Don't "Quit Drinking" - Do THIS Instead

Hey, I'm Barti Arez and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. Welcome to my podcast where I teach you how to stop drinking, how to quit craving, and how to begin the journey back to yourself so that you can transform your life. After a 14-year binge drinking career, starting and stopping dozens of times and trying everything in the book from AA to therapy, I finally discovered the key to sustainable sobriety. And on this podcast, you're going to learn practical tips, tools, and strategies to help you quit drinking alcohol the easy way so you can finally step into the next chapter of your life and begin fulfilling your potential. For private one-on-one or group coaching, visit www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com and book a call with me. SDC, welcome back to another episode. I'm actually recording this one from my car because I've got kind of a crazy day and I'm headed off to run some errands, but I've been having some downloads coming through and I wanted to get this episode out sooner than later because I'm going to be traveling next week and then the following week and it's just going to be kind of a crazy schedule for me. So something that's come through recently is kind of the theme of this episode, which you can see the title. I'm going to title it. Don't stop drinking or don't quit drinking. Do this instead. And so the premise here is that when we have developed a problematic relationship with alcohol and we get to that juncture where we recognize that this is no longer sustainable, it's causing more damage, it's causing more harm than it is good and we need to figure out a way to quit or we need to figure out a way to stop and then we find ourselves stumbling week after week, you know, month after month, even year after year because for many of us it's, you know, quitting drinking isn't a light switch as I say all the time. If it was, if it was an on off button, the world of addiction would not exist, right? There would be no such thing as rehabs. People would just come and go as they please managing and moderating as they saw fit. But clearly we know that being on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder or having alcoholism or having this really problematic relationship with alcohol doesn't allow you to just manage and moderate it the way that you hope, right? The way that you dream about the way that you wish, right? If only I could just go back to being a regular drinker. And to be honest, like there's a part of you that has to accept the fact that you don't even fucking want to do that anyways, right? Like when you talk to like alcoholics or people with like a real drinking problem, like nobody wants to just have one or two anyways, it's, that's like stupid, right? Like people who are drinkers, they drink to get drunk, they drink for the effect, right? They're not just drinking to just enjoy it. They're drinking for a purpose and that purpose is to relieve and disconnect and numb out from their psychological and emotional pain, which could just be the craving, right? You're just in a craving cycle because of this dopamine feeding that you found yourself in after years of repeated exposure and use. But the idea is, that when we go to quit drinking, all of us continue to continue to think, I just need to put the bottle down. I just need to stop drinking. I just need it. I just need to not drink today. I just need to not drink this weekend. And while that's true, right? But we just take it one day at a time. You don't have to even think about the weekend. It's just really, it's just for today, right? You just got to figure out how do I not drink today. But in this episode, I kind of want to reframe that perspective. And rather than placing your attention and focus on, I'm not going to drink. I'm not going to drink. I'm not going to drink and placing it in sort of a negative, right? Because the brain, the subconscious mind doesn't understand things through a negative perspective. It understands it through a positive frame, right? So it's kind of like saying, don't think about a big pink elephant. Don't think about a big pink elephant. It doesn't matter how many hundreds of times that you say it. Every time you say it, you're going to think about a pink elephant, right? So instead of making the goal to not drink, the goal of this journey, ultimately that you come to realize is about developing the courage to remain present to any thoughts or feelings, emotions or sensations that appear in your body that you want to run from, that you want to numb out from. So rather than making the goal to not drink, make the goal to develop the courage to remain resilient despite what might be happening for 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour during that witching hour. That's the goal, right? And that is what sobriety teaches you, right? And that's why you hear in my content all the time, you know, I say it all the time, you may hear from other people, like quitting drinking has nothing to do with alcohol and everybody discovers that through this path in process, but in the beginning, when you're struggling, you can't see a way out. You don't understand the map. You don't understand the landscape that you are about to navigate. And that's why you keep failing and tripping up is there's all these other things that you have to develop a sense of clarity around. And there's a different perspective and mindset and approach that you have to take to this thing to be successful. If you make your goal to not drink, to not drink, to not drink, like it's the wrong goal. And while like it's it's counterintuitive in a way, right? Because you're like, well, Barty, how am I going to remain sober if I make the goal to, to, you know, if the goal isn't to not drink, like obviously, right? It's like, that's why this thing is complex and tricky. It's like you have to read between the lines here. Obviously, not drinking and not taking and not picking up another drink and putting it to your mouth, is step one. But how do you do that sustainably? Right? How do you prevent relapse? That's the question. That's that is the nut that we are trying to crack here for somebody who has alcoholism, alcohol use disorder, a really problematic relationship with alcohol. Right? They call it the disease of addiction. They call it a disease because it changes your brain so much so that like it it oftentimes feels like it goes beyond your willpower. It goes beyond, you know, just your your basic logic and in rationale. Right? So you're dealing with something here that's that's tricky. So you have to apply all the different tools in the book, all the mental models and perspectives that you can to to make this thing happen. Right? And so as we think about it, right? The goal and the way that I want you to think about it is the