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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.
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 used to overcome a lifetime of family alcohol abuse, more than thirty 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Let's start now. Well,
Speaker 2:hello, and welcome or welcome back to the alcohol minimalist podcast. With me, your host, Molly Watts, coming to you from oh, friends, it is back to a very rainy, wet, dreary, gray Oregon right now. However, I have looked ahead, and in the forecast later this week, I am seeing my very first days of 60 degrees here in Oregon for springtime. So if it holds, that will be super exciting. And coming back from Florida last week, I have to say I was very, very grateful that when I got back to the Pacific Northwest, I landed.
Speaker 2:It was a day that was actually clear, wasn't pouring down rain. It wasn't dark yet. So these things are important to me when I return home from a very sunny destination, which it was in Florida, and I enjoyed oh, did I enjoy visiting that warm, sunny weather for a few days. We're not here to talk about the weather, at least not any longer, so on to this week's show. And this is a really important episode.
Speaker 2:It's important because I talk about our drinking being a habit that no longer serves us so often on the podcast. And, definitely, when I was changing my own relationship with alcohol, using that terminology, a habit that no longer serves me, was something that empowered me. But I've noticed in working with many people, hundreds of people and coaching clients and talking to them in my Facebook group and in my coaching programs that I hear often from people, it's just a habit. My drinking is just a habit. And I have realized something, and that is that that thought itself can actually become somewhat of an obstacle.
Speaker 2:And here's why. Because on the surface, that thought, my drinking is just a habit, it sounds harmless. Right? Like, maybe even it's a good thing. If drinking is just a habit, then it's really not a problem.
Speaker 2:It's not an addiction. It's not out of control. It's not a substance use disorder or a moral failing. It doesn't feel scary. It's just a habit, and habits can be broken.
Speaker 2:Right? Now, obviously, I have told you that my drinking was I was a daily habit drinker. That's how I would describe my how I described myself. And I also realize now that that idea of becoming a daily habit drinker kept me initially from focusing on something that is very pivotal in terms of changing your relationship with alcohol, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. While my drinking is just a habit is a thought.
Speaker 2:I mean, it actually keeps you stuck longer than you realize because when you tell yourself that, you are typically focusing only on changing the action of drinking, changing that habitual pattern of drinking rather than looking at why you want to drink in the first place. So today, we're gonna unpack this this thought, why it can be a roadblock, how shifting your perspective away from it's just a habit can help you create lasting and sustainable change. Let's talk about why this thought this thought of it's just a habit really feels kind of like a good thing. Right? For most of us, drinking isn't something that we started with the intention of it becoming a problem.
Speaker 2:It's a part of life. It's social. It's normal. And most of the time, we believe, and we like to believe that we have control over it. So when you start questioning your drinking, your brain definitely still wants to keep things comfortable.
Speaker 2:Right? I have mentioned on the podcast before that it wasn't really until I gave credence and weight to the amount of time that I was worrying about my drinking and realized how much that anxiety and worry that I spent so much time in was impacting my life, that's when I actually was more inspired and got really, you know, dedicated to changing my relationship with alcohol. When we keep and hold on to my drinking is just a habit, it feels more manageable, and it lets us avoid dealing with any emotions that might be tied to our drinking. If drinking is just a habit, then all you have to do is change the routine. All you have to do is change your pattern of behavior around drinking.
Speaker 2:If you always drink when you come home from work at 5PM, you just gotta focus on changing the action. You gotta get your nonalcoholic beverages. You gotta change up your your routine. You you know, do something different. You've gotta figure out alternative activities.
Speaker 2:You don't open up a bottle of wine when you start making dinner. You do something different. When you are focused on that habit and that pattern, then that's what you're going to look for is a change in the situation, a change in the circumstance that you believe is causing you to keep up this habit pattern. But if it's something deeper, then what? Does that mean you have a problem?
Speaker 2:Does that mean you might have to stop drinking entirely? None of that really feels comfortable, right, when we think about it that way. So your brain definitely likes sticking with the safer explanation, which is it's just a habit. And let's be honest, saying I just have a habit of drinking is way less loaded than saying I don't feel in control of my drinking. I rely on alcohol more than I want to admit.
