Alcohol is Mental, Emotional & Physical Debt

Hey, I'm Barti Arez and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. Welcome to my podcast where I teach you how to stop drinking, how to quit craving, and how to begin the journey back to yourself so that you can transform your life. After a 14-year binge drinking career, starting and stopping dozens of times and trying everything in the book from AA to therapy, I finally discovered the key to sustainable sobriety. And on this podcast, you're going to learn practical tips, tools, and strategies to help you quit drinking alcohol the easy way so you can finally step into the next chapter of your life and begin fulfilling your potential. For Private One-on-One or Group Coaching, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. SDC fam, welcome back. I'm super excited to be jumping into another episode today. My name is Barti Arez. I'm your host on the Stop Drinking Coach and I want to take a second to thank everybody who's been leaving reviews. We just crossed 500 5 star reviews on Spotify and we just crossed think over 200 on Apple. And it always just lights me up and gets me really excited when I see that there's a new review on there. So I appreciate you guys for taking the time to do that. I'm sure at this point there's hundreds and thousands of you who are listening to me. I don't get to engage with you guys personally but when I see a review, a written review on Apple it really gets me excited to know that my words and everything that I'm doing and all the energy that I'm pouring to this is actually helping you and helping you experience change and transformation in your life. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to do that. So in today's episode, I really want to dig into this powerful concept to really drive home and help you understand that alcohol is debt. Alcohol is a debt and we can never win the game of alcohol. You're never going to win the game of alcohol. You can't out drink the alcohol. You can't outsmart the alcohol. You can't strategically maneuver the alcohol. Every time you drink alcohol, it creates, on the back end, a series of downstream consequences in pain which if you think of alcohol like the cycle, right? On the back end, it creates such a level of psychological, emotional, physical turmoil and pain. I mean, not just those. I'm talking health. I'm talking relationships, family. The damage that's being incurred to your kids, modeling your behavior, the lost opportunity, the opportunity cost that worked, productivity, money, the whole deal, the whole deal. Like I could sit here for an hour and a half and talk about it. Alcohol incurs so much back end pain that it comes back around, right? When you are overwhelmed, when you're stressed out, when you're bored, when you're frustrated, and you're unhappy with your partner, when your kids are annoying you, when you've got crazy stuff going on in your business and your employees and whatever else it is, whatever that stressor is, right? Let's put it on a scale of one to ten. Let's say out of ten, it's out of seven, right? And maybe there's a lot of trauma from your past or maybe you had parents who didn't really teach you how to mentally or emotionally regulate. They didn't teach you how to manage the voice inside of your head and they didn't teach you how to regulate your emotions. And maybe you never learned about those things, maybe you never studied those things, maybe you've never learned about mindfulness and you don't know much about trauma and how to impact your nervous system. And you don't know a ton about the brain and you don't know a whole lot about memories and how we construct them and form our internal representations, right? So you're going through life and you've got all these things that are stressing you out. You're out of seven. And you're like, man, alcohol sounds great. It's just routine. You've been doing it for 20 years since you got out of high school since you were in college, right? You just finished things up and you go for that drink because work and kids and your partner and whatever it is, right? If you're out of seven out of ten and you drink alcohol, okay? In order and in your goal is to try to get yourself to a two or two or one so you can forget about that stress and relieve yourself, right? Alcohol is debt. So it is like you going to alcohol and saying, hey, I'm going to give you this 10 bucks and alcohol is going to give you a dollar back, okay? So when you're done drinking that alcohol, right? There is no free lunch in nature, my friend. So when you're done drinking that alcohol, when you get that temporary spike of dopamine and GABA and you start to relax and feel good and forget about all your problems and disconnect from reality, right? Or you come back to normal, you're now going to be at a nine the next day. You're going to be at a 10, okay? Because now you're in a dopamine deficit. Now you're in a GABA deficit, okay? The very thing that you use to try to relieve yourself from your life's problems amplifies them. It compounds them because those problems don't go away. And now you're in a more mentally, emotionally and neurochemically dysregulated state than when you started. Yesterday, you were at a seven this morning, you're at a nine. You did nothing to solve your problems. You