goal is is not to not drink. Right? So when you wake up in the morning and we take it one day at a time, anything to yourself, okay, for today, I'm not going to drink. Okay? Good. Like we've established that. So boom, like that that part's done. Right? The next step, the next intention that you set after that, the next sort of, you know, yeah, I guess intention is the right word. Like the next energetic commitment that you make is not to continue to not drink, but to remain resilient, to remain present to the thoughts. And when I say sensations, I'm referring to feelings and emotions. I like to call feelings and emotions sensations. That's one of the first things I teach many of my clients is like, we need to get away from this concept of feelings and emotions because they're so charged. There's so many stories with feelings and emotions. Right? And when you're looking at like doing change work, you ultimately recognize whether it's trauma work or psychotherapy or anything else, it's all a story. Right? When I take clients through like a memory reconciliation exercise and we do like a timeline therapy exercise and we, you know, take them in a deep meditative state and take them back to their childhood. And they remember their childhood or their mom or their dad one way. And then now we reintroduce it and I guide them through another process that allows them in a safe way to sort of reprocess that experience. Guess what changes the story and guess what frees them emotionally? What allows them to finally transform their mindset? What finally allows them to begin to shift the way their nervous system, their body, their emotions, respond to the memory by changing the story, by changing the story. So when we're looking at feelings and emotions, I like to call them raw sensations. Right? What raw sensation are you experiencing in your body? Well, I say it all the time. It feels like pins and needles in my stomach. Right? That's like anxiety. When I get anxiety, it feels like pins and needles in my stomach and the pins and needles kind of travel down from like the top of my shoulders to my hand. And when I can objectify the raw sensation, when I can step outside of it, take a step back and take a higher vantage point. If I can almost disassociate for myself in neuro linguistic programming, one of the one of the sort of submodalities of change is association and disassociation. So, for example, we're getting slightly off topic here, but I want to help you understand this. When we are in a problem, when something is problematic, when something is hard, difficult, when we're in an unresourcible state, we're typically associated, meaning when we close our eyes and we imagine that scenario, we imagine it from an associated state, meaning we are looking out from our own eyes at the problem. And typically the problem feels really heavy, because we're associated into the feeling and emotion and sensation, and then we're looking at the problem through the lens of that sensation, through the perspective of that emotion. And so, as a result, that influences our mind, our quality of thoughts, the narrative, and then it produces an unresourcible experience, unresourcible being limited, you know, held back, limiting beliefs, feeling powerless, feeling like things are too much overwhelming that they can't change, etc. Right? However, when you disassociate, and I'm not talking about disassociation as some sort of like a bypassing tool, but as a strategy in which how you navigate your consciousness, right? Disassociation is not a bad thing. It's the ability to step outside. It's the ability to take a higher advantage point. So, for example, when you're in that problem, if you disassociate and imagine yourself standing 10 feet away, and then you see yourself 10 feet in front of you looking at that problem, all of a sudden, you're going to instantly find that you're going to feel a little bit more resourceful. Maybe the problem doesn't go away, and you don't get all the answers, but your ability to then take a higher advantage point and maybe see things that you weren't able to see before expands. Right? And so, kind of got off topic here, but I wanted to explain that, that concept of association, interdissociation, because it's really, really important as we look at navigating different things in our life. So, when you are waking up, right? And you say, okay, I'm just going to remain alcohol free today. That is my only goal. That is the only mission. I don't have to quit drinking forever. I don't need to keep this up until I'm 80. What's going to happen when I'm 80? Am I going to have a drink again? Can I imagine a life without alcohol? None of that. None of that. The only goal, the only only goal is to remain alcohol free today. And once you establish that, the next piece is to place your attention, your intention, and your focus on coping with whatever comes up today. That it's really subtle and this might seem obvious, but it's so important. It's so profound. And when you're in it in the beginning, you don't really think this way. And so that's why I'm reiterating it. Right? If you know you're wiching hours, three o'clock or five o'clock or seven o'clock when you get home from work or whatever it is, okay? When two thirty rolls around, when four thirty rolls around, when six thirty rolls around, set in a alarm on your phone, okay? And become hyper-aware. Hyper-aware. Don't just go into autopilot and follow this patterning and programming that you've conditioned yourself with a drug for years and years and years. Okay? Part of this journey is developing higher levels of self-awareness and understanding of self. Everybody thinks they're self-aware, but it isn't until you actually analyze how somebody is living their life, how they make decisions, how they show up, their sense of accountability, the way they take ownership and responsibility, that you can actually really get a sense of how self-aware somebody is. Right? And so not to say that you're not self-aware. What I'm here, what I'm advocating here is for tools and strategies to help increase and promote even more self-awareness, right? So two thirty rolls around, four thirty rolls around, six thirty rolls around, you know, shortly before your "witching hour." Okay? In that moment, when that alarm goes off, make a commitment to not not drink, but to remain present, to develop the courage inside of you to curiously explore and be present to, the thoughts, the stories, the narratives, and the varying degrees of fluctuating sensation inside of your body. Okay? That sensation could be anxiety, that sensation could be craving, that sensation could be boredom, that sensation could be loneliness. And so understand that when we go into this state where we have craving into that kind of "witching hour" state where there's this automatic programming in conditioning to