Alcoholism is Not a Disease & How To Quit Drinking Alcohol

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. Welcome back to another episode, SDC Family. My name is Barti Arez, I'm the Stop Drinking Coach and I've got a really powerful episode for you today. As you can see from the title, why alcoholism is not a disease and how to quit drinking. I think this might ruffle some feathers out there, but that's okay. I'm here to come in with our latest understanding of neuroscience, of the brain, and of an individual that's carrying the flag and the torch, I believe, inside the recovery space and the recovery community. You know, at one point when I first started Stop Drinking Coach many years ago, I had the thought of who am I to come into this space and to create change and to help people get sober. And after helping thousands of people get sober, after working with hundreds and hundreds over 500 people personally myself, and having created content that has reached over 50 million people around the world and being the host of what I believe to be the number one sobriety podcast on Spotify and on Apple. I've gotten to a place where I now absolutely believe in the work that I'm doing and in the change that I'm making as every single day I'm having people not only within my program, but through Instagram and through email reach out to me telling me how much I've changed and transformed their life. I'm talking 20, 30, 40, 50 year drinkers getting sober just by listening to my content in the way that I speak and the way that I teach and the way that I communicate and in the way that I weave the tapestry of understanding of alcohol and everything that's connected to it together. So today I want to dig in and help you better understand why alcoholism isn't a disease and how alcoholism or what we find or self in in terms of the predicament when it comes to quitting drinking or a relationship with alcohol is actually a very natural extension of what the brain is already trying to do and is doing in day to day life. And I'm going to talk about how to actually quit drinking, right? Because I get that a lot. People respond to my short form content on my Instagram and my TikTok and they'll be like, "Barty, all this sounds great, but how do you actually quit?" And I'm going to answer that today. So stick around. This is going to be one of my most, I believe, popular episodes here very soon and it's incredibly educational at helping you understand the brain, the neuroscience and what is actually happening when you lift the hood and look at alcohol and the human operating system. So for the last approximately 100 years, we've been told that alcoholism is a disease and while that's helped a lot of people, right? AA as an entity has helped millions of people quit drinking. It actually happens to be one of the biggest reasons millions, many more people actually stay stuck, suffering and unable to quit. So I want to really break this down for you. We're going to talk about the history of how alcoholism got labeled a disease, why the label has helped some people but hurt many more, and why it actually keeps many people trapped in hopelessness. Then I'm going to show you the modern truth. Alcoholism isn't mysterious. It's not cunning and it's not baffling. It's not this deep dark black hole that doesn't make sense. It's just neuroscience. It's relatively simple and it's solvable. It's simple when we look at it through neuroscience. It might not be simple for the individual because every human has a different background, architecture and is multi-dimensional and complex but it is solvable. By the end of the episode, you're going to understand why you drink, why you relapse and what it actually takes to rewire your brain and body to finally break free. Let's dig into how alcoholism got labeled a disease. Back in the mid-1900s, doctors and researchers like Jell-Anne-Eck along with the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization started calling alcoholism a disease. The reason they did that or where they got that from was from AA because at the time, AA had no understanding of the brain, neuroscience, neurochemistry, the nervous system, psychology, childhood trauma and all of these different things. They just looked at all of these people who struggled with alcohol, couldn't quit and it made no sense to them so they're like, "Hey, what we're probably dealing with here is a disease." Then eventually in the 1950s, they labeled it that. At the time of labeling it a disease, it appeared to be a good thing. It appeared to be helping people to some degree. Before that, people thought if that you drank too much, that you were just weak, that you were immoral, that you were broken, labeling it a disease took away some of that shame. It gave people permission to say, "I'm sick. I need help." Instead of, "There's something wrong with me. I'm broken and that I'm a failure," or that, "There's something wrong with my character," or that, "I don't care about my life or I don't care about my kids or I don't care about my job or I don't care about my spouse or I don't care about my family." Labeling it a disease also helped people get out of denial. If you admit that you have a disease, you might finally stop pretending that you can manage it. Ultimately, that is what keeps people on the merry-go-round of alcohol in siphons, decades of their most precious years in their life is because they're attempting to manage it. I'll explain exactly why. I'll explain why people don't want to quit drinking and that they hope to go back to normal drinking or moderate drinking or whatever you want to call it. That's why AA has built its foundation around the disease model. Here's the problem. The disease label has helped people get sober. It came with a massive, massive cost. You tell someone that they have a disease, you're also telling them that they have no power over it, that they're powerless. They're afflicted with this thing. You can't see a disease when you're just sitting here looking at your body. You can't pinpoint it. You don't actually know what's going on beneath the surface. When you tell them they're permanently broken, it creates this thought, this perspective, this perception that they're never going to get better. Think about the ripple effect of that. Millions of people never walk into recovery rooms because they don't want to accept that identity. After having run, stop drinking coach now for three and a half, maybe coming up on four years and several months, I've spoken to thousands of people over the phone. Literally thousands of people who are on the spectrum of alcohol use the sword or stroke with alcohol or alcoholics, whatever you want to call it. Frankly, 95% of them or more don't want to go near AA with a 10-foot pole because they do not want to accept that they have a disease and they don't want to accept that they are an alcoholic as a part of their identity because they know they're not. They know that their entire life is not just a representation of their relationship with alcohol. When you hear the term alcoholic like, dude, it feels so degrading. When we look at alcohol and we look at the downstream negative consequences that come from it, nobody wants to identify with that. Nobody wants to wear that as a badge of honor, especially if you're successful, especially if you're a high functioning individual, especially if you've got many of your ducks in a row in life, but secretly and quietly struggle with this thing that's hijacked your brain and your neurochemistry and thereby changes the way that you think, believe, feel and prioritize your life as a result of changing your brain. That's the thing that people have to understand. We were misinformed, we were duped, we were lied to and we were not educated around just how harmful and destructive and dangerous and impactful alcohol is at literally changing our brain. Therefore when you change your brain, you change the person, right? We can see that very clear. If somebody has a stroke and certain parts of their brain stop communicating or stop firing, you can see the very physical outward expression of how that changes the person. and how they communicate. They're maybe the way they slur their speech, maybe half of their face lose this connection and half of their face droops. Like maybe they lose sensation or feeling inside of their body, right? So it's very clear and evident. When you change somebody's brain, it changes the person, right? So like if people believe that