Alcohol is Self Preservation Against Pain & Fear

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. Hey, welcome back to another episode. My name is Barti Arez. I'm the host of the Stop Drinking Coach podcast and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. And I'm excited to be jumping into another episode today. Today's episode is titled "Alcohol is Self Preservation Against Fear." And this literally just came to me like 10 seconds before I started to record this episode because the way I record my stuff, like I don't write out a huge list of topics. I don't look at other podcasts to see what are other people saying. What's popular? Like I wait and this is probably why my scheduling is not very consistent. I'm kind of waiting until something comes to me. And once I get that like download, that source of insight and inspiration, then I riff on that angle. And something that just came to me is alcohol is a form of self preservation against fear. And if you really think about that, it makes perfect sense. And let's talk about what that actually means. So why do we drink alcohol? Right? The reason we drink alcohol is because there is something inside of us, psychologically or emotionally, that is uncomfortable. Call it boredom, call it loneliness, call it social anxiety, call it's feelings of overwhelm, wanting to disconnect from stress, whatever it might be. I mean, insert, fill in the blank. For you, it's probably a combination of one of those things or multiple of those things. So the reason we turn to alcohol is because there's a dysregulation inside of us. Now, the question is not why the alcohol or why the alcoholism or why the alcohol used to sort of the question is why the dysregulation and what is the dysregulation? Right? That's the question. Right? And why so many people struggle on this journey and fail to do this thing successfully is because they think, Oh, okay, well, to quit drinking, I just have to put the bottle down. And yeah, of course, that's step one, you've done it. You've put the bottle down. Right? But what happens after that? Right? So many of you guys probably listening to this podcast put the bottle down. You're like, man, I've developed this problematic relationship with alcohol. And, you know, I can go a week. I can go a month. I can go 10 days. The longest I went was like three months or insert any amount of time. Right? But then, you know, I don't know, I was out with my friends and it was a nice day and I was out to dinner. And, you know, the voice in my head said, you know, look at you, you got things figured out. Like, you know, things are going to be different this time. You got this. And you started with one. And maybe that first time it was okay. Maybe you did just have one or two, but inevitably over a week or a month or two or three months, you found yourself right back at square one. Right? So we have to understand that this journey is not just about putting the bottle down. Right? Dr. Gabor Mate, he says, you know, ask why not why the addiction? Why the pain? Where's the pain coming from? Right? Let's just use some some contrasts of analysis here. You have person A who has alcohol use disorder and is developed a dependency and has an addiction. Right? It's a way to self-sue something internally. And person B doesn't drink. Right? What's the difference here? What's the difference? I think a simple thing that we can say is that person B has found it within themselves to learn how to manage their mind and to learn how to manage their impulses and how to manage their desires and how to manage their emotional system. It doesn't mean that person B doesn't feel stress. It doesn't mean that person B doesn't have a job or a business that they're attending to. It doesn't mean that person B doesn't want to find a way to relax or unplug after a long day's work or a long work week. Right? Person B has just learned how to process and manage any level of pain or discomfort that arises within themselves without needing to drink. So that's what you have to understand. This journey is about is putting the bottle down is step one, my friend. That's the easy part. It's literally a physical action of not picking up a glass that's on the table and putting it to your mouth. A monkey can do that. You just put or a two-year-old can do that once they learn how to grip things. Right? The harder part, the challenge, the journey, what you're actually doing on this road of going alcohol-free is finally being present to yourself and developing the courage to be present to and to acknowledge and to confront all of those things inside of you that you're using alcohol to change, escape, run from and numb out from and distract yourself from. And that is where your evolution occurs as an adult. Right? Our evolution depends on our ability to adapt to pain. I was just talking about this on a coaching call with my last client. Right? Pain is the greatest teacher. Pain is the thing that allows us to adapt and evolve. Right? Just look at our, let's look at nature. Let's look at animals. Let's look at biology. Right? How do we become better? How does an animal adapt to its environment so that it can survive more effectively? It does that by allowing pain to be present so that it can find a way to adapt. So the pain, it's not the thing to avoid. The pain is the path to