drink, what's actually happening at a higher level is we're going into a survival state, right? The prefrontal cortex is actually kind of shutting down. The limbic part of our brain is activating, and we're experiencing a lot of thoughts and emotion, right? And oftentimes the story and the narrative during that "witching hour," during that time of craving, whatever it is, whatever that trigger is, is that if I don't get a drink, this obsessiveness, this, this, these thoughts, these emotions, these sensations of craving are not going to disappear. I need a drink. I need to get away from these. I need to numb them out, right? And it's this story, it's this perspective, it's this narrative that you have to squash and numb out from and disconnect from what's happening, which is what leaves you back to drinking and keeps you trapped in this vicious cycle. And then when you wake up tomorrow, you have more shame, more guilt, you're more upset with yourself, there's more self-loathing, there's more regret, there's more frustration, and the cycle continues, right? So alcohol, remember, it is a debt, it is a debt every time you drink alcohol, you are incurring more debt, you are incurring more debt every time you drink, and you're going to have to pay it back, right? So when people say, how do you quit drinking? How do you quit drinking? But how do you do it? The way that you do it is by accepting and acknowledging that if you actually want to do this thing, the buck is going to have to stop. You can't keep going to the bank and borrowing money when you're already in debt, right? The reason we're drinking in the first place is because of pain, psychological pain, emotional pain, social anxiety, whatever you want to call it, it's discomfort. You are running from discomfort, you are numbing out discomfort, but Bardi, everybody at work is drinking and I don't want to be the odd one out. All right, well, you've got discomfort inside of you because you don't feel confident. You don't have enough self-esteem to stand up for what you believe and to communicate to people that, hey, I prioritize my health and my goals and my values and my family over drinking alcohol and feeling accepted by you. I don't need that because I am clear on who I am and I'm clear on my path in life. So I don't need to give myself to you. I don't need to give myself to a drug so that you think I'm cool so that you like me, right? Whatever it is, whatever it is, whatever that discomfort is, that is the mission. That is the mission, right? Like, you want to stop drinking? Okay, it's not about stopping drinking. It's about you developing the psycho-emotional and spiritual courage to remain present to the pins and needles, to the frustrating thoughts, to the anger, to the sadness, to the loneliness and to discover that you're still safe. That's the big, magic, spiritual, cosmic joke, right? Unless you've got a gun to your head or you are in a real sense of danger, and again, this is the important thing that we need to learn how to discern as adults. Am I an actual danger where my actual safety is being threatened? Or am I just really uncomfortable in feeling sad or lonely or overwhelmed or stressed out or anxious or bored? We need to develop the cognition, the self-awareness, the consciousness to be able to discern these things, right? But like, we don't. And we're not taught this principle of discernment. We aren't taught these frameworks and models of interpretation around our internal environment. At what point do we learn any of this? You don't learn it in school. I guarantee 99% of us didn't learn it from our parents. We didn't learn in high school or college. At what point did have you even heard the term mental and emotional regulation before me? You know, it's wild. Like, and it's crazy to think that we all wake up. We go to work. We drink. We fuck around. We wake up. We go to work. We drink. We go hang out with our buddies. We go to work. We wake up. We do this. And like, like, dude, we're floating on a rock with infinite space in every direction. There's nothing nor about being human. Yet we're all just walking like zombies and drones. Like any of this is normal. Like do you remember that you didn't ask to be born? And then now you're here and you had to learn how to walk and you had to learn basic math and language. And you had to learn everything. Like you were an alien some years ago. And now you're here and you wake up every day like a drone doing the same thing over and over. Not questioning your thoughts. Not questioning the stories. Not questioning your beliefs. Not questioning how things could be different or how to make sense of them in a different way. Like you have to develop the courage, right? And courage is like what all this stuff comes back down to and it's really it underlies the central theme of this episode. Is we have to develop courage? That is step one. If you look at that book that I've talked about before, I think it's Dr. Richard Hawkins or David Hawkins, I always I always mix it up. But he's got several books on Amazon. One of them, he's got a couple on like the scales of consciousness. And he talks about the sort of the energetic frequencies of different scales of consciousness. And you know at the very bottom it's it's shame and guilt and apathy, right? Those are the lowest, densest vibrating forms of energy, right? When you're in shame, when you're in guilt, you're in apathy, you're depressed. You're not moving. Your energy is repressed. You're not connected to yourself. Right? You talk slow, you move slow. You know, you're not you're not expressing energy. You're not being proactive. Right? And then it kind of moves up the scale. And once you get to courage, right, the energetic frequency of courage, that is when biologically, physiologically as a human, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. That is when you expand into new territories of life. New territories of life that up until now and I don't care who you are, how much money you make, what you've experienced, what your life is. Once you get to that level of courage, once you get to that level of courage, everything will begin to shift. Because courage is an energetic frequency that is willing to move forward into unfamiliar territory despite fear. Despite anxiety, despite loneliness, despite sadness, despite anger, despite having a huge ego, despite feeling like you're right and everybody's wrong, despite feeling like your wife or your husband is the problem, despite feeling like your boss is the problem. It's courage. Courage is the key that unlocks reality. And so how do you quit drinking? By developing the courage to remain present to your thoughts and sensations that don't feel good and by developing the courage to turn towards them instead of running from them. And this is a learning process, my friend. So if you keep trying