Introduction: Breaking the Habit

[00:00:00] Do you ever get bored of yourself? Well, that is the number one reason why I decided that I was going to go a hundred days without drinking. I got completely bored of telling myself that I was going to do something and then not doing it. So maybe drinking isn't your vice and it's something else. I think this episode can really pertain to any habit that we want to break. 

[00:00:21] And so I'm going to share with you my top tips that I used to really break my drinking habit. It was a two decade drinking habit, and I'm going to share with you my biggest takeaways from that. Welcome back to The Habit Within. Today we're diving into a deeply personal topic and one that I know that you, or some of you, will relate to.

[00:01:01] It is breaking the cycle of drinking. 

Personal Journey and Program Creation

[00:01:04] So first and foremost, I helped many women over seven year period of time, go a hundred days without drinking. I created a whole program called think beyond the drink. It's not one of my primary offers anymore, but it is something that I still love to do and have received just fabulous testimonies and feedback on, but also something that is still near and dear to my heart, even though I'm not 100 percent alcohol free anymore.

[00:01:30] But I truly believe that if it's something that's a repetitive cycle in your life, it is something that you're going to want to deep dive into, really cut back or quit altogether for a period of time so you can see who is running the bus. Is it the alcohol or is it you? Who is actually speaking here? So this episode, what I have done is compiled 10 things that really helped me.

[00:01:55] When I was breaking my drinking habit, and my whole goal is that I hope it inspires and empowers you as well. So, yeah, I mean, for years I was stuck in the habitual cycle. I was, Drinking not every night, but every other night or every third night, or when I didn't have to work the next day I work, I'm a physician assistant, I'm a medical professional, so when I didn't have to get up early in the morning to go work for 12 hours, it was my way of relaxing, connecting with my husband when I would get off of those long shifts.

[00:02:28] It was my delineation between mommy time and me time. It was that thing. I not only felt like I deserved and that it was a reward. I also kind of felt like it was my rebellious state. It was a way for, back in the day, the movies were the guys had got together and the women stayed home with the kids. It's like this rebellious thing where I was like, I can go and have fun too.

[00:02:52] I can have cocktails and go out and, you know, and then also be a full time mom. And then what I noticed is that when I had kids, so my husband and I were married for 10 years before we had children, we went out together a lot. We had dinner parties. We would go out for happy hour. We drink while we were traveling.

[00:03:10] It was a really big part of our lives. And then when we had children, we didn't go out as much. And so what happened is that alcohol was then brought into the house. So like I was mentioning, it was my way of relaxing and delineating my time. It was like, that was a flag in the yard saying, this is my me time.

[00:03:28] And so what happened was, is that. I really wasn't consciously aware that I was drinking to that extent. I wasn't consciously aware at that time that I really needed to do anything differently or that I could do anything differently, if that makes sense. It was just such a part of the life of almost everyone I knew.

[00:03:48] And so, this is just like the normal thing, but what I did say on a pretty frequent basis is, I don't want to drink as much as I'm drinking. I don't want to drink as often as I'm drinking, but then I would say, I'm not going to drink for the week. I'm only going to drink on the weekends. I would say, I'm not going to drink on school night, even though my kids weren't in school yet.

[00:04:06] Then Tuesday would come or Wednesday would come and then I would be having my husband grab a bottle of wine on the way home, or I'd be getting a six pack of beer on the way home for us to go and have some drinks when the kids went to bed. And so I really and truly just kind of got tired of hearing myself talk, which is one of the tips I'm going to give you.

The Turning Point: Making a Conscious Decision

[00:04:25] So when I finally made the conscious decision, like, all right, so I've been talking about this for a while now, and it's still nothing is changing as drastically as I want. I was still feeling tired. I was feeling like I wanted to make a change in my career, but yet I couldn't even imagine how to do that.

[00:04:42] I didn't even have time to think. I just felt like I didn't have any sense. I had tried so many different things. I had tried the green juice. I had tried, you know, I was running triathlons. I was doing yoga. I was meditating. I was doing all of the things, but still felt like something was missing. The one thing that I hadn't changed at that time is I hadn't removed alcohol.

[00:05:05] So I figured, I'll bring my milk along for a hundred days and let's see what happens. 