adaptation. Right? So if you have this, let's say you've got this animal in the wilderness, right? And it's got all these things, right? One of them is it's got scarce food. It's got two different types of predators. It's got this, you know, it lives in this type of climate so it rains all the time so it's always flooding. Right? How does that, how does that organism learn to become more adaptive? How does that organism develop, let's say, I don't know, a longer snout or sharper claws or faster movement or some other adaptation that makes it better, that makes it better at surviving? Well, it does that in response to the pain that presents itself, the predators, right? The stress of the pain of those things is what allows the organism to adapt. Similarly, as human beings, we all experience pain through our childhood, right? We have traumas. We have parents who aren't there for us. We have emotional neglect. We have different types of abuse. We have feelings of whatever, right? There's a thousand, big tea trauma, little tea trauma. We all experience it, right? And when we experience these pains and we don't fully process them and make sense of them, we internalize these pains. We create a story and a narrative around them that limit our self-expression, that limit the expression of our natural energy, who we are, and we start developing these adaptive patterns as a way to protect yourself from having to re-experience that pain. And one of the protective measures or patterns that we install is alcohol. That's what alcohol is. Alcohol is a protective adaptation to prevent you from having to experience boredom, from having you experience sadness, from having you experience anxiety, from having you to experience your thoughts or self-perceptions of inadequacy or confusion or lack of confidence or lack of belief in yourself, right? Alcohol serves as a protective measure against pain, right? And so what we have to understand on this journey is that if you want to quit drinking, like putting the bottle, it's not putting the bottle down as the easy part. What this journey actually represents is your spiritual. And when I say spiritual, here's what I mean. Spiritual is all encompassing because spiritual means our relationship to life. That is what I consider spirituality. It is the greater understanding of our relationship to life in the universe, which includes your psychological, your emotional, your physical, and your energetic evolution. So that is why quitting drinking is a, they say, it's like a spiritual progress. It's a spiritual process because what you're doing is you are finally holding the mirror and being present to the fabric of who and what you are in the way that you are now. And for a lot of people, that's difficult to do, right? Especially if you've had a really challenging life, if you've had a lot of challenging experiences, right? You've got a lot of pain or dysregulation inside you. Being present with yourself seems hard. It seems scary, right? Boredom seems dangerous. And it's not dangerous, but we feel like it's dangerous, right? Fear seems dangerous. When really fear isn't dangerous, danger is dangerous, but fear isn't dangerous, right? All these things that we don't get the opportunity to process in a really development, these things become these self perceptions. And we think that this is who we are, right? Oh, I'm not good enough. Oh, I can't do it. Oh, if I did do it, I would be rejected. I would be laughed at. I would be shamed. Who do you think you are to do these things, right? Like we're at point A and we want to get to point B, but point B seems overwhelming because we don't have the answers. We don't have the tools, the strategies, the system, the support, the accountability, the knowledge, the access. And so it's just easier to drink, right? We feel bad about our past. Maybe we did things. Maybe we said things. Maybe in our past, we weren't showing up the way that we possibly could have. But how could you have if you didn't have what you know now? Right? So there's an element of understanding that the healing process requires us to be compassionate with ourself. I like to look at it as like a simple way as like a child, right? When a five year old is having a temper tantrum, falls down, scrapes his knee or is in an airport, right? And it's super loud or whatever it is, right? It's a crazy temper tantrum and you're like, Jesus, it's a bit much, you know? You don't look at the five year old and get angry at it. You don't shame the five year old. You recognize that that is what a five year old does. That is a natural extension of the developmental process at that age, right? They don't have the language skills. They don't have the cognition. They don't have the context. They don't have the intellect. They don't have the rationale. They don't have the processing capacity to make sense of that painful experience. And so they're acting out as a way to try to one self-sooth and to try to gain the attention of maybe people around them to help them self-sooth and to help them process that experience to help them come back to safety. So similarly for us as human beings and adults, when we're embarking on this journey of putting the bottle down, you have to recognize that what's going to be left is who and what you are and all of the things inside of you that you've