You are listening to the Drink Less Lifestyle Podcast with Dr. Sherry Price, episode number 79.

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 friends. How are you today? I hope everybody is having a great end of March. For me there have been some twists and turns in my personal life and in my business life. And it’s all so fun. So today I want to talk about a concept that I talk about a lot in my coaching programs. And it really dovetails nicely onto last week’s topic podcast that we talked about which was going into are we living a life where we are interested in feeling better or are we living a life where we’re interested in doing and being better?

Because as we talked last week, depending on how you answer that question is going to determine what path and what steps you take in your life. So, Stephen Covey has that concept, begin with the end in mind. And so, knowing what you want on the end really helps determine the course that you’re going to follow, the process, the steps that you want to take to get to that goal.

And if you really don’t have that goal defined do you know that you will become distracted, you will go off course? Because you won’t know what course you should be following if you really don’t clearly have the end goal in mind. So, this comes about as doing what I call low level things which really don’t move you closer to your goals or the woman that you want to be. So, these low level things I call low quality things. And those are things like buffering.

Buffering is a tool that I use that talks about how you’re just going for those quick dopamine hits. You’re going for those quick instant gratification, that pleasure zone where it’s only just about the pleasure. There’s no end game after that. So, whether you’re buffering by indulging in too much alcohol use, or indulging in too much food, or indulging in scrolling on social media ad nauseum with really no goal in mind.

Or you’re binge watching a lot of Netflix series and then Netflix knows that in the algorithm and will present to you, if you liked that series you’ll like these four others. And it just sends you on this path where you just start going down this instant gratification, numbing out, buffering. And it prevents you from going after the things that are really meaningful to you. So, when you’re buffering notice where that is taking you. To me it’s never ending.

There is never enough alcohol that’s going to eventually get us to a place that we feel good about ourselves, or good about our life, or good about what’s going on in our life. It’s always going to take us off course. The same with too much eating, that’s going to give us a life that we don’t want. It’s going to make us feel sluggish, weighed down, emotionally, mentally and even physically. It’s going to get us harder to move, harder to want us to move and do the right things, and do exercise, or go out for walks, or live a healthy lifestyle.

So, if we constantly do these buffering things we are thwarting our own progress to our goals. So, for me I’d rather engage in activities that give me dopamine hits but that are getting me closer to my goal, not further away. So, these aren’t buffering things. These aren’t things that are taking me off course, but they’re rather things that are putting me on the course to getting to my goal.

So, if I’m off course and I’m getting a life that I don’t really want I consider that to be a low quality life. I’m not really excited about it, it doesn’t really fulfill me. I’m not really doing anything meaningful and purposeful. I’m not really living the life that I really want. I’m not going after my dreams. I’m not going after my goals. I’m just kind of low level.

And what I want to propose here is going after a high quality life, going after a life that you don’t want to buffer from, that you actually want to live because you’re getting the results, you’re creating things. You’re contributing in a way. You have meaningful relationships in your life. And you’re living with purpose. When you are living your high quality life do you know that you don’t want to sit on a couch mindlessly eating, and mindlessly drinking, and mindlessly watching Netflix, after Netflix, after Netflix series?

Now, you may choose to do that to rest, to give your mind a break, do it in little portions or small portions. But it’s not the bulk of your life. And when I was consuming alcohol nightly, do you know what that did for my energy level and my motivation? It drained it. Alcohol is a big drainer. It’s a sedative. It makes us sleepy. It makes us tired. It makes us not want to go after our goals and our dreams in life. And when I did that all the time I was like, wow, why aren’t I motivated to take other action? Why aren’t I motivated to do other things?

I have all these other goals but yet I’m not pursuing them. I made excuses. I made rationalizations of why I couldn’t do them and how I was too busy, or too stressed, or now is not the right time. And all these other things that weren’t really true. So, drinking every night gave me a low quality life. And what I craved, and what I wanted, and what I deserved was a high quality life. Because who doesn’t want a high quality life? Think about it, I want high quality in my relationships. I want high quality in my health.

I want high quality self-esteem, meaning that I care so much about myself that I won’t do those actions that negate my health, that negate, or stunt, or thwart my growth. I want to fill my body with high quality foods, high quality workouts, high quality walks with my dog and my husband. I want to have high quality conversations with my friends. These are things that energize me. These are things that feed my soul. These are things that light me up. These are things that give me energy and they get me moving towards my goals.

This is how I want to show up in my life for myself and for others because to me that’s the best life. So, when I say the word ‘high quality’ what I don’t want your mind to hear is that I’m saying it has to be fancy, it has to be fancy outfits, fancy cars, or just surface level things. Now, if that stuff is meaningful to you by all means go for it. But that’s not what I mean when I mean high quality. When I say high quality what I mean is that it’s meaningful to me. It doesn’t have to be meaningful to others. It’s just meaningful to me.

