Episode 295 Minisode: How to improve your motivation to stay sober in an evening
00:00
This episode is for every one of you who feels like you should be working out, you should be eating better and taking better care of yourself, and you’re really trying, you just can’t be consistent. We’re gonna talk about how terrifying it can be when you stop fueling yourself with extrinsic motivation, meaning that you’re motivated by how things are supposed to look and you’re ignoring how they actually feel. The only way to become the version of you
00:29
who is intrinsically motivated to act in her own best interest. The version of you who prefers drinking in moderation, who enjoys taking a walk after dinner, and who loves eating good, clean, healthy food. The only way to become her is to switch your fuel source. You have to stop relying on external validation. You have to stop trying to outrun
00:54
your feelings of shame or guilt or laziness and weakness. Because as you are switching from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, there’s going to be a lull where you don’t have any motivation. But here’s the good news. Motivation isn’t something that just happens to you. It’s something that you create. It’s based on the story you’re telling yourself about who you are and what you want.
01:21
So if you’ve been trying to bully yourself into change with willpower and shame, I want this to land as permission and possibility. There is a way to build habits that last and feel good and actually expand your life. But spoiler alert, it doesn’t happen overnight. Let’s dive in.
01:46
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.
02:22
One of the things that I can’t say I allowed myself to let go of, but I was unable to sustain for the first time in my adult life as I went through a divorce and built my business over, you know, for me, it feels like it’s a year and a half because that’s when I had to shift from losing money every month to making it. But honestly, I’ve been in business for five years and I’ve done amazing work and I, I had
02:49
quite the foundation. I invested heavily. I just was never profitable. And some of that’s because that’s part of building a business. And then some of that’s because I had a fantastic money block. And I now say that the way I got over my fear of making money, charging what I’m worth, and understanding money is how I got over that was I cut off the supply of money that was feeding my dysfunction.
03:16
and uh his name was my ex-husband and I moved him on and cut the safety net and forced myself to sink or swim. And as we do in survival mode, all non-essential activities must cease. But now if I’m really honest, I can say there wasn’t much to seize because I haven’t been working out hard as I know I need to to maintain my bone density. You know, for me, it’s not about the size of my body.
03:45
When I don’t work out, actually get skinnier. And I’m so sorry to say that, but I tend to. mean, it’s only been in the last couple of months where I’m like noticing I’ve probably gained about five pounds probably due to inactivity. usually for me, like when I went through the divorce, was so skinny. Cortisol, I don’t know if it burns fat in my body. I have no idea. But when I get stressed, I tend to get skinny. I don’t gain weight. I lose weight. And that’s probably
04:14
part of what has demotivated me or not kept me working out because what has always motivated me in the past was staying skinny, being tiny, you know, looking good. And, you know, as I’ve rounded the corner on 50, I’m now 52, my motivation has completely changed. I want to be strong. I want bone density. I want to be able to to fly to Yosemite with my daughter and hike and
04:41
Prior to my mid-40s and all the way back to my 20s, I was always leading the class, literally, of boot camp and weight training and running marathons and teaching pot power yoga. I’ve always done that. I’ve got to say, and that’s what this episode is about, my motivation was very external. I was doing it because I wanted to look good. And feeling good was a nice side effect.
05:10
But really I was much mostly concerned about how I looked. And what I noticed is that it was actually when I quit drinking in 2020 uh and went full fully sober. Most of you know my story there. I called the A hotline six weeks into COVID. I tried to drink through it like a good little soldier, know, stay home. Liquor stores are essential. Support your local liquor stores. I for sure did the best I could.
05:39
But what happened for me is the wheels just fell off my bus with my drinking habit. I just went into a free fall. I had been heavily drinking every single day for a long time, but always at a level where I could still function. You know, I still could go teach hot power yoga at 7 a.m. I could still run the marathons. And a lot of my motivation was not only tied to how good I looked or wanted to look, but
06:08
Also to run off, you know, used to run every morning because I was quote running off my hangover. You know, now I’m just like, no, bitch, you are just beaten the hell out of your body is what you are doing. But to me, that was one of the things that allowed me to function is I’d wake up, you know, that parched tongue brain buzz. And I just knew if I could just take all my supplements, drink a fuck ton of water and get my ass out the door within an hour, I’d be functional again.
06:37
And so for years, my exercise habits also supported my drinking habits. And I tell you that because when I went sober completely and began my healing journey, I completely lost my motivation. And I talk a lot of shit about getting completely sober on social media. And I don’t mean to because sobriety is just a form of self-care, right? Not drinking is...