they have a lifelong incurable disease, like why would they be motivated and believe that they can change, right? Like that's the question we have to ask ourselves. And this is the trap and it's why so many people either never get help or just continue to kind of live and shame and feel like it's hopeless and just continue the cycle of trying to manage and moderate and just keep relapsing over and over again while alcohol literally quietly steals like the best parts of their life, okay? So I want to communicate and kind of set the standard here is that alcoholism is not mysterious. When you understand what's happening behind the scenes, there's nothing mysterious about it, okay? It's not cunning, it's not this black hole that you can't ever climb out of, okay? Alcoholism is a natural product of what the brain does. It's simple neuroscience, okay? So let me explain this very simply, okay? Your brain is a prediction machine and if this is new to you, go back to one of my episodes, it's probably halfway down, it's called the brain is a predictive modeling system. I've outlined this in clear detail but I'm gonna go even deeper in this episode, okay? Your brain is a prediction machine. Its job is to predict what will bring you pleasure, what will bring you relief and what's gonna help keep you safe, okay? You have to understand that this is the prime directive of the brain over the last several hundred thousand years of our evolution before iPhones and paved roads and grocery stores and all the modern comforts and luxuries that has made us live the way that we do, even to date to some degree, like being a human being is about survival and our genetic code, our biology, our nervous system, our brain, everything that we do is either in the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. Literally everything that you have ever done, my friend, person listening to this podcast, from the moment you were born, till this very moment when you turned on this podcast from going to the bathroom, to going to the fridge, to buying a new car, to getting a job, to making money, to going out on a Friday night, to reading a book, to cleaning your house, to going on a vacation, to watching YouTube videos, to engaging with a hobby, doing yoga, going for a run, getting your oil change, paying your taxes, every single thing, having plants in your house, buying lotion, like I'm telling you, every single thing that you have ever done and will ever do for the rest of your life, as long as you are alive, is at some level in the pursuit of pleasure, getting closer to feeling good or moving away from feeling bad or experiencing some possible level of relief from discomfort. That's it, that's it. There's a smoke screen, there's a matrix in front of you that through marketing and through dramatization, and through all of these different things, is leading you to believe that you are consciously going out and making all these decisions and creating your life and managing your life, but ultimately what you're doing in every thought, in every choice, in every decision, in every behavior, is trying to get closer to feeling good and trying to move away from feeling bad. That's it, that's it, nothing else. Every single thing you do is trying to get closer to feeling good or moving away from feeling bad. And if you take all those examples that I shared with you, going to the fridge, buying plants, watching movies, like it doesn't matter what it is. At some level, you're getting an oil chain, so your car doesn't break down so that you don't experience the pain of not having a car. You go to the fridge and you eat to manage the discomfort of being hungry. You order plants for your house so that you can move towards the confidence and the sense of pride that comes from having an aesthetic household, or having plants in your house that clean the air so that you can live longer and avoid disease or lung damage. Like every single thing that you do is in the pursuit of pleasure in the avoidance of pain. And that is how your brain is tooled. That is how your brain is wired. That's all your brain is trying to do. Okay, your brain, your jobs, your brain's job is to predict what will bring you pleasure, what will bring you relief, and what will keep you safe. So when you drink, okay, your brain learns that alcohol equals relief, okay? The very first time you drink and you have a sip of alcohol, it floods your brain with dopamine. Dopamine helps you feel good and rewarded and pleasurable. It lights up a certain part of the brain that I'll tell you about. And then it also increases GABA, another neurotransmitter that calms and sedates your system. So you get like this powerful cocktail that makes you feel good and it calms you down. Okay, so the brain records that and it says alcohol equals relief, okay? This prediction that alcohol equals relief, this air in our software is eventually what leads us to continue to try to get here, but then eventually destroys our life, okay? So it records the memory, it records the moment that it brought you relief, it solved a problem that helped you meet your need, whether it was social anxiety or fitting in or enjoying the date or relieving the stress from work or shutting out the overwhelm of your family life for bills or business responsibility or whatever the case may be, right? It records the memory, it stores it, and then it predicts that next time you're stressed, alcohol will solve that problem, right? Because alcohol appears to be very effective at managing and solving the ability to enjoy pleasure and relieve pain for a really cheap way, right? It's a few bucks at the store and it's really effective, it works very quickly. Once your brain predicts that, dopamine fires, right? And so this is where sort of the craving kicks in. Dopamine is not just the pleasure chemical, it's also the teacher, right? So throughout our evolution, right, before alcohol, we would only get dopamine, which was this thing that made us feel good and was reinforcing when we applied effort in our day-to-day life and did something that was good for our survival. We had sex, we ate food, we found shelter, we created shelter, we made connection, we felt safe in community, we got a little hit of dopamine, it felt good, it felt warm, it felt satiating, and so as a result, dopamine is this very important teacher chemical. It reinforces and only fires, it only fires when it supports survival. Okay, when it does something that says, "Hey, this is good, this is gonna help you feel better, "it's gonna help you feel safer, "it's gonna relieve pain, it's gonna make sure "that you've survived longer." Boom, you gotta hit a dopamine, it's gonna help you feel better, it's gonna help you feel better, okay, when you drink alcohol, it damages your prefrontal cortex, it reduces the capacity for your prefrontal cortex to be fully online and make decisions. Alcohol, when you're drinking, shuts down the prefrontal cortex, which is why you keep making choices you regret. You're not able to think clearly and logically and rationally, that's why people will drink and drive, They'll be back. [TAKE VO] VO drive drunk with their kids in the back of their car. They will cheat on their spouses. They will get into fights. They'll take risks that they normally would not take. Because the part of their brain, when they're fully sober that can connect A to B, inputs to outputs, is incredibly, it's like it's not working, right? It's not online. Then we have the amygdala. This is one of the oldest parts of your brain that's connected to our deep evolution, and it's connected to our nervous system, and it's connected to our emotions. The amygdala is your fear and your stress center. Okay? What happens is the amygdala is connected to the nervous system, the nervous system is connected to all of our different feelings, our sensations, our different emotions. And so when we get stressed out, when we get overwhelmed, when we get sad, when we get isolated, when we get lonely, when we get anxious, fill in the blank. There's 100 different minutia of ways we could be feeling where the amygdala gets activated. Alcohol calms it down in the short term, which is why it feels like relief. Okay? Then we have the nucleus accumbens. This is your craving in your reward center. Okay? So alcohol overstimulates it with dopamine, which is why you begin to obsess. So whenever dopamine is produced, the nucleus accumbens is activated. And so here's what you have to remember about dopamine and alcohol and