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Join coach Molly Watts on the Alcohol Minimalist Podcast to explore mindful drinking, behavior change, and mental wellness. This show offers science-based strategies to help you break drinking habits and overcome anxiety linked to alcohol use. Whether you're an adult child of alcoholics or seeking peace with your drinking, discover tools for lasting change without shame or guilt. New episodes every Monday and Thursday.
Becoming an alcohol minimalist means:
Choosing how to include alcohol in our lives following low-risk guidelines.
Freedom from anxiety around alcohol use.
Less alcohol without feeling deprived.
Using the power of our own brains to overcome our past patterns and choose peace.
The Alcohol Minimalist Podcast explores the science behind alcohol and analyzes physical and mental wellness to empower choice. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol, you are not sick, broken and it's not your genes!
This show is intended for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice. If you are physically dependent on alcohol, please seek medical help to reduce your drinking.
Hey. Welcome to Think Thursday from the Alcohol Minimalist Podcast. Think Thursday is all about your beautiful, brilliant human brain. We're talking neuroscience. We're talking behavior change.
Speaker 1:We are talking about your mindset. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Hey there. It's Molly, and welcome back to another Think Thursday from The Alcohol Minimalist.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking lately about how long we carry something in our minds before we actually move on it. A trip we keep saying we'll take or a friend we've been meaning to call, a business idea that lives in our notes app, and maybe even a book we talk about writing. There's a version of ourselves that we revisit in quiet moments and then gently set back down again. And what's interesting to me is not that we have these dreams. Of course, we do.
Speaker 1:That's just part of being human. What's interesting is how comfortable we can become rehearsing them without ever gathering evidence that that version of us in our imagination is actually real. And at some point, whether we say it out loud or not, the brain begins to notice that gap. So today, I wanna talk about something I've been telling myself recently, and maybe it's something you need to hear too. And it's a pretty simple it's a pretty simple phrase.
Speaker 1:Just do the thing. I don't wanna make this dramatic or reckless, but I want you to deliberately start thinking about just doing the thing because movement changes the brain in ways imagination simply cannot. Now dreaming is not useless. In fact, from a neuroscience perspective, it makes complete sense that we enjoy it. The brain's reward circuitry, particularly the dopaminergic system, activates not only when we achieve something, but when we anticipate it.
Speaker 1:Dopamine often spikes more in anticipation than in the reward itself. So when you imagine the trip or picture yourself holding the finished manuscript or think about launching the business, your brain gets a little reward hit. It feels expansive. It feels hopeful. It can even feel productive.
Speaker 1:But the brain is tracking something deeper than fantasy. It is actually tracking behavior. You've heard me talk about cognitive dissonance before, and that's where where this concept becomes very relevant. Cognitive dissonance is that subtle internal friction that shows up when who we believe we are and what we repeatedly do don't quite align. If you see yourself as someone who values growth, who is creative, who's courageous, adventurous, but your behavior remains completely static, the brain registers that mismatch.
Speaker 1:And what decades of psychological research have shown us is that behavior is often what resolves cognitive dissonance, not our beliefs. I want you to hear me say that again. Behavior is what often resolves cognitive dissonance, not beliefs. And when behavior stays consistent, identity eventually follows. That's why you don't have to convince yourself.
Speaker 1:You just have to keep showing up. But the reverse is also true. When behavior never moves, identity adjusts instead. You don't become the person who writes the book. You become the person who talks about writing the book.
Speaker 1:You don't become the person who travels. You become the person who wishes she traveled. That shift happens gradually and quietly, but the brain builds identity from evidence, not intention. Every action is logged as data. Every inaction is also logged as data, and over time, that data becomes the story you believe about yourself.
Speaker 1:Now let's be fair to the nervous system for a moment because we wait for very understandable reasons. We wait until we feel more confident. We wait until the timing feels better. We wait until there's more money or more clarity or more certainty, and culturally, we've been taught that readiness should precede action. But, neurologically speaking, readiness often follows action.