acquired no skills of mental and emotional regulation. You didn't learn to cope. And now you're way more anxious, right? You have way less time to try to complete the get the job done, right? Because whatever, what are we trying to accomplish in life? Like what are we doing? Right? You got a business to run. You got kids like we're losing time every day. So the problems don't disappear. Every time you drink alcohol, it's going to come back to you worse. And now because of your worse, now because the next day you wake up, you're in nine, okay? Now, guess what? You're going to be even more driven to go drink alcohol because you feel like shit, you feel like more shit than you did yesterday. You have to understand that this is a cyclical, unescapable, vicious, trapped cycle. And the reason you stay stuck in it is because you are unwilling to learn. You're unwilling to develop the skills and tools. You're unwilling to develop the courage inside of you to withstand and manage pain. That is what it is. Remember at the beginning of this episode, I talked about the entire spectrum of reality is filtered through pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. So therefore, to no longer be an addict, to no longer have alcohol use disorder, to no longer be in the cycle of slavery, you have to learn how to properly navigate those two things internally from a place of self referral, not object referral, where you are looking outside of you and determining your state of reality based off of the things outside of you. You have to develop the skills within yourself. And like, dude, the recovery community just doesn't talk about these things. Like, I don't know, maybe they do, but I don't see it. The traditional 12 step stuff, like, you know, you've got, you know, it's so disempowering. Like you have to take control. How do you think anybody gets sober? The hardcoreist of the hardcoreist alcoholics. How do they get sober? They get to a place where the pain of alcohol is greater than the pain of trying something different. Anybody, anybody who develops an addiction, I don't care if it's alcohol addiction, weed addiction, gambling addiction, porn addiction, sex addiction, has to be willing to go through a process where they are willing to move through and withstand the pain of getting sober, of going alcohol free. In that means that you have to learn how to manage your mind. Welcome to being a human. I know we were all thrust into this reality, this alien planet floating in the middle of space on a rock that's spinning 25,000 miles an hour with infinity in every direction. Nobody knows why we're here, what the purpose is, where we're going. Okay. And I know, I know you didn't get the download. You didn't get the blueprint. But that is what we're here to do. We're here to learn to manage your mind and we're here to learn how to manage your emotions. Those are just the key fundamental 101. Like the fact that anybody is even doing anything else besides managing those two, like really doing a good job to optimize those two, just shows how disillusioned our society is. We've got 70, 80, 90, 100 years on this planet and every single thing you do, every single thing you will experience, every job you have, how much money you'll ever make, the relationships that you'll ever have, all comes down to how you manage your mind and how you manage your emotions. That's it. All of reality is filtered through those two things. And if you've tried to quit drinking several hundred thousand times on your own and have never succeeded, it's because you've put the bottle down, but you didn't dig deep into the world of learning those two things. Because listen, my friend, that's the block that you knock that out. The whole thing comes crashing down. That's the that you have to pull, right? If you're a business guy, if you're an entrepreneur and you're looking at systems and processes, standard operating procedures, you're looking at 80, 80, 20, what's the lever that we can pull to get the highest asymmetric upside return? That's it. You have to learn to manage your mind and you have to learn to manage your emotions. You have to learn how to talk to yourself. If you have poor self-talk, if you have a harsh inter-critic, if you're perfectionist, if you're always beating yourself up, if you don't feel deserving, if you don't feel worthy, if you don't feel capable, that's what we have to address. That, that is what we have to address. The alcohol is a byproduct of psychological and emotional, sometimes physical pain. So if you just try to put the bottle down and you don't make any other changes, of course you're gonna go back. You've still got that person in your head who is just berating you and treating you like shit all the time. You've still got that nervous system that's in a heightened state of fight or flight all the time, predicting that there's threat and danger lurking around every corner, thinking that everybody's out there trying to get you and fuck you. Of course, right? This process of quitting drinking has a very little to do with alcohol. It has everything to do with your relationship with yourself. It is about learning how to become the observer of your internal environment so you can look at the mental and emotional programs that have been running your life from the moment