Episode 301 Minisode: To Drink OR Not To Drink On The Plane
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One of my favorite things to do is study my own nervous system in real time. I am endlessly fascinated by how quickly my capacity expands or contracts or wobbles and recalibrates depending on whatever’s happening in my life. And a few weeks ago, I had one of those moments that reminded me yet again, this work is not about perfection. It’s just about paying attention.
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So I recently flew out to New York on a Thursday. And on that day, I was feeling spacious and steady, no desire to drink, even though I was in first class, no urge to escape, just genuine ease in my body. And then two days later, on the same flight, coming back, I could not wait for the Chardonnay cart. Same tools, same woman, completely different internal landscape. But instead of judging it, I got curious.
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because that fluctuation is the whole point. That’s where wisdom lives. Emotional sobriety is learning to recognize the moment your capacity starts to slip. Not so you can control yourself harder, but so you can care for yourself sooner. And in this episode, I’m sharing exactly how I walked myself through that shift. And I’ll tell you about the parts that felt beautiful and the parts that didn’t.
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So if you’ve ever wondered why your habits feel effortless on some days and absolutely impossible on other days, this one’s gonna land. Let’s take off.
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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.
02:08
So I wanna give you a little insight into my own relationship with alcohol, my thought processes, what I’m learning, where I still struggle, just to normalize the fact that you never get there. You have to drop the expectation that one day you’re gonna wake up and your desire to drink will always be perfectly appropriate, perfectly healthy,
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perfectly controlled and that you can just wash your hands of the past history of you never having to check in with yourself because you’ve arrived there and there is a place where you need no willpower no self-reflection and no self-correction because you’re never gonna make another mistake like I need you to understand that’s not a thing what is a thing is knowing that you’re always paying attention
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that you’re always learning and that your needs are always changing and therefore your strategies will need constant and regular updates, just like your phone. You will get to a place where it no longer scares you to realize that you need to self-correct or to be able to sit and look back and think, yeah, I kind of wish I wouldn’t have done that. Or I wonder what this is really about. You will get to a place where you are comfortable and safe with yourself.
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You know how to manage your feelings, your thoughts, and assess your behavior in positive and productive ways that actually allows you to move through a low spot instead of getting stuck there. So I just want to explain a high spot that I was in on Thursday and then the corresponding low spot that I found myself in Saturday. And I want to just kind of walk you through what that looked like.
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So I was traveling on Thursday and I was going to New York. was recording a live podcast in somebody’s studio and it was my first time doing that. So it felt like kind of a big fucking deal, but I was flying to New York just to do this podcast. And then I would be leaving New York and flying to Colorado. I live in Indiana where I was going to spend another week. That’s where I’m at right now.
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So there was a lot of packing and a lot of planning and a lot of logistics that had to go into moving my body through space and time into be where I was supposed to be. And Thursday, I was so ready for a travel day because for me, my experience of travel days are kind of a vacation, which does speak to my definition of vacation at this point, but just stay with me. To me, travel days are quiet. It’s like,
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I can’t control if a plane is delayed or on time. I can only surrender. I just put myself into the system and trust that one way or another, my body will be in one place, my bag may or may not be in the same place, and life will move on. I am not an anxious traveler. I don’t worry. You know, I have my list. I check it twice. I do the best I can. And I trust myself to manage logistical things as they come up.
05:23
So I really enjoy travel days because to me, it gives me a break. I’m not getting ding, ding, ding, ding, dinged with all of the notifications. Like I’ve tried a couple times to get the wifi and do work on the plane, but it never works. It never works. And I love that it doesn’t work because once wheels are up, I have a couple of hours of uninterrupted. can read my book. I can work on a creative process, know, writing or
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planning something and I’m not trying to multitask and I’m not constantly interrupted, which is kind of the state of my life in other days. And so I like travel and so I’m not an anxious. I’m not worried the plane is going down. I figure if it does, it won’t hurt long. I don’t I’m not afraid of flying. I’m not afraid of turbulence. I like having everything I need in my little bag and just being quiet and with myself for the day. So I look forward to it, right? And
06:21
So I’m sitting on the plane, we’re getting ready for takeoff and I’m having a very sweet morally superior moment. It’s like eight o’clock in the morning and almost everybody around me is ordering drinks and I have no desire to drink because I’m excited. I’m excited to spend time in this stillness and peace of my little seat on the plane with nobody bothering me like
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I have no desire to escape or to numb or to get through it because I actually like the experience of being in it. I don’t need alcohol to help me relax because I am relaxed. I’m actually not excited when the plane lands and my phone reconnects and all the ding-dings start coming again. But being a human, sometimes I judge other people when I’m watching people order double gin and tonics before we even take off.