Speaker 1:When you remain in imagination mode, you remain in prediction mode, And prediction mode feels safe because it often doesn't involve exposure or feedback. The moment you move into action, even something as small as sending an email or pricing out a flight, you shift into learning mode. And learning mode involves uncertainty, and uncertainty activates the amygdala. So, of course, the brain prefers dreaming. Dreaming offers dopamine without vulnerability.
Speaker 1:Action requires vulnerability before the reward. But confidence does not appear fully formed before you act. Confidence is built through evidence. That evidence is from taking action, so the prefrontal cortex strengthens when it is used. Emotional tolerance expands when you experience manageable discomfort and survive it.
Speaker 1:The sense of I can handle this develops after you gather proof that you can. There's another cognitive layer to this as well. In psychology, there is something called the Zeigernic effect named after Bluma Zeigernic, which describes the brain's tendency to remember unfinished tasks more vividly than completed ones. Incomplete things take up mental space. An unresolved goal, an unmade decision, a plan that keeps getting postponed, all of these things create open loops in working memory, and open loops require monitoring.
Speaker 1:Monitoring consumes energy. When you keep saying someday, your brain keeps that loop active in the background. Even if you're not consciously thinking about it all day, it exists as unresolved potential, and unresolved potential creates low grade tension. The nervous system relaxes when direction is chosen, not when outcomes are guaranteed. I saw this very clearly in my own life.
Speaker 1:At the 2024 heading into 2025, I told my husband that I wanted us to travel more. Not vaguely, not someday. I just wanted I wanted us to do it that you know, in 2025. I wanted to take advantage of work conferences and add on days that we could explore in the areas that I had to travel to for work. I wanted him to come with me because he works remotely so we could optimize our travel budget because work was paying for me to get there.
Speaker 1:We just had to pay for him. I wanted to prioritize ex prioritize experiences because, quite honestly, we aren't getting any younger. And for years, travel had lived mostly in imagination mode. We would talk about places. We'd scroll photos, and we'd say that would be amazing.
Speaker 1:But in 2025, I stopped dreaming about it all, and I started structuring. We made actual plans. And that year, we saw the Grand Canyon. We kayaked on Lake Superior. We visited the Alamo.
Speaker 1:We stood on the or we kayaked under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin and watched the bats fly at sunset. We explored the Red Rock Canyons outside of Las Vegas, and we saw a show in the sphere. We traveled to Florida to California, and we cruised to Mexico and The Bahamas. Now I don't tell you that without saying that, yeah, was there some financial stress in terms of, like, making that happen? Yes.
Speaker 1:But, you know, it was one of the best years we've ever had, and I really saw the value in just doing the thing and to stop putting it off until tomorrow. And here's what matters neurologically. It wasn't just the trips. It was the evidence. The brain now has proof that we are people who prioritize experience.
Speaker 1:That proof changes changes future decisions. It makes it easier to allocate time and money toward travel. It creates momentum. Identity is no longer hypothetical. It is embodied.
Speaker 1:So when I say just do the thing, I don't mean leap impulsively or abandon discernment. I mean stop rehearsing and start structuring. Book the call, open the document, put the date on the calendar, take the first visible step. Not the entire dream, just the next move. Momentum builds evidence, and evidence builds identity.
Speaker 1:Identity builds momentum, and momentum quiets fear far more effectively than endless analysis ever will. There is a version of you that exists right now only in imagination, and imagination is beautiful. It's expansive. It's creative. But behavior is what transforms imagination into identity.
Speaker 1:Your brain updates who you are based on what you repeatedly do. What your life story will be will be what you do with consistency over time. So if something has been nudging you quietly, not as a fantasy, but as a pull, maybe this is the moment to start gathering evidence. You don't have to leap. You don't have to know every step.
Speaker 1:You just have to take the first step. You have to move. Just do the thing, and let your identity catch up. That's all I have for you today, my friends. Until next time, choose peace, and I will see you on Monday.