and you keep failing or not failing, that's not a good word for it because we don't fail. We just learn and we iterate and we learn and we get feedback, right? If you keep trying and you keep stumbling, that's okay. You are going through a psycho-emotional spiritual process of learning how to interpret and navigate the pins and needles inside of your body. Now as an adult, you are learning how to develop the courage and the ownership and accountability and self-responsibility for your life. That's what this is, right? Just because we're all adults doesn't mean everybody's got it figured out, right? Most of us, especially many of us who have this problematic relationship with alcohol, on an emotional level, we're still operating like we're 8, 12, 14 years old, right? We're having tantrums, we're having fits when the stress gets too high. We're having tantrums and fits when we get bored. And so we're numbing it out with a drug. Remember that, this is poison. This is a drug. It's because you can buy it at the store, just because it's legal, does not mean it's somehow safer or more approved or more acceptable. Just swap out alcohol for cocaine and see yourself as that person. Like, dude, you have to objectively see it that way. Imagine if you were just doing cocaine four, five, six, seven days a week. You're taking a few bumps, eight bumps a day. You'd be like, dude, this is a fucking problem. But because it's alcohol, you defer responsibility and ownership around your behavior and its impact on yourself and your family because everybody else does it. And because you see it on Netflix and you see it on shows and you watch commercials all day. So you're like, oh, it's cool. No, dude, this is a fucking matrix. It is a matrix that we're living in that is designed to keep you down, to keep you numb and disconnected from yourself so they can keep siphoning money and moving money to the top of the system. I mean, at a broad, simple, overly generalized perspective, that's what's happening, right? I hope by now you are starting to see that the government isn't a loving government that's looking out for us. I hope you can begin to see every industry for what it is, the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, right? The insurance industry. It's all designed around profit. Everything in this capitalistic society is driven by that. So you have to understand and begin to wake up that the system that you see, this societal archetype, the way they've architected this thing around numb out here, have more sugar, do more of this, drink more. Dude, it's all bullshit. It's bullshit. It's designed to steal your soul so that you're easily controlled and manipulated in influence and they do this at scale across 350 million people so nobody fucking stands up. So nobody starts standing in their own two feet and we're all just deferring to each other, arguing with each other. But if we came together, if everybody wasn't numbing out and disconnected all the time, if we came together, dude, we would be able to enact profound change. But what's the goal? Keep everybody confused, add each other's throats and emotionally dysregulated with a small window of tolerance to handle stress and to keep just tacking on problems after problems after problems, and to cause you to just want to fucking say fuck all this. So quitting drinking is about taking your power back. It's not powerless. That powerless shit needs to stop. I can go drink. I can go drink. Nobody's holding a gun to my head, but I'm choosing to stand in my power, in my self control, in my resilience, in my sovereignty, in my self awareness, in my consciousness, in my ability to understand my physiology and my neurochemistry and my body and to understand and accept that when I add this input to my life, it creates a series of outputs that fucking ruin me. So I am choosing better inputs. That's it. Choose better inputs. So the moment you finally change is when you are finally able to connect the inputs to the outputs where you're able to see that by drinking alcohol, the pain that it causes is more than not drinking. We all have a choice to make. And we all learn at different rates and we all move at different speeds and there's a million contextual variables that play into this. But ultimately that's why it's a personal journey, right? Like you have to find it within yourself based off of your life. Who you are, what you want, where you're going, what's at stake. You have to be able to connect drinking to more pain than not drinking. And so unless you're able to do that, you're just going to keep drinking. And this is why addiction takes hold of people and for some people it feels like they can't get out because there's a couple of things that you need to get clear on. You have to get clear on the pain that alcohol is causing in the present moment. You have to play the tape forward on what will happen and how the pain will continually compound and get exponentially worse if you don't stop. And then you have to think about a future. You have to be able to imagine a life for yourself that is better than drinking. You have to. You have to believe in some vision. You have to believe that life can get better. And the sort of paradox of this or the dichotomy of this is that that's why like you can't get people to just stop drinking when they're not ready to, right? Because they're still writing the pleasure curve up. Why would somebody stop when they're still writing the pleasure curve up? It's only when you, you only stop when the pain exceeds the pleasure. And when you are at that phase in your life where the drinking is being so problematic and causing so many issues in your life and the life of the people around you, right? Only when you go face to face with that pain and you're like, okay, I'm fucking done with this pain. I don't want this pain anymore. When you open yourself up to another path and you are willing to open yourself up and accept any other form of pain that's not this pain. That's what rock bottom is, right? Rock bottom is this place or this moment, right? You don't have to lose your house and your money and get divorced. It's this moment of awareness that this pain that I'm feeling, this shame, this guilt, this overwhelm, this frustration, the sadness, whatever it is, self-loathing. It's being sick and tired of that pain. Sick and tired of being sick and tired of that pain, where you're like, okay, I'll open myself up to any other form of pain. I'm going to be bored for a little while. Okay, fine. Oh, I don't get to go to bars anymore. Okay, cool. No problem. You know, I don't do biggest trips every weekend. Okay, fine. Whatever it is, whatever it is, you open yourself up and going back to the theme of this podcast, you remain courageous and present to whatever other form of discomfort presents itself in the moment. And to understand and