you were born that were installed and have become the unconscious programs that you now identify with and think, this is who I am, that you've taken on within your identity. Alcohol is debt, you're never gonna be able to win. You're never gonna be able to win. And the alcohol use disorder brain, the alcoholic brain, will try to convince you otherwise. It will try to convince you 100 million different unique ways that it's just gonna be different this time that you can just have one. Why? Because alcohol lights up dopamine and we are biological rats in a cage living on this planet that are driven by dopamine. Alcohol is like a jackpot going off in your brain. And it creates the signal to reinforce more of that. It's not personal. You're not dumb, you're not less than, you're not incapable. You're dealing with a substance that goes beyond your intellect that is responsible for your ancestors' evolution in your lineage and bloodline for two and a half million years. This goes beyond you being smart or successful. That's not how it works. We're dealing with a substance that goes way beyond your ability to try to rationalize it. And it's a debt, right? Like the perfect example is this. Okay, alcohol is a pay day loan, right? If you work a job and you are paycheck to paycheck and you run out of money, so you go to a pay day loan place and they'll give you 250 bucks for the week so you can eat or you need gas, whatever it is. They're gonna give you that 250, but they're gonna make you pay back 350. They're gonna put some crazy interest rate on it. So they'll give you 250 cash, right? You're in pain, you're hungry and you need gas or your electricity's being shut off, right? You are in pain, you're in a survival state. Somebody comes to your rescue and they'll take you out of that pain, but guess what? Within the next seven days, you're gonna have to pay back 350. So now your paycheck's gonna be smaller. Your energy system is gonna be less, you're gonna have less motivation, you're gonna be less clear. You're gonna be more anxious, right? The problem doesn't go away. Alcohol is debt, you are incurring a debt that you can never pay at all back, right? So now when you get that paycheck next week, whatever that is, you're, it's now $100 less than what it was. And guess what, that next week, that next week, you're gonna run out of food and gas even faster because you have less money. And guess what, then you're gonna have to go back to the payday loan place again and they'll give you another 250, but they're gonna charge you another 350 for it. Or they might increase it. In fact, if you think about what alcohol is, it's gonna be a bit of an increase. So next week, when you go back, they're gonna charge you $355. And then the next week, it's gonna be $360, and then $365 and $370. And in a little while, they're eventually gonna charge you $400 for the 250. And it's just this cycle of slavery. You can never pay it back. You are an organic piece of meat. You are an organic piece of matter. Your brain's neurotransmitters have a sensitive balance. And when you keep assaulting them, because you haven't learned how to manage your mind in your emotional system, you haven't learned these skills, these tools. You haven't developed the courage inside of you to be willing to begin to reorganize the structure of your life because it's become unmanageable in the way that you run it. You're just gonna keep incurring more and more in more debt. Dude, our organs are not forever. Our time on earth is not forever. Your children are only young once. You only have certain types of opportunities that you might have within certain cycles of the economy. You keep living as if you're gonna live forever. And it's just not. You're just not. 99% of people have never actually sat down to really consider the fact that they're gonna be wiped from existence one day. There's gonna be a moment in your consciousness where you're gonna be like, shit, this is it. There we go. The 70, 80, 90 years. All right, what do we do with it? How did I play my cards? Was I scared? Was I afraid that I put it all out on the table? You have to look at the big picture. And you have to learn, you have to develop the courage within yourself to begin to confront the pain. What is the pain? You know, overwhelmed stress, frustration, you feel disconnected, you feel scared. You have to understand that all the pain can be managed. And when you learn how to mentally and emotionally regulate, when you learn to reinterpret pain as a signal in your body, you develop more agency, you become more powerful. All the pain that I had in my life as a result of all of my childhood and my upbringing, the loss of my father and all the instability and the disconnection from my family and what felt like emotional neglect. And waking up 3 AM to parents fighting and cops coming to the house and getting made fun of it's school and all of it, all of it. That negatively affected my self-image, my confidence, all these things. Dude, they've all been worked through and 110% replaced with all that's become my power and has empowered me and has become the fuel source of my energetic expression moving forward. Every ounce of pain, every anxiety, every heartbreak, every loss has been transmuted. And that's what you have to understand about this journey. When