In this episode, I’m sharing the story of how I quit drinking five years ago and what I’ve learned along the way. I break down the science behind dopamine and alcohol, and offer a different alternative to being more intentional with booze—I call it a “conscious drinking lifestyle.”
If you’re considering opting out of “mommy wine culture” or reducing your alcohol consumption just because that’s the kind of person you want to be, you’ll learn exactly how to do just that with my three step process.
This episode will help you learn more about alcohol, your relationship with it, and help you decide what the best options are for you to create the life you want with alcohol as a mom. Tune in to hear my story, real experience, practical tools, and more.
If you’re a mom, you’re in the right place. This is a space designed to help you overcome challenges and live your best life. I’d love for you to join me inside the Mom On Purpose Membership where we take this work to the next level.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.
Hello, my lovelies. Welcome to the podcast. Today I am talking about my transformation with alcohol and how I haven’t drank in five years. And I just want to share with you my story. I don’t talk a ton about this story and I want to dedicate an entire podcast, to it so that you hopefully get some nuggets of wisdom, some tools and some inspiration if you want to go on a similar journey. So I don’t drink alcohol at all, and I haven’t in about five years or so.
I also don’t identify as sober. I prefer to call it a conscious drinking lifestyle. There’s something about the word sober that to me, when I say that word, it implies a lot, a lot of negative thoughts. That may or may not be the case for you, but I just want to explain myself that I feel more empowered when I just label it. Like I just prefer not to drink. I just have a conscious drinking lifestyle. I have some friends who practice a different religion and they don’t drink, and I know for them as well, they’re not going around talking about being sober. They’re just talking about how they don’t drink. And that’s kind of how I think about it for myself. I’ve just made the choice not to drink. So mommy wine culture, it is real, right? We have all witnessed it, experienced it maybe, and we know what it is.
It’s this kind of reprieve from the day-to-day struggles and challenges that they’re real, of course, but in a way that’s more of an escape. Like, oh, I had such a hard stressful day, so let me escape with a glass of wine. And we all have our escapes. There’s no shame in that. But I think bringing more awareness around what our escapes are can be extraordinarily powerful for being more purposeful and intentional with respect to whether we want to continue using those escapes. So, because I don’t participate in mommy wine culture, I thought it would be helpful to share my perspective in case this is something that you are interested in. So before I dive into, where I’m at right now and how I got there, I want to take you back to my late teenage years. When I started drinking, I continued to drink, you know, from that point up until my early thirties.
So, you know, a decade and a half, maybe a good 15 years or so, give or take. And I drank socially with friends. I did the nightlife in my late twenties and early thirties, and it was a blast. It was a really fun time. I was never arrested. I never thought of myself as having a problem with alcohol. I certainly wasn’t an alcoholic. I never had any instances where,there was, you know, a specific traumatic event or something that I greatly regretted that had like a long lasting impact on my life. Of course I had the typical, oh man, I think I drank too much last night moments and some of those, kinda embarrassing moments that kind of come with that for sure. But nothing that was, you know, even memorable for me at this point to even bring up. And I share this because I don’t think there’s enough discussion around drinking and wanting to change the way that you drink in like a really positive way, kind of like we have with food.
So I think that with respect to food, we talk about it in a way that, uh, we want to make changes just to better ourselves. Not because we have this huge, horrible problem or there’s any shame attached to it. It’s just like, oh, maybe I should eat some salads or something like that, right? I think that with alcohol, either you drink normally or you quit because you’re an alcoholic. And I think that’s all or nothing thinking that has not been my experience. So if you are someone who just genuinely wants a different approach, that is really what this podcast is about. It is meant for the person who, isn’t an alcoholic. To be clear, it is for the person who is just thinking about changing her relationship with alcohol more intentionally. Whatever that may look like, it may look like completely abstaining like I have, or it may look like, adding some moderation.
And I’ll talk with you more about that towards the end with how I would approach it. And I’ll give you my kind of specific tools and process for how you can go about changing your relationship with alcohol in a very real and impactful way. Next, I think it would be helpful to just talk about alcohol and dopamine. I find it so fascinating that there is so much shame around alcohol. Like if you get addicted, then somehow something is wrong with you. In fact, I think if you are able to drink a lot and not get addicted, that is honestly more shocking because alcohol, just like sugar, just like our phones, are all dopamine hits for us. The more you use them, the more you want to use them. They’re designed to be addictive. Alcohol has a significant impact on dopamine, which is the brain’s reward chemical.