why it's so destructive, why it's so damaging, why it is such an illusion, why it's so toxic. Okay? Your brain on average sits at about 50 nanograms per desoliter of dopamine. So when you're in a normal, natural waking state, you've got 50 nanograms per desoliter of dopamine. This is enough to help you do what you need to do in daily life. Like go to work, clean your house. You know, it's part of kind of the motivational circuit to be able to go out and do basic things to survive. But then there's certain substances, there's certain activities, there's certain behaviors, there's certain things that will significantly increase the dopamine in your brain to give you the motivation to pursue them. Right? Like food and sex, right? Raises your dopamine to around 90 to 100 nanograms per desoliter. So you're doubling your sort of baseline level of motivation. And if you pay close enough attention to your mind and body and how you feel, you can feel how when you get hungry, you become very, very motivated to seek out food. In fact, you get a little hangry. You start to get sometimes a little short. Sometimes you get a little frustrated. You don't want to talk to people. You don't want to do anything else. You just want to fucking eat food, right? Or think about the times where you start to get aroused or maybe you see the opposite sex or whatever the case may be. And you start to feel that surge or that motivation to want to go talk to the person or maybe you want to date the person. Or maybe you have these thoughts of what it would be like to be intimate with that person, right? That's all connected to dopamine. That surge of motivation that pulls you forward towards that thing so that you could experience the pleasure or the reward or the relief. That's tied to the discomfort that you're feeling. Okay. Then you've got the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the memory center of your brain. And when you drink alcohol and you are able to get your needs met in that short term window, it remembers that alcohol equals relief. And so it keeps replaying that prediction out. The brain is not able to connect to the fact that alcohol causes hangovers. It destroys your life. It causes brain fog, massive opportunity cost in your business. It's damaging your relationship, your wife, your husband, your kids are disappointed in you. Hours and hours later, you feel guilt and shame and regret. It's too far away from the critical window where your brain is learning and receptive. It's outside of the memory reconciliation window, which I'll talk more about. Therefore, the program never gets updated. So when you look at it this way, you can begin to see that alcoholism is not a disease. Your brain is just trying to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. And it's human beings that are multi-dimensional and we each have an incredibly unique architecture with different tendencies and a different social life and a different family life and a different socioeconomic status and different stressors and different childhood traumas and different relationships and different levels of connection and confidence and self-esteem and happiness and skills and fears and self-limiting beliefs and models of the world and politics and what's gonna happen. And like you can see how every human being is infinitely multi-dimensionally complex when we look at thoughts, fears, beliefs, values, goals, desires, skills, competency and everything in between to be able to help us like as a model or representation of every human's capacity to move through life, right? Like you can see how it's incredibly complex and how every person has different varying degrees of fear and anxiety and problem solving capacity and ability to mentally regulate and ability to handle stress and ability to manage different forms of discomfort and then you tie in their programming and their childhood and how their parents treated them and their language skills and the stories they tell themselves in their mind about what's possible and what's not possible and their level of IQ or intelligence or competency to problem solve their life and whether they gear towards optimism or pessimism like you can see how in every single moment as a human being we are trying to manage homeostasis. We're trying to manage pain and we're trying to manage pleasure, right? We're trying to manage feeling safe, feeling okay. We're trying to manage how much effort it's gonna take to get certain rewards. We're gonna try to manage what we have to do and what the payoff is gonna be, right? Like all of that is constantly fluctuating within our mind and body, right? So you can see how all this is starting to make sense here. So this is where things really get interesting, okay? It's, so what I'm developing here, this new model of recovery called neurorepaterning, right? It's based off of this really fundamental understanding that alcoholism or addiction is just a prediction error in the brain. It's not complex. Every time you think you wanna drink, every time you tell yourself it's gonna be different that it's gonna be okay, you're running a prediction error. Your brain and all of the deeper underlying functions are not connecting the fact that alcohol is actually incredibly destructive. And all it remembers and all it values and all it cares about is in the moment helping you get to what you want, which is more pleasure or relief from pain, okay? Or maintenance of safety. So every time you drink, your brain predicts relief, right? And you get it, but you get it for a moment because what happens after, right? It's followed by anxiety, guilt, hangover, shame, health consequences, damage to your relationships, opportunity costs at work and business with your finances, with your career, with moving up the ladder, with your creativity, with becoming the version of yourself that you deep down know you're capable of being, living the life you desire and your overall potential, right? So what happens here is your brain made a bad prediction, right? That's very clear. It doesn't matter if you're in denial, where you're at. Every time you drink and at some part you know you don't want to or you know that it's bad for you, but you keep giving in, your brain just directed you into making a bad prediction. And nine times out of 10, you can absolutely agree with that because you feel like shit, you feel worse, you wonder why you did it, you wonder why you lost control and weren't able to manage it in that moment. And so every single time you can see that it's making a bad prediction. It's based off of faulty code. It's running off of code that at one point seems like it was reasonable, but over time we can see as we zoom out and look at the whole picture is actually faulty code, right? So in neuroscience this is called a prediction error, okay? And so the brain instead of fixing it, the brain actually doubles down, doubles down, doubles down. It says, okay, maybe I didn't drink enough. Maybe next time it'll work better. Maybe next time I'll manage my conception, I just won't drink as much. And then the loop, the stamp, deepens, okay? This is the entire cycle of alcoholism. It's not a disease. It's your brain doing what it is designed to do, which is to seek pleasure, seek the fastest path to relief, find the best shortcut that doesn't require the amount of, that requires the least amount of application and energy so that I can get to its ultimate goal, which is to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain, right? So here's the big shift, okay? Your brain is just running on bad code, okay? Alcohol is not the problem. problem. When we're stuck in cycles of drinking and alcoholism, we think, I just kind of stop drinking. Alcohol is the issue. It's alcohol that's causing the shame and the guilt and the dammit. That's the issue. Alcohol is the problem here. Alcohol is an inanimate object that just sits in physical reality on your table. Alcohol is the messenger. Alcohol is the bridge. It's the thing that your brain is using to solve discomfort, access to pleasure, stress, loneliness, boredom, fear, trauma, social anxiety. Which means the real work of recovery is you're beginning to understand if you've been listening to my podcast, is not about alcohol. It's about healing the things that are underneath alcohol. It is about healing the dysregulation that we do not have the courage and capacity tools and resources to otherwise resolve and manage. Because we don't have those tools, because we don't have