Speaker 2:I don't know how to relax without a drink. Those thoughts, they feel scarier, don't they? And so we avoid them. But here's the problem. When you believe drinking is just a habit, you keep trying to fix it, like I said, with those actions rather than looking at the thoughts and the emotions that are actually driving the desire to drink.
Speaker 2:And that's where people get stuck, and that's really where I try to help people get unstuck. So let's break that down. A habit, by definition, is something that you do automatically, like brushing your teeth. You don't think about it. You just do it.
Speaker 2:K? But drinking is different. Drinking is typically an emotional response. And even though you may do it habitually, you do it consistently, you do it routinely, regularly, frequently, daily, you don't drink just because it's what you do at 5PM. You drink because at some level, you believe alcohol will change how you feel.
Speaker 2:And here's how this plays out. Your thoughts create a feeling, and the feeling creates your desire to drink. And drinking is the action that you are taking in response to that feeling of desire. You are looking you've you've built up a habit of turning to alcohol, creating desire for alcohol to mitigate or create a feeling instead of what you are instead of realizing that it's actually your thoughts that are creating the feeling in the first place. So if you drink after work, it's not just because it's a habit.
Speaker 2:It's typically because you associate alcohol with relief from stress. If you drink in social situations, it's not just a habit that you go out with your friends and drink. It's because you believe that alcohol makes you more fun, makes it more comfortable, relieves your social anxiety. If you drink at night, it's not just a habit. It's because you believe that alcohol will help you unwind, get to sleep faster, will help you turn off your brain, and escape from your thinking.
Speaker 2:Hey there. It's Molly taking a quick break to talk with you about Sunnyside. You all know that Sunnyside is my app of choice and my recommendation for a tool to help you create sustainable change around your drinking. One of the things that I love about Sunnyside is their commitment to improving the user experience, and that has been a constant since I started working with them nearly three years ago now. Since June, they have added the Android version of their iOS app.
Speaker 2:So now it's available for Apple users and all Android users. It's the same Sunnyside experience across all of those devices, and it's just another example of their commitment to improving the user experience. Another example would be the fact that now you can set it up for push notifications. So you can take all of the daily texts, the reminders, and put them into a push preference so that you determine how you want to receive the support from Sunnyside. I would love for you to check it out.
Speaker 2:Go to www.sunnyside.co/molly to get started with a fifteen day free trial today. And if you only focus on breaking the drinking habit without addressing that thought, feeling, action cycle that you have created, you are missing the root cause. And that's why you can white knuckle your way through a dry January and go right back to drinking in February. Because when you are just focused on rules or trying to mitigate the behavior and things that only target the action, not the reason for the action, Those things are sustainable for short periods of time. But without addressing the underlying emotions of your life and the reasons that you're drinking in the first place, it's just a habit is keeping you stuck.
Speaker 2:So how do we change this? We have to start shifting our thinking to take back our power. We have to start recognizing how we create feelings in our lives. For this, this is really important, and important at least it was important to me. K?
Speaker 2:If I was to stay consistently overwhelmed, stressed out, frequently frustrated in my life, then the habit of drinking would have continued to be very hard to change. I've done episodes before about talking about how I had to create better coping strategies because I could not change my relationship with alcohol because it was my number one coping mechanism. I couldn't change that without addressing what was causing my desire to drink. So the next time you feel like drinking, I want you to stop and ask, what am I feeling right now, and what thought is creating this feeling, and what do I think the the drink is gonna do for me? I then want you to challenge the thought that alcohol is actually the solution.
Speaker 2:Because if your brain says, I just need to relax and unwind, and alcohol is gonna help me do that, I want you to ask yourself, is that actually true? Is it true? You've heard me say it before, and I just said it earlier in this podcast episode. It was when I started understand that this story that I told myself that I needed to drink to relax and unwind, yet I was constantly worried about my drinking. That disconnect, not understanding that it was a cycle that I was continuing to perpetuate for myself really made the difference when I started to connect those dots.