recognize that through this human experience, through this sobriety journey, the way that you feel in the beginning, the first two weeks, the first month, two months, three months, is not reflective of how you're going to feel a year into it. Every single day that you learn how to cope, which means you learn how to bear. Right, a lot of people say you need to learn coping strategies. You need to learn coping strategies. And it's like, yeah, but like, there's no magic coping strategy. Everybody's different. Some people walking is a coping strategy. Other people eating a meal when they get a craving is a coping strategy. For other people, it's working out is a coping strategy. There's no secret coping strategy where you push a button on your temple and you lift one leg and you hold your right nostril and you breathe out 10 times like, sure, yeah, maybe that's going to help reset the vagus nerve and it's going to regulate you a little bit. But there's no magic coping strategy. To cope means to learn how to bear. Okay. And I'll probably make another episode on this because this is really important. A coping strategy is about learning how to bear. And like, that's what we have to do as adults, man. We have to bear the weight. We have to shoulder the responsibility. And the reason so many of us like don't understand this is because we never were initiated into adulthood. We went from being a problematic teen or growing up in a dysfunctional environment where maybe we didn't have the safe dear connection or support. And I'm not talking about the people who grew up in a great environment and just developed a neurochemical feeding addiction to alcohol as we all can and we all do when we develop a problematic relationship. Sometimes it's not trauma. Sometimes it's not pain. It's not a divorce. It's not sadness. It's none of that. It's just, dude, we start a fucking partying in high school and college and repeated exposure to a drug will cause addiction. Okay. Right. There is no initiation process. We there was no initiation. Like we just got hurled into becoming an adult. And not everybody is resilient. And not everybody learned the principles of resiliency. And not everybody had like to learn how to navigate difficult things. And so for many of us who had difficult things throughout our life and we didn't know how to make sense of them or cope with them, those things just built and built and built and built. Like steam. Just steam. Just pressure. Pressurize steam inside of our mind and body. You know? And then we discover alcohol and it temporary relieves that steam, that pressure for a few minutes or for an hour, a couple hours. And we become dependent. So how do you quit drinking by developing the courage to bear the stress? By developing the courage to bear witness to your thoughts. Why do we go to therapy? Dude, it's all coming full circle, right? Because we go and we talk to somebody to tell us it's going to be okay and how to interpret and navigate our thoughts. Because we didn't learn how. We got caught in looping cycles of disempowering thoughts and beliefs. Which then affected our nervous system, which created anxiety. And what is anxiety? A projection of something going wrong. What's depression? Depression is repeated thoughts of disempowering thoughts and beliefs about the past or the future. Feeling hopeless around things being able to change. And when all day, every day you are telling yourself a negative story, a disempowering story about who you are, what the world is, what other people are, the possibility of changing. And then you tie in your skills and your self-consciousness and your self-esteem. And a hundred other things, then you become depressed. Depression isn't a deep dark black hole that you become afflicted with. It's a result of repetitive thoughts and perspectives and narratives and internal representations that are disempowering. Repeated over and over and over and over again, which represses your energy. And that's called depression. You've depressed your mind and your emotional operating systems energy. So what are the qualities of depression? Right? Oh, the person doesn't. They talk slowly. They move slowly. They're not motivated. Right? The energy is repressed. Why is the energy repressed? Because there's so much fear, there's so much anxiety that the system represses you to prevent you from re-experiencing other forms of pain. Re-experiencing social pain. Re-experiencing relationship pain. Re-experiencing pain with your kids. Re-experiencing pain with your partner. Re-experiencing this. Re-experiencing that. It repress. It pulls it back because of the stories that you're telling yourself. Right? So the goal is to remain present. Why do you keep relapsing? Because there is a moment with your buddies or at dinner or after work where you are giving in to a series of thoughts or feelings or emotions and not remaining present to them. You're numbing them. You're running from them. You're changing them. So how do you stop drinking? But, Bardia, you've got 250 videos. All these things sound great. How do you actually stop? By developing the courage to say the buck stops with me. That's how. And it's incredibly frustrating, I get it. We try to do this and you understand it and then you drink again. And why the fuck did I do it? Well, you got to a point where you said fuck it. That's why. It's really simple. Like if we just had like a. If we had your thoughts projected out onto a projector and everybody could see it. And it was four o'clock and you get cravings at five. Like, okay, let's just project all of your thoughts and your sensations onto this projector to show what's happening mentally and physiologically. And you would see that intensity of both thought and emotion would start to rise and you would get to a point where you fold. All right? And that's okay. It's a learning process. You are learning how to not fold. All right? You are learning how to surrender. You're learning how to let go. I know you've got thoughts and stories that are really controlling, that are really overpowering. I know. You're not alone in that. A lot of people want to control everything. I know. It's just nature. We develop an adaptive behavioral strategy towards our thoughts and our emotional and behavioral operating system to be overly controlling of ourselves and other people and situations. Because it's a coping strategy to trauma. When you were a kid, you didn't have control. Your parents were over-controlling. So you modeled their behavior or they were so controlling over you that you got so fucking sick and tired of it that you developed it in your own way. All right? Like when you can connect the past to the present, it all starts to make sense. And so how do you change by remaining present to whatever is showing up and choosing the harder thing despite the easier thing being so luscious