07:06
is just like sleep. The more you get, the better you feel. It’s not like sobriety is bad. I’m sober most days. It’s when I talk about sobriety, I talk about it as a lifestyle, as a lifelong commitment. I’m married to this idea that I’m a non-drinker forever. And of course, that’s how I entered into sobriety was that, you I got the t-shirt and the bumper sticker and I could
07:29
give anybody a short or long version of a talk about how alcohol is a toxic poison and how much better I feel and all of this stuff. Bottom line though, is that I really struggled with motivation. You two years into my sobriety, I’ve talked about this story how I was depressed. I still cried every single, I cried every single day. And now I managed to drink like an asshole for 25 years and I wasn’t crying because I wasn’t feeling nothing. But like I worked out every day.
07:57
So it was very weird to me to feel like I couldn’t function. Even though I had stopped drinking completely, I was officially doing everything right. But I couldn’t, I had no motivation. I felt like a slug on a log. And I actually remember saying that in a coaching call with my coach Omar. I’m like, I feel like a slug on a log. And at the time I attributed it to my brain chemistry. And I wasn’t wrong.
08:27
What was wrong was if I attributed it to my brain chemistry, then it was not something I could control. And I had gotten into post-acute withdrawal syndrome rabbit hole. And that takes like 18 months to two years for your brain chemistry to come back, which it doesn’t. And let me explain exactly why that is. Analyne key shows that like even severe addictions, you can take a 30 day break and your baseline dopamine.
08:55
levels will reset. So this post-acute withdrawal syndrome, it’s real, but the cause is not that your body isn’t capable of producing the correct amount of dopamine. The problem is that your dopamine is tied to your internal narrative. whatever you think you want, what fires dopamine is the anticipation of a reward. And so, for example,
09:23
If you think you hate running and you go force yourself to run, you will never experience a runner’s high because you are using willpower to do the run. and like the euphoria that somebody feels from a run, you might feel okay if you force yourself to run. Cause and this isn’t black and white. I’m using an example, right? But people who think they hate to run will never experience a runner’s high. And people who think
09:53
They can’t drink, or their motivation is tied to external factors, like what other people think of them, which, let’s be honest, let’s remember what you think about what other people think are still your thinks. And so we don’t understand that our dopamine fires on anticipated reward, and we’re rewarding ourself. We’re rewarding ourself with the validation of everybody thinks I look good.
10:19
and so-and-so thinks that I’m doing it right and I’ve met everybody’s approval and I’m pleasing the people around me and I’m meeting all of my goals. These are internal narratives. These feelings are not caused by anything external. They are caused by the story you’re telling yourself. So the reason that I suffered with uh post-acute withdrawal syndrome, as you will, is I was in withdrawal from all my normal sources of motivation. There was nothing to get away with anymore.
10:48
There was no reward at the end of the day. And while of course sobriety helped me feel better, I looked better, I slept better. I also started putting even more pressure on myself because now I ain’t got no damn excuse as to why I am not doubling my output, being even more productive, more successful. I wasn’t, in the first year, 18 months after I quit drinking, I could hardly get out of bed.
11:19
And you know, and it was nice to come down from beating my body up, don’t get me wrong, slow nice walks, but most days I felt very depressed and there was a lot of crying in that situation. And I don’t, I don’t regret a moment of it because I had a lot to work through, but I also had a lot to learn. I had a lot more to learn than I had to work through. It wasn’t all my unresolved trauma or
11:47
you know, or anything like that. I had to learn how to motivate myself from the inside out. And that’s what I want to talk about here because this week I have begun strength training and I feel so good about it and so completely confident that I will still be having this conversation a year later, years from my life. And I’m going to map it all out for you. It’s not that I’m never going to miss.
12:15
or fall back or get out of sync. But I know that I’m doing something that feels good in my body. I also know that I’ve taken the time to gently build this habit. So in the last episode, I talked about how I started running um back in February. So I’m recording this in September. Back in February, I just habit stacked my daily habit of getting up and brushing my teeth.
12:45
and I inserted a 12 minute run on my treadmill. And so I am in the habit of waking up and getting right into it. Because for me, if I miss that window, then there’s a thousand other things that are gonna swallow me up. And then the resistance, the friction to actually going up on the treadmill, it’s just not gonna happen. So for me, that’s when my body wants it, that’s when it works for me. I built this habit of running every single day.
13:14
And of course I haven’t been perfect about it. And I was starting to get bored with it. So I don’t know, early August, I noticed that I was skipping more days than I was doing it. And so then I said, okay, we’re still keeping the morning movement routine, my friend. We’re just gonna shift it. And I’d been bitching it myself because I wanna go to yoga, but I don’t like to go to my yoga studio, hear my excuse, because everything’s hot, hot, hot these days.
13:42
And which means I can’t go in the middle of the day because I am a sweater. My body turns on and I release enough fluid from my body to probably need an IV. I used to have to get IVs after marathons. Like I sweat so bad. So I can’t go to a yoga class in the middle of the day because first of all, it makes me feel depleted. I don’t feel good when I’m done. I feel like I need a fucking nap. And hair and makeup, hello. Like I have to come home and completely shower and start over.