And that’s why I love my program, Epic You, because living as your epic self, living your epic life means that you’re living a high quality life. It’s a life full of meaning, of purpose. And it’s the life you truly want and see yourself living. It’s in alignment with your desires, it’s in alignment with your values. And it’s living in your integrity.

And I was just having a conversation with one of the members in Drink Less Lifestyle about this. We were on this topic because she was like, “Goodness, after three months in this program I am down two pant sizes, working out consistently for the first time in years, if not decades.” Her and her husband used to fight about money and now they don’t and they put together a budget. And she’s asking for what she wants. She has a clear sense of when she wants to retire and when she gets to retire. And this has led to such peace of mind for her that she hasn’t had in years.

Because she was drinking every night as a way to buffer away all the problems. She didn’t have the energy to tackle them. She didn’t even know how to tackle them. She wasn’t spending her time fixing the problems and fixing the areas of her life that she wanted fixed. And we were talking about just in these three, maybe four months, she was sharing how much more energy she has and how she’s so happy. And she hasn’t been this happy in years. She feels younger and lighter, and that her life matters again because she now sees she’s living her high quality life.

She’s living a life that she wants to be living and before she wasn’t. And since that was painful, she just wanted to buffer out of it and buffer away from it. But now she’s going after exactly what she wants in life. She’s not coming home from the hospital after pulling extra shifts due to COVID and people being out and feeling sorry for herself that she just throws back the drinks. And when she did that she realized that just takes her further away from the woman that she wants to be.

And she was living in a household where her family members were like, “You need to go to AA. You need to start going to AA. You need to clean this up.” But that wasn’t the approach that she wanted. She had done that in the past but she’s like, “I’m just not there. I don’t want to do it that way.” She wanted to learn skills to stay in her power, improve her life, clean up the things that weren’t working and get over this drinking thing so she can just drink on her terms.

It was no longer this dependency, this emotional dependency that I talk a lot where women really struggle with just wanting that drink because emotionally they feel not good, or they want to feel better because things in their life aren’t where they want them to be. And now she’s able to do that. She’s able to drink on her terms. She was drinking most nights and now she just drinks on weekends occasionally.

So, in working with me I helped her see how she could have the high quality life that she wanted and deserved as well as the steps to get there. She wrote me a text yesterday and she said, “The biggest change you have helped me to achieve is to stop self-loathing and start learning tools to improve so many areas in my life. Thank you so much, Sherry, I’m so glad I found you.” And this is what it feels like to have a high quality life. And when you want a high quality life you will accept help from people who you know can help get you there.

I remember there was a goal in my life and it was to become a pharmacist. So, I knew the path to get there was to go to pharmacy school. And when I wasn’t doing well in a subject I’d go to the teacher for help because I knew the teacher could help me get to my goal which was to do better in that class, in order to become a pharmacist. So, accepting help from others is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It’s a sign of I know what I want and this person can help me get it.

And I’m always thinking that way in my own life. If I want something who can help me get it faster? Because I want the quickest path to my high quality life. If I know that I go to the gym and do my own training can get me to my goal, but if I work out with a personal trainer who could design a workout to get the results exactly the way I want them and to show up on my body, it’s a no brainer to hire the personal trainer. Plus, they can get me there faster. Why wouldn’t I?

And this is what I want you to think for your life. And what I want to offer is that it’s so fun to even help others achieve their high quality life. When I got that message from my client I was like, yes. It’s why I high five other women that I work out with when we’re friends and we’re working out, and we crush a good workout, we high five each other. It’s like yes, that was a high quality workout. I showed up and so did you.

Or when I’m working with my daughter and she’s got a challenging math problem and then she finally gets it, we high five. It’s like yes, that’s high quality work that you put into that. And that’s going to lead to you learning it and leading to your transformation to learn how to do well in math, and learn how to do good in school. And so, we want to celebrate the high quality life because it is worth celebrating. You work to get it so let’s celebrate it. And let’s celebrate it together.

It’s why I love having a community of women where we’re all celebrating each other’s successes because it’s meaningful to get something that you want. The pursuit is meaningful. High quality does not mean high ticket or pricey, it means it’s meaningful. It’s of high value to you and high value means it aligns with your values. And if something is so valuable to you like your health, or losing weight, or getting control of this drinking thing once and for all, let’s go after it. Why aren’t you going after it?

Two of the reasons people don’t go after it is because they’d rather pursue lesser goals. It’s about feeling better in the moment. It’s just about buffering and not really having to go after the high quality life. They’re settling for a low quality life. They’re in it for just the immediate gratification and they give up on the goal at the end. They give up on a life of more meaning, of more purpose, a life that is more worthwhile to live. And when you do this it causes you to feel a low level of depression and a low level of self-loathing because it’s not what your true desire is.