been running from. And your adaptation, your evolution as a man or a woman occurs in response to or in relationship with your ability to be fully present to the things that are hard to the things that are challenging, right? It's really simple, like a perfect analogy, right? It's like you go to the gym, right? You have Person A and you have Person B. Person A goes to the gym and they hate being there. They see the gym as a punishment, you know? They feel like they're being judged. They feel like they're being laughed at. They think that having to pick up weight that's heavy is punishment. And with every rep, they grow greater and greater disdain for the process. And they think that it's hard and they can't wait for it to be over. And when they bicep curl, it burns and they hate it and it sucks, right? But that Person A who went to the gym has this goal of losing 25 pounds of fitting in better into their clothes, feeling confident, right? They have this vision. They're at point A, they want to get to point B. But they look at the pain of the process and they are fighting it at each and every step. Do you think that that person is going to be successful, like in enduring that path? By having that interpretation of pain, pain is neutral, pain is objective. It sucks across the board. It's objective. It's the story in the narrative that you tell yourself about the pain, which colors the experience and then allows you to move forward on one track or another. So Person B goes to the gym and has the same goal, losing 25 pounds, fitting better into their clothes and feeling confident, right? Having a great physique that they're proud of. But when Person B goes to the gym, they throw their air pods on, right? They've got a motivational tape or song or podcasts in the background, right? They're looking at their phone, tracking their workout, right? Every time they bicep curl or do the exercise and they can feel the resistance, they recognize that that resistance, that pain, that burning feeling, that lactic acid is the bridge. It is the connector to 25 pounds down and having a great physique and feeling confident. They recognize that that burn, that feeling that is uncomfortable is the necessary part of their growth and transformation. So it is our interpretation of our internal environment and the data that is presenting itself that colors our experience of reality, and dictates how we feel about something and ultimately the behaviors and the choices that we make that produce our outcomes. So quitting drinking, overcoming in addiction, it doesn't have anything to do with alcohol my friend, and that is why you've tried to do this several times on your own and haven't been successful. Because you're like, okay, let me just manage this thing. Let me just moderate it. Let me just bring it from five days a week to one day a week. Let me just figure out how to do it sometimes with my friends so I don't feel left out. There's a million and a half strategies and stories. But you're looking at it the wrong way, you're processing this experience the wrong way, right? Alcohol is not the thing that was marketed to you, my friend. It's just not. It's not this thing that's cool and fun and exciting. It is the detriment. It is the handcuffs to your mental, emotional, physical, energetic and spiritual evolution as a human being. Or as long as you continue to drink alcohol, your hands are tied behind your back. It's like you're trying to fight the fight of life and you've got one hand tied behind your back. Yeah, you're going to be able to make some progress. You're going to be able to make some money. You're going to be able to build a career. You're going to be able to have the type of whatever, you know, but just imagine, just imagine if you had two hands. Just imagine if you've been able to get to where you've gotten to with one hand, imagine if you had two hands and not only two hands. When you free up the other hand, not only do you get that other hand to also begin fighting, but you also regain your balance and your posture and your ability to dodge and your ability to be more proactive in how you swing and your ability to throw combos. Getting that hand back isn't just getting the hand back. It's a compound with all the effect where you get so much more back. You gain back balance. You gain back speed. You gain back agility. It's not just getting your hand back. It's so much more. You gain combos. You gain, you know, counters. Dude, it's insane. It's insane. And so how do we get that hand back? This is a developmental process in your journey where you are willing to say, "Okay, enough is enough." And I'm going to find it within myself to muster the courage. to be fully present to whatever pain wants to present itself and understand that's not my pain. It's your pain. This is your journey as a human being. You're at point A and you want to get to point B. Whatever point B is for you. And so do you think that if you, let's say you're on this track, you're moving, right? You're moving through this track. Do you think if you stop and look behind you and say, what am I carrying with me that's no longer helpful? That's no longer serving me. That is weighing me down and making me 50 pounds heavier. Do you think if you did that for six to 12 months that after that 12 month mark, you would be able to