14:11
And so my yoga habit of going to the studio and all the studios around here are all hot. I did take five minutes and look. So they’re just, it’s, can’t. So, but luckily I taught yoga for 20 years. There’s a yoga teacher that lives in my head. And so when I started blipping on my consistency with my run, I set up a little yoga place and I said, okay, any day you don’t want to go run, then detour turn left here and you can do yoga. And that,
14:41
has been amazing. Like I’ve not just been stretching, like I’ve been getting back into my routines and fuck the 12 minute limit. I’ve been going 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes. Like I don’t want to stop. And this is what I’m talking about with internal motivation. You have to match the movements that you’re doing at a level of where you’re at, not where you should be, so that it feels good. And so the one thing I’ve noticed, I don’t know if it’s my age,
15:11
um probably, or also my complete lack of fitness, even though, you know, I do some stuff, I’m telling you, but whenever I’ve gone to the gym and done a workout, I am so painfully sore, not the fun kind of sore. I love when I move my body, feeling evidence that I’ve done something. But this was, I’m talking enough lactic acid to kill a horse.
15:40
So painful, I can’t sit down, I can’t get up, it hurts. And so, I don’t know, go figure, genius. Maybe I was doing it wrong. Well, that’s what I figured out now, right? One of the reasons why I have avoided strength training is because two reasons. Number one, it requires me to go to a gym. And with my job, uh it’s, that’s just, there’s a lot of friction there. I have to get dressed in workout clothes, which I dress professionally every day. So I have to change my clothes. I got a,
16:10
put my hair up and with my hair, if I put it up, it’s not coming back down because I’ve got fine hair and there’s rubber band marks and it gets bad like blah, blah, blah. So there’s been a lot of friction with the going to the gym, but I want to be strong. want to build, you know, I want to feel like again, I could go to Yosemite and, or I could run away from somebody chasing me. Like I love feeling fit, but my definition of fitness was so far out there.
16:39
that it just delayed the starting of my habit, plus the friction of when am I going to do this? And so I have a girlfriend, she just moved here, and she’s got this, and I’m about to get it too, spoiler alert, but she’s got this thing called Tonal. And it looks like an inverted TV on the wall. And I’m familiar with gym equipment. I don’t want to brag, but it’s not bragging if it’s true. I was a personal trainer. I know how to do everything, right?
17:06
It looks just like this TV that’s hanging on the wall. And yeah, there’s some things that you can pull out. Well, oh my God. It’s a full gym. It’s got these arms that come out and these attachments and the arms move up and down, but it’s computerized weight resistance. you there’s no, you don’t have to stack your weights. The computer adjusts your weights for you. And there’s like 500 different movements.
17:35
You can’t run out of shit to do here lower body upper body all of the things and So I went and she finally got it installed and I went and I did it and it was okay And I know myself well enough now. I didn’t choose the 60 minute intermediate workout I chose just got here beginner not and I’m totally out of shape workout and I moved through the movements and they guided me and they adjusted my weight and I had that
18:04
perfect sweet spot of feeling like I could do it and I enjoyed doing it and I know I’m going to get stronger here. Like it it constantly is adjusting with you know whatever your failure point of failure is and it’ll back it down by one pound and like think about how much time and effort that takes in a gym right and so I I decided to take my morning movement
18:31
practice and put in two strength training days. So I have her garage code, she ain’t up that early and I get up at 545 and I go over there and I am shocked at how much I’m enjoying the actual experience. Like when I’m done, I’m like, I can’t wait to come back on Thursday because I doing it Tuesday, Thursdays then if I can’t, do it again on the weekend. I can’t wait to go back. The soreness level that I have is not sore. It’s an awareness.
19:01
that I moved my body. Like it’s amazing. And so of course, as you might imagine, I went home and I ordered my own. It takes like six weeks to get here. And I’m like, that’s perfect because I can go through the beginner stuff over at her house. And I’ll be honest, it wasn’t cheap. And I really thought about the investment I was making, but I had already been going over options like, okay, I’m gonna have to hire a personal trainer to come over and drag me out of my desk. And I’m gonna have to buy equipment for my house.
19:29
Like because going to the gym, like I said, it’s just not really feasible with the way I work. I need it to be more compact than going in lollygagging around in the gym for an hour and a half. And so I was thinking about hiring a personal trainer. I was thinking about ordering all this other equipment. And this was, I’ll be honest, it was less than $5,000. And I did a firm. They’d let me do a firm. So like my payment is like 120 a month.
