You are listening to the Drink Less Lifestyle podcast with Dr. Sherry Price, episode number 110.

Welcome to Drink Less Lifestyle, a podcast for successful women who want to change their relationship with alcohol. If you want to drink less, feel healthier and start loving life again you’re in the right place. Please remember that the information in this podcast does not constitute medical advice. Now, here’s your host, Dr. Sherry Price.

Well, hello my beautiful friends, thank you for joining me for another episode of the Drink Less Lifestyle podcast. I’m so excited you’re here. Today I want to talk to you about something that I find can be very helpful for many of us, and especially when it comes to being around alcohol.

And before I dive into the topic, I want to tell you it originated from a phone call I had with a woman who was thinking about joining my membership program, EpicYOU. She had been following me on Instagram and she reached out and she DM’d me and she’s like, “Can we get on a call? I think after learning about you and finding your podcast I think you can really help me with my drinking.”

And so, when we were speaking on the call she was talking about all the things that she’s tried. And she has found that it didn’t really work with changing her long term desire for alcohol. But what I loved about her story is she was telling me how she used to be an overeater and a binge eater and how she’s overcome that in her life. And so, she knew that if she did it around food, it was totally possible that she could get the same results around alcohol.

And as we were talking I was asking her, “Well, what worked around food?” Because if we had success in one area, can we use that success and try it in a different area because that’s the low hanging fruit, if something has worked for us in the past. And so, we explored what has worked with her food and how she did try a lot of those same tactics around alcohol and how they haven’t held up all the time. So, she feels like she made some progress.

She’s not drinking as much but she still has weekends where she overdrinks, she passes out, she blacks out, she can’t remember conversations. And it just doesn’t feel good to be that woman anymore. And first off I have to say I was so impressed with the amount of awareness that she has had. She’s done a lot of that inner work to change how she reacts to things in the external world. And I was so impressed because she was so young. And to have done this work as young as she is, she’s going to get benefits for decades to come from doing this work.

And I wanted to share a part of her story is because I think when we were talking just like probably many of you, you think your story’s unique. You think it’s something I haven’t heard before. You think that nobody else is going through the same challenges. And I’m sure by just giving you a flavor of her story, many of you can say, “I see parts of myself in her story.”

And here’s something else that she commented on is, “I don’t escape with alcohol. I don’t use alcohol to escape, I don’t use it to numb. I don’t have deep trauma in my life, or big T trauma.” So, she had this great awareness of how she she wasn’t using it, which is wonderful. But she really couldn’t answer the reason why she was using it. She was always using it in a celebratory fashion, in a fun fashion. And for some people that’s exactly how they use alcohol.

So, while I may look at a lot of the aspects of low emotional states, or when we’re angry, or we can’t handle our, or don’t know how to unwind, or how to relax without it. There are plenty of women in my program too that use alcohol too much in a celebratory sense, in a fun sense, and this is how I get to enjoy myself on weekends kind of sense. So, knowing why she wasn’t using it is somewhat helpful, but what would be more helpful is helping her identify why she used it and so we went there.

She’s like, “I don’t have social anxiety, I’m a very outgoing person, I’m extraverted, I love people, I love conversation. I don’t feel I need alcohol to have a good time, I just choose to have it. And I like my job. I like my boyfriend.” She’s like, “Actually my life is very, very well so I don’t really understand why I’m using it.”

And that’s how some of us are around alcohol, it’s like this periodic episodic binge, periodic episodic overdrinking episodes that we engage in, not all the time but enough where it bothers us. Enough that we’re like, “Why do I keep doing this? I don’t want to be doing this.” So, for her it wasn’t a nightly thing, but it still bothered her. When you overdrink whether that’s every night, or episodically, or periodically it still bothers you. Because it’s not the relationship you want to have with alcohol. It feels very out of control.

And so, I won’t go too much into her story but one other aspect I do want to bring forward with it was she noticed and what she was commenting most on is these blackout episodes or pass out episodes always happened when she went out with her friends. So generally, Friday or Saturday nights out with friends she would start drinking, and came home, continued to drink and then she would pass out or black out. She lives in a big city, there’s lots of drinking going on, yes, there is lots of drinking going on in most cities big or small.

So, pinpointing when the overdrinking happens is so helpful and then noticing what’s going on. And in situations such as this, are you just going with the flow? Are you just following others? Are you just getting sucked in to what everything else is going on around you? And if that happens to you then I would love to offer you this tool is that you want to learn to lead yourself.

Because here’s the thing, people will always be choosing to do things around us and we get to decide to still hang out with them whether we do the exact same thing or we choose not to do the exact same thing. But when you can choose from a place of what’s in alignment for you and lead yourself, that’s what’s going to give you peace and control around alcohol because that’s how you want to show up as you. So, it’s like being a leader of yourself.

And when you’re a leader of yourself you know what yourself wants. You’re the CEO of yourself. You’re the CEO of your mind. You’re the CEO of your actions that you take. And as we learned last week, when we are that CEO of our mind we know that the mind will govern what the body does. And so, leading yourself is a form of self-discipline. You are leading you. You are leading the charge, not your friends, not a Friday night, not a Saturday night, not the circumstances. not the bar, not the weekend, not your spouse, not the social event that you’re at, not the gala, not the club.