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or halfway through the flight when somebody’s on their third glass of Chardonnay and like the flights an hour and a half. I mean, where are going lady? How are you going to be when you get there? So I was just noticing myself. I was noticing other people and I was really grateful that I didn’t have a desire to drink. And I was also a little curious and judgmental about the people that did. Well, well, well, fast forward to my flight out of New York.
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which by this time I’ve been gone from my house and my space for two days. And as lovely as Chelsea is at the New York area of Chelsea, as lovely as it was, my hotel room was very small. Like there wasn’t any place that I could really work. I didn’t know the city and how to use subways. And I didn’t have the bandwidth to really figure that out because I still had a full work day the day I was there on that Friday, right before my podcast interview. So.
08:12
You know, it was stressful having to try to negotiate the subway and the Ubers that are $130 every time I got in one and I didn’t really have proper meals. You know, I was taking care of myself the best I could, but it wasn’t relaxing to be in New York. And so by the time I’m sitting on the plane waiting for wheels up, I could not wait for that gal to come ask me what I was having to drink. I’d already decided I was having a Chardonnay and I did not give a fuck that it was 11 o’clock in the morning.
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And before I continue with the story, I want to outline what was going into that thought process. On the very relaxing plane ride, alcohol-free plane ride that I had on the way out, I had worked on a piece of content that I’d been kind of struggling with. And over the two and a half hour flight, I’d completely rewritten it. Now I don’t get the wifi because it doesn’t fucking work, but never has that been a problem before because I do it in Google docs.
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And then as soon as I connect to Wi-Fi, it updates and whatever was there is there. Well, this particular Google Doc is a Google Doc I share with my team. This is a co-creation of this project. And it did not occur to me that if someone else updated the Doc before my Wi-Fi connected and my changes updated, that I would lose my changes. And luckily, I didn’t notice this. This happened on Thursday. And then Saturday morning,
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When I’m getting ready for my very relaxing day on travel, I was just going to go ahead and record. had like an hour before I had leave the hotel room. I was going to record my part of this thing. And when I went to do that at 6 a.m. in the morning, because I was up too early, I realized I had lost all of it. It wasn’t there. And I had felt so confident about the fact that I was complete. I had left my notes on the plane for the gal to throw away. So 6 a.m. I’m traveling out of New York.
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and all the work that I did wasn’t there. So now my nervous system has a problem because instead of feeling like I’m right on time and I’m all caught up and this is gonna be a relaxing day, the few things that I had thought that I was gonna work on on the plane were now getting crowded out by the realization that I had to redo something. So now my day of travel that was relaxing and I can do whatever the fuck I want.
10:38
I had a nervous system response. was a stress response. According to my nervous system, I was behind and I didn’t know how to catch up. Not to mention this is now Saturday afternoon. I haven’t had a break all week. I’m going into another week, me and a team member out in Colorado and we plan to work all week doing our normal stuff and working on these projects. And I got overwhelmed and overwhelm is not just a feeling. It’s a fact. It’s a state of the nervous system. Remember there’s three states.
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You’re calm, alive. I got this. I don’t need to go faster. I don’t need to slow down. I’m moving at a sustainable pace. I can keep this up. That’s your parasympathetic nervous system. Then when you have the startle response and you realize, oh, fuck, all that work that I did was lost. Now I have a problem. Then your brain starts squirting a dopamine and adrenaline and cortisol. And you now have the energy to move into action when
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though your nervous system evaluates your internal and external resources, and a lot of that is what you perceive them to be, but when your nervous system does the calculation and the math is not adding up, there is not enough time and energy to do everything you need to do, then you move from the stress response into the trauma response, which is your state of overwhelm. Stress is very activating and it’s energizing. Overwhelm is where you hit the wall.
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it’s the freeze response, it’s the shutdown, it’s feeling slow and heavy, it’s the opposite of the stress response. Like you just want to give up, crawl into a fetal ball. I can’t handle this, I can’t do all this, and I don’t even fucking care. That’s overwhelm. And this is why you have to learn how to think greater than how you feel. It wasn’t that I wanted a drink on the plane. What I wanted
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was a mallet to the head, somebody to put me out of my misery, because my brain was telling me about all this shit that I needed to get done. And what I really needed was a break. I wanted to give myself permission to just clock the fuck out. But I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I wasn’t stopping long enough to identify what it is that I really needed. And sure enough, one glass didn’t fucking cover it.
