Journey to the Sunnyside | Mindful Drinking & Alcohol Health

In this episode, we dig into the strange grief that can show up when you start drinking less. Not regret. Not a craving exactly. More like the quiet feeling of missing something you’re genuinely glad you changed. We’ll look at why alcohol can become woven into your rituals, identity, stress relief, celebrations, and even the future you quietly imagined for yourself. And why feeling some sadness along the way doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means something real is changing.

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Creators and Guests

Host
Mike Hardenbrook
#1 best-selling author of "No Willpower Required," neuroscience enthusiast, and habit change expert.

What is Journey to the Sunnyside | Mindful Drinking & Alcohol Health?

Exploring the science of drinking less, from alcohol cravings and habit change to moderation, naltrexone, and building a healthier relationship with alcohol. Whether you're sober curious, cutting back, or thinking about quitting, this podcast meets you where you are.

Journey to the Sunnyside is a top 1% podcast reaching over 500,000 listeners every week. Through expert interviews, neuroscience research, and real stories, we cover what actually works — mindful drinking, behavior change, medication-assisted approaches, harm reduction, and more.

Hosted by Mike Hardenbrook, #1 best-selling author and neuroscience enthusiast. Brought to you by Sunnyside, the leading program for changing your relationship with alcohol. Start your free trial at sunnyside.co.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in our episodes do not necessarily represent those of Sunnyside. If you're concerned about your drinking, please consult a medical professional. This podcast is not medical advice.

Speaker 1:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. And I wanna start off this week with a conversation that I had. I was talking to somebody last week who was cutting back on drinking. They were about six months into it.

Speaker 1:

And honestly, she's been doing everything that she's been setting out to do. But she also said something that stood out to me. It was kinda to the effect of, you know, things are good. I'm sleeping better. Mornings are much more clear.

Speaker 1:

But something still feels off, and I don't really know how to explain it. And the reason that stood out is because that feeling shows up a lot. People make the changes. It's working. And then there's this weird feeling, this ache sitting underneath everything.

Speaker 1:

And it's not a craving. It's just this sense that something's missing. And the worst part, they don't know what to call it. Because we have language for things like habits. We have language for triggers and routines and mindful drinking and cutting back.

Speaker 1:

But we don't really have language for this specific thing when you're making changes and you feel good about it and still somehow it feels like you lost something. And I think what's actually happening is some level of grief. Now, I'm not talking about grief in this clinical sense or this huge dramatic sense. Just basically this normal process that can show up when any familiar pattern changes. And once you name it in that way, the whole thing kind of starts to make more sense.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going get into that today. First, I want to talk about a type of grief that psychologists call ambiguous loss. And this is real grief. This is grief, but it's also invisible. There's no defining end.

Speaker 1:

There's no flowers. There's no closure. There's a researcher named Pauline Boss, and she studied families with missing soldiers and also people that were caring for loved ones with dementia. And I'm not comparing the level of loss here, but what she found really applies to a lot of the situations where something real ends, but nobody is around, maybe including you, to give it much acknowledgment. And I think cutting back on drinking fits perfectly well here.

Speaker 1:

And I'm gonna get into why, but here's one thing to notice when it comes to this big change that you make. You know, nobody's coming over and saying, this has changed. I acknowledge it. Nobody's marking the end of this in public, and yet something did change. Something did end.

Speaker 1:

And not the drinking itself necessarily, but the old relationship that you used to have with it. And because changing your relationship with alcohol, it doesn't look like loss from the outside. And it truly isn't loss, so to speak, but there is change. Now here's something that researchers have found about grief that I think explains a lot about what people feel when they cut back. When we lose something, we don't just grieve what it was.

Speaker 1:

We also grieve what we assume would keep happening. We carry this unconscious picture of how life is supposed to unfold. And when that pattern changes, it doesn't just affect the present. It rewrites the whole future we've been kinda basically counting on. And that's why grief can feel way bigger than the change itself.