So when you drink alcohol, it stimulates the release of dopamine, which creates feelings of pleasure and relaxation. This is why in the moment alcohol makes you feel so good, lower your inhibitions and help you unwind. But here’s the kicker, as you continue to drink, your brain adjusts to this surge of dopamine over time that regular alcohol consumption leads to something called tolerance, where your brain produces less dopamine naturally in response to the same amount of alcohol. So maybe when you first start drinking, you get this huge surge of dopamine. And then the more that you drink, you need to drink more to get that same dopamine impact. This means that in order to feel as good as you once felt with drinking, you will need to increase your consumption to achieve that kind of dopamine high. And here’s where it gets really interesting. When you stop drinking, your brain is left in sort of like a dopamine deficit for a while.
And this is one of the reasons that you can feel irritable, anxious, or experience cravings. When you reduce or quit drinking, your brain has been used to alcohol providing you with those dopamine spikes and now you’re taking it away. Now, I mentioned sugar and phones earlier, and the science here is similar. These things also create short-term dopamine boosts. The more you indulge, the more your brain craves them. It’s why, for example, after scrolling for hours, you might feel like you have a dopamine hangover, a sense of dissatisfaction or craving for more stimulation. The critical difference, of course, between alcohol, sugar and scrolling phones is that alcohol’s negative impacts go far beyond just the dopamine cycle, as we all know, right? Even though food can negatively impact your body and does alcohol does it in a way that I think is more exaggerated and also it has impacts far beyond just your own body.
So I’m not saying that eating too many cookies, versus drinking too much versus scrolling on your phone have the same consequences. They do have very different consequences, but I think it’s really important to desham the way you think about alcohol. So you can make really intentional decisions. But I do think that because the consequences are so different, that’s why like just socially and culturally, alcohol gets such a bad reputation, right? If you overeat and you eat too much sugar, the negative impact is mostly on you in what I would call sort of a quiet way. That’s a very unlike alcohol. And I actually have personal experience with that. My dad was an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver from his alcoholism when I was in my very early thirties. I almost didn’t bring that up here only because it isn’t a part of my story as to why I stopped drinking.
So I just want to make that very clear. I talk openly about all the things, including my relationship with my dad, including his alcoholism. But I just want to make it clear that I had a very healthy relationship with alcohol myself, and my dad’s experience with alcohol isn’t one of the reasons why I decided to quit drinking, and kind of change my relationship with alcohol. So all of that said, I saw the impact of alcoholism in our family, and I do have a lot of experience with AA, with Al-Anon. And those tools work for some people and they do not work for everyone. In fact, they don’t work for a lot of people. But I don’t want this to turn into an episode that is anti those options. I do though want to bring to light that there are other ways of approaching alcohol that may work for you, particularly if you are someone who just wants to change your relationship with alcohol, who wants to navigate drinking more intentionally and consciously.So if you are someone who is not an alcoholic and you’re looking for different tools, that is where I come in. I got you my friend. The reason that I decided to quit drinking was because I thought about my future self and I thought about my future self as a mom, and she was a non-drinker. So I told Steve, who wasn’t yet my husband, we were just dating. I told him that I was going to quit drinking. And of course he thought I meant for like 30 days or so, but I really meant forever or until I change my mind. So that’s what I did. And here we are five-ish years later. I don’t vilify alcohol. I don’t think it’s bad or “wrong”. I just find those labels to be really unhelpful. I just find alcohol to be what it is. Alcohol just is.
And when you drink it, there’s an impact on your body in the moment and on those around you when you’re inebriated, there’s also the long-term impact on your health and on those around you as well. So for me, I just saw my future self as a mom who didn’t drink, and I continue to think about that version of myself, and she’s just a non-drinker. I haven’t seen an upside yet to adding it back into my life. And so I don’t, and it really has been as simple and as straightforward as that. Now, I do give myself permission to redecide. I have the power. I feel very empowered around alcohol. We keep alcohol in our home for when we’re hosting Steve drinks. You know, on occasion he’s not a big drinker at all, but I find it to be really important that this is a decision that I’m making consciously right now and into my future for who I want to be.
So I have a few stipulations on when I can re decide. There’s no re in the moment. There’s no redeciding at night, there’s no redeciding on like a big event day. So I’m not going to be re on New Year’s Eve or at a wedding, but I am giving myself permission to always re decide in the morning and way ahead of time. And so far, when I think about it, I just don’t think there’s a big enough upside to add it back into my life. And so I just continue to live that way. It is not dramatic at all. It’s really not a big deal. There’s just no chatter about it. I never in a million years thought this would be the case. I thought that when I quit drinking, I wouldn’t have friends, I wouldn’t have anything to do going out socially or to dinners or anything like that would be weird.