the support system, because we don't have the accountability, because we're trying to climb a mountain in which we've never climbed and have no idea the route up, our brain, our body, our mind defaults to the path of least resistance, which is, hey, in the past, this helped me manage my stress, this helped me manage my loneliness, this helped me manage my fear, my social anxiety, myself doubt, and all the risks that I'm afraid to take. I can just numb out and forget about it. So let me just do that. And because we've wired our system that way, hundreds and hundreds of times, with a substance that artificially produces masses amounts of dopamine, like literally jackpot reward going off in your brain, it's like, that seems like the best option. So considering that alcohol dampens your prefrontal cortex, now you're not thinking logically and rationally, you're amygdala, the fear center of your brain is now super hyperactive. And when you're in a craving state and you have all these intense sensations in your body that are like, I'm super unsafe and I need to resolve this, you go out and you drink. It's not complicated. It's not baffling. It's not mysterious. You know why you drink every single time. You know, I talk to people, you hear stories that are like, shit, yeah, I don't know why I did it. It's like, of course you do. You were in a moment where you wanted to either increase pleasure or eliminate or numb out some level of discomfort. And you have memories from your past where when you engage with alcohol, it helped you do that really quickly and easily, right? It's not mysterious. It's not cunning. It's not baffling. It's just what the brain does and you have memories of it and you've patterned and wired these different centers of your brain to remember this as a prediction that you're going to feel better or get closer to your needs being met, right? So why does traditional recovery fail, right? When we look at AA, when we look at therapy, when we look at rehab, when we look at sober apps, when we look at a lot of other sober coaching programs out there, why do they fail? Well, they fail because many of them are are one dimensional, right? Like, A says, emit your powerless. Do a journaling exercise, call the 12 steps where you do some self-reflection and take some inventory around what why you might be drinking, right? Let's look at our character. Let's look at our personality a bit. Let's look at our past. Let's do a little reflection. Therapy can be really helpful. I'm a huge advocate and proponent of therapy, but most therapists also drink, actually. And if you're not specialized in addiction recovery, talk therapy at a surface level can be helpful in helping you work things out, but it's not getting to the core. It's slow. You're meeting for an hour and an half, maybe once a week, maybe once by weekly. And outside of therapy, you have no structure. You have no daily path. You're not optimizing neurochemistry. You're just like talking through stuff. And again, I support that. But as the secret weapon for addiction recovery, I don't think so. Rehab, incredibly expensive for what you get, right? Like, to be in a center for 30 days and have to pay $30,000, a thousand bucks a day, kind of crazy, kind of insane. And it's really easy to stay sober in rehab when you go for 30 to 90 days. You literally can't bring drugs and alcohol in and you can't leave, right? And when you're in rehab with 25 other people and you're not like getting that personalized level of like support by going through your own like multi-dimensional healing experiences and you're thrown back out into the same environments with the same triggers and people and stressors. It's like, dude, there's really high relapse rates there, right? And then obviously sober apps and trackers, it's like trying to put a bandaid on a bullet wound, right? It's you're not getting much there. The thing that you have to ultimately realize about recovery, right? And I'm putting this out there as a broad general understanding that all humans need to begin to understand. But you also need to understand is the person who is trying to get to the other side of this thing is that human beings are multi-dimensional. And our relationship with alcohol isn't just about putting our debattled to our mouth or drinking alcohol because we have stress from work. If you've been drinking for several years or several decades, alcohol has woven its tentacles into multiple multiple multiple different dimensions and aspects of your life, right? Stress is not like just stress from work, right? Stress could be stress from your relationship. Stress could be stress from your business responsibility. Stress could be from retirement. Stress could be from your kids or your family members or having to wait in line at the grocery store like it's it's multi-dimensional, right? It's connected to all these different things. So if you solve for stress, what happens when loneliness creeps in? You might work on some aspect of this traumatic piece of your childhood, but what about social anxiety when you've also patterned yourself to be dependent on alcohol for that? That's why relapses so common. That's why relapses so normalized in the addiction recovery space. Because when you look at a multi-dimensional human being with an incredibly complex architecture dating back from their first imprints of childhood to their relationship with the masculine and the feminine and their you know their imprints and their childhood experiences and their relational dynamics and their work and the infinite layers that are involved, you can begin to see that like alcohol has woven its way as a solution for like 50 things or 20 different things for the average person, right? And so if you solve one piece but you don't have a system and a structure to solve for everything, people are going to keep relapsing and this is what I've been wrapping my mind around over the last few years as an individual who I believe is like trying to carry the torch and push forward the recovery space so that as a collective we can begin to heal and wake up and become more conscious and learn how to be sovereign and understand our human operating system and not fall into these patterns of addiction and we develop the skills and tools and resources to manage and drive our human car, right? So it's like it's about understanding that when you go to quit drinking, there's going to be multiple different things to learn how to manage and heal and upgrade and optimize and don't let that scare you, don't let it scare you, you don't have to do it all at once, you don't have to do it tomorrow, it's peace by peace by peace one day at a time and the program and the structure that I'm developing is going to be the most profound system in the world. I mean, I can't think of another individual one who speaks like me, who talks like me and just has the breadth of understanding of being able to connect everything together from psychology to emotions to the nervous system to the spiritual component to childhood to advance therapeutic methodologies inside of neuro-linguistic programming and the somatic piece and all of it and all of it. And I'm going to talk more about that here very shortly. So again, it's important to understand that when you look at your relationship with alcohol, like you need to get to a place where you understand the neuroscience, you need to get to a place where you're like, okay, this is logical, this is input and output. And while it seems mysterious and baffling because you're getting emotional, it's still logical. Okay, you're getting emotional, you're getting stressed out, overwhelmed, you're having a craving that is emotional, it's intense. It's visceral, it's physical inside of your body. But again, when you understand why you got there, how you got there, why you're feeling the way that you're feeling and why you're having a craving and why you choose to drink in the moment even though you don't want to, when you understand the neuroscience, when you understand the brain, when you understand pain and pleasure, it becomes really simple, right? And so now it's like, okay, I get it. I've got a brain that's seeking pain and pleasure. It's seeking to avoid pain, it's seeking to pursue pleasure. It's seeking to keep me safe and as a multi-dimensional human being who has a life with a million different things going on, I'm trying to move forward in time towards becoming a better version of myself, towards building a life that feels good and