Alcohol is a Compensation Pattern & What You Need To Do To Quit

(soft music) - What is up SDC fam? My name is Barty Perez. I'm the stop drinking coach, and I'm back with a new episode today. And before I dig in, I wanna wish everybody a happy new year. And I hope the first 13 days of January has been serving you well. As we step into a new year, this is a really great opportunity for all of us to really just reflect on our life and who we are and how we've been showing up. And what we wanna call into this new year, what we wanna create, what habits we wanna change, who we wanna become, the power that we wanna step into. And also the things that we realize aren't serving us and the things that we wanna let go. And so in today's episode, I really want to drill in and talk about alcohol as a compensation pattern, right? When we drink alcohol, there's all of us who are like, dude, I really just love to change my consciousness. I love to get fucked up. I love to just feel what it feels like to be buzzed. And it's like, yeah, for sure. Everybody who drinks alcohol likes that. Everybody loves to party. Everybody loves to let loose and let go and disconnect from our life and work and relationships and the stress and overwhelm and all the different things that we feel like maybe take a lot of energy and overwhelm us in our life. But what's more important to realize is that like alcohol and the use of alcohol in this dysfunctional relationship we have with alcohol outside of that is a compensation pattern for other things in our life. And so what's a compensation pattern? A compensation pattern is something that we apply in order to protect ourselves from something else, right? So for example, let's talk about a really simple one. People pleasing is a really, really common compensation pattern that a lot of people have. And the reason we develop a compensation pattern called people pleasing is because at some point in our life in our past, maybe in our childhood, maybe during our adolescence growing up, maybe using some past relationship, we felt like we had to overextend ourselves and constantly say yes or go above and beyond to make sure that other people are okay or happy with us because we were fearful of what might happen if we didn't compensate in that way. We were fearful about what might happen if, you know, we weren't constantly saying yes. And so what's that fear? That fear is typically the fear of rejection, the fear of argument, the fear of conflict, the fear of people creating distance from us, the fear of people not liking us, the fear of something bad happening, right? Because at one point in our life, we said no, we drew a hard line, we said a boundary, we showed up in a way that we felt like at the time was true and authentic to ourselves, and then there was a repercussion, there was a repercussion, right, maybe it was with our family, maybe our parents were showing up in a certain way, maybe our brothers or sisters or someone in our family was showing up in a different way, and that created an uneasy feeling inside of us, a created a lack of safety, a created anxiety or fear. And so in that moment in our life, we believed, we created a compensation pattern that said, "Hey, I need to overextend myself "and make sure that I do everything I can to say yes "or to take care of all these other things for these people, "or else something bad was gonna happen." Or else I was gonna continue feeling these feelings of a lack of safety, or I'm going to continue to feel unsafe, or this person is gonna continue to withhold love and affection from me, right? So you can see that people pleasing is a compensation pattern against some underlying fear or anxiety, right? And so the way these compensation patterns are developed happened kind of slowly under our noses over the course of our life, right? So I want you to think back to like a child, right? Think back to when you were a kid, before the fear, before the anxiety, before the loneliness, before the different pains and traumas that you incurred through your life, right? A child, you know, they're not really compensating for anything, you know, a 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 year old, they're not doing a ton of compensation. They're believe, they believe they're whole and complete as they are, and they're open, and they're creative, and they're exploring the possibilities of potential, right? And they're moving through life, fully connected to their authentic self. They're just being who they are, they're a kid, they like to play, they like to mess around, maybe they're a little mischievous, right? And then what happens? We all go through life and we have experiences, big T or little T traumas, maybe they're not even considered trauma, they're just considered experiences that in those moments when we're children, we don't know how to manage them, they're too overwhelming. The emotions that are coming up are more than our nervous system is capable of dealing with, and more than our conscious mind and intelligence has the capacity to make sense of our process. And so as we go through life, as children, we go through life and we experience these things that are hurtful and painful, and we don't know how to make sense of and manage. And when we go through experiences that are hurtful, painful, that we don't know how to make sense of and manage, especially during those early formative years, from zero to seven or zero to 12, zero to 14, depending on who you talk to or ask. And we don't have the intellect of mental and emotional regulation and enough context of life and reality to be able to really process those things and return our mental, emotional, physical and energetic cycle back from intense experience, back down to safety, that experience gets stuck in our mind and it gets stuck in our nervous system. And it's not your fault, this is just what the human body does. This is what our brain does. It's a natural survival adaptation to pain. So it takes that painful experience and think of it like putting on a pair of glasses permanently. Doesn't have to be permanent, but until we learned what's going on unconsciously and we begin to heal, those pair of glasses that we put on our permanent and now we look out into the world through the lens of that filter. So if it had to do with relationships, if it had to do with our parents, if it had to do with friends at school, if it had to do with stepping into your power or being your true authentic self, or if it had to do with feeling certain types of emotions that maybe were okay or not okay, or there was repercussions around it, when you would voice how you're feeling or whatever it was, maybe it was not listened to or denied or rejected or whatever, right? We look out into the world through that filter. And so we look out and we are unconsciously filtering all of our new experiences through that past pain, right? Through that risk that we took where we failed, through that putting our self out there and it was denied or rejected, where we tried to do X, Y, or Z and it didn't work out, right? And so what happens is we start to develop these compensation patterns, right? All we're trying to do if you go back to listen to some of these other episodes that I've put, the prime directive of every human being is to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain, right? And as we move into becoming a self-sufficient, responsible, accountable