increase your speed to point B significantly? Yeah, of course. That's what happens when you quit drinking. Everything in your life gets better. You think you're going to be missing out and oh, I'm going to be bored and dead like sure. Those are the acute emotional, psychological, neurochemical withdrawal symptoms. That's really what they are. Eventually you adapt and everything gets better. But like, that's a really good analogy, right? It's like you're trying to get to this point B, but dude, you're carrying all this weight, you're carrying all this weight from your childhood, you're carrying all this weight from your last relationships. I just got to, here, I'll read this to you. I just got this private message from a client I brought in two days ago. She just said, it seriously feels wrong to feel this good. I cannot believe the change in one week. Look at that. Sorry, didn't want to go too off track and lose my train of thought. But yeah, wouldn't it make sense to just pause your life for a minute and to look in the rearview mirror and then look out the front of the windshield and say, okay, where do I want to go? What do I really want? Not just this bullshit story or track that I'm like telling myself on like, what do I really want? What seems good to me? I have a limited amount of time. Okay, I've got another 30, 40, 50, 60 years left, assuming I'm lucky enough. That is a fucking bold assumption too, by the way, is none of us know. But let's just for the sake of this thought experiment, consider we've got this predefined amount of time left. How do I want to go out? How do I want people to remember me? Right? What fears and nonsense do I want to put aside? Like, what do I want out of this thing? And would it make sense? Would it make sense that if I were to turn back and see what weight I'm carrying in my backpack, if I were to unload some of that weight, would I be able to freely move towards that position? It's like, yeah, for sure. So you have to understand that like, it's not the alcohol, okay? It's you. It's your unwillingness to be fully present to the fear, the fear of boredom, the fear of missing out. Oh, my family and my friends are going to go drink wine. Oh, they're going to go to dinner and they're all going to have wine and I'm not. You know, they're going to go to this party. They're going to go golfing. Have you ever asked yourself like, why do you need to drink? For what? For what? Social anxiety, it makes you more social, makes you laugh. Right? Like, dude, you can learn how to do those things without alcohol, just like you learned math and algebra and language. Language was way harder to learn than, you know, walking was way harder to learn than how to just go be in a social circle where you ask people questions because that's how you be social. That's how you eliminate social anxiety. You just ask people questions and you actually give a shit. You actually care and you actually stay interested. Read how to win friends and influence people. You practice what's in that book for a week, two weeks a month. Your social anxiety is going to start to diminish and fade. So the question is not why the alcohol, the question is what is it about me internally? What is it about me as a human being within my evolution? What am I numbing? What am I running from? What am I afraid of? What am I scared to acknowledge? What part of my psyche and my emotional system and my protecting myself from having to re-experience? That's the question. Alcohol is a form of self-preservation. It is a protective measure against having to feel or confront something. That's what it is. That's what addiction is. It's too pronged. It's this neurochemical feeding cycle. This pain pleasure balance that gets totally fucked up as a result of the substance that we're consuming, which keeps us in this neurochemical feeding cycle of highs and lows, dopamine, GABA, serotonin crashes, high pleasure. It's connected to all these different parts of the brain as well. It gets more complex, but it's this neurochemical feeding cycle. Then it's underlying levels of dysregulation inside us. What if you weren't dysregulated? At this point in my life, I'm coming up on three years sober next month. I would say there is a ton of dysregulation that exists inside of me. I'm pretty clear on who I am. My filters are pretty clear. I feel like I'm relatively objective. I make good choices. I have good behaviors. I have good routines. I'm pretty self-aware. All the work in progress. My emotional system is fairly balanced and calibrated. If I feel any deviation from my neutral baseline, I immediately notice and recognize it and I don't catastrophize it. I immediately take on the responsibility to say, "Okay, let me rewind the tape. What was my role in this? What could I have done better in my communication, in my tonality, in my behaviors, in my decision-making, in my planning?" Then I take a neutral and objective approach to whatever the situation is. I try to empathize and consider where the other person is at. I try to imagine their map of reality and what they might be going through and how they might be experiencing life and what their internal motives are and what their desires are. All this happens within three and a half seconds. I just make an assessment. I'm like, "Okay, great. This seems like the next best choice or