I thought I wouldn’t have fun. I didn’t know how I would approach the events that kind of had been, created around alcohol like a wine night or something like that. It was really odd for me to think about experiencing my life without alcohol. And yet I knew that my future self was just a non drinker as a mom. And so I just decided to go for it. I just quit drinking. I haven’t drank since. And let me tell you, five years later, I can’t even imagine drinking. Now. It is just so normal. I have mocktails that I order when I go out, so that normalizes it. And I feel very comfortable drinking mocktails around other people who are drinking. And if there’s not a specific mocktail on the menu, I make sure to order something that’s sparkling and I ask for it, neither a short glass or a wine glass.
So I might ask for sparkling water with a lime and a wine glass. That way I am cheersing and feeling like I’m a part of the group versus maybe if they would bring out, you know a soda glass and kind of just feeling like I’m not drinking in the way everyone else is. I like having that nice glass and feeling like, oh yeah, this is my version of having a good time. And it is so easy. And it, it’s something that I don’t think is intuitive. I remember coaching someone on her journey with conscious drinking and she was sort of excluding herself. She wasn’t cheersing, she was sort of, kind of pouting in the corner away from her friends. I think she was at like her sister’s. And I said, you know, why didn’t you just grab a mocktail or grab a glass and put some sparkling water in it and, and be a part of the group that way?
And she just thought, I just never thought of it. And so it really is as simple as that. You can completely change the way that you drink or don’t drink and it just impacts you. And you get to decide how much fun you have and you get to decide the experience that you continue to have with alcohol. So now I want to share with you my conscious drinking process. There are three steps to it. Number one is to create a plan for how many drinks you will have at least 24 hours in advance. Number two is to follow through with that plan no matter what. And number three is to allow and process urges in the moment. That’s it, that’s all you gotta do. So let’s walk through an example. Let’s say that you are used to having a bottle of wine with your husband on Friday nights and you aren’t sure how you want to change your drinking, but you just want to be a little bit more deliberate, with it.
What you might do is just create a plan for this Friday to do exactly what you normally do, which means that your plan would be this Friday husband and I are going to cook dinner and share one bottle of wine. There’s something so empowering when you decide how much you’re going to drink and then you follow through with that no matter what. Now you can drink less. So if Friday night comes and you and your spouse decide,that you want to just have a glass or a glass and a half and not finish the bottle, that’s fine. But the key is that you don’t have more than what you committed to. So you follow through and you allow any urges that come up. So that means if you finish that bottle of wine and it’s earlier than you expected and you’re in a great conversation and you really are tempted to go get another bottle of wine, you don’t do it.
You don’t do it not because there’s anything wrong with drinking more wine. You don’t do it because you’re becoming someone who does what she says she does. And this is really important because in the moment your primitive brain is at work, it wants more of that dopamine, it wants that, that pleasure hit. And what you are aiming to do here is using your prefrontal, more thoughtful part of your brain to decide intentionally the role of alcohol in your life. So that means feeling the discomfort of saying no to yourself in the moment, allowing urges, I have the urge to drink more alcohol with my spouse and I’m not going to, I’m just going to allow it. You can name it, you can process it, you can be with it, and that’s it. Now, you know, the next day you can be really proud of yourself that you followed your plan.
And when you’re deciding on your drinking plan for let’s say the next Friday, you can adjust it. You know, this is your plan. You can decide actually next Friday we’re going to drink a bottle and a half of wine because I really want to be able to have that extra glass each for us. And so then you decide on increasing it, or you might decide, okay, this past Friday we only had three quarters of a bottle. So next Friday I want to plan that we’re going to have three quarters of a bottle. You can adjust your plan. The key that I want you to take away here is that it’s really important to not overdo it and then not follow through. So I would so much rather have you plan, we’re going to drink two bottles of wine next Friday and then drink, you know, two or fewer bottles, then have you say, we’re going to drink one bottle and then end up drinking two.
You know, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s no shame in it if that’s what happens. But the reason that that it like is “harmful” is because of what it does to your psyche. IE your mindset with respect to the next week. ’cause now you’re like, oh, I didn’t follow through. I can’t do this. Something’s wrong with me. I failed, I’m off the wagon. Whatever the thoughts are, right? You beat yourself up. And so then you have to do mindset around now I’m not going to beat myself up. Then you have to do mindset around now I gotta create another plan and can I do it? And now there’s more self doubt. And so if you really just create a plan that’s realistic for you, you build so much more self-trust and then you have so much more self-confidence, you know that I’m just someone who does what she says she’s going to do.
So take your plan really seriously. This isn’t like, oh, I’m thinking about two glasses, so I’ll just write down two. And then you get there and it’s girls night and you have five. Do not do that. It really will erode your own self-trust and your own relationship with yourself. And so it’s super important that you take it seriously. You follow through no matter what, and you allow and process urges in the moment. And you can come into the Mom On Purpose Membership and get coached on this. There are tools to help you. I do all of the coaching. There’s a community. You can get 24 7 access to written coaching. So if you have an upcoming event or, want kinda feedback on creating your plan and, and working through all of these challenges and what happens when you don’t follow through and all of that, you get that added accountability from me inside the membership and from other women and moms who are doing this work as well.