adult, we're still caring, tons and tons and tons of experiences from our past that weren't fully processed, that still create some level of pain inside of us. This could be fear, this could be anxiety, it could be insecurity, a lack of confidence, a lack of self-esteem, right? All these things that show up as quote unquote mental health that people just give you a pill to amount from, our experiences from our past that are unresolved, that still live in our mind and body. And so what we do as a normal natural process is we create an adaptation or a compensation pattern to protect ourselves from re-experiencing that pain again, right? And so what happens is given this knowledge, given this understanding of who we are and what this architecture looks like and how it's composed and created, we then go out and become an adolescent. And when we are truly in one of the most sensitive, formative, vulnerable periods of our life, we all are exposed to this drug called alcohol. And alcohol comes in for many of us, number one, as just a tool and a resource to go out and begin experiencing the boundaries of what it's like to kind of start to-- to get close to being an adult and disconnect from our parents and start to develop our own identity and start to become more social and go to parties and high school and do all these things. And it seems like this really cool thing. It's like, hey, I'm rebelling. I'm getting away from my parents. I'm finally forming my own identity. I'm beginning to explore all these new aspects of life that I didn't have access to when I was a little kid. And that can seem really cool and fun. But on the other side of that, on the other side of that coin, what's happening is that, hey, we've still got all these underlying mechanics that are probably unresolved and are creating psychological or emotional fear or a lack of safety or insecurity or whatever. And the fact that part about alcohol is that in the short term, it seems to work as such a great solution for so many different things. You're fearful, you're anxious, you're lonely, you have social anxiety, you're bored, you don't know what to do. Alcohol, the way the neurochemical cocktail of it in terms of how it increases dopamine and GABA is this almost like perfect, you know, euphoric/sensitive effect, which disconnects you from all that pain and puts you into this totally different state of reality. And that seems really attractive. But the problem is that alcohol is so negatively impactful on your neurochemistry that it starts to create a feeding cycle of addiction. If the prime directive of human beings and our brain is to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain, then in a way, when you look at alcohol, it's like the, in a fucked up way, it's the perfect solution for that. Because all you have to do is go to the store, buy a couple drinks and you instantly get access to pleasure and you instantly get away to alleviate and disconnect and avoid that pain, right? And so what happens when you drink alcohol? It instantly raises your dopamine 4x above baseline and it makes you feel really good in the moment. But then what happens, right? There's no free lunch in nature. What goes up must come down. And then when the alcohol wears off, your dopamine drops below baseline, your GABA drops below baseline. And so now the next day, you feel worse than you did initially. You feel worse than you did before you drank. Maybe you were drinking because you were lonely and sad or frustrated or overwhelmed or angry or stressed out or whatever, right? But now the next day, you feel worse. You feel like shit. And on top of that, you're more anxious because now your GABA has dipped below baseline, right? The anxiety, the anxiety that you feel a day, two, three days after you've been drinking, right? And so what happens now? If the prime directive is to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain, well now you're below baseline and what's the prime directive? The prime directive is now that you're in pain. Now all the systems in your mind and body and physiological system are now trying to pursue pleasure again. So how do we pursue pleasure? We sit around and be useless and we binge Netflix. We order greasy, nasty food. And then we maybe drink some more, right? Or the hair of the dog or whatever they call it, right? Hair of the cat, where it's like you go and you have a little bit of alcohol to try to get you back up to that baseline. And so you can see that alcohol, it's already becoming this compensation pattern. You're already used, it's like first you tried to use alcohol as a way to compensate for fear, for social anxiety, for loneliness, for sadness, for overwhelmed stress, anger. But now you're caught in its grips and you're using alcohol to compensate for how shitty you feel from drinking, right? And so if you see this for what it is, you can see that it's a rigged casino game. It's a rigged system. You're going into the casino and you're putting $10 in and it's giving you a dollar, right? And this is the perpetual cycle of drinking alcohol. And so it's very, very important to understand that like beyond why you think you enjoy drinking, you have to begin to lift the hood and look at the underlying mechanics of what's happening here. We all are drinking alcohol as a way to compensate for something, right? It's nobody's just drinking willy-nilly out of the blue. That's just like not how it works. You don't go and you take a drug and then just have no repercussions after and say, yeah, this is just this thing that shows up or pops up from time to time with no real intention. Like everybody, everyone listening to this, you know why you drink. You know how you feel after. And more importantly, you know what you are avoiding in your life, right? And part of this journey, in fact, I wouldn't say part of it. I would say what this journey is actually about at the deepest core level is the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual evolution of you as a human being. Alcohol is like, it's this thing that comes into our life and becomes a blockade. It's the thing that we use to procrastinate against the deeper mechanics of our operating system that we are avoiding, numbing out, running from, don't want to acknowledge, don't want to deal with, and don't want to take accountability and responsibility for fixing and healing in our life, you know. And that's really, really, really important to understand because if you've been trying to quit drinking and you have a problematic relationship with alcohol, what everybody just thinks is I just need to stop drinking. I just need to put the bottle down. I just need to take a week off. I just need to do dry January and I'll be fine. I just need to take a little bit of time off here and there. I just need to go 90 days and it's fine. And it's like, if you think that way, you're going to continue to stay stuck in the cycle because alcohol is a band-aid. Alcohol is the symptom. It is the surface level reflection. It is the compensation pattern that we find ourselves in because we are avoiding something deeper. Like for me, when I look back, let me share with you in what ways alcohol was my compensation strategy. So when I first discovered alcohol when I was 14 or 15, alcohol seemed like a really great tool in strategy while I was that age to feel like I was more independent, to feel like I'm no longer