You are listening to the Drink Less Lifestyle Podcast with Dr. Sherry Price, episode number 94.

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. How are you doing? Here in the United States, we are having summer and I just love summer. It is my favorite season. And wherever you are tuning in from out there in the world I hope you are in a great season. And as I think about seasons I wanted to do a podcast on this, talking about our rhythms in our life. Because when you look at time, when you look at nature, when you look at things in life there’s always a rhythm to it.

If you think about the day we follow a 24 hour time period. And if you think about our bodies they are on their own natural circadian rhythm. Our bodies have that own internal clock. And if you look at a woman’s body it has another rhythm, a monthly cycle.

And as we look to nature we have the four seasons. We have spring where budding begins and blooming starts to happen and summer where it’s all out beautiful with the flowers and the trees and everything is so lush. And then we head to fall where they’re starting to lose their leaves and lose their petals. And as we go into winter, nature tends to be in that hibernation mode. And then we’re back to spring again and blooming. And there’s always rhythms in these cycles in life.

There is that ebb and that flow, a season for reaping, and a season for harvesting, and a season for sowing. And we go through seasons where times are tough or hard and then they are easy. We feel these cycles in our life.

And I’m noticing that I just went through a cycle of major content creation in my business. I was heads down, getting lots of content developed for Epic You because in the program as you know we launch a new topic every month. And I was on fire with ideas and how to solve problems, and how to help women work through some of the common struggles in their life. And I love these seasons in my life because I am fueled by passion and desire to create these great workbooks and videos, and tools for my clients so they can tap into their power and live their life the way they want it designed.

And then I was ending that season or that flow, and that workflow that I was in and I came upon some family issues that needed to be tended to and they needed to be addressed. And so, I kept going. I kept running because I wanted to help them through these tough times because it brings me joy to help others. And now as I’m listening to my body it is telling me that it is time to enter a different rhythm. It is time to enter a different season and that’s a time for some rest and restoration.

Well, I love running at full steam ahead, I love being in that work and creation mode. But I also recognize you can’t stay there forever. Your body needs time to recharge. And I just posted about this in our group community’s channel on Slack for Epic You where my goal for this month is powerful relaxation because I’m craving that right now. My body is giving me that information that it needs to sit and recharge, rest and recharge.

And so, I want to ask you, how often do you tune into your body and notice its rhythms? And do you even know how to tune into your body and listen to what it needs? What I find is that women are very intuitive. We have that sense that we could pick up on others very well. I know when my mom calls she can tell with just my first hello if I’m having a good day or if I’m struggling or what’s going on with just that one word, hello. We can read when somebody we love, something is off or something is missing, or they’re not having their best day.

And I hear this when I’m coaching women, many of them are so tuned into their kids, they know when something’s missing or something is off, or they’re very tuned into their spouse’s needs. But oftentimes what I find is some women can’t tap into what they need and what’s going on inside for them. They’ve tuned that out or they’ve ignored themselves for a long time and so they’ve lost that ability to tap in and to tune into what’s going on.

And I recently deepened my work in this area by getting formal training on becoming an inner voice coach, one, because I wanted to help me and two, because I wanted to tune in better to what was going on for my clients, because our body’s filled with so mush wisdom. And I wanted to help women tap into that, tap into that more for their benefit.

Because I’ll tell you, when you chronically drink or you overdrink quite a bit you are tuning out from yourself. And you’re creating a different rhythm in your life. You’re creating a rhythm of drinking and overdrinking which further disconnects you from your true wants and your desires. I remember when I was overdrinking, it just made me apathetic. If you were to ask me why I was drinking, I really couldn’t put my finger on it other than saying, “It’s just a habit, it’s just the rhythm that I fell into. It’s just a cycle I keep doing over and over.”

And I couldn’t get below the surface any more than that. That was just the rhythm I was in. I blamed the drinking. I couldn’t see my triggers and why they were happening. And so, what I want to help you do is to tune into what is going on inside your body because your body will tell you when it’s time to charge it up and work hard. And your body will also give you signs when you need rest, and relaxation, and recharging. And when I look back over the course of my life, I tend to see things.

I see when my body is conditioned or more likely to want to take action and go full steam ahead and when it requires relaxation and recovery. And maybe this is left over programming from when you’re in high school and going through college where you get your summers off, at least off from the academic part. Now, I had jobs during the summer, so I’m not saying I sat on the couch the whole time but it was a different type of rhythm. And it did feel like there was a lot more relaxation time, relaxation for my brain because it wasn’t taking rigorous tests every other week.

And so, I notice that in the summertime I look for more social connection, backyard barbecues, I also look for more rest and recovery during these times. Now, overdrinking I know I used alcohol as a way to relax. I felt I needed it in my life because I couldn’t rest and recharge on my own. I became dependent on it as a method to drive down into my relaxation, as a method to get to my relaxation point. And so inside Epic You we are talking about transforming our stress, not just managing it.