we are in psychological and emotional pain and we've developed an addiction because of trauma and our partners left us in a nasty divorce and XYZ, whatever. You have to understand that the pain is not permanent. It is not permanent. This conscious vessel, the thing that you are, this witness to mind, this witness to your emotional operating system, you have the capacity to control and dictate how you experience reality internally. But you don't know that, you didn't know that. We've just all been hurted like cattle and sheep through a system that has not given us any of the tools and information about how consciousness works, how our mind works, how we represent memories, how we perceive our past, how our nervous system works, how it produces various degrees of sensations and how to regulate them. So we're just going through life in the system's redlining and we're just continually getting ourselves into greater levels of debt. You have to understand that alcohol is a payday loan. You're never going to be able to win. You're never going to be able to outdrink the alcohol. Every time you drink, you're doing further damage to your neurotransmitters and taking yourself into a deeper deficit, creating more pain that you feel compelled to escape. And because you don't know any other ways, you're just going to keep going back to the alcohol. It is slavery. It is modern day slavery is what alcohol is. And it's a poor trade off. It's a very, very, very poor trade off. Think about it. I mean, I would encourage you to do this exercise. If you're still drinking, like next time you drink, grab a pen and paper and write down with each drink how you're feeling. First two drinks will probably be feeling the best. Third or fourth, yeah, okay. You're starting to feel a little bit better. By the fourth, fifth, sixth, if you can even drink that much, I mean, I don't know, maybe you're drinking 20. You're chasing. It's not even that. that good anymore. Now you're just chasing. The dopamine's going high and it's dropping rapidly causing you to have a craving for another one. So you're playing a game where you get two hours of this fucked up system and then you have to deal with all the downstream consequences. You wake up feeling like shit, shame, guilt, regret, anxiety, frustration, low energy, brain fog, feeling lethargic. You have to deal with your partner and okay, like they're probably not super happy with you, right? Your kids, you know, setting a poor example for them, you know, you got to show up at work and you're not going to be 100%. You're going to leave opportunity on the table, money, growth, like for what? For what? It's a poor trade off. If you learn how to manage your mind and you learn how to manage your emotional operating system, you don't need alcohol. You don't need alcohol. You don't need alcohol to soothe you because you can soothe yourself. I like pride myself on the fact that there's nothing. There's nothing that the world can throw at me. We're all be like, oh, I need alcohol for this. There's fucking nothing. And it feels so good because I used to be such a fucking slave to it. There's nothing. I pride myself on the fact that I can carry so much mental and emotional weight that there is nothing that I think alcohol would be a good solution for. It's dog shit. It's dog piss is what alcohol is. It is the worst drug. So many better drugs out there than alcohol. Like it's, it is, it is debt. It is mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic debt. You're making yourself a less capable human being. So if you're successful, if you make good money, if you have a growth mindset, what are you giving your power away to alcohol for? The same tenacity that you put into building your business to making money to becoming a better leader, put that energy, take that proactive approach and put it into becoming the best version of yourself. Let the piss go. You're not missing out. You're not missing out on any friends who just sit around and drink. You're not missing around on you're missing out on any parties. Dude, you've been to all of them. You've been to all of them. I've gone to bars recently. And like, you know, there's this part of your brain that romanticizes and it's like, you go to a fucking bar and it's like, dude, it's not that cool. Everybody just sit around talking. That's like not that exciting. That's not that adventurous. That's not, dude, you're not missing anything. And, you know, a big part of quitting drinking that nobody really talks about is there's a reorganization of your self-image in your values that comes as a result of this. You know, I don't know how old you are listening to this, but how much longer are you going to keep fun at the top of your value hierarchy? You're not sixteen. You're not twenty two. Okay. Like as we grow and mature and evolve and develop spiritually, emotionally, fun goes down on the value hierarchy. And you just, you have to figure out how to do that. You know, when we're in a drinking phase, like everything's all about having fun, you know, go to work and do this and hang out. And so we can have fun. Like, dude, that doesn't get you anywhere. It's a hedonistic way to live. And when you start introducing drugs as a way to have fun, you're fucked because it's a black pit and it's a debt cycle. You like, if