BREAKING DRINKING HABITS
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 34.
Hello, friends. So, I've recently returned from a holiday with my husband to celebrate my 50th birthday. It was an absolutely fabulous week.
Getting away is something we haven't done much of for quite a while. Somehow, when the kids were little, it was hard for us to tear ourselves away or to find someone to watch over them for any length of time. And then when our kids got older, I felt like it was hard to tear ourselves away for different reasons.
You worry about what they'll get themselves into when you're not around, or you think maybe they'll just need us or actually notice that we're gone when they're teenagers. But I think the separation was good for all of us, for my husband and me. It was a rare chance to relax and get away and frankly do nothing without worrying about having to entertain anyone.
And for my kids, it was proof for them and for us that they can manage pretty well on their own. So, I've actually had a few people ask me to address the topic of drinking or more specifically, the question of how to reduce or quit drinking alcohol. So I thought I would dive into this topic as just one of the goals that some of us have in our lives.
And I want to draw a distinction here. There are some of us who would label ourselves alcoholics with an addiction to alcohol. And then there are others of us who might fear that we drink a little too much, but we don't identify as alcoholics.
Much of what I'm going to talk about relates to the second category. Those of us who would like to drink less, who sometimes find it's hard to stick to the promises we make to ourselves about drinking less, but also who don't identify as alcoholics. And I realize that is a distinction that each one of us has to make for ourselves.
So I want to share a bit about my journey here. I've always loved my wine. I didn't really start drinking until college, but once I got there, I quickly found that drinking helped me reduce my social inhibitions.
Drinking was a huge facet of my social life throughout college, although then it was mostly cheap beer. And then when we moved to New York, the drinks became more expensive. It's no surprise that I came to associate drinking with having a good time.
It's almost like you get to a certain point of adulthood and you can't remember what it's like to go out and not order a drink. Like remember when you were in elementary or middle school and you used to hang out with your friends and it was a blast to make brownies and watch a movie, have a sleepover. There were absolutely no alcohol needed.
Sometimes I would find myself looking back at those times thinking, why can't life be that simple? Why does alcohol have to be part of every social situation? So if this is something you can relate to, maybe for you, the reasons you drank initially were different. But for me, it started with having fun and maybe feeling just a bit more comfortable in my skin and social situations where I was with people who I didn't know as well. Then as I got a little older and work started getting a bit more intense, I started drinking to alleviate the stress of a long day, sometimes to alleviate boredom.
And look, it didn't feel like a problem for me. I'd come home, pour myself a glass or two of wine and get up the next day and go to work. I wasn't getting drunk or out of control, at least not on a regular basis.
It was just what I did. Eventually I got married, had children and a habit. At the end of a long day, I poured myself a glass or two of wine.
And I want to preface all of this by saying, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this. All of us like different things. Some of us like salty foods or sweet foods.
Maybe we like beer or wine. Maybe we scroll on social media or shop online. We sometimes refer to these things as guilty pleasures, which I think is a perfect way of summarizing the cognitive dissonance of wanting something, enjoying something, but then feeling this overriding guilt about doing it.
In my twenties, I didn't have much guilt about my daily glass or two of wine. It didn't negatively impact my life in any way. In fact, I perceived that wine made my life just a little bit better, quite a bit more fun.
Sometimes it took the edge off. It was a stress reliever. I mean, what was the problem really? So as I said, when I became a mother, my wine habit persisted.
In fact, it became a bit more of an ingrained and automatic ritual once my life fell into a pretty monotonous rhythm. Let's face it, life with young kids, it is precious and beautiful, but it's also a bit like Groundhog Day. Every day, a bit like the last.
Wake, feed, change, feed, nap, laundry, repeat. So I think my mind at one point told me I deserved a reward at the end of these cute, precious, but totally mind-numbingly boring days. A glass of wine was just the thing, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of the day.
I could almost hear my brain telling me, you did it. Here's your reward. Fast forward a number of years and my daily habit was still going strong.
By this time I was working and taking care of my kids, taking care of my home. So the stress of all of that responsibility and the schedule only exacerbated my perception that I deserved a reward for getting through it all each day. Only as I got older, the habit, which before didn't have much of a downside, seemed to be coming back to bite me.
In the mornings, I'd have a headache. Sometimes I'd feel nauseous. I'd feel regret.
And if I'm honest, I'd also feel ashamed. Not only that, but when I drank, I tended to eat more. So I would feel guilty about overeating.
I felt like I was putting on weight. So once all of these negative symptoms seemed to be accumulating, even after only a few glasses of wine at night, I started saying to myself in the mornings that I wasn't going to drink anymore. But that evening would roll around and I would find myself falling into the same habit.