Yes, there are great tools to manage stress, but you really want to learn how to transform it to where it melts away. And being on the go, go, go keeps us in that adrenalin pumping, cortisol pumping, got to be on all the time, go, go, go, everything needs to be done, this needs to be done. I have so many projects on my plate. And this needs to get done. And then I need to make dinner. And then this needs to happen. And then we need to go to that barbecue party and blah, blah, blah.

We are on all the time. And our bodies aren’t designed to go all day long. And if you think about our bodies, even our bodies signal, hey, we need rest and recovery. We need sleep, our brain needs to sleep in order to be able to function properly and appropriately. Our digestive system needs rest where it doesn’t need any more food or any more things coming down the esophagus. We need to clean up what’s been given to it over the course of the day.

And so, when we do that seven to eight hours of sleep, that’s a way that the body is recharging itself so it can go, go, go the next day. We’re like a battery. We can’t just keep going, and going, and going. We need that place where we can just unwind, rest and recharge. And so, a couple of things as I’m going about this process this month focusing on powerful relaxation and recharging. I’m doing a couple of things that I want to share with you.

One is when you listen to your body and you know what it needs, and for this case looking at decreasing the stress in my life, and transforming that stress, and focusing on recharging, I’m adding in more downtime and rest. So that first thing I’m doing, adding in some time where I can just be, where I’m doing less running, more being, more relaxing. The other night I slept for 10 hours, it felt magnificent. My body was needing that extra rest in this season and it felt delicious. Have you ever gotten to that place?

Maybe you take a nap and you’re like, “That nap felt amazing. I feel so recharged after sleeping a good night’s sleep or taking that power nap.” And any time I overdrink I don’t get that powerful, restful sleep. It prevents us from getting into that deep REM sleep where we feel truly rested and restored. I know if I spend a lot of time out in the sun and at the beach, that it’s just draining to be in the sun, direct sunlight for that long. And so, I come in and I love the cold air and the air conditioning. And my body craves a little bit of a shuteye and a little bit of a power nap.

So, I’m practicing the tools that we are learning on transforming your stress into my own life this month because we always have strategies that we can fall back on. So, we can learn to soothe ourselves and not rely on alcohol to do that. So, I’m focusing on more white space. I love calling it white space in my life this month. Some people call it more margin where we’re not packing our calendars back, to back, to back and taking on more to-do’s and more projects.

So how about you, where can you commit to making more white space this month for yourself if you are needing to lower the stress level in your life? Is this a season or a rhythm that you want to be in where you give yourself some more time to breathe, and appreciate, and take in all the beauty that life offers, especially when it’s in full bloom? Are you taking time just to slow down just a bit more, enjoy those conversations around the dinner table, enjoy an evening sunset, or taking a stroll after dinner since we have more light in our nights?

Or do you like to get up early and watch the sunrise, or notice the different smells in the air this time of year? And one thing I’m deliberately taking a stance on is increasing my time freedom this month by lessening all the things I’ve committed to, lessening my obligations. Which brings me to point number two, for powerful relaxation, I’m subtracting things from my lie that don’t suit me right now. They could be small distractions that I have let accumulate or things that just aren’t serving me in this cycle, this rhythm of my life.

So, I mentioned over the past few months I’d been grinding out the work and doing this amazing content for the ladies in Epic You. And I’ve been loving spending all the things that I’m learning and all the things I’ll be teaching there. And I know it’ll pay off big for the ladies in the program. So, as we’re finishing up all the workbooks and all the videos that have been created, I’m now seeing I have more time but I’m also looking at how else have I been spending my time.

And there was an activity I was involved in that took an enormous amount of my time. And when I look at the results it was creating, it wasn’t providing me as much benefit when I got honest with myself as I thought it was. I made the commitment months ago and I was doing this activity and sometimes when I got involved in this activity there’d be more commitments to do and more projects to do that came up from signing up for this activity. But what I was seeing the results that I wanted from this activity, just wasn’t producing.

There was a mismatch from the time involved to what was being produced in terms of the increased result in my life. And when I really looked at the facts and when I really boiled it down, I decided I’m just going to eliminate it from my calendar. Just because I committed to that a few months ago, doesn’t mean I need to still continue to commit to it today. So, it freed up time, it freed up that emotional component that I’m like, I need to do this, I need to do this, I need to get involved, I need to do this activity. It’s freed up that emotional component for me as well.

Because we want to look at our time and how we spend it. We’re always spending our time and as our time’s spent on a cost, something that costs us something, meaning there’s little return on investment, it’s just a huge sunk cost. Or are we investing our time in something which would produce greater results in our life? Now, we talk about this in the time management course within Epic You because we want to look at how we’re spending our time. Is it a cost or is it an investment that we’re making?

