Episode 257 Minisode: Adjusting Expectations For The Holidays (Part 2)
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I usually go into the holidays thinking that I know what I’m doing. So I take my well thought plans right into the shit show every time, like it’s my first day at band camp. Family dynamics, stress, and oh, somebody’s opening a bottle of wine at every single meal. And as you can imagine, there are times when I get over served, but I’ve learned how to roll with it because it’s not too much alcohol that sets you back.
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It’s how you respond to yourself when you make a mistake. Part two of this episode on adjusting expectations for the holiday will help you understand why I call myself the hangover whisperer on social media. I’m going to walk you through the three question framework that I shared in part one so you can see in real time how to turn what feels like a failure into data, compassion, and next steps. Because when you couple,
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realistic expectations with the belief that you can absolutely trust yourself not to be perfect but to learn from your mistakes. Every setback becomes the set up that allows you to do better next 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 this is part two of adjusting your expectations for the holidays. And I’m going to share my own personal story of my experience last week where I would say I had a relapse of alcohol use disorder. And that has nothing to do with how much I drank or how often I drank. I drank every single day when I was at my parents. It has nothing to do with the quantity of alcohol. Alcohol use disorder is a thinking problem, a disconnect.
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And so my experience was that I drank more than I thought I should be drinking. There was a disconnect between what I wanted for myself and my performance, what I actually did. And so I’m going to take you through my experience using the three questions I gave you in the last episode that you want to apply to your own setbacks or relapse, which you can and should expect during the holidays or other times of stress. The first question is,
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How could that have been worse? What have I done to improve? Where’s my improvements? Give me credit for what did go well. Number two, what have I learned? What’s my takeaway here? And then number three, how will I change my strategy so that I can do better next time? That’s it. So I’ll start with the first question. How could that have been worse? And where have I improved? Well.
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It could have been way worse. mean, I was never drunk. I had small glasses of wine. My parents have these little tiny wine glasses. And so it doesn’t really feel like a full glass of wine. And so in terms of like what I’m used to drinking when I have a glass of wine at a restaurant, they’re kind of little baby glasses. So I am not nearly paying as much attention to how much I’m actually drinking. And honestly, I don’t. I usually just go by feeling. And I did that.
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Like, it could have been way worse. I never felt out of control. I just continued to drink because it’s like a splash at a time, you know, probably like an ounce or two in these little things. And I kept refilling. And then I’d be like, OK, OK, back it off. Let’s grab a LaCroix. Let’s have some water. I’m drinking these stupid shakes. And I’m going to get into that. But let’s have some of my shake. And so I paced myself. But.
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It was still where the first drink was poured somewhere around three or four o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m still splashing my shit at nine o’clock. And in my ideal world, I would have had a little bit late afternoon with my family and then switched to water, where I kind of kept going back and just going with the flow. I wasn’t really paying attention. How could this have been worse? I could have gotten drunk and made myself sick. I didn’t drink an amount that
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really interfered with my sleep because I could kind of sleep in there. It wasn’t like a normal work day or anything. So it could have been way worse. But where I struggled was on this part of the question is, how have I improved? I didn’t see that as an improvement. I was sober, completely sober for three years. And last year, I still was very just not as interested, more cautious, just
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still still very aware of my drinking and this year I just kind of feel like it’s totally normal and I felt like that hand-to-mouth habit was activated and I wasn’t drinking as mindfully and I share this with you because when you want to see how you’ve improved you need to expand your timeline as far back as you need to go to see how this is an improvement. You cannot compare your performance
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during a holiday week, especially if you’re new to this program in mindful drinking and it’s been a shit show for a while. And so you’ve had a couple of months of mindful drinking and then all of the sudden you go through the holidays and you’re like, well, this isn’t an improvement. If that’s the answer, then open it up, get more data, go back farther. So when I look at like how it used to be, oh, like there’s no question here. Like physically I had no regrets. It was only mentally that I thought.
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Why didn’t I just stop around 8 o’clock? So when I asked myself, could this have been worse? That was an easy one. How have I improved? The hump that I had to get over was to not compare myself this year to last year, which was my first year of drinking after three years of sobriety. oh So expand your timeline on the how have I improved and just go as far back. At some point, it’s been worse.
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that data, get the data that shows that you have an improvement. And here’s why that is so important. If your brain is cataloging this as a failure, then it will trigger the habinula in your brain, which blocks your dopamine and motivation and your serotonin and feel-good chemicals and your curiosity and hope. And if you are logging your situation as a failure, then you are shooting yourself in the foot.
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And this is where I love the question on group calls. People are like, well, aren’t I just bullshitting myself? Yes. Yes, you are. You are always bullshitting yourself. The story you are telling yourself is a story. There’s no such thing as a true story by definition. A story is cherry picked data within a timeline. It’s got a theme. It’s got villains and heroes and an arc. OK? So you’re always telling yourself a story. And therefore, it’s always bullshit. And you can either.
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Bullshit your way to success and improvement or you can bullshit your way to failure and relapse It’s your choice. It’s all bullshit. Okay, so find the improvement I found the improvement by just zooming back out to how I lived 20 years of my life and That was an easy win. So now I can say okay This is an improvement and I can go to the next question. What did I learn? What have I learned and
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I can see exactly what caused this. So three, four weeks ago, prior to Thanksgiving, I started a program with a functional and integrative doctor where I didn’t realize I was going to be going on an elimination diet and didn’t really plan for the amount of stress and change that I would need to accommodate and didn’t adjust my life at all. Just kept going 100 miles an hour.