this might seem like the next best option or I should say this or take ownership here or I should set context and frame and help them understand this." I just move forward to point B and point B is getting back into a place of harmony in homeostasis. You just problem-solved it and it doesn't matter how intense the feeling is. It doesn't matter. Before, when I was drinking, feelings were all, they were a catastrophe. Boredom was a catastrophe. Stress and overwhelm from a long week's work was a catastrophe. A craving was a catastrophe. Now, with enough meditation and mindfulness and healing work and recognizing what all these things are, as just sensations that appear inside this vehicle that I inhabit, I observe it. I'm not disassociated. That's not what this is. I just observe it. Oh, yeah. This intense Russian to my stomach. We call that anxiety. I can feel it coming on right now. And yeah, it's not the most pleasant. I'm very familiar with what a nice neutral baseline feels like. It's not the most pleasant. But guess what? I'm still safe. Even though my mind might be going into all these directions, I've spent enough time in meditation to say that, "Okay, well, the mind is creating some story, but I don't have to buy into the story. I can observe the story. I can I can just wait. I always have the option of waiting. And guess what? The nature of this biochemical system that we inhabit that we're conscious witness to is that it's just always changing. I know, guaranteed that if I just wait long enough, the mind will change its patterns and dialogue as well as my body. And as you learn to adopt new tools to self-regulate, I can do some deep breathing. I can go workout. I can apply a few different techniques. And I can actually take my system that was redlining at an 8 or an 9 or a 10. And I can bring it back down to a 2 or 3 in a few minutes. And it's amazing. It's amazing. It's like I'm in full control operating this vehicle. But do you know how I got here? I got here by putting the thing down that was numbing me to all the scrambled dysregulation that existed in my mind and in my body. The stories, the narratives, the belief systems If I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy. I could never do it. The overwhelm, the frustration, the boredom, whatever. They're all just interpretations. They're interpretations. And what's really important to understand on the healing journey is that like, dude, like nobody outside of you heals you. This is all an internal game. And how we heal isn't this magic thing that like, all of a sudden changes what happened to us in the past. You'll be surprised to discover that our healing is a result of getting to a place where we're able to reinterpret and reprocess the meanings of our past. And when we do that, it changes the memory. It changes our interpretation of what happened to us. And as a result, by changing our interpretation, our nervous system also changes. I.e. the emotional, visceral sensation-based response also begins to change. It's really incredible how it works. It's like this computer and it's this feedback system. And the first imprint, the first imprint of pain, right? When you're 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, that imprint is based on limited data, right? When you're those ages and you have a very sensitive nervous system and you don't have the ability to rationally assess things and you don't have life experience and context and the ability to really use language at a high level and to be able to fabricate meaning properly, that pain is catastrophic. It is a threat to your survival. But guess what? That pain that you've been protecting yourself from, from confronting, guess what? When you get older, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, sometimes as an adult and you distance yourself from that pain and you've now raised kids and have had tremendous amounts of life experience and acquired skills and knowledge and context and have overcome tremendous challenges and problems, right? When you now go back to reconfront and be present too and to reprocess that pain, you're gonna be able to do it from a much higher vantage point with way more psychological, emotional, and physical resources than you had at that point, right? So it's like you're split. There's this part of you inside of you that's operating as this child or this teenager that's really hurt and that hurt is real and that trauma is real and that pain is real. I'm not invalidating it. It is absolutely feels true to you because it happened. But then there's this other part of you that is now way more evolved that is 10, 20, 30 decades into the future that has the capacity, the strength, the fortitude, the courage to be able to go head to head toe to toe to be fully present with that thing and to be able to make sense of it in a new way. And that is healing. That is being able to recognize the pain, not just as this static source of damage, but to be able to recognize the greater, broader perspective around how that pain arose and what it meant and what we can do with it, how we can alchemize that pain into a source of wisdom, into a source of strength, into a source of greater understanding, into a greater source of empathy and compassion and intellect. That is what Prayn represents. When we develop the courage to be