It felt like I was on autopilot. There were many mornings when I would beat myself up. I honestly asked myself on a regular basis, am I an alcoholic? I'd take those online alcoholics anonymous quizzes or I'd Google what constitutes an alcoholic.
I wanted some reassurance that I didn't have a problem. I justified my behavior because after all, I wasn't every night. Did a few glasses really hurt? I'll be honest.
I probably carried on this way for about 12 years, wanting to drink, not wanting to drink. It was exhausting. Honestly, the constant beating myself up, the feeling that I wasn't in control of myself.
And honestly, maybe that I did have a problem. And meanwhile, I was working so hard in all of the other areas of my life to make it look on the outside like I had it together, that I didn't have a problem. Like I wasn't spending hours a day feeling guilty, nursing a mild hangover.
And then later in the day, craving a glass of wine, craving the relief of that first sip and not being able to not drink. It was a never ending spiral of guilt, shame, craving, relief, numbness, and back to guilt. During those years, I spent a lot of time looking for answers.
I started to learn about habits and found some relief in understanding the habit reward loop, that there's a trigger and then an action you take in response to the trigger. And then the most important part, the reward. And the reward, that's the reason why these cycles become a habit.
Like a Pavlov dog, I had practiced receiving the reward of a glass of wine at night so often that I would get a craving just because it was the end of the day. It was habitual. It's the same reflex that causes you to wake up and go through a very specific routine each morning without even thinking.
Wake up, brush your teeth, wash your face, grab coffee. You don't even have to think about it. It's also the reason you can drive to the grocery store without having to remember each and every turn or how to operate a car.
You do these things enough time, you go on autopilot. It's a beautiful aspect of our minds, actually, because these habits free us from having to think about every single thing we do each day. But when it comes to our negative habits, our brain develops neural pathways to make those actions easier for us too.
So that's how it felt to me, my wine habit. I was on autopilot. If it was nighttime, I would pour myself a glass of wine.
Trigger, I came home. Cue, craving, reward, the first sip. In those moments, the only problem was when I got home and I didn't have wine.
And this was the really interesting thing. When this happened, I would feel really uncomfortable, anxious, deprived, really like something I deserved had been taken away from me. I didn't like that feeling, but I liked even less that I was having that feeling just because I couldn't have alcohol.
It felt totally out of control. If I'm honest, drinking also started to take up a lot more bandwidth in my life. I found myself thinking about it constantly.
First, as I said in the morning, I would spend hours beating myself up, making promises about how I wouldn't drink later in the day. And then later I'd find myself looking forward to the end of the day, the glass of wine. It was like I started anticipating the reward I was going to get once I got home.
So for years, I noticed all of this and felt helpless. And although I felt fairly sure that I wasn't an alcoholic, I still knew that I had a problem that I had no idea how to solve. Up until fairly recently, there's been quite a bit of stigma around alcoholism and not drinking.
Or said another way, it's crazy that not drinking alcohol at an event or a dinner is something we somehow have to find ourselves having to justify, as if we have to have an excuse. Maybe it's because we don't want people to think we have a problem. In other cases, sometimes our friends pressure us to drink.
They may not even realize they're doing it, but sometimes when one person's drinking, they don't want to be the only one. Or they think another person not drinking means they should not be drinking. We just have so many different thoughts about drinking that complicate the situation and the effort to cut back even more.
So suffice it to say, I felt really stuck. This was actually the moment when I discovered coaching. And for me, it's been transformational.
Whatever your goal is in life, whether it be to start something or to quit something, there are going to be tons of people and companies who can offer you advice about how to do it. But for me, the how just wasn't getting me anywhere. I mean, here's the simple reality.
How do you stop drinking? You just don't drink, period. But that didn't work for me. And this is true of so many of our other goals, weight loss, building a business, parenting, getting a job.
There are a million different ways to tackle any of these topics, and we can look them up online. But how can you actually succeed if just knowing how to go about it doesn't always or often work out the way you hope? Coaching is not a how-to manual on how to live your life. It's not about actions.
It's about mindset. And here's how this worked for me with my wine habit. I thought I had a problem with drinking and that there was something wrong with me that I couldn't stop.
Now, again, I want to be clear. I'm not talking about addiction, which is a different thing altogether. This was a habit that had begun to have negative consequences for me.
I wanted to end the habit, but I found I couldn't do it on my own. So going back to the habit cycle, there's a trigger and then the craving, and then there's the reward. The craving could be thought of as desire, a sensation of needing something.
So the reward does two things for us. One, it produces a dopamine hit that floods our bodies with a big dose of pleasure. In fact, the amount of dopamine we get from a glass of wine or alcohol or something really sweet or from drugs, those things produce this concentrated hit of dopamine that is fantastic in the moment.