you have to rely on something outside of yourself to have fun, you are a slave to it. You're a slave to it. You give your power away. You say, "Hey, I'll give my power to you, alcohol. Let me ingest you so that you can give me fun." It's a poor trade-off. Like, you're not alcohols. There's an infinite reserve of alcohol, but there's a limited reserve of you. And every, every time you give a piece of yourself a way to alcohol, that's a part of yourself that you can't get back. Okay. And whatever you gave away, it's going to take more of it. So if you give $10, alcohol is going to take a hundred from you. You can't win the game. And you have to acknowledge that. You have to accept that. Takes a long time. Takes a long time and a lot of beating your head against a concrete wall. You know, that's why they say, like, it's not absolutely necessary to hit rock bottom, but you need to get to a place where you are not blinded to the pain. You have to feel the pain. You have to feel its consequences. Nobody would ever stop using drugs if there is no down-stream consequences. We are these animals that are driven by neurotransmitters. That's it. Stop taking so much credit for yourself. You're driven by neurotransmitters. Okay. If your neurotransmitters are good and balanced, you're going to be feeling good. They're in a deficit state. You're going to be feeling like shit. And there's that's just what it is. So you have to understand that like, hey, the decisions I make, like, there's an impact. There's an impact. You have to be willing to take responsibility for those decisions. And you've got to get support. You've got to have some accountability. You've got to have some people around you and you've got to want it. And you have to be willing to be like, all right, if there's going to be pain here, you have to get to a place internally where you're willing to manage some pain for a little while. There's no getting out of this debt cycle without pain. You know, debt is painful. It's painful. Right? Oh, well, what about the cravings? Yeah. Well, you know, for years or decades, you had pain mentally or emotionally, and you never dealt with it. And you used a drug to try to cover it up. And so when you remove the drug, not only do you have the pain of the past, you have all the pain of being in a neurotransmitter debt cycle. You know, you have to, you have to develop the courage within yourself to be willing to move through the pain temporarily. You know, and this isn't medical advice. If you're in withdrawals, go see a doctor. If you're concerned about the way that you're feeling, go talk to your physician, but understand that anybody, anybody who gets sober, me, all of my clients, every person that you've ever seen in an AA meeting or on social media or anywhere else, they develop the courage within themselves to learn how to manage the craving. They develop the courage within themselves to manage their anxiety. They've developed the courage within themselves to reorganize their value system. They developed the courage within themselves to figure out how to keep themselves busy in an evening or on the weekend when they would normally be drinking. It's an even playing field. Everybody who goes through this experience has to deal with the same challenges. You've got friends who are going to talk shit. You know, you've got, you know, people who, you know, are going to laugh at you. You've got your first vacation that you have to go on alcohol free. You've got your first wedding that you have to attend alcohol free. You have to go hang out with all of your old boozer buddies and have a dinner party alcohol free. It's all the, it's an equal playing field. So that's why I say it's like it's about getting to a place internally within your spiritual development, spiritual meaning encompassing all your mental, emotional, energetic development as a human being where you can see the future. You can play the tape forward and be like, okay, yeah, if I continue this, things are going to get really bad. And if that happens, it wouldn't be good. There could be some real maybe irreversible damage or there could be some real consequences that I don't fucking want to have to deal with. You have to use the pain as a motivator. Pain is the best motivator. Not the pursuit of pleasure. Pain is a much better motivator than the possibility of a better future. If you're not really sure how much better life can get, just get fucking terrified of how much worse it can get and let that scare you. That's a good motivator. That's why more people are willing to not put their hand on a burning stove than use our open free economy to become a millionaire. Way more people, 99.9% of people will almost 100% of the time up to not put their hand over a burning stove. When at the same time, all those people live in a free market capitalist society in the United States where you have access to basically infinite amounts of information for free where you can go and become a millionaire and pursue all the pleasure that you want as a crude example. You know, Pain is a good motivator, so if you haven't done the exercise of grabbing your journal and writing out all the pain that you've experienced from alcohol, all the consequences on every level, mental, emotional, physical, familial, children, health, you