present to our pains, when we go into it with the right mindset, with the right frame of heart and understanding, that pain can transform into your greatest asset. And that is why this journey is so profound. That is what quitting drinking is, my friend. It's not, oh, like, a missing out, like, no. It's this place, it's this journey within yourself. It is a deep, deep journey within yourself that allows you to transcend and to heal and to reunite and to reintegrate and to become whole, to become whole again, to be able to start loving yourself, to start being able to believe in yourself, to start being able to increase your esteem for yourself, to be able to reestablish a deep sense of integrity and personal values, to be able to get clear on your boundaries, to be able to get clear on what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, to be able to understand your own energy, to be able to take your own energy and to be able to freely express it to the world without fear, without hindrance, without blockages. It is about being able to get to a place in your mind where you can ultimately visualize something and architect something using your imagination and to be able to bring that into existence, to be able to collapse the time in which it manifests and shows itself because you are using the full capacity of who you are with no more limitation, with no more blockage of energy, with no more stories and narratives and emotional patterns that limit your expression and your capacity to be the fullest expression of yourself. Alcohol is a form of self-preservation against the things that we fear, acknowledging, and confronting. And it could be boredom, right? Maybe you're like Bardi, you know? I've got several clients who are like, you know, but my childhood really wasn't that bad. Still have a great relationship with my parents, you know? Yeah, things were good. Like parents are still together, there's no fights. Like, and that's fine. So I don't want, you know, this, you know, 'cause a lot of this kind of almost seems like a trauma base or we came from, you know, this totally dysfunctional place and it's not. Regardless of whether you came from a good family or whatever, we still have these experiences, right? We still have these big to your little T traumas throughout our life. And they disregulate our psychology and our emotional system, right? And maybe you are really confident and maybe you are smashing it in a lot of areas of life and you just started drinking when you were in high school and you were in college, right? And so on that front, it's the neurochemical feeding cycle and what alcohol does to our brain and how it molds and shapes and rewires our reward center in our emotional system and our automatic decision making, right? So in your case, maybe there isn't a ton of childhood trauma or, you know, underlying psychological or emotional pains because of the choices you made or anything else. Maybe it's just, man, I have been drinking for 10, 20, 30 years and I've become dependent on it to the point where, man, when I don't have alcohol, I feel bored, I feel unfulfilled. Everybody that I know in my social circle drinks. So if I don't, it feels like I'm gonna be the only one out, right? And those are all true and feel valid for you as well. But it ultimately comes down to the same thing. The pain that you are afraid of acknowledging is the pain of boredom. You're afraid of acknowledging the pain of, quote unquote, missing out while everybody else goes, does one thing, you're over somewhere else doing the next, right? The pain of having to really evaluate where you are in your life and to consider, wow, every single person I know drinks and my entire life track and social circle and hierarchy system has been adopted around drinking alcohol, consuming a drug. And as I really think about it, do I really have anything in common with these people? Do I really like them to the core? Are they somebody that I would love to spend time with fully sober? Fuck, maybe not. And that's painful. Because what does that mean? Well, that means that, okay, we might have to start disordering. distancing ourself from certain people, and that's painful because we're social creatures, right? By nature, we don't like to isolate, right? It means that we may now have to go outside of our comfort zone and try to maybe make some new friends, right? And if we've used alcohol as a way to alleviate perceived social anxiety, well, that's scary, right? Because how am I going to do that? People are scary, right? I don't feel comfortable expressing myself. I feel like I'm going to be laughed at or judged or I have to show up a certain way to be acknowledged or accepted. Boom, right, dig into that. Great. You're using alcohol for social anxiety. Let's dig deeper. At what point in your life did social anxiety develop? Well, probably happened in seventh grade when I went to raise my hand and answer a question, and everybody laughed at me because I got the question wrong. Or I was getting bullied. Or, you know, I was on a soccer team and something happened. Like, great, let's get to the root of that. And use neuro-linguistic programming to help you reprocess that experience. Let's do some memory reconsolidation to change the way that you retrieve that experience within your mind and body and to change it at