19:59
Which, you if I was joining like my Y where I used to join that my ex-husband paid for that, it was like $80 a month or something. Plus if I wanted to do personal training, which at this point, the stage in my life, I know that Colleen needs the support of accountability and guidance. Well, that’s included in this. Like they even adjust my form. I got dinged today and they’re like, put all of a sudden the AI coach that was leading me through the workout.
20:28
They stopped and said, and ding ding, you need to put your knees, I don’t know what it said, but it corrected my form in real time. So I’ve got somebody to guide me. I’ve got all these preset workouts and I didn’t make the mistake of choosing intermediate workout for where I wanna be. I went with where I’m at, beginner, wussy, weak, and I’m allowing myself to be pushed to my capacity, you my growth edge.
20:57
It doesn’t matter where I’m at, it matters where I’m going. And I’m pushing myself outside my comfort zone. It feels like resistance is there, but it also feels sustainable. I take my muscle to fatigue, but I’m not blowing out my muscles. I’m not ripping them to shreds. I’m not hurting myself. And so in the last two weeks, I have built this habit with strength training that I know I’m going to sustain. And I feel so good that
21:27
I’m adding just another layer to my life of me being a whole, healthy, balanced, happy person living in my integrity. And it’s not that I wasn’t living in my integrity. I was doing the best I could for where I was at. But I’m tickled that I have come through yet another gate of busting myself out of my little tiny, tiny, tiny habits that I have, you know, where I live in a
21:53
50 foot radius of any given day I’m at my desk or I’m in my kitchen or I’m in my bedroom. Like I’m so proud of myself for just taking the actions that have built one thing at a time. And now having the balls to invest in myself and know that I know I’m going to do this. It’s not like, oh, I hope I do this. Like I’ve tested it. I’ve built the habit of showing up. Then I
22:19
tested out the actual equipment and I’ve got another three or four weeks before I get mine. So I’m going to my friend’s house. I’m holding that space for myself and I’m moving the ball forward and it just feels so good. And so what I want to leave you with is that if what you’re doing in terms of what you think you should be doing, if that’s hard or painful, then you’re either doing too much or you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
22:47
and you’re not clear on your why. You know, when you have to rely on willpower to force yourself, you have a motivation problem. Motivation is tied to your internal narrative. And I promise you, the solution is not to push and work harder, it’s to get coaching on your mindset. The story you’re telling yourself about what you want and where you are and where you should be and how you need to get there, you just need coaching on that.
23:17
And you also need to understand that you’re not building one new habit with working out or eating healthy or whatever it is you want to do. You’re not building one new habit. You’re building like 10 new habits. For example, with my realization that I’m not cooking or feeding myself properly, I didn’t decide, well, I’m going to start eating healthy. I decided I’m going to start going to the grocery store once a week so that I’ve got some foods to actually cook for myself.
23:45
You’ve got to look upstream, my friends, and begin to build the habit. This strength training workout that is now a three day a week strength training with actual weights and a personal trainer, that didn’t just show up when I started last Tuesday. I started last February just walking up the stairs and walking on the treadmill for 10 minutes. That’s where I started was 10 minutes.
24:10
And I was allowed to quit as long as I got on the treadmill, the goal was 10 minutes, but if I got off at two, I could. I don’t think I ever got off at two, but like I built the habit. I didn’t just show up here now ready to embark on strength training. I built it. So I just want to reiterate that again, that if what you’re doing feels too hard or painful, you’re either trying to do too much or you’re trying to do it for the wrong reasons. And if you’re relying on willpower to force yourself,
24:39
then something is a skew with your motivation and motivation has to do with the anticipated reward and what you’re telling yourself you want is off. And so you need coaching. You don’t have a skill deficit externally. You have a skill deficit in how you’re framing and thinking about the situation. It’s a thinking problem, not a drinking problem. Okay. And using shame or fear.
25:07
or shoulding on yourself, shoulds or shit, when you’re shoulding on yourself for where you should be or what you should be doing, you are not building habits that are going to last. They’re not sustainable. You will eventually run out of steam. And what I love and what I will leave you with is that I don’t feel like I’m going to run out of steam. I’m building my life in a way that I’m just getting started. My best years are ahead of me.
25:34
because I’m willing to be where I’m at and I’m willing to give myself, my Colleen, the support that she needs to feel good about where she’s at and then also clarity about where she’s going and then allow her to move at a sustainable pace where she picks up speed instead of losing it. And I’ll be honest that feeling like I can keep going indefinitely and expanding, that’s a new feeling for me. I’ve never felt that.
26:04
before in my life. I’ve always felt like I just have to push, push, push, push and hope and pray and then beat myself up when I fall short. And now at 52 years old, I feel like I’m expanding because I no longer do hard or painful things. I get coaching and I create habits and systems that allow me to move at a sustainable pace. And that’s how I’m able to identify as somebody who’s unfucking stoppable.
26:33
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.