And our bodies were designed to respond to very small amounts of pleasurable things with dopamine. And this was meant to encourage life-sustaining behavior, like just eating, eating simple foods or having sex. But we found ways to concentrate that pleasure into such incredible doses that our bodies are absolutely flooded with short-term pleasure on a regular basis.
And so our brains automatically start thinking, I want more of that. So the reward gives us dopamine as reinforcement of the original behavior. And this is something that starts to ingrain the habit if we continue to repeat their behavior.
The second thing that the reward, in my case, the glass of wine does for us, is that it satisfies the craving, the desire, because a craving is uncomfortable, right? It's more than just a want. It feels like a need. Take a moment right now and close your eyes and think about what cravings feel like for you.
What does that feel like in your body? For me, honestly, my mouth starts to salivate. I can actually feel the taste buds on my tongue anticipating the thing I'm craving. The desire can feel like pressure sometimes in my head or my chest.
It's not a terrible feeling. It's not painful, but it's uncomfortable. And the solution seems so easy.
Just satisfy the craving by giving yourself what you want. And this is what we're doing, so many of us, when we have habits of doing things we don't really want to be doing. Again, the cognitive dissonance of wanting something now and not wanting it over the long term.
Maybe it's having an afternoon snack or eating a second helping of dessert. Maybe it's alcohol or binge watching shows on Netflix. We get an immediate reward from doing these activities, both dopamine and a satisfied craving, pleasure and reduced discomfort.
So when I was struggling with drinking, understanding all of this was super helpful to me because it put some chemistry behind what I was experiencing. My body was reacting exactly as it was built to react. Our bodies produce dopamine to encourage us to do things that make us feel good and continue our lives.
The problem was simply that I was doing something that was making me feel good in the moment, but terrible the next day and in the long run. So with this information, we can do a few things. We can get rid of the trigger, but in my case, I couldn't avoid coming home at night.
I wasn't going to not go out to dinner with friends. I wasn't going to stop going to parties. And in fact, I'd come to associate drinking with so many different aspects of my life.
It was impossible to get rid of all of the triggers. And honestly, this is a problem for weight loss too. You can't just not eat.
In fact, you have to eat, so you can't avoid breakfast, lunch and dinner. So if you can't get rid of the trigger, the craving feels inevitable if that's the neural pathway or habit cycle you've developed. So the only thing that's left is to somehow stop the reward from happening.
So the typical way we do this is to white knuckle it, to use willpower. We just are not going to do it. We may clean out all of the alcohol or unhealthy food from our cabinets, but eventually we're going to be faced with that craving.
We're going to be faced with a glass of wine or the pile of brownies staring us in the face, or you come home from a particularly hard day at work and you just can't withstand the craving. I'd often have a mental temper tantrum on those days when I was trying to white knuckle it. Like, it's not fair that today sucked and I'm not allowed to drink.
It actually felt like an additional punishment in my day. Now to give myself credit, there were a number of times over the 12 years I struggled with this when I did stop drinking. I'd white knuckle my way through a few days and then maybe a week, sometimes longer, and the cravings started to lose their hold on me for a while.
I'd think I'd finally nailed it, but then I got lulled into a sense that, okay, well, I don't really have a problem, so I can have a glass of wine tonight, and that would be fine. A drink here and there until a few months later, I'd fallen back into the same routine. I imagine this is a similar cycle that happens to those who embark on dry January, and I had those Januaries too, where you're good for some period of time, and then it feels like you slide back into the old habits in a blink.
When this happened to me, I'd feel even worse. Like, I'd managed to pull myself up just a bit, but then fell back into despair, and then the worry that there really was something wrong with me kept being reinforced. So coaching is all about asking questions so that we can really understand why we do what we do and how we can approach what we want to do.
In all of my efforts to stop drinking, I'd been asking myself the wrong questions, namely, what's wrong with me? Why can't I stop drinking? And I didn't have the answers to those questions. In fact, it was a circular argument I had with myself. What's wrong with me? I can't stop drinking.
Why can't I stop drinking? Because something's wrong with me. It was total insanity. So here's a different question a coach once asked me.
Why do you need a glass of wine at the end of the day? Well, the answer seemed obvious. I needed the wine to relax. Cue craving.
Then I would drink. Voila, I'd relax. But digging deeper, my coach would ask me, why do you need wine to relax? My answer would probably have been something like, because I deserve it.
Maybe even because it's not fair if I can't have it. Because it's uncomfortable if I don't have it. And even deeper, because I was frustrated by something that happened at work.