the root, the original file where that program of social anxiety was installed. These are all programs and patterns. Remember, when you're born, you are an empty sponge. You're a, we're just data processing units. We're a conscious witness that has this mind that's like a software program and we have this emotional system that is it works in tandem with what the mind presents in terms of the internal representations it has. And so if we can go in and we can begin to augment the way the internal representations are being presented, we change our interpretation of the internal representation, which then changes how our neurochemistry fires, how our hormones fire, how our stress response elicits itself, how our, like, it's all connected. And once you understand the framework of this human operating system and you can see, okay, I'm here and then I have this trigger and then this happens and that happens, you can dissect it like a surgeon. You can just reverse engineer the process and say, oh, yeah, right here is where this shift occurs. So if we move this, if we push this button, if we turn this style and adjust this, how do you feel now? Wow, wow, I feel much better. Tell me more. Oh, wow, yeah. So, man, that thing, it just doesn't really seem like that big of a deal anymore. Wow, yeah, what else are you noticing? Man, I just, I just felt this huge release in my shoulders. Wow, okay, beautiful. It's energy that has been stored there for the last 30 years that you just now released. How do you feel? God, my neck feels better. I feel lighter, beautiful. So if you were to think about that thing again, how would you feel about it differently? Wow, well, I mean, it just, it's crazy that I thought about it that way for me. But more, it just, it doesn't, yeah, it just doesn't seem that big of a deal and that thing that I was worried about. Yeah, just wow. And boom. It's done. It's different. It's different permanently moving forward. And I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. Your experience of reality, everything that you think you're so committed to and life is this way and I am this way and my responses are this way and this is how things are. It's all an interpretation. You are a conscious witness to data presenting itself within your mind and data presenting itself within your body. And when you learn the operating system, just like you learn the operating system of how to drive a car and all the buttons and how to turn it on and how to turn it off and how to replace the oil and do all these things, when you learn that within your own conscious experience, you can begin to shift and tweak and in change almost anything that you want. Who you think you are is nothing more than a complex set of established neural pathways in your brain, right? It's like, remember, when we're born, we're a sponge, no neural pathways, nothing. We're just a empty data processing unit waiting to receive. And then every experience you have from the moment you're born until this moment, as data comes in through your five senses, it establishes these tracks in your brain, these neural pathways that says, oh, data point here equals this. This is a color. This is a shape. This is how I respond to this. Oh, I'm having this feeling. Here's how I should do it that are like just millions of just interactions happening and they become you. And you say, oh, this is who I am. These are my programs. These are my patterns. This is how I respond. I ask you who you are. You basically dig into your memory bank and you just pull up your experiences. You're no different than the person who is born on the other side of the planet. You're both just a conscious witness. You just have different neural pathways established, which then represents this thing called ego, who you think you are. And you say, oh, this is how I am. It's not who you are. You're the witness to it all. And so to recognize that what alcohol represents is it's this persistent, this persistent procrastination, this persistent procrastination against just being fully present. It's not to the things about ourselves that we think are bad or painful or unsafe or that we think are going to hurt us. But what you discover through this process as an adult is that, hey, you're coming to this place from a totally different vantage point. Those pains, those challenges, those hurts, those losses, those traumas, yeah, they're real. And refeelling them and reprocessing them and working through them is going to be challenging. Yeah, you may cry. You may scream. You may have feelings of rage and anger. Those are perfectly normal too. Those are normal responses to your needs not being met and feeling hurt. But you have to understand that the longer that we procrastinate against feeling those things, the longer that we're going to live our life in handcuffs and we're not going to be able to move forward and create the life that we want for ourselves. And so when you really dig in this human experience, it's about learning how to redefine and re-adapt your relationship to pain and discomfort. Because when you start to get really good at managing pain and discomfort, that is when you evolve. You look at every person that you admire, every athlete, every celebrity, every whoever, whatever it might be in any field of life that you're passionate about. In order to