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working from the time I get up till the time I go to bed, and oh, by the way, I’m eliminating grains and nuts and beans and legumes and coffee and sugar and alcohol, just all those things, just no problem. I didn’t set realistic expectations for myself. I didn’t plan to set myself up for success. I expected myself to behave differently in the exact same environment that I was used to. And it went well, and I’m so proud of myself, but I wasn’t nailing
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I wasn’t perfect. And it was harder than I thought. And some of the old neural pathways came back in of, I’ve already screwed up, so it doesn’t matter anyway. And this is so hard. What the hell is wrong with me? Like I said, I was going to do this. And I just caught my hand coming out of my mouth. And somebody put a cookie in there. Like, oh, what? I wasn’t paying attention. And so because I was doing that elimination diet and not
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not allowing for the effort of difficulty that I was attempting to scale a mountain by eliminating all of the food groups that I like. And I didn’t make allowances for that. And so I was beating myself up because I wasn’t being perfect. And that’s the slippery slope. My brain was cataloging failure, that I wasn’t measuring up to where I should be. And failure begets failure. And so I wasn’t
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fully mindful of all of that in my body. I mean, I’m pretty mindful. I do this for a living, pretty damn good at it. But I was with family. know, mom’s got opinions, dad’s got opinions. There’s stress, I’m late, I should have brought this, let’s do that. Oh, I’m in trouble because I’m in my room working and my mom thinks I should be sitting on the couch. And there was just a lot of stress. It was wonderful, I had so much fun. But like I said in the part one of this, like change, doing anything different is hard.
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So what did I learn? I learned that starting an elimination diet prior to the holidays without adjusting my work schedule and other expectations on myself is not setting myself up for success. And so I would either need to be clear with my doctor going into that of, you know what? I’m like a 50 % on this. I’ll do the best I can to move the needle. But I’m not going to sign up and say I’m on an elimination diet. That’s what I learned, is to set realistic expectations.
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And because I failed to do that, because I underestimated how hard it would be to completely and radically change my diet right in the middle of my busy life, I set myself up for failure. My brain logged failure. And then I drank like somebody who was not real happy with herself. Does that make sense? So what an amazing gift my week of drinking was at my parents. What an amazing gift.
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Because now I will set a different boundary next time. I learned not to push myself beyond my capacity and expect myself to perform just because I really want to. And I’m crossing my fingers. I’m getting it all right. And I’m a badass. And I can do all the things. No. There’s only so much time in the day. There’s only so much bandwidth in your bandwidth. And there’s only so much focus that you have to apply to changes when you are also trying to get through the holidays and a stressful week.
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So what did I learn? There’s not a damn thing wrong with me. And I did fucking amazing for what I did manage to accomplish. And so finally, the third question, what will I do different next time? Well, I mean, the first thing is I won’t sign myself up to do that again. And then I did go to my parents. And normally, I bring a case of LaCroix. And I just make it really easy to switch to water at the end of the evening.
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So next time, I will make sure to load up my car with some non-alcoholic options. And I will put those on the counter next to the wine. Because like my experience last week, it never really occurred to me to stop drinking until I got into bed. I’m like, what the fuck did you just do? You’ve been drinking for like six hours. Why? Why? And then I was beating myself up. And I calmed myself down. It was fine. But I just didn’t really think ahead because I was on this, I can’t have anything I want anyway. So I guess I’ll just starve myself.
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I just didn’t bring anything because I was working so much I didn’t take time to go to the store or think ahead. Like it totally makes sense why that happened. And I just want to leave you with this. I’m honoring the fact that I had a recurrence of alcohol use disorder to show you that for the rest of your life, you’re going to have to have these conversations with yourself. And it means nothing about you anymore.
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then you would have to have a conversation with yourself because you’ve been to too many birthday parties and you ate too much birthday cake. Or you’ve been on vacation and you’re drinking every night. Or you’re in Napa and you’re drinking every day. It is no different to have have to look at this alcohol thing than it is to have to look at how much pizza you’re eating or how many soft drinks you’re having or how much exercise you’re not doing and to self-correct, look at the big picture. I’m just teaching you.
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how to look at the big picture, what questions to ask yourself, and to make sure that you understand that it doesn’t mean anything about me. I don’t have alcohol use disorder. I’m just framing it in this context with you because technically, alcohol use disorder is when you’re drinking more than you think you should be drinking. That’s it. And now that you’re in this program, you will be armed with this awareness that it’s not about how much you drink.
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It’s about the story you’re telling yourself. And you’re logging failure in your brain. You’re calling yourself a failure. You’re saying, I expect more of you than you are delivering with me. What the fuck is wrong with you? That is alcohol use disorder, not the drinking. And when I go on vacation at some point, I often plan. I’m going to be drinking most nights on my vacation. That’s not alcohol use disorder, because I’m fucking planning for it, and I’m looking forward to it. Alcohol use disorder.
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is when you’re not meeting your own expectations and your brain logs at a failure. So I hope this me sharing my story allows you to respond to yourself with kindness and compassion using these three questions. How could that have been worse? And where have I improved? Zoom your timeline as far out as you need to go. Number two, what have I learned? And number three, what am I going to do different next time? Put me back in, coach. I got this. All right.
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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.