Speaker 1:

And I think that's what happens when people change their relationship with alcohol. Here's the thing worth understanding. Part of what you're grieving isn't last Friday's glass of wine. It's every future Friday where maybe you could drink without thinking about it, where you could start making dinner, you could pour wine, and you weren't thinking about how much you were drinking or how much you had before you sat down to eat. And that off switch that was always available, maybe to cut loose on a Friday and not count, maybe the spontaneity of just having a glass of wine and turning into three or four, and you never gave it a second thought.

Speaker 1:

So when you change your relationship with alcohol, you're not just changing how you drink, you're also rewriting a version of the future where drinking had no boundaries. And that's why this kind of grief is so hard to locate. It's not necessarily a memory. It's the disappearance of an assumption you didn't know that you were even carrying. You're mourning a future that doesn't exist anymore, and you're changing it for the better, of course.

Speaker 1:

But that change is touching something deeper than the drinking itself. One of the most consistent things researchers find about grief is this: loss and relief, they're not opposites. They sit right next to each other. And you can be proud of a decision and still be sad about what it cost you. You could be sleeping better, thinking clearer, and still carry some sadness around how things used to be.

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You can still be certain that you made the right call and still miss the old pattern. People have said that sadness is evidence against the decision. They think if it were really right for me, I wouldn't still feel the way I do. But grief's presence doesn't measure whether you made the right call. It measures how much the old pattern maybe mattered in your life.

Speaker 1:

And for a lot of people, that old relationship with alcohol mattered, not as a substance exactly, but as that reliable companion through stress and celebration, maybe boredom and transition. And for a lot of years, maybe decades, the grief is proportionate to that history. Holding both things at once, the relief and the loss, the clarity and maybe that ache, is what real change feels like from the inside. And one more thing worth saying here is that you don't need to hold negativity around the person that you were when you drink differently. You don't need to decide that all of it was damage or none of it gave you anything or that that earlier version of you was somehow flawed.

Speaker 1:

In grief work, there's this idea called continuing bonds. The idea that healthy grieving doesn't require cutting yourself off completely from what it was. You can carry what was real and valuable about a pattern while still choosing to change it. So trying to reject it entirely usually makes grief even harder. That version of you that didn't think much about the limits was managing stress the best way it knew how and reaching for connection and relief with the tools that were available.

Speaker 1:

Was it an imperfect strategy? Sure. It was one whose costs eventually outweighed the benefits. But a strategy still that made sense given what you had at the time. I think about it in my own life, the choices, you know, maybe I'm not the most proud of, The ways that I struggled that I didn't fully understand while I was in them.

Speaker 1:

But that version of me also got me here to this work, to actually caring about this in a way that I couldn't have if I hadn't have lived it somehow. And the mistakes, they weren't detours. They were just part of the path. And I think that's true for most people who eventually find their way to something better. So instead of rejecting that part of yourself, try acknowledging what it was reaching for, what it was trying to protect, because you probably still need some of those things just through a different relationship with alcohol.

Speaker 1:

So if what I'm saying here identifies with you and you think there is some level of grief, I just want you to know that grief isn't evidence that you made the wrong choice. Sometimes the hardest part of change isn't deciding. It's realizing that even the right changes leave an empty space for a little while. When you can name what you're actually grieving, not the alcohol, but maybe the carefree, not thinking about it, maybe even unlimited version of yourself, something starts to shift. Not all at once, not because naming it is gonna fix everything, but because grief that gets acknowledges moves on.

Speaker 1:

Grief that gets perceived maybe as a craving or something to manage tends to stay right where it is. So if you're in that strange flat place right now, you don't have to talk yourself out of it so much. You can just let it be what it is. The old relationship with alcohol is changing, and that's allowed to be difficult at times. And just because it's difficult, just because it's hard, doesn't mean that you're not doing exactly what you should do.

Speaker 1:

Okay. If you got anything out of this episode, please rate and review wherever you're listening to. Email me, of course, mike@sunnyside.co. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.