take full responsibility to the source of the tiredness and understand that that’s probably a thousand pronged. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you’re not giving yourself breaks. Maybe you’re pushing yourself through your day on a regular basis and your adrenals are burning out and your thyroid is off kilter. Maybe it is a preoccupation or a distraction with some sort of fake mental math that your brain is so busy doing about the drama with other people.
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or worries about a job or concerns about your finances in the future or what other people’s finances are in the future or how much time you will or won’t have to do this or that in the future. Like if you have preoccupation going on in your brain, that is draining your mental battery. That is causing tiredness. It might not be the only thing. There might also be a lack of water, a lack of movement.
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My body gets tired the more I sit, the less energy I have. Our bodies are physical. We’re animals, guys, ladies. We got to get outside in the sunlight. We have to move our bodies. And so the gentle call to action when you find yourself tired is to look at everything that you’re doing and say, what else do you need, body? Do you need more sleep at night? All right, I need to clear my schedule tonight and hit the hay early and get you some sleep.
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I need to maybe cut back on the coffee that’s keeping me up at night and dehydrating me and keeping my adenosine blocked in my brain like there’s so much going on there. The solution, water. Water is the most energizing fuel you can give your body. You may have to look at the thinking processes and the problem solving skills that you’re applying to whatever drama, trauma drama is going on in your life and take full responsibility for the fact that the reason you’re tired is because your dome light’s on.
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And you’re draining your mental resources because you’re not managing your mind. And that it’s not like you can just turn your brain off. You might also need to move your body. Get it some more exercise. Put on some music. Give it some uplifting content or some mindfulness exercises like yoga or Tai Chi or whatever. Realizing that being tired is, in the present moment, it is what it is.
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But the perpetuation, if you are tired on a regular basis, it is the result of choices that you are making. And there’s so many resources within this program on how to boost your dopamine, you know, with the cold shower and the morning sunlight and appropriate use of coffee. And then there’s ways to balance your brain chemistry today, not two years from now, with amino acid supplementation.
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and high protein meals that you’re eating on a regular basis so your blood sugar isn’t all wacky. And there’s thought work that you can do to ask yourself better questions and design an environment for yourself, for your body to move around in that allows for creativity and curiosity and optimism. If you’re in the same little pattern moving about your house every single day and you’re feeling low and tired,
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and unmotivated, you need to get out of that environment. Because here’s the litmus test for being tired. We’ve all experienced that point in time when we were so exhausted we couldn’t go on, and then something happened. The person showed up in our life, or the money came through, or someone needed your help, and you sprung into action, finding the resources, solving problems, giving of yourself.
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as though you were not just exhausted and too tired to go on five minutes ago. When your tiredness can be turned on and off like that, it’s an emotion. And even when it can’t be, there’s still an emotional component that you have control over. So your takeaway to consider here is that tired is mostly a feeling, not a fact.
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and that it is how you respond to your body when it is tired that either perpetuates the fatigue and exhaustion or allows you to crawl out of the hole one rung at a time. 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 gonna need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure,
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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.