And so, when you lead yourself you will find that you lead you, not anyone else and not anything else outside of you. You get to lead you. Now, a lot of us do this automatically in other areas of our life. We lead ourselves to work. We lead ourselves to do all kinds of things. We drive a car. You’re leading yourself and you’re leading the car. You’re the owner and driver of that vehicle. Maybe you lead yourself to the gym. You are constantly saying, “I want this and this is how I get it and that means I need to lead myself.”

So, the question becomes, are you leading yourself on purpose especially when it comes to around alcohol? And I like to even go deeper. Are you leading yourself on purpose and for a purpose? The purpose could just be I want to break the habit. It doesn’t have to be anything greater than that. The purpose could solely be I want to be in control and break this habit. So, are you conscious about this? Are you consciously aware of leading yourself to get the results that you want?

Because if you’re not leading, what happens is we fall into following, following others, following what society wants, following the expectation of others, getting absorbed into what’s going on around us and just going along without really consciously thinking about it.

Or some of us keep repeating it because it’s just something that we did yesterday, so we’re allowing a past experience at a bar, at a restaurant or even at your house to inform you how you should do today. Which today is a completely different day and you can completely make a different decision. But you may not feel like you can because you’re just following and falling back into what you’ve always done. So, a whole new day, could be a Monday, could be a Friday, could be any day, you get to live differently by leading yourself.

And here’s what I want to offer, this is magical when you do it because you lead yourself to greater health, feeling better and loving who you are more. You have better relationships and especially the relationship with yourself and with alcohol. That’s what you’re leading yourself to. You can lead yourself through anything and to do anything. You can lead yourself to right now hit pause on this podcast if you wanted to. You know what else you can lead yourself to? To go to the couch and put your feet up and just rest, and relax, and unwind.

After a full day of work or getting things done around the house you can just lead yourself to rest. And now what I love is I do that, I lead myself to rest at the end of my day and it doesn’t need to include alcohol which in the past it needed to include alcohol, at least that’s how I felt. I thought it was necessary to relax and to unwind. My brain didn’t know any way to do it because I had been doing it that way and following that pattern for years. And actually, my brain was so filled with this is the way you do it, that it couldn’t see any other way.

I didn’t know how to lead myself because I always fell back into following an old pattern. I kept thinking, if I just put more rules around alcohol and had more willpower, man, I can really accomplish this, but that wasn’t it. That’s where I went wrong. It wasn’t about willpower and it wasn’t about more rules. I had to decide to lead myself differently in a new direction with new tools. I’m like, “Okay, if these tools that I have been using rules around alcohol willpower and they are not working, I must have the wrong set of tools.”

It’s like carrying around a screwdriver when you need a hammer and that felt frustrating because you’re taking it as a personal failure when it’s not a personal failure, it’s just you don’t have the right tools. So, when I found someone who had tools to help me do this I latched onto them. I’m like, “I want to learn new tools. I don’t have the right tools.” I want to lead myself to a different destination but I need to learn how to do that. And thank goodness that I did.

And because I learned that, I want to teach it to all of you, all of you that want to learn these new skills and these new tools so you can become a woman who can take it or leave it. You don’t have to write off alcohol for the rest your life. You don’t have to count days for the rest your life if you want to. You can be free, you could just be free, freedom to choose, freedom from the over-desire, freedom from the feeling like you need it to relax, freedom from feeling like you need it to have fun.

And when you learn these tools, it’s not just learning them, it’s not just absorbing them in the brain. It’s also about execution, leaders execute. And when leaders execute, that means they walk the walk. They don’t just talk the talk, they actually walk the walk. And so, when I show up and give tools on this podcast and when I show up and give more tools inside of EpicYOU, it’s taking those tools and applying them to your life, walking the walk, because that’s when they start to work.

If you just listen to this podcast, great, it could be inspiring, it could be motivational, it could be mind bending, all that’s wonderful but it’s walking the walk. It’s leading yourself to do these things that’s going to give you the change and the result that you want. And once I understood that I could lead myself to any result that I wanted, my brain got engaged, my brain got excited. I started creating emotions of excitement for myself because here is how I can do it. And this is what I need to do.

This is fascinating, I thought it was always about making rules around alcohol and it’s not, there’s more to it, there’s other things? Oh, my goodness, teach me, I want to know. And I love teaching these tools on the podcast so, so very much because I know from the feedback that I get from this podcast alone that many of you are changing your relationship with alcohol. That excites me to my core. My heart is on fire for you.

And if you’re listening to this podcast and it makes you feel good and you’re feeling inspired and motivated that’s great too, but don’t let your journey end there. It’s like going to the movies and seeing this amazing movie, very inspirational, we think about things in our life that we want to change, or we come back from maybe a Tony Robbins event, we’re all pumped up. And we want all this change but then we don’t lead ourselves, we just keep it in our head. We’ve got to learn to take this information and use it in our lives.