know, work, opportunity costs, money, all of it, relationships. Write that all down, get super clear on it, and then fast forward that 12 months out, write a new version what life will be if you don't stop 12 months out. And then do it three years out, and then do it five years out, and then do it 10 years out, and keep writing it. Give yourself this space, you've spent hundreds, thousands of dollars on alcohol, you've spent thousands of hours drinking, you have this relationship with this substance, give yourself the, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? Like, have the, what is it? Like, you know, have the dignity to at least open up a journal and write out what's actually happening here. Because dude, it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And then you just have to accept that you just do it one day at a time. That's it. Just one day at a time. You don't have to quit drinking forever. I am not quitting drinking forever. I just know I'm not drinking today, and I'm three years out, all free, and life has never been better. It's beautiful, it's incredible. You know, if you're trying to do this thing and you're like, "Fuck, I don't know, Bardia, everything you say makes sense, but I just can't imagine ever drinking again, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. You don't play that game. You don't run that script." That is an error code. That is a 404. You've hit the wrong website. The way that you are using your brain is not correct. The only commitment that you have to make is that you're just not going to drink today. I'm not even going to say, and then you do it again tomorrow because you don't. If you even think about tomorrow, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong if you think about tomorrow. If you think about this weekend or the wedding or the vacation or whatever, you're doing it wrong. You're giving yourself unnecessary psychological and emotional turmoil and burden and stress. Today, you figure out how to not drink. That's it. That's it. That is how you re-structure and reorganize your reality. You can think about the future when it comes to your business. You can make financial projections and you can do marketing strategy and all that or your projects that you're working on. When it comes to alcohol, the only commitment that you make is that you're just not going to drink today, ever, today. That's how you win the game. It's possible. It's possible. I was drinking four to six bottles of wine a day, bottles, not glasses, bottles, a lot of alcohol, a lot of alcohol. I was obsessed with every cell and fiber of my being. You have to understand that alcohol is debt. You have to get to a place in your mental, emotional maturity process where you are willing to begin to reorganize your life for a little while. Quitting drinking is not putting the bottle down. That is step one of a deep, multifaceted process. You have to be willing to do the work. This is really growing up as what it is. When people fall into a state of addiction, ultimately, it's because reality was too much for them to handle psychologically and emotionally. They had to turn to something outside of themselves. Getting to a place where you're no longer going to turn to the nipple, to the bottle, is a major evolution. It is a major, major, major evolution in your adult journey, in your maturation process, of the way that you learn to navigate your internal spectrum of reality, your beliefs, your values, your self-image, the possibilities, the way that you manage sensations. This is a growing process, a massive growing process. Let me tell you, when you dig in and you do this work, when you start exploring your traumas, when you start learning how to reinterpret your traumas, when you start releasing this energy, when you start freeing up your energy, when you start becoming more creative, more open, when you start believing in yourself more, when you start to become proactive in your life, you start doing all the things that make you an elite human being, not elite better than others, but just elite in your own self. Man, you don't know what's possible. You do not know what's possible. Why? Because it doesn't exist. It's not within the frame of your neural network yet. You have an experience that it is outside the realm of anything that you've experienced. It's bigger. It's more. There's more, there's more map to explore. There's more map to develop. You've got three businesses. You can make it ten businesses in three years. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. Whatever it is, whatever you want for yourself, maybe it's not that. Maybe you just want more stability and connection at home. Maybe you just want to be a better mother or a better father, telling you it's all possible. And when you go through this process, what's waiting for you on the other side is better than you can begin to imagine. It's not just what your imagination can create. It's better than that. And that's the thing to remember. When you embark on this journey, it's front-loaded with pain and some craving and some boredom and all these things and pity parties of missing or of Smith. You think, you know, trying to communicate here, thinking that we're missing out. Oh, where buddies are out drinking. Every morning they wake up, but they hang over, feel