Because we want to make sure that we’re getting the results that we want. And if we’re not then maybe we shouldn’t be spending our time in this way because it’s too costly for us. I’m also looking at other things I could be subtracting in my life. When I was writing a lot and creating a lot of content I was also noticing I was consuming a lot of coffee. And so, in this season of my life where I want to relax and recharge, I also want to reset.

And I don’t want that much caffeine coming in so I’m weaning myself off of caffeine for the month and this feels good to me to do right now. And it feels like something my body’s ready to take on, a reset in terms of the coffee intake.

Another distraction I noticed that’s creeped in is that I started looking at my phone within five minutes of getting out of bed. And I know that by looking at my phone and seeing all the emails that come in and all the things that I have got to respond to, it just elevates my cortisol level, gets my adrenalin going. And I decided to get back to a more peaceful morning routine because that allows me to recharge, and recover, and reset. It also becomes a distraction because I click on something and I go down that rabbit hole. And then all of a sudden it’s a time suck.

So, for this month I’ve decided we’re just going to eliminate that distraction and I encourage you to do this in your life too. What distractions have creeped up a bit too much and now they are too much of a time suck. They’re not allowing you to really powerfully relax. They’re causing your blood pressure to go up. They’re causing you to engage in your nervous system especially at times when you want to calm your nervous system which brings me to point number three.

Is that I’m focusing on increasing my self-soothing activities and exercises because these are a way that I can help regulate my nervous system without needing food, or alcohol to do it. I know the biggest reason women overdrink is because they do it for emotional reasons. They feel anxious. They feel they need to relax. And that I will be talking about in an upcoming podcast as I’m doing research on this component of the main reason that drives overdrinking for women.

And anxiety is an expression of a revved up nervous system, we’re activated. We’re thinking about the future. We’re nervous how something’s going to turn out. We’ve got fear. We’ve got questions. We’ve got uncertainty. And so, this causes a feeling of restlessness inside of the body and we want to pace, or we feel a little bit caged, or anxious. And we want to get rid of that energy so what do we do? We turn to alcohol to turn down the volume of that, to take the edge off, to be comforted, to soothe us.

And so, for this month I’m increasing my commitment to doing self-soothing exercises. Because while I do them daily, I’ve gotten away from doing enough reps where it makes a difference on my nervous system. And these only take a few seconds to a few minutes each day and they work to lower my anxiety and my stress. So, I’m recommitting to doing more reps of these.

And actually, we were just talking on the last Epic You call about these reps and how to do them so we lower our stress, and we lower our own anxiety because these are the places where we struggle and where we turn to alcohol. And we don’t want to be doing that. So, we want to retrain the brain that we can be self-soothers. We don’t require alcohol to soothe us. And we don’t require alcohol to calm our nerves. And the great news is we have that ability. We just forgot.

So many of us within Epic You decided to commit to doing these exercises. And we know that by doing these exercises we’re going to feel better. We’re going to lower and transform our stress and we’re going to be more emotionally resilient. And we’re practicing these as some of us are going out to stressful events like weddings when there’s some social anxiety, or other engagements where we can tend to be revved up. Because nothing is more powerful than being able to rely on yourself to emotionally regulate versus having to rely on food or drinks to do that.

So how about for you? What practices help you powerfully relax? Do you know self-soothing exercises that work for you? And I like to call these our power players for relaxation because we can rely on them at any time so we don’t need alcohol, so we don’t need to overdrink. Because we know if we do drink the ironic thing is, is that it does increase stress and anxiety. We know that it doubles these feelings in the body because it is a depressant. And so, we get the unnatural high and then boom, we get the super low crash.

And then the super low crash happens the next day around the same time that we tend to want to drink. So, then we’re like, “Wow, well, here’s my anxiety again. Here’s my restlessness again. I can’t seem to relax. I guess I need alcohol.” Which is just not true. And there’s nothing more powerful than arming yourself and your toolbelt with strategies that you can turn to, to cause that relaxation for yourself so you don’t need to overeat or overdrink.

And when you overeat or you overdrink it just loads your life with other problems like you can’t sleep or don’t get a great night’s sleep, or you have weight gain, or you’re forgetting conversations, or you’re just downright mad at yourself because you’re like, “Why do I keep doing this when it doesn’t make sense?” I’d rather empower you with life enhancing and energy giving strategies where you can become independent from alcohol.

And the best part is that these strategies help you feel better and they give you energy and more vitality so that you can go and live the life that you want. And if you need help learning what activities and what exercises you can do to self-soothe, come join us inside Epic You. We are talking about these strategies on our calls and inside the group program. You get access to all this amazing material plus 18 plus programs, plus more to come. There is so much goodness inside that you won’t want to miss it.

And we are a community of ladies that powerfully lift each other up. Alright my beautiful ladies, that’s what I have for you this week and I’ll see you next week.

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.