and tasty? That's how you grow. That's how you evolve. That's how you take ownership and responsibility. And that's how you develop more self-awareness and accountability. By doing the thing that's harder in the present moment. That is what forces you to grow and adapt and evolve and move into new territory. Right? Like how do you run for longer period of time? Well, you start by running a quarter mile and then half a mile and then a mile. And then once you get to that mile, you find that comfortable pace. And then, you know, a week later, you push it to a mile and a quarter. The comfortable thing to do is to stop at a mile. Just like the comfortable thing to do at 5pm is to just drink. You don't want to run another half mile. You don't want to run two miles. I know. I get it. But what do you want more to escape the vicious fucking hellhole cycle and to fix, begin making progress towards fixing your life and not nuking your life and dying on your death bed? Are you regretful? Or do you just want to get fucked up? Well, if you just want to get fucked up, then just get fucked up. You know, I guess. But then, deal with the consequences tomorrow. Deal with it. You have to take ownership of your inputs and your outputs. And if you keep getting frustrated and angry of why you did it, at some point the buck has to stop. At some point, you're going to say, all right, It doesn't work. So what do I need to do instead? I need to develop the sack to remain present. I just need to remain present. I need to reinterpret what is going on in my mind and I need to reinterpret what is going on inside of my body. And then I need to learn how to cope with it. I need to learn how to bear it. Go on a walk. Take out FaceTime friend, read a book, watch a movie, eat some healthy food, go take a drive, call somebody, connect with somebody, go check out a restaurant, go do something different, interrupt the pattern. From a neuroscientific point of view, that's what we're doing. Every time you get through a craving, you are depotentiating, you are pruning the old pathway. Just a little bit, fraction of a percent. Do that six months, do that a year, and those pathways are going to be significantly less powerful than they were. And your ability to, when you feel a little off, to breathe, to grab some food, to go for a walk, to go workout is going to be more established. And that's going to be easier. Remember that hard and easy is not some objective thing around morality. You either have the neural pathways or you don't have the neural pathways. It's like playing guitar. When you start out, you have no idea what the fuck you're doing and your finger dexterity is pupu. You feel like a moron, right? Not because you are inherently a moron, it's not a moral failure. You just have not developed that aspect of your life, that aspect of your brain, finger, hand, balance connection. It's not a moral failure. And so addiction is not a moral failure. You're not weak willed. You're not less than. There's nothing wrong with you. There is an aspect of your psycho-emotional, spiritual humanity which you have not developed, which is learning how to redefine and reinterpret the way that you navigate what is going on inside of you. But you have to have clarity, you have to have a reason why, you have to be clear on the pain, you have to get clear on a future that's better, and you have to connect to those things, and those things have to ring true to your heart or your soul or something. There has to be some sort of connection to it, you know? And then another tip, another piece is you have to connect picking up another drink to something really bad happening. If you don't think it's a big deal, or if the brain keeps telling you, "It's not a big deal, you can just have one." I know it. I know that voice. It's plagued me for many, many years. But when I got to that place of rock bottom, when I got to that moment of clarity, what I connected drinking alcohol to was if I pick up another drink, the version of BARTY that's talking to you now on this podcast would not exist. He would not be able to be created manifest. And if I picked up another drink, what I equated it to, whether this is true or not, but it's more likely definitely true than it is not because I wouldn't have been able to become who I am today had I not put alcohol down. So what I equated it to was I'm going to die an early death, and I'm going to be laying on my deathbed. And I have enough self-awareness and I've read enough books to be like, "Dude, I fucking shat this existence. I literally just fucking pissed, pissed it away. I've got enough self-awareness to really be able to connect to that level of regret. I don't know about you, but I do. So in that moment, I connected it to, if I pick up another drink, I'm going to die an early death, and I will not be able to fulfill my potential. And that scares the fucking living shit out of me more than anything else. That terrifies me. The thought and idea of like living out the remainder of this existence like meager, poor, broke, frustrated, anxious, fearful, afraid of judgment, afraid of being myself, constantly in my head. Dude, all that, I've always known all that as fucking horseshit. I knew that eventually I could escape that if I did the work. Listen, when you develop confidence in self-esteem and you start to develop greater levels of self-awareness, like all that bullshit goes away. Fear of judgment, fear of what other people are going to think, fear what other people are going to say, like all that shit, fucking dude, it disintegrates. Like yeah, we're human. We have it to some degree here and there. It's not 100% like I'm not just some walking, like walking fable. But like a lot of the fucking bullshit that you just deal with, like the constant little fears and anxieties and whatever they are, dude, a lot of them, you can learn how to move through them. You can move through them. You can get to a place where you can start to feel like very unrestricted in life, very unrestricted. And your ability to go out and express your energy in ways that you could only dream of starts to become possible. When you heal, when you come back to yourself, when you develop courage to work through your shit and who you become through that process is a major level of process. That's what's waiting for you on the other side of this thing. Like, and that's why I say man, like you have to change your perspective around this. Quitting drinking isn't about putting the bottle down and being sad about it and missing out. It's about reconnecting to your potential. Use this as a springboard to become the person who you've always dreamed of being. There is no other playing field in life, not college, not starting a business, nothing else, which is going to force you to go deeper and to learn more and to develop more than overcoming addiction. Nothing. There