a kid, to feel like I could go out to a party and socialize and be the life of the party. I was a, you know, the start running back of my high school to be the popular guy, you know, way to meet girls and to do all these different things and, you know, feel like I'm rebelling and, you know, I've got all this testosterone running inside of me and I could be who I am and do what I want. I don't have to answer to anybody. So there was that. There's those patterns and I could be the guy, right? You know, and then as my relationship with alcohol sort of continue junior year into senior year, that was kind of the thing, right? Let's party. Let's do what I fuck we want. Let's not answer to anybody. Let's be our own individual. Let's rebel. Let's be, you know, against the system. You know, I was always into conspiracies and the government, like fuck it, you know, like, I'm just my own person, you know, I'm an adult now. I don't answer to anyone, whatever. Right? So there's all that, right? It was fun. You get crazy. You go to parties. You're up till two in the morning doing crazy shit. It was all that. But then out of high school, I found myself with a severely problematic relationship with alcohol as a binge drinker and I loved the dopamine. I was a fiend for how alcohol made me feel, right? It's not a pissing contest because I know you do too, right? Everybody who has a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, alcohol, you sort of alcoholism whatever. It's like, yeah, I get it. You love to drink. You love the way it makes you feel. So did I. So did I. That's why I drank so much, right? But then once you're at a high school and you kind of do all that and like, okay, close that chapter. That's in the book, right? Now you're 18, 19, 20 in your early 20s. And maybe you're going to college, I didn't go to college. Well, I went to community college. I didn't go to university. I didn't have that university experience. But then you kind of keep doing that, right? Now you're more of all those different things. You're finally officially an adult. You're finally broken away from your parents. You're finally really stepping into and forging and trying to figure out your identity and who you are and how you want to show up in the world and what you want to do and how you want to contribute and your deepening relationships and getting better at socializing and all these different things, right? Learning skills. And that continues on, right? But all those things from our past, those fears, those anxieties, those self-limiting beliefs, none of those things got resolved. None of them got resolved. And now you're getting deeper and deeper and deeper into a whole with a substance that that is augmenting your neurochemistry in the way that your brain prioritizes. is reality and makes decisions every day and becoming more neurochemically deficient, lowering your baseline level of dopamine, right? Requiring yourself to feel like you can only socialize if you have this drug and that things are boring without it, right? And your, and alcohol continues to become this compensation pattern. So into my 20s, now that I'm out of high school and kind of pass like the growing phase, you know, and being super rebellious, now into my 20s, I'm starting to reflect on like, okay, who am I? What do I want? What's my purpose? What's my direction? What career do I want to get into? What skills do I have? How can I contribute to the world? What do I want to do? How much money do I want to make? What kind of lifestyle do I want to have? And I start reflecting on these types of questions, which are the same questions that I'm sure almost everybody reflects on in their early 20s, early to mid 20s. And for me, right, I knew that in my 20s, I wanted to live and be the person that I am today, like this stop drinking coach, this person who is running his own deal, you know, in entrepreneur, using his gifts and his talents is connected to his true authentic self in a way, living in a way that he's helping other people and guiding and supporting other people through their life. I've just, I got into personal development when I was 14 when my dad died. I've read hundreds of books around all these different topics and like my core base architecture from when I can remember when I was seven years old and really start to become conscious was that like the universe, the nature of the human experience, consciousness, the concept or ideology of maybe God or some higher power or some underlying intelligence that's like running that like I've just always been fascinated by these things, right? Because I've always just trying to, I've always been trying to make sense of like, what the hell is this? Why am I here? What's going on? What's the purpose? Like why? Why? Why? Why this? Universe has been around 13 and a half or so, maybe some scientists are guessing 20 plus billion years now and maybe it resets and starts over it like it's just wild. And all this time went by and I have no recollection of anything that happened. And all of a sudden now and I'm this guy, I'm Barty and like it's just mind blowing to me, right? And I encourage you to continue to tap back in and reflect on how mind blowing it is to just be alive and how none of this is really normal, but we've accepted it as normal, you know? And so my compensation for alcohol or the reason I was using alcohol and like felt like I needed to drink was that there was all this part of me that like knew I needed to go out and start stepping into this version of myself. I needed to start using my voice. I needed to start taking more risks. I know I knew I needed to start just like stepping up. I knew I needed to start stepping up in life if I wanted to become this version of myself. And every weekend when it came to like the opportunity of like spending time and making forward progress on this other thing outside of my job that was paying my bills, I had an immense amount of fear and anxiety and these really unsettling feelings that felt immobilizing too overwhelming. Like where do I start? What do I do? What lane? How much work is it going to take? Am I really committed to the process? Am I really willing to make all these sacrifices? But I knew it was something I really wanted. But I just like it was so like it depends and needles in my body like the it was like a freeze response because I didn't have the confidence. I didn't have the self-esteem. I actually had a lot of insecurity around my voice which is insane because now everybody today says they really enjoy my voice and it happens to be like one of my greatest assets but growing up and that's why this whole everything is like tied together. It's weird. Like all of my pain was directly tied to alcohol and alcohol was the compensation strategy for that underlying pain. Yet the pain that I ultimately got to a place where I learn how to process through all of that pain became my greatest asset. It became the substance of my conversation inside of stop drinking coach. It became the substance of every one of my episodes. Right? So you can see that for 10-15 years while I was drinking I was using alcohol as a compensation strategy as a compensation pattern for a bunch of un-unprocessed stuff inside of me that was hurtful and created limitation and sadness and insecurity and fear and a lack of confidence and all these different things. So the compensation pattern was because I knew I needed