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So I was that lady who was ordering another glass. And I think they try to get you drunk on the plane. I mean, these are big, full glasses. By the time she brought me my second, I was like, is this even legal? Whatever. Thanks. And so I’m telling you all of this because I want you to understand how I responded to myself later when I got off the plane. And then this morning when I feel dehydrated and a little, you know, not full of energy and rainbows this morning.
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Because of course, when I landed and met up with my team member, we go to dinner and have more wine. Because now the script I’m running is it’s Saturday night and I want to be fun and celebrate. And I don’t want to admit that I drank two glasses of wine on the plane and all those old scripts, you know, that we use to justify not stopping ourselves in the middle of a bad decision tomorrow. I’ll just take care of this tomorrow. Right. That’s normal. But what I want to show you is that I see my own
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drinking habits as a direct data report from my nervous system. And drinking too much is a symptom of quote, not enough, not enough of something. My brain has fallen back into old patterns, neural pathways that I have used for decades where alcohol is my bandaid, my coping mechanism to help me compensate for a lack of self care, a lack
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of feeling like my needs are a priority. Drinking too much is a symptom that I’m not paying attention. And my brain is just doing its job, trying to solve the problems, trying to compensate, trying to balance the scales, trying to relieve the pressure in my nervous system of my own stupid, unrealistic expectations. And then also the pressure
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of just not having taken any time in recent days to process my emotion, to just sit with myself and say, how you doing, sweetie? That was a big deal. I mean, good job on flying all the way to New York and nailing it on that interview. Like you did so well. How are you feeling about it? I didn’t take any time to treat myself like a friend, like a partner, like a person that I value. I just kept my foot on the gas and kept pushing through.
15:24
And it wasn’t even the old alcohol scripts that were running. It was also that stupid belief that I’m going to feel better after I get this thing done again. Once I get through all of the stuff on my to-do list, then I will feel better. I was running the script that I can’t feel better unless this goes well or unless other people help me or they pick up the slack or until I have time.
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But as we learn to talk and think differently about time, I am the source of my time. I have to make time. I am the creator of my time. I am the one who is penciling in all that shit on my schedule. But I have by default, I suppose, or by learned behavior, I don’t know, I have a very dopaminergic brain. This is my ADHD. The time for me to relax and feel complete never actually comes.
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because of course I’m projecting my anxiety into my own life, into my own to-do list, into my own schedule. And even when one situation does resolve itself, another one magically appears because I’m in the habit of believing I can’t feel better, I can’t relax until or when or if or after certain other things happen. And
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I still get sucked into those patterns. And so I’m recording this because I want to normalize that for you. And so when the first thing I thought this morning was, I’m not going to drink tonight. The next thing I thought was, stop the bus. I’m getting off here. The thought, I’m not going to drink tonight is just my brain trying to solve the problem for the feeling that I’m having in the present moment that
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I didn’t make good decisions yesterday and I need to punish myself or I need to make up for it or I need to make plans for my future self about how much she will or won’t drink because obviously I can’t trust her because I can trust her. When I look back at my Thursday and my Saturday, it all makes so much sense and I have so much compassion for the version of me who woke up on Saturday morning
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facing a full 14 hour day travel and realizing that she’d lost her work. Like I have so much compassion with her. And what needs to change is not how much I do or don’t drink on a plane. My takeaway from this is how to put protections and reminders and gentle invitations more often for me to return back to the state of my nervous system where I feel complete and I feel safe and I feel like I have time.
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and space to do whatever I need to do. I’m not late. I’m not behind. I’m not overworked or under producing. I just need to protect my body from the bully in my brain. That’s it. And I’ll never get there. I’ll never get to that place where I don’t ever have to stay connected with myself, where I don’t ever have to think critically about how I’m organizing my life or how my needs have changed from yesterday to today.
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or how effective my strategies are. You we talk about with the iterative mindset, you never fail. Your strategy fails. And my strategy to blow into New York, work the whole time I am there, not give myself a break, might have actually gone according to plan if the straw hadn’t broke the camel’s back with me realizing that I had lost my work. The fact that that small thing
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meant that I exceeded my capacity and I moved from stress into overwhelm and I didn’t catch it and I wasn’t able to write myself in real time simply is telling me that I need a little bit more breathing room. That’s it. And so this morning, instead of making plans about how much I will not be drinking tonight or this week, I’m making plans for how much extra space I’m going to give myself to walk slow and breathe deep here in the mountains of Colorado.
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I’m going to be less available to everybody else and more available to myself. And that prescription feels expansive and like a huge relief in my body. And that’s how I know I’m on the right track.
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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.