is no playing field in life, not marriage, not starting a business, not going to college, not traveling the world for six months. Learning to overcome this, learning to work through this journey is the most powerful and profound arena on the planet. Bar, bar none, hands down. Yeah, starting a business is hard. The skills that you have to develop there is difficult and it's time consuming and there's a lot of risk and you have to develop leadership and you have to become humble and you have to put money in and it's its own arena. But dude, overcoming an addiction, learning how to manage your mind, learning how to manage your operating system, learning how to manage your emotions, learning how to regulate, learning how to, and everything that comes from that. See, when you learn how to navigate this playing field, it bleeds in. It is the most transferable skill to everything else, to business, to your relationship, to being a mom and dad, to how you show up for your kids, to how you show up at work. Overcoming an addiction is the most transferable set of skills that positively impacts every aspect of your life. Why? Because you're learning how to take ownership, you're learning how to take responsibility for your thoughts and sensations and you're learning how to cope. You're learning how to bear them and how to reframe them through therapy, through coaching, through reading books, through understanding how to become the witness, through learning how to surrender, through learning how to let go, through having faith, through all these different things, not faith in a particular spiritual religion, but just faith in yourself, faith in the universe, that the world in the universe isn't here to fucking ruin you, that it's all a lesson. You were born to go through a series of events that are going to teach you things. And as a result of learning through learning those things, your soul is going to gain what it came here to gain so that you can live better, so that you can live in more harmony, so that you can experience and create more success, so that you can pass on your wisdom to other humans. And at a macro level, that's what we're doing here. It's not about the individual, it's not just about you and I, it's about our species as a whole, right? I went through all my pain and all my shit, so I can process it and make sense of it and synthesize it and develop the courage and bravery to overcome my fear of judgment, fucking all my insecurities, so that I could now spread a positive message to humanity to help wake up souls and to help expand people's consciousness and to help people get their lives together, so that collectively, as they do that, they create a better experience for their partner, for their kids. They raise better human beings. They are more productive at work. And so it's so for the, it's for the ripple effect. It's for the ripple effect. And it works. It works. I went from growing up in a super crazy dysfunctional family with all types of dysfunction and trauma to losing my dad when I was 14, to experiencing a hellhole of addiction while learning and growing through the process while trying to retain some level of self-awareness and commitment to growth and success. And then when I finally was able to connect all the dots, I synthesize them, I process them, I made sense of them, I spent hundreds or thousands of hours pontificating and philosophizing and reflecting on them and figuring out how to explain them and in what order to explain them to try to make sense and connect the dots. And then now I package it together and I provide a path forward for other people. So I can shorten their learning curve. I'm doing for others what in many ways my life and the people who came into my life did for me. And then you're going to do it for the people around you. You're going to do it for your kids, you're going to do it for your partner, you're going to do it for your family, you're going to do it for your friends, you're going to do it for the people in your community. And then slowly but surely life is just going to keep getting better. Remember like you were not born to just come to earth and just fucking drink your pain away. You got sidetracked, alcohol is a sidetrack. It's procrastination against your personal evolution. So if you're ready to stop, if you're ready to wake up, make the commitment to not, not drink, to not, not think about about a pink elephant, but to remain courage and resilient today. And if you can do that and you can get through today, you're going to wake up tomorrow happy and grateful. Whatever sensation or thought that was telling you to drink or boredom or anxiety or loneliness, whatever that was is going to be gone for the most part. And you're going to be half a percent more resilient and then just make that commitment again the next day. And don't get any farther than that just one day at a time. So I hope this episode was helpful for you. I'm glad I could put out another one before my travels over the next couple of weeks and really, really take on this perspective and mental model. It's not about not drinking. It's about learning how to bear witness to whatever comes up for a short period of time. Remember your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, the sensations that come in your body, they fluctuate. The nature of the human experience is constant change. And your ability to learn how to ride that wave is what is going to allow you to be successful on this journey. When you hold on, when you grasp for dear life at a thought or a sensation that doesn't feel good and you think that you have to catastrophize it and you do catastrophize it, dude, you're going to be, you're just, you're going to the bank and you're collecting more debt. And the buck is going to have to stop somewhere. It's going to have to stop eventually or it doesn't and you die. My dad died at 57. Young man, that is fucking young. Left behind me, my two sisters, my mom. Because he wasn't, he didn't develop the self-awareness, the understanding to figure out like, okay, if I'm in addiction, how do you stop the addiction by developing the courage to remain present and to embark on a journey of discomfort? That's what this is. You are embarking on a journey to learn how to redefine and reinterpret discomfort. That's what it is, right? And every podcast you listen to, David Goggins, all of your favorite podcasts, relationship podcasts, it doesn't matter what they are. They all say the same thing. You want to become a better human, get better at managing discomfort. Otherwise you don't. People who are not good at managing discomfort are operating at the lowest levels of society, struggling with the most pain in every capacity. Because they're not learning how to make sense of that pain. They're not learning that that pain is a teacher. There is a signal. It is feedback