better and more connected and more whole. But I can see how parts of myself, I haven't fully developed, I haven't gotten really good at managing stress, I haven't gotten really good at communicating my emotions, I haven't gotten good at setting boundaries, I haven't figured out how to develop the confidence to leave this job I hate. I haven't figured out how to muster the courage to develop the risk taking capacity so that I can grow and scale my business or join a mastermind where I can get the support of other entrepreneurs, like whatever the case may be, right? So therefore, it's overwhelming my system and I've taught my system through hundreds of repetitions that this thing works temporarily. So I keep going back to it, not complex, not baffling, not mysterious. Okay, so as I've been trying to figure out, how do I bring relapse rates down to hopefully zero? I mean, I don't think anybody could bring relapse rates down to zero for good because I'm not in control of anybody else's choices, right? Somebody could just choose to go to the bar or order a drink like you can't control that. But how can I find ways to bring it down, right? And I've worked with over 500 people over the last three years, I've studied, I've paid close attention, I've looked at why my client might go 90 days alcohol free and then have a drink, what was the thing that caused them to drink? I'll take a deep inventory of what they were thinking, what they were feeling, how they rationalized it, how they justified it, what tools did they apply, what did they not apply, what was their frame of thinking, what was their environment, who were they with? Like I'm scientifically and rigorously looking at all of these different components to see, how can I plug the gap, how could I had them be more prepared? What could I have resolved in their mind? What could I have, what tool could I have provided them? How could I have them be more resourceful to make a better decision to where maybe they go to the dinner, but then they don't go to the after party or the club or whatever afterwards where they ended up having a drink, right? Like I've been trying to build a system and to build a model around this. So I've developed something called neuro-repaterning, okay? And it's a revolutionary new system and program that is based in neuroscience to help you actually begin to rewire your brain's prediction machine, okay? And in a broad sense, okay? It's about helping you collapse the old associations. It's about helping you neutralize in dismantle the old association of alcohol equals pleasure and replacing them with new ones like alcohol equals pain or that sobriety equals freedom, presence, power, and abundance, right? And we do that at a neurological level, meaning when you have the thought of alcohol or you have the desire or the feeling of wanting to drink, it's actually different than what it was before. It's neutralized or when you think about drinking, you start to feel repulsed because through a concept called neuro-associative conditioning, which is the basis of neuro-repaterning, which is used by super elite human beings and high caliber individuals and the military and the Navy SEALs and Tony Robbins and superstar athletes and actors and things like that, right? It's based off of real science. How do you go in and actually change and manipulate the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions and the sensations that are connected to our experience of consciousness, to our feelings, to our expectations, to our beliefs, to our memories, things like that? So neuro-repaterning, it uses a variety of advanced tools, neuro-linguistic programming, incredibly potent, incredibly powerful. One of the most potent and powerful change work methodologies out there, hypnosis. I don't know what your perception is of hypnosis. Maybe you think you've tried it before. Maybe you've heard of stage hypnosis where people quack like chickens, that stuff is nonsense. Hypnosis is real. What hypnosis effectively is is taking you into a very relaxed and meditative state where your brain changes its brain waves and allows you to get into a more receptive state where thoughts, feelings, emotions and memories are more malleable and changeable. And a big piece of all of this as an overarching idea, our latest most profound understanding and revelation in neuroscience is neuroplasticity. Before, we used to think that once you're in your mid 20s, 30s, mid 30s, once you're an adult, you are fixed. You can't really change. It's hard to change. It's impossible to change. And you just are who you are. And with the discovery of neuroplasticity, we now understand that that's not true. The brain is malleable. It's like plastic. It's like gold. It's really soft. It's really malleable. And it can change. And it's always changing in every second based off of the data that's coming in through your five senses. What you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you taste and what you touch. Your brain is always changing. So any memory that you have, any trauma that you have, any association that you have, any connection that you have, can be changed. Even if you think it can't, even if you went through that divorce and you were like this, destroyed me, I'll never recover. I'll never find true love again. Even if you had a moment or a memory during your childhood or through your adolescence, where you were shamed and embarrassed in front of your entire high school, and now the thought and idea of going into a room and introducing yourself to somebody seems absolutely terrifying and you freeze in your boots thinking about it, you can actually go out and become a really confident person with high self-esteem and build a massive social network. Your entire operating system is malleable. Your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions and the sensations that are connected to them. Through this understanding of neuroplasticity and through the skills, techniques and strategies of neuro-associative conditioning and ultimately neuro-repaternity, which is this entire new system inside of SDC, inside of the stop drinking coach, right? Some other really key potent strategies and tools, timeline therapy, memory reconsolidation. Memory reconsolidation is the, it's the ability to change our memories and to change our association. So if you're listening to this, what most people think is that if you have a memory, that memory is etched in stone, that there was an event and I have a memory of it and that's just what it is for the rest of my life. And that's actually not true. You can actually change your memories. You can change the way that you remember things and you can change the perspectives, the stories, the narratives and the accompanying sensations, feelings and emotions that are tied to a memory. So if you have a traumatic experience from your past, if you have a moment that caused fear, pain, self-doubt, a self-limiting belief around you not being good enough about you not being capable, about life being too hard, about people can't be trusted. Like every dysfunctional or dysregulated program inside of your human operating system software can be updated, can be changed, can be neutralized, can be healed and can be transformed. Within neuro-repaturning, obviously you hear me talk a lot about mental and emotional regulation. That's a deep inside of it. There's tons of breath work, tools and emotional anchoring. And of course, as I talked about in a neuro-sociative conditioning sort of being the overall model of this and what you're gonna learn inside of the program through actual guided experiences that you go through is how to neutralize cravings, like literally neutralize cravings and then turn the program of alcohol equals pleasure to alcohol equals pain. And when you do that, staying alcohol free and making good decisions in the moment, even if people around you are drinking or whatever, becomes really, really easy. And let me give you the example, and I've given this example before. When you burn your hand on a stove for the first time as a kid, there is an imprint that is created. This is an up for debate. It's non-negotiable. When you burn your hand on the stove and you realize, oh my God, I should not put my hand over a burning flame or on a hot stove. You learn it. You don't need a coach. You don't need your best friend over your ear. You don't need somebody over your shoulder to convince you and to remind you that if you put your hand on a stove, it's going to hurt. The