Speaker 2:When your lower brain throws out that I just need to drink to unwind, I need you to ask it, is that actually true? Is this helping me? And what else could help me relax and unwind? What would be a better solution? And PS, we also need to go backwards and decide, do we really wanna keep living in stress and overwhelm because there's a different story, there's a different version of your life that allows you to see things from a different perspective that stressful, might not be quite so overwhelming, might not be so frustrating without changing the circumstances of your life.
Speaker 2:You want to look for alternative thoughts that serve you better. Instead of alcohol is how I relax, try I am learning to relax without alcohol. You see that subtle shift? I'm learning. I can learn to relax without alcohol.
Speaker 2:When you just allow yourself a moment and take a pause and instead of sticking to the absolute story that alcohol is how I relax and unwind, I need a I need to drink to help me relax, which is the way that I used to think. I literally had that sentence. Remember, folks, thoughts are just sentences in our brain, and we're the writers. We're the narrators. We get to choose how we talk to ourselves in our own brains.
Speaker 2:We get to choose how we talk anyway, but write a better sentence. Instead of I need to, say, I can learn to relax without alcohol. Instead of alcohol makes me more social, try, I can enjoy being around people without drinking. Try these thoughts on. If these thoughts help you feel more confident, if they feel less desire to drink, if they feel more committed to taking the action and the choice that you want to make that align with your long term goals, then it's a useful thought, then it's a helpful thought.
Speaker 2:Keep it. Recognize it. Repeat it. And the last part of this is that we gotta learn to feel our feelings instead of avoiding them. Emotions really pass on their own.
Speaker 2:You've you heard me if you I'll link it in the show notes when I talked to Jill Bolte Taylor. And in my book, I reference her. I think it's ninety seconds is the is how long an emotion actually lasts unless we're fueling it with our thoughts again. Right? And in emotions feel really intense at the moment, but they dissipate if you allow them to.
Speaker 2:The more you practice sitting with discomfort, the quicker it dissipates and the less that you will rely on external things like alcohol, like overeating, like over over scrolling social media, like over watching Netflix, like over consuming anything else if we learn to practice and allow discomfort to be there. So let's recap here. The thought my drinking is just a habit feels safe, and I get it because I have told you I was a daily, quote, unquote, habit drinker. That's how I described myself. And for a long time, I felt very good about thinking that my habit, my daily drinking habit was just a habit that no longer served me.
Speaker 2:And there's a part of that that is super true and super empowering, and it kept me from falling into the powerless mindset that is so prevalent from the recovery industry. It kept me from sticking with the story that this was a genetic problem. It's it kept me from feeling like I was a moral failure. It was just a habit that no longer served me. There's power there.
Speaker 2:Right? But we also have to be willing to not just write it off to habit, not just write it off, I just like beer too much. I just like wine too much. We have to be willing to go in and explore the emotions that we don't want to feel or the emotions that we're trying to create when we are drinking alcohol. Your drinking isn't just a habit.
Speaker 2:No one's is. We may develop a habit. We do it habitually. We drink regularly, daily, because we have associated alcohol with the way to either buffer away negative emotion or to help us create more positive emotion. But we can change how we feel by changing how we think.
Speaker 2:And it's learning how to manage your thoughts, how to allow emotion to be there, and how to create the positive emotion that we want in our life without needing to outsource that to alcohol that is really the key to changing your relationship with alcohol. Every time you wanna drink this week, I want you to ask yourself, what am I feeling? I want you to look for and ask what thought is creating this feeling. And I also want you to ask yourself, what else could I think that would help me feel differently and that would serve me better? If you would like to learn more about how I help people work on their relationship with alcohol, I would love to talk with you.
Speaker 2:You can reach out to me directly, molly@mollywatts.com, or visit my website mollywatts.com/workwithme. And I hope that you got something out of this episode. If you're one of those people that keeps saying to yourself it's just a habit, I really want you to ask yourself and dive into some of this stuff that that I talked about today. Keep going. Keep learning.
Speaker 2:Remember, you have more power over your drinking than you think. And until next time, choose peace. 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.
Speaker 2:You can stop worrying, stop feeling guilty about overdrinking, 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 www.mollywatts.com/work with me, or reach out to me directly. Shoot me an email, molly@mollywatts.com. We'll jump on a call and decide what might work best for you.
Speaker 2: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.