to do more. That life was more than just drinking and being in this repeated cycle where I felt like I was reliving the same week of my life over and over again and it was a strategy to avoid confronting my own soul. It was a strategy to avoid being present to the dysregulation to the fear. Right? And so for each and every one of us who continually turns to the bottle day after day, week after week, you have to see that your relationship with alcohol, that's all it is. You're not broken, you're not diseased, you're not mentally ill, you don't have defects. Okay? You're using alcohol as a compensation pattern as a compensation strategy to deeper underlying things that aren't resolved that maybe you have resentment towards that maybe you have fear and hurt around and that you have anxiety towards. And so because you have these really unsettling feelings that you don't know how to process otherwise, that you don't know how to cope through otherwise, that you don't feel confident enough to make progress towards managing or resolving otherwise, we take the easy solution which is go to the store and grab a drink, go to the bar and have a drink. It's an avoidance pattern. You've heard me say this time and time again, alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution. And so there's there's two things there's two things to really understand here about alcohol. And when it comes to the healing process and re-adaptation and personal transformation and evolution back to a life free from alcohol, right? There's two things to be mindful of on this journey, right? So like right alcohol in your mind and draw a circle around it and then draw two lines coming down at a 45 degree angle. There's two spokes that come off of this thing. The first one is how everything I've been explaining around how alcohol is the symptom. It's the bandaid. It's the compensation strategy towards some underlying fear, anxiety, limitation, sadness, hurt, loneliness, overwhelm, anger, whatever it is, right? So one, it's the compensation strategy against that. The other line that comes down is the neurochemistry. And this is what I got famous on TikTok for talking about and have held so many people who never even listen to my podcast or join the program get sober. Alcoholics get sober. People who just watch my TikToks get sober. Alcoholics by understanding the neurochemistry. When you drink alcohol, it significantly raises your dopamine of baseline. And there's a really good video on YouTube. It's called the neuroscience of addiction. And it's like this guy standing there. Really good good video. It's like 12 minutes long. And he's this neuroscientist. Then he starts off by saying in the video, the three most important things in life are food, water, and dopamine. Okay. And when you begin to understand dopamine, everything starts to make sense. Dopamine is tied to motivation and reward and pleasure. Okay. If the prime directive of the brain and the human operating system is to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, dopamine is at the crux. It is at the king's helm. It is sitting in the chair. It is tied to all of this. So when you significantly raise dopamine, when you significantly raise this this this this this neurotransmitter that's responsible for pleasure, reward, and motivation, dopamine is also tied to memory and learning. So what's interesting about dopamine is that whatever precedes the raise of dopamine, the brain looks at that and says we need to repeat and reinforce that behavior. Because dopamine is tied to our survival. It plays a crucial and essential role in how we got here in 2025 as human beings. Like it's one of the core, it's like mechanics of how we make decisions and how we move through life and what we get close to and what we move away from. It's all tied to dopamine. Food and sex raises dopamine, right? Exercise raises dopamine. Relationships and connection increases dopamine. You know, the pursuit of worthy endeavors that are meaningful increased dopamine, right? And then you have things like alcohol raises dopamine, porn raises dopamine, weed raises dopamine, gambling raises dopamine, all the other drugs raise dopamine, right? So it's very important that you understand that we're messing with something, we're fucking with something that is tinkering with this very important component of our brain and is tied to so many different aspects of like our sense of self, how we make decisions, how we prioritize things. Like how you make decisions and how you prioritize things is a reflection of your life. If life is a massive struggle, it's because the way that you prioritize things and make decisions in your life is really, really poor. Therefore life is really hard and a massive struggle in your circumstances are always seem like you got the worst deck of cards. But as an adult, you're fully responsible. You are fully responsible for the circumstances and outward and inward reflection of your life as an adult. It's nobody's fault anymore at all. It's not your fault for the pain that you went through and what happened to you, but it is your responsibility now if you want a better life to work to do what you need to do to heal and change and transform and evolve. So understanding that second spoke of dopamine is like understanding that when we go to quit drinking, there's two things that need to be managed. One is the proactive process of improving your mental and emotional regulation and kind of beginning this healing journey of developing more consciousness, developing and raising your self awareness and beginning to become more, having a more sort of sensitive, intuitive understanding of the patterns and programs that are inside of you that are creating dysfunction and then healing through that through different modalities. The second piece that we all have to learn how to manage and get through is learning to re-regulate our neurochemistry. And my program is one of the only programs that I've seen from all pieces of content and TikToks and Instagrams and other sober influencers or whatever that helps you on a daily basis proactively optimized dopamine. When you have more regulated dopamine in your brain, you're going to be less likely to have cravings and want to constantly pursue something to take you back up because your own baseline isn't a good healthy state. And there's things that I teach and that my clients do on a daily basis that support that. Annic, totally working with over 300 people, people report about an 80% reduction in the amount of cravings that they get when they pursue this journey following my protocol compared to any time they've done it on their own or any different circumstance. And it's because this is like what everybody leaves out is like the neurochemical aspect of addiction recovery. It's so important. And so reflecting on compensation patterns, alcohol is a compensation pattern. And so what I encourage you to do listening is really be honest with yourself. You have to get honest. Like that is the most important thing. Atics, people who struggle with alcohol, whatever, not labeling, not judging, I'm just saying people like us, we're notorious for not being honest with ourselves and constantly doping ourselves, constantly lying to ourselves. Every time you say it's going to be different this time, every time you say it, let me just have one, it'll be okay. You're lying to yourself. And I know like you're