same thing goes with alcohol, right? When people hit rock bottom, that is effectively the rewriting of the code. Because the pain is so great from rock bottom that the brain is finally able to update. Alcohol actually isn't pleasure anymore. Look how alcohol now destroyed my life and it's going to cause me to be in prison for the next 15 years because I just killed somebody while drunk driving. Or I just lost 60% of my assets because I was served a divorce because my partner's been telling me that I need to stop drinking or that this is going to happen. And I haven't been able to find a way to listen because I haven't gotten the support that I needed or I wasn't ready to or willing to. Right? You can rewrite the code to where making certain decisions or living within a certain identity becomes automatic, naturally automatic and natural and sort of feel effortless. Okay? So the beauty here is is like, if you decide to work with SDC, if this stuff resonates with you, if you enjoy the podcast, right? It's like, it's not about managing alcohol. What you're going to learn is how you can eliminate the desire for alcohol by rewiring your brain. When it comes to shame, when it comes to guilt, when it comes to fear, when it comes to all of these different things. So inside of neuro-repaturning as of now, I have a base library of 202 guided experiences. And this might be like, "Barty, what the hell? That seems overwhelming. I'm just trying to quit drinking here." What you have to understand is that, again, human beings are multi-dimensional and complex. While John might come into the program and he's struggling with alcohol because he's using it to manage his stress from his business and all of his responsibilities, Sue might come in because she's feeling isolated from her family. And then Tyler might come in because he's feeling, despite his level of success in different areas of life, like feels incredibly isolated. While somebody else might be coming in because they are traveling all the time and going to cocktail dinners and business meetings and they're just super socially anxious. So within SDC, there's gonna be a bit of a choose your own adventure and you're gonna be able to go through a process that unique to you and unique to every specific individual, you're gonna be able to pick and choose the exact things that you need in order to be able to start addressing the root cause of your personal drinking so that you can use these tools and techniques and strategies to neutralize it, to heal it, to reintegrate it, to transform it and to get to the other side, where that thing that you were drinking over is no longer creating compulsion to drink because you just feel more neutral. You feel more resilient. You feel more capable, right? And while all of this might seem like, but how does this work or how does this make sense? Like, don't worry about it. That's what's in the program. I mean, we use a variety of different advanced methodologies and modalities. We use future pacing where you're anchoring into the future. We're bringing your future self back into the present moment. We're adjusting sensations, we're amplifying things, we're reducing things. We're changing the texture of it, the quality of it, we're making some things disappear. Other things were amplifying other times or swishing things around until one becomes neutral. And the other one becomes the default while anchoring into really positive feelings of elation and confidence and strength. Like, don't worry about the technical details. Just understand that I've been spending the last three and a half years of my life trying to crack this code. OK. And so as of now, there's around 202 guided journeys. And if you come through the program, when you come through the program, you can just follow them all the way through. And by the end, not only are you going to have quit drinking, but you're going to have upgraded every facet of your mental, emotional, physical, neurochemical, and spiritual operating system. Because the reality is, is that this is some of the highest level change work that's used by some of the most elite individuals on the planet. And you're going to be getting access to it in a way that's not only going to help you quit drinking, but is naturally going to begin to help you heal and transform and fulfill your potential in every way. So as of now, I got 202 of them. As I continue to build this out, this library is going to expand. So for example, shame is a big one that a lot of people struggle with when it comes to alcohol. So as of now, I have several guided experiences around shame. But eventually, what I'll probably do is I'll go in and I'll create like 10 levels deep into shame. And we will architecturally, like a surgeon, like go in and help you heal shame in every possible route, and dissolve and neutralize and re-anchor, and reprocess and re-imprint new perspectives and ideas and ways of being and living, that then allows you to look at those past experiences in a way that's incredibly empowering, instead of disempowering, and drains your energy like shame does. So I've got a list of like 50 things here. I'm just going to read them off because I want you to understand the context and the breadth of what I'm building here as a truly like category defining system for addiction recovery. So we've got stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, loneliness, boredom, overwhelm, anger, resentment, shame, guilt, fear failure, fear of success, social pressure, social anxiety, low self-worth, lack of purpose, childhood wounds, parental trauma, relationship conflict, conflict, divorce, breakups, money stress, career burnout, insomnia, chronic pain, emotional dysregulation, inner child neglect, identity crisis, lack of belonging, perfectionism, control issues, people pleasing, rejection wounds, abandonment wounds, lack of intimacy in a relationship, loss of passion, spiritual disconnection, unresolved guilt, family dysfunction, cultural conditioning, going on trips, societal norms, masculine and feminine imbalance, midlife crisis, existential anxiety, purpose, suppressed creativity, suppressed anger, suppressed grief, lack of boundaries, unresolved resentment. Like there's, it goes deep, it goes deep. Every person is different, and I'm trying to build a system that says no matter who you are, where you're at, how can you come through my system and how can you have the absolute highest possible chances of success? I don't know about you, but I don't know anybody, any program that is going as deep and as multifaceted as this. In keep in mind, I've been running stop drinking coach for the last three and a half years, and it's been incredibly successful for the vast majority of people who have come through it. We heavily optimize neurochemistry, there's a proprietary, incredible daily routine that you follow, like everything I'm building here is gonna be stuck on an already successful program that's transformed hundreds of lives. So remember, like the goal of recovery, right? It's not just to stop drinking. We can all stop drinking. We've all done it a thousand times, right? We'll get a week, we'll get a couple of months, whatever. The goal of sobriety is to get to a place where you no longer even have the desire to drink. And you guys have heard me say this, you know, at one point, throughout my life from the age of 15 to 29, I was a heavy, heavy, heavy weekend vinc drinker. The longest I went without alcohol was six months, but for the most part, I was getting absolutely obliterated to three days a week. Then once COVID hit, I started drinking every day and I got up to drinking four to six bottles of wine a day. That is what my brain did. It wanted more relief, it wanted more pleasure, it wanted more high, and it didn't care. It was just consuming, and I didn't have a way to manage or control it. I had no understanding of any of these things. Then I hit rock bottom, and I had a moment of clarity. I played the tape forward, I was 29 at the time. I said, "If I continue to drink at the rate I'm drinking, I'm going to die in early death, and I'm going to be in my deathbed, not having fulfilled my potential." And the feeling of that was darker, heavier, scarier, and more fucked up than anything I had ever experienced in my life, even losing my dad. I was like, fuck, if I die without like getting to live out, and experience who I could be, and I just piss it away as a fucking drunk in this deathbed at an early age. the shame I felt was immense. And