Joined in 2023 
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It takes about a week for the body to detoxify itself, so be gentle with yourself during this period. Once your system is clean, you're going to feel amazing. You'll have more energy. Your brain will feel like a fog has lifted. And it's possible you'll feel happier than you have in a long time. Here are a few things you can do to help the process along. Her work has helped thousands of people understand the impact of alcohol on their lives and dispel widely held beliefs and misconceptions about the benefits of drinking, including that it helps you relax, sleep and connect. Every one of our own emotional snags, where we feel judgmental of ourselves, judgmental of our circumstances, let down by someone else. All of those things are these big flashing neon signs saying, hey, there’s something in you that you need to work on, that you need to find peace with. And that journey towards cultivating and finding more and more peace in yourself in your heart, I think is the number one thing without a doubt over time.
The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: Discovering a Happy, Healthy, Wealthy Alcohol-Free Life by Catherine GraySober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Concentration Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol by Ruby Warrington
The other day, my doctor told me to stop drinking all together because of my issues with low stomach acid. Low stomach acid is pretty common for adults over the age of 60. And, my wine drinking was not helping matters. I would classify myself as a moderate drinker, so quitting was a bit tough for me the first 3 or 4 days. Then, it got easier. And, after reading this eye-opening book explaining the addiction and poisons of alcohol and the reaction of your own body chemistry - YIKES - I really had no clue. Gee, everyone around me drinks - can’t be that bad. Gee, it is that bad.
I can’t do this alone
If you go into sobriety without changing any of your thinking about alcohol, thinking, “Okay, but drinking is still awesome, everybody still loves it, and I’m the only one who doesn’t get to do it, poor me,” then sometimes you have to have, like, a decade of sober fun experiences to convince yourself otherwise. A decade of, “Oh, this concert is actually fun,” “Oh, this vacation is actually fun,” “Oh, this is actually good.” What it’s not is a magic bullet, which I can’t seem to stop pursuing. And sometimes Annie’s cheerleadery tone got on my nerves. It’s not for everyone, but it is for someone, probably many someones. After reading literally thousands of stories from people who've gone through this process, I'm pretty sure I know what your beliefs are. But that's not important. What's important is that YOU know what they are. So let's start this experiment by writing a list.
Oh, my God, that’s my favorite. Because I was working with a coworker. I was at L’Oréal, and she, you know, I quit, probably a year before, but I just was like, yep, used to drink feel better without it. I’m done, you know, whatever. And so, she was somehow distinguishing. She was like, but you chose to quit. I mean, you didn’t have a problem with it. Like, it was super important for her to draw that line. And I was like, and it’s addictive. You know, I was like, you know, if I was just, and then you know, other people would come in, super hungover. And when they heard I stopped drinking, they’d be like, Well, did you have a problem with it? And I’m like, at the time, like, I haven’t had a drink in Oh, they present tense. Do you have a problem with alcohol? Right? I mean, like, I haven’t had a drink in three years, you were hungover. Yesterday, like, eight, zero problem with alcohol, you know? Yeah, that is incredible. You’re reaching so many people. I love it. Well, thank you so much for your time. I truly appreciate it. This is my 100th episode. My, can’t imagine a better, better guest to have on. My husband bought this book about 3 months ago and did the experiment himself. He kept suggesting I read it too. Well, once my doctor said “No more drinking”, I started reading! I have been alcohol free for 19 days, and I have a whole new mindset now- One: I do not want to go through the “Start over” period again - way too annoying. Two: I have not felt this good in a long time. I am way less anxious- much more calm! (Bet my kids and husband are loving this new me!) Three: I want to experience my future social engagements sober and memorable! This experiment was a success. Something the author wrote on Day 2 hit me hard and something shifted. It's Day 30 now and this was honestly not that difficult. I had a few weak moments (mostly at night with friends), but overall I've lost the desire.And so that initial mindset shift, I think is vital. And it just sets the stage for how much easier it can be if you can access a place where it’s like, okay, I don’t know for sure that my life will be miserable. I’m not entirely sure. Let me see how this might be and allowing that to be true for every first whether it’s that first happy hour, the first all-inclusive vacation, the first holiday, the first birthday, whatever the case is, but then I think we do need to do work, especially if we are in the group of people, which I think many of us are, who have used alcohol to self-medicate. And I think that work involves building a life you don’t want to escape from, for me, being alone, in my own mind, was a really terrible place to be. And before it was alcohol, I would just, you know, noise, whether it was always being social, or always being too busy, or putting everything I could on my plate or being a workaholic, or, you know, I mean, not even being able to get into a car without having like some something going, that was going to distract me usually a murder mystery on a, you know, book on CD at the time, or whatever the case was. Because being by myself, in my own mind, was not a safe place, it felt just full of landmines, it felt full of self-judgment, and self-loathing. And, you know, worry about everything that I could not control the entire world, all of my friends, everybody I’d loved. And so, it wasn’t a safe place to be. And so, if we’re medicating to escape our own minds to escape the narrative that’s happening in our own heads, we do have to work on that, because we might be able to put down the alcohol once we learned enough about it, but I promise we’ll switch to something else. We’ll go right into that next thing, whether the next thing is overworking or, you know, too much television or whatever that next thing is to distance us from us. And so, the work on that, I think is very important. And it doesn’t have to be overly difficult. If you cannot resist that, then there’s something wrong with you, you are not the responsible one. And for that, to be allowed for that to be the only warning that we have on something that in 1988 was confirmed, that is a carcinogen like alcohol causes cancer doesn’t matter if it’s beer or wine or hard alcohol, it was confirmed in 1988, that alcohol is carcinogenic. And for the majority of people on the street, if you were to survey them, the majority would not know that alcohol was carcinogenic. The majority would also not realize that alcohol is addictive. Because when we draw this line between Oh yeah, you can get addicted to nicotine or you can get addicted to heroin, but only if you’re an alcoholic only if there’s something wrong with you human. Will you ever have a problem with this substance? We have totally obscured the fact that the substance itself is not only addictive, but according to a study that was done about five or six years ago called the margin of exposure approach. It was definitively named the most harmful drug on the planet. And they did a whole spectrum of harm. And they measured it based on harm on to the individual harm to society. It’s addictive nature, all sorts of stuff. Hi there. This is a very special episode for me, not only because my guest is Annie Grace, who I am a huge fan of and her book, this naked mind came out four months before I quit drinking. So, it was something that I know I listened to and learned a ton from in early sobriety. But also, because this is my 100th episode.
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