Your true desire is to go after your accomplishments, to get the life you want, to meet your goals, to have a life of meaning and purpose. We are built, we are made to live a high quality life. That’s what keeps us humans designing and contributing more and more to the world.

Another reason people don’t go after a high quality life is because they have the false belief that they can’t get it. And most people haven’t even tried really hard to get the life that they wanted, or they tried for a time period and then just stalled out. They think that the older they get that they shouldn’t have such high goals. Really? I’ll tell you what, most men don’t feel that way or think that way.

There’s nothing wrong with going after more goals. It keeps your spirit alive. It keeps you engaged in your life, and showing up, and contributing in a very powerful way. It’s like you’re serious about what you want to accomplish in your life. How fun is that? And when you’re pursuing a high quality life you don’t have this low level depression and this low level self-loathing because you’re not settling. You’re not settling for less.

Maybe you crave high quality connection with your spouse or your partner but you’re not doing anything about it. Maybe you’re expecting them to take the lead, or to make the first move, or to change. That’s a completely powerless position to be in. And that’s not how a high quality woman thinks or acts. The high quality woman thinks, how could I get a high quality life, and a high quality marriage, and high quality connection.

And just think about all the women that you admire. They all go after their dreams and their desires. They all speak their truth and what’s on their minds because they have high integrity for who they are, the impact they want to make in this world and they’re not going to settle. So, for me I’m making a huge impact in the world. I’m freeing women from a low quality life of suffering and feeling stagnant. And offering them a path and steps to a high quality life.

And I’ll tell you, drinking is just such a small part of that. That’s one area we clean up but we clean up so many more because you know, drinking isn’t the real problem. It never is the real problem. Our brain finds it as a solution and it’s a fake solution because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t clear up any problems and it actually gets in the way of cleaning up a problem. It doesn’t change your life into an epic high quality life. All is it does is keep you stuck and feeling enslaved to it. And that produces a low quality life.

How you know is because you yearn for a better life or for real solutions to the problems in your life. Also think about this, if drinking really was the main problem, when you stop drinking you would just be different. Your life would be different. You would just love your life but that’s not what most people feel when they stop drinking, you know why? Because all the problems are still there, they remain. And now we see them because we’re not intoxicated, we’re not numbed out.

And the problems appear bigger and more apparent because we’re not numbing from them. And when this happens people feel like, I can’t deal, or maybe they feel a void in their life that they want to fill but they just don’t know how or they’re not taking steps to do it. And so, what happens, they’re like, “This sucks.” And they go back to drinking. Yeah, of course, if you don’t clean up the problems you’ll go back to drinking.

But that’s not what we do in my programs. We fix the problems so that you create your epic life, so that you create your high quality life. And when you do that your desire for alcohol vanishes because if you’re living your best life you don’t want to numb out from it. You want to be in it. You want to engage in it. Your life brings you happiness. Your relationships and your connections to others brings you joy. Why would you want to numb out from that? You don’t.

And this is what I love to work on and this is what we talk about all the time in my programs. We work on your life. We free you from what’s not working and we get you into what does. Because if not you will suffer emotionally and mentally if you aren’t living the life that you want to be living. And you start believing that this is as good as it gets, I guess I just have to make the best of it. And you become stoic and apathetic. You feel like you’re just going through the motions.

And you even start to question what is your purpose. I see that a lot in my clients. I know this because I see it, it wears on them, they wear it like a heavy emotional weight. And this is so apparent because right now inside Epic You we are talking about removing that emotional and mental clutter in your life so that you could go on and free yourself to live that high quality life.

So, as I wrap up this episode today where are you at? Are you living a high quality, aka meaningful life? What qualities are missing if any? What do you want to pursue more of that you’re not doing? And if you want to pursue more of something how can you invite that into your life to give you meaning and purpose, and going after it with full gusto and energy? So, if you know the steps that can create that and those are your power moves, by all means, start taking that action, start doing that, start getting the results in your life.

And if you can’t take those power moves it’s because you have life problems that are getting in your way and I can help you solve those problems so you no longer want alcohol. And you get to become a woman who can take it or leave it with drinking. If you want my help go to drinklesslifestyle.com and check out my different programs that you can sign up for to get my help because living a high quality life is so rewarding and fun.

Alright my friends, have an epic week and I’ll see you in next week’s episode.

Thanks for listening to the Drink Less Lifestyle. If you’re ready to change your relationship with alcohol, check out my free guide, How to Effectively Break the Overdrinking Habit at sherryprice.com/startnow. That’s sherryprice.com/startnow. I’ll see you next week.