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Change your relationship with alcohol without shame, guilt, or going sober. Join science-based coach Molly Watts to break habits and find peace through mindful drinking.
Hosted by author and coach Molly Watts, this show is for daily habit drinkers, adult children of alcoholics, and anyone stuck in the “gray area” of alcohol use.
Each episode blends neuroscience, behavior change psychology, and real-world strategies to help you build peace with alcohol — past, present, and future.
You’re not broken. You’re not powerless. You just need new tools.
Less alcohol. More life. Let’s do it together.
New episodes every Monday & 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.
Welcome to the Alcohol Minimalist podcast. I'm your host, Molly Watts. If you want to change your drinking habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, you're in the right place. This podcast explores the strategies I use to overcome a lifetime of family alcohol abuse. More than 30 years of anxiety and worry about my own drinking and what felt like an unbreakable daily drinking habit. Becoming an alcohol minimalist means removing excess alcohol from your life so it doesn't remove you from life. It means being able to take alcohol or leave it without feeling deprived. It means to live peacefully. Being able to enjoy a glass of wine without feeling guilty and without needing to finish the bottle. With science on our side, we'll shatter your past patterns and eliminate your excuses. Changing your relationship with alcohol is possible. I'm here to help you do it. Let's start now. Well, hello and welcome or welcome back to the Alcohol Minimalist Podcast with me, your host Molly. What's coming to you from. It is a very foggy Oregon this morning. Very foggy indeed. Many days in the fall, we get this inversion that creates a lot of fog in the morning. It's kind of cool. And then it burns off and it's beautiful in the afternoon. So I'm going to hope that's exactly what's coming for us later today. How are you doing? Welcome to November. How did your more sober October plans go? I hope they were successful. I hope that you were able to find small wins throughout the month and really help leverage those and create start creating sustainable change. You know, I'm all about creating habits that service for the rest of our lives and really about making change something that is doable and realistic and hopefully something that fits and aligns with your long term goals. And so yes, I hope you had a great month. I want you to keep going. Let's head off into November. We are fast approaching the holidays. I cannot even believe that Thanksgiving is not barely three weeks away now. That seems very unbelievable to me, but alas, it's where we are. And this week we're talking about something that you might not realize plays a role or a bigger role in your drinking habits than you think, and that is your environment. I am talking about the space around you, the objects in it, and the cues that quietly shape what you do and when you do it. And even when you're working on mindset, when you're working on motivation and long term goals, if you're not aware of how your surroundings are reinforcing your habits, you might be making change harder than it needs to be. Now, that said, I want to be very clear. Your environment alone is not what drives you to drink. For most people, alcohol isn't just a reflex, it's a response. It's a way to change how you feel. And that's the real work of becoming an alcohol minimalist. It's the internal work, understanding the thoughts and feelings that fuel the desire to drink and understanding how to you know, how they are behind the habits and also how to become a better thinker. I say that all the time. Manage your mind. Making these few intentional shifts in your physical environment can support that deeper work. It can help interrupt kind of the default setting, the autopilot. It reduces friction and create space for making new choices. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today. Let's first talk a little brain science. Can we you know I love my neuroscience. There is a concept in behavioral psychology called cue induced behavior. When your brain experiences a cue like the sight of a wine bottle or the feel of your couch after dinner, it activates a chain reaction of thoughts, typically unconscious thoughts, thoughts that happen so quickly you're not even aware of them, which cause feelings, right? Like the feeling of desire, which is what an urge is. And that's how the environment plays a part. Over time, your brain starts linking these cues two expected outcomes. And because your brain is incredibly efficient, it starts predicting that outcome and desiring it before you even consciously decide to do anything. This was demonstrated in a well-known study by Doctor Nora Volkow, who is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and her research showed that for people with established alcohol habits, just seeing alcohol or an alcohol related image was enough to activate the dopamine reward system in the brain. Translation your brain doesn't wait for the first sip. It starts responding to the cues themselves the glass, the label, the sound of the bottle opening, the smell of the wine. And unless you are aware of it, you feel a desire to drink before you've even had a conscious thought. Now let's bring this home quite literally. Think about your evening routine. Maybe you have a specific glass you always use. Maybe you have a favorite spot on the couch. Maybe you have a ritual where you pour a drink as soon as dinner is over. All of these are environmental cues your brain has learned to associate with alcohol. And it's not just what you see. It could be the sound of ice clinking in a glass. It could be a certain playlist or a show that signals relaxation time. It could be lighting a candle or a scent. Even just walking past your home bar set up can be an external cue. And these cues reinforce habits. Not because you're weak, not because you lack willpower, but because your brain has rehearsed practiced this loop over and over and over again. It feels familiar. It is almost automatic. That's how habits work. Now here's the important part. Changing your environment, of course, can help. It's not the whole strategy. It's not even most of the strategy. But environmental shifts are short term supports. They are helpful because they can disrupt an automatic habit loop. They can reduce triggers and temptations in the moment, and they help you pause. Right. We're going to hearken back to our one of our favorite tools here at Alcohol Minimalists, the PB and J. Pause. Breathe. In just ten minutes. You're going to notice what's happening. You're going to take some deep breaths. And you're going to pause and ponder and take just ten minutes to allow the feeling of desire to pass. This is crucial here. Okay. All of this changing the environmental cues, doing the PB and J. They don't change the emotional need that drinking is trying to meet. Most people don't drink because there's a wine glass on the counter. Even though they may think that's because that's that's one of the reasons