I find that the work on consciously drinking is similar to kinda changing your eating habits in so far as it’s like a food or a substance that you are deciding to change your relationship with and, and what does that look like? And then there’s all of the other drama, the mindset drama that comes up with respect to, you know, how your spouse is impacted by this change and, and they might not like it. And what does that change about your marriage? Or maybe it’s your girlfriends or the wine club you’re a part of, and kind of all of the fears and doubts that may come up on this journey. We have support for you inside the membership so that you can normalize this process and think about it more like a goal and a future focused journey. Not like something is wrong with you that needs fixing.
I never want you to think that with any of my tools. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are whole, you are, um, wonderful and worthy and you might just want to change your relationship with alcohol. So it doesn’t have to be that heavy and dramatic, although I do recommend that if you go on this journey, you take it really seriously, just like I recommend that for all of your goals. And, and I say that because I think sometimes we can go back and forth and start and stop and self-sabotage. And again, that just negatively impacts self-confidence and self-trust and just makes it harder. The next time that you can always do it, you can always try again. I’m here for you. That’s why it’s so important to, to get a good coach, to come inside a community like Mom On Purpose because you will have people supporting you.
I know that for many of you listening, there are lots of people in your personal life who are not doing, uh, this work. And to have a community of women who are constantly getting coached and talking about it and changing their lives in a really deliberate way, it’s a really, really inspiring, I never would have thought I would be someone who didn’t drink. In fact, because of the family of origin that I grew up in and my relationship with my dad and his relationship with alcohol, I thought that I’d probably marry someone who had a drinking problem. Now, consciously I didn’t want to, but I had a habit of dating men who drank, I would say a little bit too much or partied too much, or that was a high priority for them. And I just thought that there was no way out of that cycle.
And I thought that my relationship with alcohol would always be complicated. I didn’t think that it would be something I struggled with, but I thought it would be something that I struggled with, with respect to the men in my life. And I just cannot tell you how spectacular and transformative it has been for me to not have experienced any of that in the last five years. Like I just genuinely thought I couldn’t have the life that I have right now, and I do. And it’s because of the tools that I used. I now have a life that doesn’t have alcohol in it really at all. It’s not a big deal, it’s not dramatic, it’s not a part of it. It is just kind of in the background. Non-existent for our family except for when we’re hosting, we’ll kind of put some out. We can be around it easily, and it’s not a part of my social life in a big way either.
I don’t have a lot of friends who drink a lot, and I just love that there is not a lot of mindset chatter about it going on in my mind. And that is one of the benefits to completely abstaining from alcohol is that I don’t have to redecide all of those decisions about the planning. I’m not suggesting that quitting drinking is is right for everyone, but I do want to mention that the difference between abstaining versus moderating is that sometimes abstaining can be easier once you get over kind of that initial discomfort because you don’t have to remake all those decisions all the time versus, you know, if you’re cutting back, you do have to remake decisions and there will likely be some chatter, which is totally fine. It’s just part of the process as well. Another part of not drinking that I just love is mornings.
My mornings are amazing. I never feel hungover. I never have to think about parenting while having a hangover. Oh, Steve and I joke that sometimes we feel like we’re hungover except we didn’t have a fun drinking part, and that’s just from being up in the middle of the night. I’m sure you can relate to that as well. And so there are just so many benefits that I’ve experienced to not drinking, saving money, like we spend no money on alcohol unless again, we’re hosting an event or a party or something like that. I also think it’s pretty cool that I will be setting such a different example for my kids than what I had and what a gift that is to them. So I’m sharing this story with you here today, not to convince you to not drink. I would never want to tell you what to do, but I do want to challenge you to think more intentionally and consciously about alcohol.
Do you like the role that alcohol is playing in your life? Do you like how much you are drinking when you think about your future self? Does she drink how much you drink now or does she have a different relationship with alcohol? The main tools that I used for making this decision and living into it for the last five years have been future self visualizing, allowing urges, processing feelings, decision making, and having my own back, which is really about relationship with self. So those tools I was not taught growing up and I learned them, I studied them. I am a student of and a teacher of personal development because of the impact that these tools have had in my life. I just can’t imagine how different my life would be without doing this work. I would probably still be drinking. And I just want you to know that you can have the exact relationship that you want with alcohol that serves you and your future self. I did it. I have the tools that can help you. I’ve also helped clients do this as well. If this is something that you are interested in, come inside the Mom On Purpose Membership and I would love, love, love to support you on your conscious drinking journey. I will talk with you next week. Take care.
Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom on Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.
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