in like you might feel like you're in denial around that, but that that's what it is. That's what it is. When you when you've played the game a thousand times and you know how it ends a thousand times and then the thousand and first time you say maybe it'll be different. Like imagine that. Imagine objectively like looking at somebody else, take yourself out of the picture. Imagine like some guy or girl in the street and they've done something like they've played this slot machine a thousand times and a thousand times they've lost. But then they go back and they're like like maybe this time it'll be different. I'll just I'll just I'll just pull the slot machine twice. Wouldn't you look at them and just be like dude give it up. It doesn't work. You know any person who saw that would say dude it doesn't work. You've tried. You have to be honest with yourself you know. And as you're reflecting and being honest with yourself you have to ask yourself besides the fact that you think you love alcohol and the dopamine and the relaxation it's easy like fuck all that. Why are you drinking? What are you afraid of? What work are you afraid to do? What do you feel like is too hard or too scary? Where do you feel like you have to step into and be more of your true self that doesn't feel good that feels scarier uncomfortable? What do you think might happen if you stop drinking? You'll have social anxiety. You'll have to be present to feeling lonely. You have to be present to stress from work. You'll have to be present to a relationship that you feel unhappy in. What is it? And that's your answer. Maybe it's one, maybe it's multiple, but that's your answer. And let me just speak to your heart my friend. The reason you are here on planet earth for another 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years is to resolve that. That's why you're here. That's why we're all here. We are here to learn how to navigate our human experience. And if we have been living in a way that has gotten us to this place where our circumstances are not reflective of what we truly want in our heart in our soul, then our job, the reason we're here on earth, the reason we came to earth, the reason we incarnated is to learn how to develop the confidence, self-esteem, personal power, decision-making, and skills to let go of the things that are no longer serving us and to use our power, our gifts, our tools, our skills, and our resources to redefine and recreate the life that we want. That's it. What other reason are we here for? All aspects of reality fall into that directive. What you do for work, where you work, who you're in a relationship with, your health, your weight, how strong you are, your mindset, your perspectives, the types of information you consume, where you like to spend your time, what you like to avoid. Like it all falls within that. It all falls within this journey of moving and progressing through life so that you can go out and create the type of life that you want and enjoy. Life isn't meant to be a constant struggle. Life isn't meant to be constant pain. Life isn't meant to be constant stress and overwhelming loneliness and sadness and fear. It's not. Those are tools. Those are medicine. Those are experiences that we have that we're supposed to learn from so that we can audit and redirect our mind, our decisions, our habits, and our patterns so that we don't keep re-experiencing the same pain over and over again. Just like running a company. If you're the CEO or the manager of a company, and it's such, I love using analogies related to work and business because so many things that pop up in our day-to-day life or personal relationships would not fly in a business. It just doesn't work. Because business is very clear, it has a prime directive, it has organization, it has structure, and it has a goal which is to provide a service or a product and to generate revenue, provide us so help people and then gain value from the people that you help. And in order to do that successfully at scale, like things need to be dialed in. But how is it that when you look at a business, it makes perfect sense that like, hey, if you have a client or if you have a customer or if you have an employee who keeps making the same mistake over and over and over and over and over again and over again and damaging the company or there's this pain that's popping up in the company that's like hurting the culture and it keeps happening over and over like you don't tolerate that in a business. You say, what do we need to do to fix it so that we can move towards the prime directive, which is to scale and help more people and sell more products or services and to generate more revenue. You would find the bug in the system and you would work to resolve it at whatever cost is necessary or if you don't, eventually that bug that's in the system is going to destroy the company. It's going to destroy the morale. It's going to destroy the way people connect and communicate and it's going to destroy the procedures and ultimately you're going to sell less and less and less of the product or service and you generate less and less revenue and ultimately the company is going to fail and die. It's very clear. So why is it that when we look at our life and we have pain, sadness, frustration, overwhelm, resentment, anger, whatever, a relationship that we might be unhappy in it, unhappiness, you know, a job that we hate. Why is it that we continually perpetuate that and feel like that's okay? That this is, we just accept it. You just like put your cards down and say, well, this is just how it is. I'm just lonely. I'm just stressed out. I'm just unhappy. Go back and listen to my last episode about feelings or feedback. The emotion of unhappiness or overwhelm or sadness or loneliness or whatever is the feedback. It's not the thing to stew in and accept and say, this is just the energetic frequency of life on earth for me now. That's not it. It was never that in the first place. But when you're not taught these things, when you don't look at life in yourself and perspectives of reality through this higher vantage point, you just accept it because the pain is too great. The overwhelm is too great. You feel too unresourcedful. Your confidence or self-esteem is at an all-time low. You've tried a million times to do your best in a million different ways and broke a promise to yourself and it didn't work out. And so it's like you get to a place where you fold your cards. But that's not it. The emotion, the unhappiness, the disconnection, whatever the underlying architecture there is. It's now as an adult, your job is to resolve those things so that you can move forward and start expanding into your potential. That is the prime directive of why we're all here on earth. If you are not trying to expand into potential, I guess that's fine. If you have a fixed mindset and you're just okay and you don't want to see any progress or growth in any area of your life, I guess that's fine. I can't make a judgment call. Everybody's free to do what they want and experience consciousness in the way that they choose. It's free will. But if there's any part of you that believes you can be better, life could be better and that there's a part of you that believes that you're meant for more, can do more and need to do more like your soul is calling for that. Then that is the prime directive. That is why you're here on earth. And