like shit. Right? Like we're focusing on all the wrong things. But I challenge you. Go on to my, just go on social media. Find anybody. Anybody who got sober, all of them say it was the best decision of their life. And guess what? All those people are just like you. You think you're so unique. I thought I was so unique. Everybody thinks we're so unique, but Bardia, you don't understand. I have such a unique relationship with alcohol. I'm already so successful in high functioning and I only do it twice a week. And when I do, it's like, all right. It's all the same. It's all the same. And yeah, there's a real growth process that comes from it. A real powerful growth process. It's a debt. You know, the cravings that you feel for a while, you're paying back to the debt. You're paying back the dopamine debt. You're paying back the debt from never addressing the problem itself. You just have to be willing to pay back the debt, just like you went to college, right? You got a hundred, two, three hundred thousand dollar loan. And then you got to pay back the debt for years. You got to pay it back. They gave you something when you needed it. And you got what you needed. Now you got to pay it back. But with the alcohol game, man, it just destroys you. Such a poor trade off. It's your energy. It's siphons, your life force. It siphons your clarity. You gain weight. You feel like shit. Shame, guilt. The lowest vibrating energies of consciousness are shame and guilt. It just plagues you with shame and guilt. Dude, it's rough. It's rough. You're a hundred thousand times better without alcohol. I promise that. I know. You know that too. You've gotten sober for a week, two weeks, a month, three months, whatever. You did a dry January. You know how much better you feel. So when you get to that critical point of like, should I go back or should I keep going? The reason you go back is because you're unwilling to feel the pain in that moment of dealing gratification, of being willing to let go of that toxic relationship, of being willing to change up the way that you manage your time and the things that you do. You're committed to an old version of yourself. And if you want growth, if you want success, if you want to fulfill your potential, if you're this person who's like, yeah, I've already, I've got this growth mindset. I know I deserve more. Life could be better. Then put your money where your mouth is. And when it comes to that critical point of making a decision, delay the gratification of the short term bullshit and be willing to make an adjustment in how you act in that moment in pursuit of a medium or long term goal. That's largely what quitting drinking is. Alcohol represents instant gratification through the instant pursuit of pleasure or the instant relief of pain. It is an instant gratification tool for the masses who do not know how to manage that state of energy internally within themselves, psychologically or emotionally. That's why I say people who quit drinking become really successful over time because you learn the basic skill of delayed gratification. If you live your entire life based on instant gratification, you're not going to get anywhere. Life is always going to be hard. You're going to be very challenged. And if you're already successful and you've got all the things by traditional means, do just wait. Wait. until you really master delayed gratification. All of the resources internally that you have applied to building any level of measurable success over time compounds. Shit starts to skyrocket over time. But you gotta give it that time. And you gotta be willing to endure some boredom and some anxiety and feeling like you're missing out along the way. It's a reorganization of the entire spectrum of who you are over time. And we just do it one day at a time. So I hope this episode was helpful. I hope it really framed in context how alcohol is dead. You're never gonna win the game. You just gotta rip the bandaid off and you just gotta start. There's always gonna be another birthday or vacation or wedding or event coming up. You know, you gotta believe that life can be better. You know, all the things can be better. And the big cosmic joke is that it is. When you quit drinking, it seems so terrifyingly scary. And the big cosmic joke is on the other side. It's all the things that you actually ever wanted for yourself, but you were afraid of tapping into. The deepest fears, anxieties, the lack of deserving, worthiness, all those things. When you just stay the course, all the things that were the scariest and hardest and the most painful become the fuel source. The fuel source to really step into the possibilities of who you can be. So hope this episode was helpful. I appreciate you listening. Share this with somebody you know who you think it might help. And if you haven't left a review, I would super, super appreciate if you did on Spotify and on Apple. I'll leave it at that and I will see you guys in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star review and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.thestoptrinkingcoach.com and book a call with me. I offer private one on one and group coaching to make letting go of alcohol easier and more sustainable than you ever thought possible. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.