Top Strategies for Breaking the Habit

[00:05:09] So today I'll share my top strategies that got me to the point where I didn't drink or want to drink for five plus years. And hopefully this will be helpful for you. And again, this is not, it never has for me been about sobriety or recovery.

[00:05:24] I know that that can be very beneficial for so many people. For me, that was never my journey or my intention. So, just as a caveat to this whole story, you can choose whether you'd want to listen to this and it feels aligned with you or not. Number one is I had to choose myself. So this is one of the hardest things I had to do because like I mentioned, I hung out with my husband for a decade.

[00:05:48] He was my drinking partner. I didn't even know what life would look like between he and I if I quit drinking. But here's the thing is I refused to let that hold me back. I refused to let the unknown hold me back because I had to commit to myself. I had to commit to this future version of myself that I didn't know.

[00:06:08] I mean, I basically, I had to commit to the unknown. And I had to be okay with the fact that our relationship might have completely devolved. It didn't, which was very hopeful, but I got to that point where I was like, Ah, we've tried this thing together, where we're gonna go a week or a month or whatever without drinking, and we would, but one of us would always cave.

[00:06:29] So I knew that I had to just say, Regardless of what he does, which I didn't even ask him, and he actually didn't quit drinking for a year, I am choosing me. Of course, I have to say that I know a lot of people out there, partners still will come home with booze, and he didn't. He would go out to drink. Or when we go to a restaurant, he would order some drinks.

[00:06:50] Actually, he did, like, three months later, he would stay up and watch a movie and he would drink some whiskey. But it was not in front of me. Like, he was really good about kind of hiding it from me. But that's his story. So number two is I got really tired of hearing myself talk. So you might have heard that in the intro.

[00:07:09] And this is really important because I want you to think about that too. So I just really reached a point where I was exhausted from talking about wanting to drink less. I was so bored of it. I was just like, this is such a boring conversation. And again, like I was bored talking about it with my husband.

[00:07:24] I was just like so frustrated that I finally was determined to take action on it. I was like, I'm just, I don't want to be this person who just talks about wanting to change, but never changing. So just think about that for yourself. Are you tired of hearing yourself talk about something? Like, just, it's just boring, you're boring yourself.

[00:07:43] And then that might be a sign that, you know, you're frustrated enough to make a turning point. Number three is I just focused on a hundred days. So I didn't say I'm going to quit for the rest of my life. At a hundred days, I knew in my heart of hearts that if I started drinking again at that time, That I would be back to where I was before.

[00:07:59] I just, there was just so much unraveling that needed to happen and one of the biggest unravelings is I needed to find out who I was again. And I know that it's going to resonate with a lot of you women out there, is that we go through these different iterations of our lives. And if we don't really reevaluate who we are now, we're living on this old programming that doesn't even resonate.

[00:08:23] Does it? It's not even who we are anymore. So I knew that I had a lot more work to do and that alcohol would completely get in the way. And then I hit a year and the same message came through is that I knew if I started drinking at that point again. That I would be back to where I was before. It was just a deep knowing, and you have to get to that place where you know yourself.

[00:08:45] And so then I got to the five year mark. I wasn't shooting for five year mark at that point. I was alcohol free. I was going to be alcohol free for the rest of my life. And then it no longer resonated with me. That never longer fit my narrative. I had grown and changed so much. That wasn't part of me anymore.

[00:09:02] Again, that's something you personally need to figure out. But my point of this is saying just focus on a good enough time to where you can really move through so the first 30 days is about breaking the habit. I always like to say the second 30 days is about really creating a new habit. And then that next 30 to 40 days is where you're kind of in the open waters.

[00:09:26] You have less obstacles. Some still come up, maybe you're going to a wedding or somebody's birthday, some event that you might not know of, but most of the time when you're in that 60 to 100 days, you're kind of smooth sailing. And then you'll be able to really like decide whether this is something that you want to move forward with.

[00:09:46] I read a lot of Quit Lit in, um, and took an online program. It was like a 90 day self guided alcohol free program. And that was just basically to help reprogram my brain to allow me to, cause I had soaked in so much information about how alcohol made life better, is that I needed to inundate with myself with all of the literature.

[00:10:08] Not only literature, I mean, I was studying about how alcohol affects the body. I was reading about. how alcohol affects the brain, about how it affects our mood. And so I really just absorbed, saturated, I should say, self in the world of everything alcohol and What it meant to live an alcohol free life.