so look at the loneliness or the sadness or the disconnection or unhappiness, not as this wall in front of you that you just have to accept and wallow and keep drinking over. But to recognize that, that is your next step is to begin exploring and better understanding and working towards resolving those things. Until you resolve those things, you're not going to be able to break free and step into the person that you aspired to be. In a way, when you begin to want to go forward, you also have to go backwards a little bit. Because in order to move forward, you have to free yourself from the chains and bondage of your past. Right? If you feel really lonely, like what that's calling for is for you to step into your power, to step into your truth, to step into your authenticity and to go out and try to create more connections and develop more relationships. It's calling you to find your lane. It's calling you to find your tribe. It's calling you to find your community. It's calling you to maybe go out and date and find your person. You don't stop at the loneliness and just say, well, that's just what it is. What it's calling for is your development, your social development, your mental development, your emotional development, your confidence development, your self esteemed development. That's what it's calling for. And when you work on developing those aspects of yourself that are stunted in fear and anxiety and worry in a lot of confidence from your past when you were eight, nine, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20 years old, then your life is going to expand into new territory. You're going to begin moving into your potential. And I know that could seem scary. Moving into potential could feel really scary because one, you've never done it before. It's unexplored territory. You don't know what could happen. But guess what? What's the alternative? You just keep reliving the same familiar known bullshit over and over and over again and then hating yourself and having shaming guilt over it? Dude, you don't have forever. There's no redoes. You don't respawn after you die and get a second chance at this. Like, dude, you've got how much time do you have left? Look at how old you are and consider how many reasonable years do you have left? Where you're in good health and have the capacity to like make it happen. You've got to take action now. There is no tomorrow. There is no next week. There is no more kicking the can down the road. You can. You can keep kicking the can down the road, but you've been kicking the can down the road. That's why you're listening to my podcast. You know, when you wake up tomorrow, it's going to be now again. You can't escape the present moment from the moment that you're born to the moment you die. Life is one long experience of the present moment. So if you want to live a good life, you have to learn how to make peace with the present moment now. You can keep putting it off, but putting it off is another compensation pattern for you to avoid having to take action now. Everything's a good compensation pattern, right? Even things that seem really productive in a way or compensation patterns, all compensation patterns don't have to be bad, right? You're doing something now to either mitigate or avoid something. You drink alcohol is a way to compensate, feeling stress and overwhelm and sadness and boredom and loneliness or XYZ. I go to the gym now to compensate so that when I'm 70 or 80, my body's not falling apart, right? So we have to apply better patterns to our life. And you have to remember and understand that when you go to quit drinking, the first initial parts and stages are a re-adaptation and re-acclamation process. Right? The way that you feel in early sobriety is not how you're going to feel for the rest of your life. Your entire constitution, A to Z, recalibrates. And you have to remember that. I'm four plus years alcohol free and at my worst, well, for 15 years, I was drinking three days a week, absolutely obliterating myself. And then for six months, I was drinking 20 to 30 drinks every single day. If that's not feigning, I don't know what you call it. If that's not obsession, I don't know what you call it. If that's not neurochemical rollercoaster deficiency destruction, I don't know what you call it. Quitting at 29 at like the peak of like my life at that age, I was like, well, I was certainly not at any peak, but 29, right? It's like, that's a good age to be. We all wish we go back to be 29 again, right? I'm not that much older, but 29 is a great year. And to think that like be deathly afraid and think like, I wouldn't be able to do it and that my life is over, I just, I didn't know. I was operating from a different level of consciousness that was just a reflection of what my past experiences were. I hadn't expanded into my map of reality now. And at that time, I was afraid of what my body was going to feel like and what my mind was going to feel like. But guess what? You will get through it and your body and mind and physiological system will recalibrate and re-adapt. to what it feels like to just be fully present and okay and to not have to be in a cyclical hellhole cycle of moderation and and and feeling like shit and anxious and obsessing around when your next drink is going to be all the time. Dude, it gets better. It gets better. Millions and millions of people who have gotten sober just like you. You are no different and not any more unique than the next person. You're stressed, you're overwhelmed, you're sadness, all that stuff. Like it's it's not it's not unique. And it's really really important is like you consider starting and embarking on this journey that like you humble yourself to recognize that like you're not that different. If millions of people have done it, you can do it. But if you haven't been able to do it on your own, if you've tried again and again with 30 day challenges and dry januaries and will powering and white knuckling your way through it, only to find yourself returned back a week a month, three months later, you have to recognize that you need more. You need more support. You need structure, you need accountability, you need a routine, you need systems, you need you need information that you don't have because you keep relapsing. That's the name of addiction recovery. It's how do you mitigate relapse? If there's no more relapse, there's no more addiction. Addiction is doing something over and over again despite harmful consequences and not being able to stop. So if you stop and you mitigate relapse, then you beat addiction. That's what you're learning how to optimize for. When somebody is saying like, how do I stop drinking? Well, the question they should be asking is what's causing me to go back and keep relapsing? Beer, craving, underlying, overwhelm, sadness, boredom, loneliness, hating my job, being in a relationship that I don't like, anger, I don't know, what is it? That's what you're solving for. That's what you're using alcohol to compensate against. That's it. And so if you keep trying to put the bottle down, but you're not at a place where you're really willing to do the work and begin this mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation process, then you're going to keep going back to drinking. So you have to get honest with yourself and you have to reflect and say, what is, who am I? What do I want? What's my ideal? How is my