get to those places, those levels that we admire and respect and revere and would love to also experience, they had to just go through pain. You look at Kobe Bryant, you look at the guy woke up every morning at 3.30 and trained harder than anybody. And it's like, do you think that he wasn't tired in the morning? Do you think that he didn't get exhausted practicing eight hours a day? No. Like he just had a different relationship to it. He saw the pain as a necessary part of his adaptation and evolution to become the best and to win. And so I want to encourage you to reflect on, like, why not be the best? Why not be the best version of yourself? At what point did you get away from thinking that, hey, you can be fucking awesome. You can be fucking amazing. You can be the person that you've always wanted to be. You can have the things that you want to have. The things that you're seeking are also seeking you. At what point did you stop believing that it's all possible? It's all possible for you. But the way that we experience those possibilities, the way that we move into unmanifest potential is through pain, is through acknowledging and being present to and processing that pain in a healthy way that allows us to adapt and evolve and become a stronger, more resilient wiser version of ourself. To the degree that we avoid the pain is to the degree that the pain stays present and the present moment continues to be a reliving of that experience over and over again through time until our eventual demise. It's insane. It's insane. But the way that we free yourself from those shackles is by stopping, saying, hey, this thing isn't working anymore. This procrastination thing, this alcohol thing, this numbing thing, this distraction thing, it doesn't work anymore. And where everything changes in your life is where you develop courage. Courage is the turning point, as I said in my last podcast. You have to develop the courage within yourself to withstand the boredom, to withstand the fear of missing out, to withstand having to make new choices, to withstand whatever it is. And to recognize like, hey, you can do it one day at a time. You just do this one day at a time. You don't have to solve this whole problem and puzzle piece and life thing tomorrow. And you don't have to start working through all these things next week. You just figure out how do I not drink today? How do I make it through the rest of the day today? And then tomorrow, you just make that commitment again, but you don't even think about tomorrow today. You just get through today. And as life naturally, in its own divine timing and order presents challenges. That version of you in the future will handle it. But you just focus on how do I make this moment the best that I can? How do I ensure that I maximize the value of this moment to lay down a brick of foundation now? So that by the evening evening Bardia has the brick that I laid now and is 1% more equipped to handle it. Your ability to stay present and to live life that way is the key that unlocks your future because all of our power exists in the present moment and that is why healing your relationship to yourself healing your relationship to your mind healing your relationship to your emotional operating system is the key that unlocks reality because wherever you go there you are it's always the present moment So if you ask me our only goal in life Should be to learn how to optimize our mind and to optimize our emotional system because these are the two foundational drivers that produce All of our experience of reality how we feel how we act what we do our behaviors our actions our routines our responses our communication It's all filtered through those two things and When you remove the alcohol and become present to those two modalities and begin to work through them and reprocess them and heal them to create alignment within yourself mentally emotionally spiritually energetically man Imagine who you could be if you had full unrestricted access to all of your resources What you could create how much love you can give to the world how much service how much abundance you could Willfully and Appreciatively receive if there is no more blockages of your energy So I'll leave it at that Remind yourself that alcohol is a form of self-preservation against fear so ask yourself what in this moment am I so afraid of Is it this boredom is it this missing out is it this story this narrative what is it and how can I get through it? How can I reprocess it? And if you want help and you want support and you want a community and you want a system to follow and you want accountability and you want to work with me through this process go to my website www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com and fill out an application and I will reach back out to you and You know hopefully we can connect and and work together And if you haven't I would really really appreciate if you left a five star review on my Spotify and on my Apple Just to help this this podcast reach more people who need it and share this episode with somebody who you think it might help Feel free to share it on your social media or anywhere else. I appreciate you listening and I will see you 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.thestopdrinkingcoach.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