so in that moment, I made a vow that I would be willing to open myself up to any other form of discomfort as long as it wasn't that. I was like, dude, anything is better than that. I'll deal with some boredom, I'll deal with cravings, I'll deal with thinking, like I'm just gonna be sad and bored and I won't have friends and I won't get to socialize and party and go to dinner, travel, as long as I don't have to experience the feeling of dying without fulfilling my potential. I'll deal with anything, fine. But trust me, when I say that the thought and idea of trying to imagine a life with that alcohol was the scariest, most daunting, terrifying thing I could imagine, but I had no other choice. Like, I was probably gonna die and my life was gonna be fucked, right? So it was the ultimate sacrifice. I mean, if I was drinking 20 to 30 drinks a day and you're drinking five drinks a day, not to be a pissing contest, but who was deeper in alcohol? Who loved alcohol more? Who was more obsessed with the next drink? Again, it's not a comparison where each, it's relative, right? It's relative. We have different feelings and thoughts and neurochemistry and tolerance, right? It's relative, but like, take that into consideration. And today, I hit five years alcohol free on September, October, like last month, beginning last month. And I haven't had cravings for alcohol in three and a half, four years. I don't think about drinking, I don't desire to drink. Obviously, like, I'm on the other side of this thing, right? There's no desire to drink. I look at alcohol culture and it's like, I'm trying to save the world here to some degree and get people to see the other side because it's so much better. But I didn't know that it was so much better. I was fearful. I thought life was gonna get worse. And it was challenging from time to time. There were moments on the weekends where I thought it would be great to have a drink and then I had to move through that discomfort. But also, I didn't have neuro-associated conditioning and I didn't have neuro-repaterning. The program that I went through worked and it kept me sober, but it was a lot simpler. It was like, it was kind of like the, I don't know, the Honda Civic relative to the Tesla, right? The Honda Civic works. It's a great car, it's reliable. It'll get you a couple hundred thousand miles and it'll get you to the other side. But what I'm building here with neuro-repaterning is the Tesla. It's a whole new different situation in system that's gonna dramatically accelerate the process. In terms of how you feel moving through it, right? That's kind of the test, right? When people go through a program like, are they staying sober and struggling and craving every day? Or are they going through the program and it's feeling easeful, it's feeling easier and more manageable than they've ever tried before? The cravings are fewer and far between. Many clients I have come through the program like, don't get cravings and they used to drink every day and have cravings, right? So you never really know. Everybody's a little bit different, but there's absolutely people who come through my program who follow it exactly the way it's laid out and stop craving alcohol and just they just stay sober. These are real tried and true alcoholics. So I don't wanna hear the people that are like, "Barty, it sounds great, but it doesn't work for the real alcoholic." Like that's all that disease nonsense. What we're looking at here is somebody's nervous system. We're looking at their brain. We're looking at their desire to seek pleasure and their desire to avoid discomfort and we're looking at their humanity and who they are and what they've got going on in their life and where their problems and challenges and struggles are and where their limitations are and where they don't feel resourceful to be able to work through things because of past imprints and we're learning to resolve those and neutralize those and develop the courage to tell better stories and re-imprint and apply new emotional associations and expand our vision and expand our capacity to see and to develop our confidence and our personal power so that we can begin to move through life in a way where we feel more confident and resilient and connected to our truth and feel better about the life track that we're on and get to a place where alcohol and this thing that produces a bunch of dopamine artificially that's destroying our life is no longer the centerpiece because we're feeling more connection not only to our self and to the world and to our purpose, right? So, like the goal here again is to eliminate the desire to drink, to build a mind and a body that's resilient to stress, to emotions and to life and to have the tools of mental and emotional regulation so that you don't need a substance to escape. I've been mentally and emotionally regulating through every challenge, stress, or in confrontation for five years in a month now and my capacity now to meet any life, curve, ball, or challenge, at no point do I even have a thought that maybe I should drink over this? It doesn't even register, just like the last time I thought about Pluto was six years ago, I just, it's irrelevant to me and you can get there too but you have to begin to look at like what you're doing here. You have to begin to educate yourself on what's actually happening behind the scenes and if I'm gonna go through a recovery process, if I'm gonna work with a coach and a program like what are you guys actually doing? Help me understand at a deeper level what is going on here and how I'm gonna benefit from the process. So let's bring this home, okay? Alcoholism is not a disease once you understand the neuroscience. It's a pattern and patterns can be rewired. If you've been struggling to quit, again, know this. It's not a moral failure, you're not broken, you're not powerless, you don't have to live in the shadow of alcoholism and claim that as your identity. You have a brain that's learned the wrong prediction. Your brain keeps predicting that alcohol is gonna help you and provide relief and it's not connecting to the rest of the movie. It's like alcohol and alcoholism is a movie but it only plays the first 10% every single time. Every single time you're like, oh, okay, getting a craving, I'm getting kind of bored, frustrated lonely, socially anxious, stressed out, isolated, insert a hundred other possible things. Man, getting drinks sounds good. Boom, cue, craving, discomfort, okay, this is gonna work, this is gonna help momentarily it does for a few minutes or an hour and then downstream consequences. Now we're chasing that high with each next drink, the next day and during that period, we're doing things that are sometimes destroying our life and other times just wasting it. So I don't know how old you are, where you're at listening to this, but like you're wasting the most precious years of your life and it doesn't matter if you're 35 or 65. Like right now is the most precious time of your life 'cause it's the present moment and you're never gonna get it back. And all of us are aging and things are declining even though we don't want them to. It's just the nature of being alive. So every moment regardless of your age is the most precious time of your life. It's now, it's the present moment, you can't escape it. There's a quote that Julian shared with me, he was my coach when I was going through this program and he's my co-coach, he runs my group coaching program and I've shared this several times and it transformed my life. It hit me like a ton of bricks and it changed a lot for me. He said, he says, "Life is one long experience "of the present moment." So if you wanna live a good life, you have to learn how to make peace with the present moment. And when I heard that, it just fucking, it just knocked my soul. 