life now and how would I rather have it be? And draw a line between point A and point B and say, I'm going to invest in myself some way, somehow, and I'm going to find a way to get there. Because apparently with me trying to do it alone, I haven't been able to. And that's okay. I was unable to. I was not able to quit drinking alone without a program. The program that I went through transformed my life. It saved my life. And it's the same program that I now offer with my group coaching program. It changed everything for me. And mind you, I had read all the books. I'd listen to all the podcasts. I was entrepreneurial. I was doing all these things that seemingly on the outside was like, yeah, party is pretty much like, got to shit together and pretty dialed in on the outside. It seems like a good guy. But I couldn't figure it out. And I needed more. Because there were so many things that I was unconscious to and blind to. I didn't know how to make all these different connections. I didn't know what tools to apply. I didn't know how to begin reorganizing and restructuring my life. I didn't have, you know, somebody in my ear on a weekly basis supporting me, guiding me, giving me wisdom, insight and downloads on how to make sense of all this discombobulated energy and confusion inside of me. I needed something outside of myself. And I'm not saying people can't get sober on their own. People do. Sure. But be honest with yourself. Like if you lack accountability, if you lack structure, if you lack community, if you lack, you know, resources and tools and you're not really sure and you don't have the discipline to do all these things on your own and just, you know, dial your way through it, then I encourage you to work a program. Work a program. I just launched my group program and, you know, a bunch of people came in December, dozens and dozens of people came in in December and everybody's loving it. We had our first group call last Tuesday and everybody loved it. They're like, that was amazing. I'm so glad I joined this program. I've had multiple people who just joined, send me like super deep heartfelt messages around wild stuff. You know, I've been dealing with a narcissist for the last 10 years. I was alone. Like, you know, I've tried all these other programs. I've tried 30 day challenges. Nothing work. I can't believe I finally like am here. You know, I've been listening to your pot. Like most of the people who have come in have been listening to the podcast for like six months, 12 months, 18 months. And they're so stoked. They're like, I'm so glad I finally made it. Like, everything that you say resonates and now coming into your program, it makes perfect sense. So understand that like when you're looking at your relationship with alcohol, like understand that we're here to do deeper work. We are here to grow. We are here to evolve. We are here to mature. We are here to learn how to take accountability and ownership for our life. We are here to learn how to develop responsibility. You know, I heard this the other day. When you break down responsibility, what's the word? Responsibility. Your ability to respond. I actually hadn't heard that. Never thought about it that way. And I was like, Holy shit. How responsible are you? What is your ability to respond to your day to day life? What is your ability to respond to your mind? To your thoughts. To the sensations that flow through you. How do you respond to them? Do you react towards them and catastrophize them and feel like you have to put out a fire and immediately go drink? Or do you have the capacity encouraged to be present? And to apply using your personal power and sovereignty as a man or woman, a tool or a strategy or a modality or a resource to begin to regulate yourself. And to understand that who you are as a person in the present moment is nothing more than your choices and decisions in how you respond to your mind, to the thoughts that you have, and to the sensations that flow through you. Overcoming our addiction to alcohol is a journey of improving our response ability. We become more responsible. We get better at responding to life. We get better at responding to stress. We get better at responding to overwhelm. We get better at responding to loneliness or sadness. We get better at responding to overwhelming thoughts that seem debilitating. We get better at responding to our partner, our kids, our relationships. That's what's waiting for you on the other side of letting go of alcohol. You are improving your response ability. That's it. Who wouldn't want that? Right? If I were to ask you, hey, if you were to increase your responsibility by five to 10 X over the next year, would your life get better? Of course, everybody would say yes. You would say, well, I'm reasonably responsible now. My life seems to be somewhat in order. I've got a job. I pay bills. I have kids. I have a marriage, whatever. I'm somewhat responsible. I clean my dishes. I make my bed. I get groceries. You pay my bills. Okay. But what if you were 10 times more responsible? How would things get better? You're like, shit, I don't even know what that means. But it does get better. If you had a better response to every one of your thoughts, if you had a better action to every one of your thoughts, and you compounded that over time over the course of months and months and months, dude, life gets so much better in every way. Your life is just a result of tons and tons and tons of little tiny micro decisions, micro thoughts, micro actions. And so alcohol is a compensation pattern, my friend. We've been using alcohols away to mask and numb and disconnect from the true work that we are here to do in our life. And if you're ready to do that work, I encourage you to reach out. Go to my website, www.thestobdrinkingcoach.com. I've got a video presentation on there. It talks about the whole deal. It talks about neurochemistry. It talks about my journey. It talks and goes into the details of the program and just sit down and watch it. It's like listening to another podcast episode. So if you enjoyed listening to the podcast, head over to the website and listen to that video. And do something different. It's like the old saying that's like super corny. It's like definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result. If you want 2025 to be different, you have to be willing to do something different. If you want your social life to be different, you have to be willing to do something different. If you want the quality of your relationship or marriage to be different, you have to be willing to improve your communication. You have to be willing to be present. You have to be willing to share how you feel. You have to be willing to listen to the other person and understand their reality and their point of view. And you have to be willing to compromise and come up with solutions together. If you want your work to be different, if you want to make more money, if you want your health to be different, if you want to lose weight, if you want to love the person who's looking back at you in the mirror, if you want more energy, if you want to get out of the vicious cycle of constantly feeling shame and guilt and anxiety, you have to be willing to do something different. Listen, you're already familiar with all the pain that alcohol causes. It's predictable, it's repeatable, you've seen it, you know it inside out. If you want to escape