I was exhausted from driving the kids around. I didn't want to cook dinner. I sound like a spoiled child here, but these were the range of reasons reinforcing my desire to drink.
The reality was, in my mind, the wine was solving so many problems for me. So many layers of problems that I'd come to rely on wine as a buffer, a source of pleasure amidst the big and small frustrations of my life. The wine was solving a problem for me.
In my subconscious mind, the wine wasn't a problem. It was the solution. So taking it away felt like agony.
Honestly, I have so much compassion for myself looking back on my journey. I was struggling. I placed so much pressure on myself to be a good mom, a good wife, a good employee, keep the house clean.
So much pressure. And the only release I ever allowed myself was the glass of wine, or two, or three. In retrospect, I understand exactly why I was doing it.
The wine made me feel just a little bit better. And that was enough. I wasn't miserable in my life.
In fact, I probably would have beaten myself up for complaining. I had, I have, so much to be grateful for. So I should have been more happy.
Enter more unconscious thoughts about what was wrong with me that I wasn't more happy. Our minds are beautiful, powerful, terrible things. And we use them against ourselves more often than we use them to inspire and propel ourselves.
My mind had woven an intricate web of a story that told me wine helped me relax. It helped me feel more comfortable at a party, that I needed wine to celebrate, that I deserved wine if I'd had a terrible day. It was my solution to almost every problem in my life.
And the added bonus to every happy time too. Birthdays, holidays, Fridays. So we believe these stories.
And the dopamine hit we get in the short term ties it all up with a pretty bow. So we practice it enough. And all of a sudden we find ourselves 10 or 20 years into a habit we can't for the life of us break.
But I was able to break it. And I actually still drink when I want to. But definitely not every night or even most nights.
And definitely not as a solution to problems in my life. So how did I do this? The first step, and it's going to sound very simple, is to plan whether you're going to drink or not. Plan.
Plan no drinks. Plan just one drink. Plan five drinks.
But plan those drinks in advance. Ideally 24 hours at least in advance. So then you've planned.
You know exactly how many drinks you're going to drink, for example, on a Monday night. And then when Monday night rolls around, let's say you've planned to drink nothing. And Monday rolls around and you notice a craving.
And remember the craving, it's just a sensation of desire in your body that feels a little uncomfortable when you don't answer it. And that's the second step. Don't answer it.
But instead of white knuckling and relying on willpower to get through the craving, instead of ignoring it, I want to invite you to allow the feeling. Don't push it away. Don't try to distract yourself.
Just sit with it. It's uncomfortable. It's not painful.
But if you just sit and notice how it feels and don't answer it, it will subside. It doesn't even take that long, a few minutes at most. Now I'm not going to lie, it might come up again that Monday night a few more times, but just continue to allow it.
Sit with it. Don't try to push it away. Now just those steps might require some practice and there will be plenty of times when you just give in.
That was my experience. Sometimes the craving just felt too strong and I would give myself the reward and it's okay. Start to count the number of times you successfully allow the urge.
Count them up. Keep a running tally throughout the weeks, throughout the month. Give yourself credit.
Celebrate yourself as you build up more and more unmet cravings, unmet urges. So that's the first step. And as you do this, or after you get comfortable with the practice of this, now we get to the fun part.
You get to ask yourself why. Ask yourself, what problem is this habit solving for me? Yes, it's giving me a hit of pleasure. Yes, it's alleviating the craving.
But what is the underlying problem this habit is solving for you? Is it helping you relax? Explore why. Is it making you feel more confident in social situations? What's really going on for you in those social situations? Does the thought of giving up the habit make you feel terrible? Why? There's so many layers to this exploration and if you have a habit you'd like to break and want to explore this, I'd love to talk to you. For me, I learned so much about myself in the process of this exploration.
I discovered how much pressure I was putting on myself and somehow I didn't realize that the pressure was optional. It felt like life was happening to me, but in fact I was the one creating the pressure. I learned how to approach my life in a way that meant I didn't have to rely on wine or anything else to make me feel better at the end of the day.
That doesn't mean I don't have bad days. I've just learned how to process those feelings. How to sit with negative emotion without reacting or trying to numb it away.
I thought I had a drinking problem, but I discovered I had a mindset problem. I had a view of my life that left me powerless, frustrated, exhausted, and by turning that view around I didn't have to change anything about my life, yet everything changed. Our minds are beautiful, powerful, terrible things and we use them against ourselves more often than we use them to inspire and propel ourselves.
You have the power to inspire yourself. Until next time, friends. Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast.
Please visit us at www.thesmalljar.com, follow us on Facebook and Instagram at smalljarcoach, and subscribe to this podcast.
Remember, you are the author of your story.