they do it. They drink because they're tired. They're anxious. They're stressed. They're bored. They're looking for relief. The glass just makes it easier. That's why if you only focus on tips and tricks, I say their tactics. You'll probably find yourself white knuckling through willpower because you really haven't addressed the thoughts that are fueling the urge. Okay, we've got it all laid out here. Environmental cues and understanding that changing your environmental cues is a support tactic, and that we've got the separate, bigger work to do. Let's talk about a few practical experiments that you can try. All right. Let's do them this week if you want to. Hey, it's Molly here to talk to you about Sunnyside. If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you know that Sunnyside is my number one recommendation for drinking apps that help you change your relationship with alcohol. I've been a Sunnyside partner for more than three years now, and one of the key reasons that I chose Sunnyside to be my app of choice is that they are really focused on continuous improvement, just like me and for you, it is continuous improvement of the app in terms of how the customer is experiencing it. They've completely redesigned the progress tab from the ground up, which makes it easier for you to see your progress over time. They've introduced many infographics to help you better see the big picture of drinks reduced, and how dry days have added up since you joined Sunnyside. They have a dry day. Street tracker. Now, for those of you that are focused on taking a real extended break from drinking, and they intelligently surface trends in your data to highlight any positive things for you, like a steady decrease in overall drinks over the course of time. These changes and these improvements are something that Sunnyside has continued to do ever since I started working with them. You can check it out over at Sunnyside and get started on a 15 day free trial today. Let's try a glass swap. Number one, use a completely different glass. Maybe a coffee mug, a water bottle, or a mason jar for your evening for your evening drink, especially if it's non-alcoholic. Studies show that glass shape influences how much and how fast people drink. Breaking the visual and tactile association can disrupt the urge. But for those of you that tell me that your fast drinkers that you just drink everything fast, I really want you to try this experiment this week. Change the shape of the glass that you're drinking out of. Number two, change your drinking location for one week. Don't drink anything and let's make that including non-alcoholic drinks in your usual drinking spot. Our brains link locations to routines. Changing where you sit or stand can increase mindfulness and decrease the autopilot. So change your location and don't drink there. All right, I don't know where you're going to drink. Drink someplace. Just don't do the same thing. Maybe change it up every day. All right. Clear the visual cues. That's number three. Put away the bottles. Put away the bar tools, corkscrews, glassware, out of sight, off the counter and see if this helps. Cornell research shows that visual cues increase consumption, whether it's candy, soda, or alcohol. Removing visual triggers makes choosing differently easier. Number four swap the soundtrack. Create a new wind down playlist. Light a different candle. Use a sound machine to shift your evening routine. Sensory cues like sound and scent are powerful. I think I've read it. I'm sure many of you have. That scent is our most powerful memory tool, and changing the atmosphere can help reduce cravings that are triggered by old associations. Number five is create a wind down zone. So this is a different kind of spin on this right. We're not putting away a cue but we're actually going to create a space. Choose a cozy chair, a quiet corner, the kitchen, a sunny table and designate it as your new wind down zone. Use it for non-alcoholic rituals like tea or sparkling water. Some light reading journaling if your current environment signals time to drink, then your brain needs a new association to anchor relaxation to. You're not just removing all the external cues, you're going to be replacing them with something meaningful, something calming, and something enjoyable. And add sensory elements, some soft lighting, a warm blanket or a scent to reinforce this new routine. Your brain loves multi-sensory rewards, so make it cozy. Make it comfortable. Make it something you like. For me, you know the pumpkin spice candles come out especially in the fall, but I actually like pumpkin spice all year round. So that for me is a very comforting scent. Here's a little something that I really want you to think about, and I want you to expect. All right. If you try these changes this week, you probably are going to feel uncomfortable, even in your cozy space. And that's normal. When you interrupt a routine, your brain notices you have created a gap between the cue and the behavior. And in that gap, you now have room to ask, what am I feeling right now? What was I hoping alcohol would help me feel or avoid? What thought is fueling this desire? And this is really the deeper work. This is what I help people learn to manage. It's the real strategy behind changing your drinking habits, not just managing the what or the where, but understanding the why. So let's bring it all the way back here full circle. Your environment doesn't cause your drinking, but it can reinforce it. Changing your environment won't change your desire, but it can give you space to explore it and use these tactics not as a fix, but as a bridge to greater awareness. When you combine environmental awareness with emotional curiosity and intentional thought work, that's when real, sustainable change happens. If you try one of these experiments this week, I would love to hear from you. You can email me, you can post in the Alcohol Minimalist Facebook group. You can try to DM me on Instagram. Quite honestly, I'm not great about Instagram, so I'd say email or Facebook group first. But tell me what changed when you changed your surroundings and I hope that you will share that with me. Like I said, I receive every email, I respond to them all and I am eager to help. That's all I have for you this week my friends. Until next time, remember that change is a progress. We are looking for progress, not perfection. And as always, choose peace. I will see you on Thursday. Thanks for listening to the Alcohol Minimalist podcast. Take something you learned from this week's episode and put it into action. Changing your drinking habits and creating a peaceful relationship with alcohol is 100% possible. You can stop worrying, stop feeling guilty about over drinking, and become someone who desires alcohol less. I work with people in two different ways and you can learn about them over at my website. Go to. Me or reach out to me directly. Shoot me an email Molly at Molly. We'll jump on a call and decide what might work best for you. This podcast is really just the beginning of our conversation. Let's keep it going. If there's one thing I know, it's that change is way easier when you stop trying to do it alone.