this thing, you have to now be willing to open yourself up to a new level of discomfort. But it's better than what you've been doing. Listen, if sobriety was not better, if sobriety was not, if freedom from alcohol was not better, people wouldn't pursue it. All these people who quit drinking, millions of people whose lives are better and don't go back to drinking is because it's actually better. You have to remember that. I know you have fear in the present moment because you're drinking and you can't imagine without it, but it's actually better without it. That's why people get sober and stay sober. If it wasn't as cool, if it wasn't as enjoyable, I would be drinking because I already know the dopamine. I already know I'm a fiend for it. I already know how much I enjoy that state of alcohol. But it's better now. Everything in life is better. Everything in your life can be better too. You have to remember there's so much light at the end of the tunnel. Part of your transformation process, part of your maturity process, part of your evolution comes from you learning how to develop the courage and capacity to now be present to new forms of discomfort for a while so that you can work through them, heal through them, gain strength and resilience and then upgrade your nervous system's window of tolerance for stress and to learn how to mentally and emotionally regulate. Then it stops being so hard and then it stops being so overwhelming or whatever. It's not like that for everybody. Some people when they come in with this structure, they just breeze through. Other people have a little bit more of a challenge and that's okay. There's eight billion people and we all have a different architecture. But I can guarantee you it's going to be wildly different from anything you've ever tried before. It's like it hits all the components, it hits all the pieces. And so I encourage you, I encourage you to really reflect, what do you want for yourself this year? You know, who do you want to be? What problems do you want to let go of? If you could wave a magic wand, what would life be like? You know, you've got to start dreaming again and realize that it's all possible and it's especially possible if you're not doing it alone, if you're not doing it by yourself, isolated, you're doing it with a bunch of other people who are operating on the same wavelength and frequency, proactively pushing their life forward and then connecting and talking about it and having a weekly accountability partner and attending calls, where you're getting like the most elite level downloads and insights of consciousness and the mental and emotional operating system and human experience. You're not doing it alone. You don't have to do it alone. You know, the reason you go to work and save money is so that you can invest in yourself so that you can invest in yourself. You are the most important asset. You're more important than your car. You're more important than anything. You're saving for a flat tire. You're more important than that. You know, and with the group program, like I've brought it, I've brought the price down, I've tried to make it really accessible for the value that you give. Like when people come in and know like what's all included, they're like, dude, that's so cheap. And it's just like, dude, it's, it's, and you can, you can bring it down to less than a hundred bucks a month if you pay over time with a firmer after pay a check out. So it's like, money is not the issue. You know, it's, are you willing? Do you have the courage to say enough is enough? I want something different. I'm done compensating against this shame and the guilt and the fear. Like I'm tired of living that way. You know, I've said this before. It's like, when was the last time you got angry at like fucking dealing with the same things over and over and over again? You're so much better than that. You have so much more potential. You have so many gifts inside of you. You have so much love to give. You have so much, you know, so much, so much authenticity to express so many ways you could help others. So many different ways you could, you know, connect with other people and have beautiful, enjoyable conversations. You know, that don't revolve around drinking in nonsense. You deserve it. You deserve it. So I'll wrap up the podcast there. I really wanted to take a moment to really go deep in helping you really connect the dots. Alcohol is a compensation strategy. It's a compensation pattern. It's, it's not about alcohol. The journey of quitting drinking is nothing to do with alcohol. It's you. It's a symptom. You know, and inside of my program, there is so many resources. Step by step, eight is e-strategy with videos and courses and guides. And you have a daily system and a protocol that you follow that optimizes mind, body, spirit, neurochemistry. It takes a holistic approach to every part of the human. It teaches you mental and emotional regulation of variety of different modalities to better interpret and understand your mind and your operating system, your childhood, how you became who you are, how we develop these compensation patterns, what to do when they come up and how to move through them. Accountability, weekly coaching, a supportive community. I mean, man, it's like it's the whole package. It's the whole package. And I talk about in a way where it's the best because I believe it's the best. The reason I feel that is because it's like coming for me. And when I look at a lot of other stuff out there, I'm not judging. I'm not pointing fingers. Everybody's free to follow what they want. But like, I understand how I interpret things. I understand the way that I make connections. And and the resources and the structure that I've put in there is it just works. It makes sense. It makes sense. So if you've been listening to this podcast for any period of time and you're like, yeah, this guy makes sense. I love the way he explains it. What's behind the scenes just adds on to all of that. You're like, oh, yeah, perfect. This is great. You know, so go to my website, www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com. Like I mentioned, I've got a video on there. It's just like listening to another podcast. So watch or listen to that. And then you can sign up for the program right if you click through. And if you'd like to pay over time with a firm or after pay at checkout, brings it down to less than $100 a month. So money is not an issue, right? You're already spending more than $100 a month on alcohol and all the damage and repercussion that comes from that. So look at this as an investment in yourself. And let's make 2025 the year. The world's getting wild. The world's getting crazy. You deserve to get yourself in order. You deserve to have personal sovereignty and freedom so that you can go out and create and build the life that you want for yourself. You deserve the confidence. You deserve the self-esteem. You know, alcohol is a distraction. It's procrastination against our personal evolution. We're just kicking the can down the road with our own progress with alcohol. All right. So thank you for listening. I appreciate everybody who listens and supports the podcast. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email, support at the stopdrinkingcoach.com. And yeah, I appreciate you listening and I'll see you in the next episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]