[00:10:31] And so that was where I was able to change some of these brain circuits that had developed in this one way and I was able to start building some new ones like, oh, prevalent, alcohol is pretty prevalent and pretty dangerous in the lives of a lot of people around the world. And so that really helped me break some of those old, uh, thought patterns I had around it.

Living Alcohol-Free: Real-Life Experiences

[00:10:53] Fives is I really lived a really full life without having alcohol at all. I mean, I went through COVID without drinking. I went through deaths and weddings and changes of jobs and so many obstacles, so many challenges and so many joys. All without alcohol. And that really allowed me to reinforce that I could handle everyday life without it.

[00:11:15] It was not something that needed to heighten the experience or dull an emotion. It was able to have the whole spectrum of emotion. And it's never my go to crutch anymore. It's not the thing that I'm like having a really bad day. I need to have some alcohol or I want to get together with my girls. Let's go have champagne somewhere.

[00:11:37] No, it's like always let's go on a walk. Let's go to a yoga class. Let's go to a breathwork class. Let's do something else. It's never. About the alcohol when before it was always about the alcohol, everything always revolved around the alcohol. So really being able to feel that within my core is that I was able to really change fundamentally, like how I showed up in this world.

[00:11:59] Number six is that when I quit, I did the bare freaking minimum. So that means that I went to work and I would come home. And my husband and I had already put my kids to bed, and I would go straight to bed because I worked those 12 hour shifts, so they were already in bed at the time I got home. If it was a day that I was home, and I picked them up from preschool or daycare, and I would bring them home, I switched it up.

[00:12:23] So that means that if usually what I would do is start making dinner, And open some wine while I was making the pasta sauce and all the stuff. Instead, what I did is I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, packed them up in a stroller. They ate that while we were on a walk. When they came home, they took a bath.

[00:12:42] And then I just switched up the routine so much that I didn't put myself sort of within that routine of wanting to drink. The other thing is that again, I did the bare minimum, meaning that I allowed them to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And we ate takeout a lot more than I typically did, and I would go to bed when they would go to bed.

[00:13:04] And so I did that for probably about the first 45 days or so. Because my main goal is just to not drink. Number 7 is I stopped doing all of the activities I did before. I stopped going to yoga, I stopped exercising, I stopped doing triathlons, I stopped drinking green juice. Actually, what I did is I, which is number eight, is I indulged in the simple pleasures of life.

[00:13:30] And really, this helped, like, letting go of the hardcore exercise. And the Vinyasa yoga and the triathlons and then putting my body through like these cleanses where I would only have green juice for a week or whatever it may be. It really allowed my body to become safe within itself again. So I wasn't pushing it to these extremes anymore.

[00:13:54] I love my, I'm sure you guys have heard of nervous system and how everyone's talking about you need to reset your nervous system or calm your nervous system. It really allowed me to do that. It allowed me to just care for myself by doing absolutely nothing. When my kids would be at preschool, I remember I would like lay on the floor in my kid's room, staring at the ceiling and like, uh, when I was three.

[00:14:18] Try to pick up toys or whatever it was because I just needed space and then indulging in the central pleasures You'll hear out there that don't eat sugar because you're just gonna have a sugar addiction instead of drinking alcohol and all that stuff I mean, I think it's baloney. Um, there's definitely some science around how your Sugar levels are off when you stop drinking and your body.

[00:14:39] That's why your body is craving sugars. And then also It increases your dopamine when you have sugar. I mean, all of the scientific stuff that we're not going to get in today, but basically I just allowed myself to have sweets and it was great. Oh my gosh. It was so good, ice cream and brownies and all that.

[00:14:57] Of course, I would just have like one, I wouldn't eat a whole pint or anything, but still, I allowed myself those yummy, sugary sweets that I'm not eating now, so, so, so I didn't like transfer one to the other. And number nine, which I think is extremely important, is I focused on who I was going Becoming.

[00:15:17] And so often I feel like a lot of these alcohol free recovery programs focus on this like past version of yourself. And I did definitely reflect on that past version, but I reflected on it of who I no longer wanted to be. And what could I take from the past that helps me in the future? And then I created who I wanted to be in this next version of myself.