And you’ve got to lead yourself to experience it. And by experiencing it I mean you’re executing it, you’re executing the tactics, you’re executing the tools and you’re like, “Now I see how it’s changing my drinking.” And when you lead yourself, you’re leading yourself to a better life. Now, just think about it, if you cut back on alcohol just think how much your life is more amazing. when you cut back on alcohol you get smarter, you get thinner, you get prettier and you get richer.

Now, those may seem like far out results that I’m saying but think about it. All of it is true. When you cut back on alcohol you’re smarter, you know why? You’re not killing brain cells, you’re remembering conversations, you’re not causing early dementia. Your prefrontal cortex stops shrinking. There’s just so many benefits of the brain that it actually does make us smarter.

And how about thinner. We can all agree that alcohol is empty calories. We can all agree that when we drink more many of us eat more or snack more. We make poor decisions around food or the timing of the food. We know when we cut back on alcohol, many people lose weight. And maybe prettier isn’t the word I wanted to use but you get better skin, you feel better about yourself. Don’t you feel better about yourself when you drink a lot less or don’t drink for a while? Your anxiety lessens, your stress lessens.

So, you just think more positively about yourself and that’s a prettier place to live than beating yourself up all the time and having that internal critic go, “Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why do I keep having more wine, and more wine? And I know it’s not helping me.” We talk to ourselves prettier. And then you’re richer because you’re not wasting all this money on alcohol, and especially if you’re drinking out at night because we know that what you pay for one glass of wine you could probably buy that whole bottle at a grocery store.

So, you’re just not wasting as much money. People tell me all the time that the redness in their face goes down, their gut starts to heal. If they’ve got any type of autoimmune condition, or inflammatory condition like achy joints, or anything like that, once the stop drinking or drink a lot less a lot of that improves. People notice that when they drink a lot they get that big red nose, they feel like Rudolf. And when they stop drinking or cut way back that red nose and that rosacea and stuff in their face, all that starts to disappear.

So, when we look at all these benefits, how motivating is that? I’ll tell you, if the pharmaceutical industry could put all of that benefit in one pill, all of us would be off to the races to buy it. We’d be like, “Yes, I don’t care what it costs. Give me that. Give me that pill that makes me smarter, richer, thinner, makes me like myself better. And it makes me know that I have control around alcohol. Yes, sign me up. I want a prescription for that.”

And I want to offer that’s available to you, are you running to go get it? What’s stopping you from getting this for your life, to get to this healthier version of you, to feel amazing about yourself, to lead yourself? You know what’s stopping you? The only thing stopping you is fear, fear of the unknown, fear of what life will be like, that’s it. And so, you know what you need to do? You need to lead yourself through the fear and through the doubt. That’s what you need to do to get to the results.

And for many of you that will be the hardest part. That’ll be absolutely the hardest part is going in and saying yes to you, yes to yourself, yes to I want this and I’m ready to go after it. Once you make that decision I will tell you, so many people find the rest of the journey so much easier. And this is why I advocate for all of you here listening to this podcast especially if you keep coming back and you find that you’re overdrinking or your drinking is not where you want it to be.

You have to lead yourself, lead yourself to get to the tools that are going to change you because you deserve it, because you want it. And now is the best time before the holidays hit, before it’s an all get out and we just go out there and overindulge, put on weight, get achy joints, don’t sleep well, all stressed out. And then we feel like our life is out of control or that we should be happier, and we can’t get to a place of happiness because we’re so medicated with so much sugar, and so much alcohol.

That our emotions are up and down, and crazy, and all over, because we’re dysregulated from what we put in our mouth. Food is medicine, alcohol is medicine, alcohol is a drug, it’s a type of medicine. And if you have too much you get the toxic effects of it, you get the negative side-effects. You can still have some but when you overindulge, when you take too high of a dose you’re going to get much more of the negative side-effects.

And then come January we’re going to be so mad at how we treated ourselves, and how we didn’t lead ourselves, and how we didn’t develop control and self-discipline in this, specifically this time of year. There couldn’t be a better time of year to do this work. Make this season different than the last couple of years. For many of you, you’ve fallen into a pattern around COVID and you just can’t pull yourself out. Lead yourself, join me this month in EpicYOU because I am on fire. We are all leading ourselves to results that we want.

So, if there’s something in your life and you want to change it, lead yourself to get that change. All is you’re asking for is a bit of a better life. Who doesn’t want that? And I just want to share with you this quote that I love, “How much longer are you to wait to demand the best of yourself?” When I hear that question it just fuels me into action, it fuels me to lead myself for my benefit and for the benefit of others who I have the honor of being around and serving. Alright my dear podcast friends, I love you all so much and I will see you next week.

If you want to change your relationship with alcohol and with yourself, then come check out EpicYOU, it’s where you get individualized help mastering the tools so you can become a woman who can take it or leave it and be in control around alcohol in any situation. EpicYOU is the place for women who want to be healthy, confident and empowered to accomplish their goals and live their best life. Come join us over at epicyou.com/epicyou. That’s epicyou.com/epicyou. I can’t wait to see you there.