'Cause I realize like, dude, this whole alcohol thing, this whole thing is because I don't have a peaceful relationship with myself in the present moment. Something's always tugging at me. Something's always pulling at me. There's some fear, there's some anxiety, there's some limitation, there's some, there's some fucking story around my family or some resentment or this thing or that thing. And it's like, dude, don't you get fucking tired of that? Like at what point, how many years do you have left, how much longer are you gonna keep living with the same resentment, with the same limitation of all I can, or it's too hard, or that thing happened to me, therefore I can. And it's like, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? Go to your deathbed in your grave and just keep perpetuating the same thing. Or are you gonna do something different? Make an investment in yourself. Like you save money in case your tire pops, you save money in case you need to pay a hospital bill that's unexpected. You save money in case your wife or your kids your family or somebody or you need something during a moment of crisis. Well, this is moment of crisis. It's been a moment of crisis for you for how long now? How much more disappointment and shame and self-doubt and damage and opportunity cost are you going to incur because you're afraid of doing the work to change the way that your brain functions. You're afraid of like, and here's the thing. It's like you don't have to be that afraid now with no repaturning. And I'm not just saying this because like, I'm just talking to myself here. Much of my podcasts, the last 41 episodes, is like me talking to myself, talking to the old version of me. And if I knew that I could go through like a series of guided experience, like I have the context that you don't have. I have the deep understanding and details and the connecting of all these dots of why this works. But you don't yet. But like, I'm speaking to you as I'm speaking to myself, like I wouldn't be asked scared going into it because I could do a bunch of really powerful exercises that could help neutralize the intensity of the craving. And now it's like not this thing that's so daunting. I can do a bunch of exercises and personal deep like experiences that would help me feel as confident as I did in my most confident moment when I go out to a business meeting or when I go out to a social event. Like all, I can access it and learn how to turn it on. And that might seem crazy. And it's like, Barty, what are you talking about? What do you mean, turn it on? It's like, yeah, the human operating system is vast. It's complex. And if you had a hard time explaining what happens when, you know, light goes into your eyes and how it produces your ability to see, or you're not able to help me understand the basics of like what's happening in your digestive system. When you eat food to produce you know, fecal matter on the other side a day or two days later, you're probably also not up to speed on all of these super underlying really powerful tools and strategies that can change like your internal state of consciousness and your thoughts and feelings and associations and frameworks. So this is this is what I've dedicated my life to the last few years. And I'm more happy and I'm more excited than I've ever been. I've got like more motivation. I'm literally like sitting behind my laptop from 10 a.m. to almost 10 p.m. every single day working on this stuff. So, um, yeah. If this episode was helpful for you, please do share it with somebody who you think it will help. If you have a friend, a family member, a colleague, a spouse, one of your kids who's struggling, who may need a lift, may need a hope, a source of inspiration to be able to look at their relationship to alcohol in a different way. Please do share it with them and please do subscribe to the podcast. If this podcast was helpful for you, feel free to message me on social media. My Instagram is @TheStopDrinkingCoach. Send me a message and let me know or send me an email. And if you'd like to join the program, go to www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com, fill out the application, book a call with me. And yeah, you know, as I mentioned in one of my last episodes, the entire sort of program structure is changing. The investment for the program is increasing. It's still going to be manageable. It's still going to be cheaper than rehab, but what I'm providing here as a system, as a coaching system, as a community, tool structures, resources, you're not going to get in rehab. You're just not. It's way more valuable than rehab. It's way more valuable than a $200 in our therapist. It's way more valuable than an $850 an hour psychotherapist because you're limited to just sitting with them and speaking with them one session at a time. I'm not saying don't do those things, but I've built a system. I've built a structure. I've built a path. I've gone out. I've worked with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And I've surgically broken down every point of relapse, every underlying root cause, every connection point, every thread of what needs to be looked at and addressed and work through and healed and transformed. And it's like you get a plug-in play system that says, hey, go through this really simple onboarding process and then just do this. And then check in every day with accountability and attend one-on-one calls with myself, or my coaches attend the group coaching calls, consume these resources, do these exercises, and then come back and report. And let's refine and let's grow. And as a program and as the founder of this program, this isn't stopping. So it's just going to continue to get better and continue to refine. But at this point, this is SDC 3.0. And I'm incredibly excited. I think it's going to help thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And I feel super grateful. I feel super grateful that five years ago when I had my arm and shoulder mangled, hanging upside down backwards, even though I thought the thought and idea of quitting drinking was the most terrifying thing in the world, I developed the courage to just stay present and take it one day at a time. And now I'm here, talking to you and potentially helping you and supporting you and your family and the ripple effect of everybody that would be impacted if you choose to stop consuming a poison, if you choose to update the prediction error in your brain. And take control of your human operating system and develop a deep sense of sovereignty. Last night's group coaching call was about how sobriety is an initiation. When we look at our history over the last several thousand years in every ancient culture across every continent that never communicated to each other, that never talked to each other, we have been initiating ourselves from childhood to adolescence to young adults and beyond through this concept of the hero's journey. And it's ubiquitous across the board. It's in every spiritual text and quitting drinking is that. It is your way of waking up. It is your way of evolving. It is your way of becoming who you can be. And it's a way of you maturing out of the childhood and adolescence attempt to seek the bottle, to seek the nipple of relief when you do not know how to manage your mind and the sensations that flow through you. And quitting drinking is that initiation process and to becoming the version of yourself that you dream of that you hope for, that you desire, that you journal about when you look out and you look into the sky and you wish and hope that you could only be an experience and do and live as an embody this archetype of something somewhere in your soul that you imagine. This is the path. The skills and the tools and the resources that you acquire and learn through this journey 110% directly apply to helping you become a more powerful resourceful and effective happy, sovereign, loving, connected, present, human being in every other aspect of your life. So thanks again for listening. If this has been helpful for you, please do share it with a friend. Please give the podcast the five star review, hop over to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. You can actually leave a written review there. And yeah, I hope you take advantage of this if it feels right and you feel energetically called too sooner than later because the investment of the program is going up and when it goes up, it goes up and there will be a certain demographic who sees this and has the capacity for it and it may not be as accessible to others. And that's okay. There's a lot of other programs out there that could also help. So please do if you do feel called, if you do feel inspired, if you do feel energetically aligned, I really invite you to not kick the can down the road and really sit with yourself. And if this feels like the thing, go to my website, fill out an application, book a call and let's do this thing. We just take it one day, one moment, one strategy, one tool at a time and I promise you your future self. Well, thank you. Thanks for 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.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.