[00:15:38] And that, my friends, is what kept me alcohol free and now a minimal alcohol drinker for so many years. And, well, until today. It just It still drives me if I'm like, Ooh, um, I'm going to have a couple glasses of champagne. I'm like, no, I'm not going to have anything to drink because tomorrow I want to be the absolute absolute for, um, this desire.

[00:16:03] Like I want to wake up in the middle of the night at 3am, not because I had a glass of wine. I want to wake up at 3am because I'm having like this idea that comes through me and alcohol really doles that. So really getting excited on who you're becoming. We'll really pull you in the right direction of wanting to stay clear, wanting to stay like clear minded and fully embracing the transition that's occurring.

[00:16:27] And then, like I mentioned, number 10 is I let go of the past. So I gradually did this over really the course of the year, but I really learned to release that old version of myself that was not only tied to drinking, but that was tied to all of these ideas of what I thought I needed to be or who I thought I was.

[00:16:48] I really released that and I'm still releasing that. It's a lifelong process, but I released a huge majority of it that first year. I mean, it really tethered me. Um, yeah, it really tethered me to this person. I no longer was. And so I really had to be very intentional. I worked with many coaches. I still work with coaches.

[00:17:07] And really feel like somebody who's been through the same process I want to go through and has received the transformation that I want to receive that is also certified, that is also well educated, I know they'll be able to get me there. And so that's who I look for and go for and go to for support.

[00:17:25] But this really allowed me to grow into this healthier, happier version of who I am right now. 

Final Reflections and Recap

[00:17:29] All right. So let's just recap. The key strategies that helped me quit drinking, choosing myself over the unknown, getting tired of hearing myself talk about the change I wanted without any action, focusing on 100 days as a manageable goal, reading all the quit lit and science around how alcohol changes and affects our bodies and brains.

[00:17:51] Taking an online program that just kept me accountable. Five is living a full life without alcohol. So you living that five years that alcohol is able to go through all these challenges and obstacles. Not saying that you need that same thing. But for me, that's what I knew like in my heart of hearts that I needed.

[00:18:08] Six is when I quit drinking that very first 90 days or so. I did the very bare minimum while I was healing and really resetting my nervous system. So I stopped doing all that yoga and exercise and really pushing myself hard. Because I was probably doing that in a way to make up for drinking alcohol or for I don't know Maybe it was to punish myself or maybe it's because I needed it like yoga because I needed to relax more I don't know.

[00:18:34] I just needed to know if I even like doing that stuff again seven as I let go of those old patterns I indulged in the simple joys like eating sweets And really reveling in those hangover free mornings, like every morning I'd be like I'm so glad that I'm not, that I don't have a hangover and so I really reveled in that and the fact that I loved, I love really juicy yummy sheets, soft sheets, got a new pair of sheets, now I'd make sure like every three days I changed my sheets and I'd take bath after, take like two baths a day, I mean it was just luxurious.

[00:19:07] And the other thing I did is I really focused on who I wanted to become instead of who I was. And ten, gradually releasing the past version of myself so I could step into this version of myself that I was creating. So, if you're considering making this change, start small. Maybe pick one of these strategies and see if it helps you and integrate it into your life.

[00:19:27] And remember, lasting change is a journey, it's not a destination. So if this episode resonates with you, I am taking five new people in January who really want to unravel their relationship with alcohol, they want to break their drinking habit, then you're welcome to reach out to me and I can share with you what that looks like.

[00:19:50] And if this episode is interesting and inspiring and that you know that somebody else in your community or on the Grams needs to hear this as well, please share this and I look forward to hearing from you and how you are doing. And until next time, take care of yourself and remember, change starts from within.

[00:20:08] And also get on my email list because I will share in the podcast episode these 10 things so you don't have to write them down as well as I'll be sharing with you when the doors open to the Holistic New Year Reset Workshop which will be in the middle of January at some point. I don't do all of my reflecting on the past year and looking to the new year until January.

[00:20:31] Because I have kids, I have a full life, this is a busy time of year. I always felt so guilty on January 2nd that I hadn't even thought of what my new year intention would be or reflect on the last year, which I think is, there's so much beauty and gold in that. I don't do it for myself until mid year.

[00:20:47] This is something that I used to offer a few years ago, so I'm bringing it back around. So keep an eye out for that in your inbox, and I look forward to seeing you there.