about themselves where they can take more ownership and accountability and responsibility. Right? And I'm not saying that the trauma that you experience or the abuse you experience is valid in that you're responsible for it. But now that we're here and we're aware and we have a path ahead of us as an adult, we have to figure out what we're going to do with it. And so that's what this game is. That is what being a human is. That's why we're here. We're not just here to work. We're not just here to have barbecues on the weekends. The purpose of your life is to learn how to interpret and navigate your internal environment. And when you learn how to do that, then you can go do whatever you want. Then you can go be successful. Then you can go start a business. Then you can go travel the world. Then you can go do whatever you want. But if you're trying to, if you're placing all your attention and focus on those things, but internally, you're constantly criticizing yourself, constant imposter syndrome, constant emotional dysregulation, constantly like talking shit, constantly judging others, constantly judging yourself. Dude, you're looking at it the wrong way. Your purpose here on earth is to learn how to navigate your internal environment. Everything else is secondary to that. You're not here to just work. You're not just here to hang out in the fucking weekends. You're not just here to party and go to bars and watch the fucking games. You're here to learn how to navigate your internal environment. And when you make a commitment to that, that is the key. That is the key that unlocks reality. So that you can go out and do whatever you want. So you can go start the business. So that you can go out and make the money that you want. So that you can go out and whatever it is, create that side hobby, get that side hobby or get that other job or whatever it is. It's about learning how to manage your mind and your emotional operating system. And the first step in that is by learning how to become the witness. Learning how to step outside of yourself and to look at your thoughts, your stories, the narratives, not as you, not as who you are, but as a passing series, as a passing form of like clouds in the sky. And they're going to change. Same thing with your emotions. When you start to notice an emotion, notice it as a distinct and separate phenomenon from your awareness, create distance, and watch it. Notice it. Bear witness to it. Remember, as human beings, like, dude, the full spectrum of emotions are okay. We're a human being. We are meant to experience all of it. Frustration, anger, distrust, disdain, excitement, joy, happiness, all of it, all of it. There's, I don't know, 100 of them. They're all okay. They're all feedback. You don't need to catastrophize any of them unless you're in danger, then fight or fight. But you have to be able to develop the skill to discern the difference between those things as an adult. And then go out and get support. Get support. You're not alone. You're not unique. Every addict thinks they're unique. They think they're an exception to the rule. Nobody wants to accept the fact that, listen, I fucking, I have an addiction. Dude, there's nothing wrong with that. Nobody has the capacity to develop one. And unfortunately, like, the 12-step community and, like, our society has placed so much, like, negative criticism and judgment on this word addiction and, like, addict and, you know, alcoholic that everybody's got shame around it. Dude, everybody's fucking addicted to something. I guarantee number one, everybody's addicted to their phone. And beyond that, I mean, dude, it's just, addiction is a norm. Normal, natural, like, response of what the brain does. The brain is a survival tool, and it runs on neurochemistry, and it's trying to make sense of things. It's trying to survive. It learns behaviors, you know. It produces certain types of neurotransmitters and responses to certain things. And the brain doesn't know that alcohol is fucking ruining your life. It just know it produces dopamine and gabin, sedates your system and released pain. You have to be the one. You have to be the conscious witness to step up and be like, "All right, I'm connecting my inputs to my outputs. I understand that alcohol provides pleasure and reward, but the fact is, I was never meant to experience that much pleasure and reward." And so you have to learn how to cope with that. You know, I've got people who, you know, they weren't drinking because they're so sad or like, you know, life is so terrible, they drink because it makes the party better. It's my reward. It's my reward. I feel good. It's like, yeah, I know. But now it's causing all these problems. And like, the fact is, is you have to find it within your soul, within yourself to recognize you were never meant to experience that much reward in the first place. You took a drug. And so now you filter your life through this drug and you think everything's boring or, you know, nothing's that pleasurable and I'm being deprived. It's like, no, dude, no, like, you were never meant to experience that in the first place. Sex and food is the top of the food chain, right? You want to feel really good, build an incredible bond with a partner and have intimate sex where you guys are safe and connected and vulnerable and experiencing pleasure together. Or go to your favorite restaurant, you know, and be present. It's slowly two fifty times every time you take a bite. So we have to, we have to get to a place if we want to do this thing where we develop courage. Courage to remain present, purge to remain present, to the stories and the emotions that pop up that don't feel good. But guess what, that's your journey, right? Whatever stories or narratives or whatever is coming up for you, that's your curriculum. That's your life. Take ownership of it, take responsibility for it, love it, appreciate it. You were gifted this life. You didn't ask to be born. You weren't on a waiting list to become a human. You just popped up out of this infinite void. Look up into the sky right now, like, dude. As far as we know, we're the only conscious beings like floating on a rock in infinity. And you have the gift of five senses. You can smell food. You can smell it nice perfume. You can walk. You can exercise. You can learn. You can listen. Dude, this is, I mean, you can hear the birds in the background. What a gift. What are we doing? What are we doing here? What are you doing here? You have to take this into your own hands. You're not powerless. You're powerful. But you have to fucking get aggressive. You have to say enough is fucking enough. And you have to use that energy, that fucking I'm tired of this horseshit. And you have to let it fuel you forward. Like one was the last time you got fucking pissed off. Being angry, like, about this is a good place to be. Like wasn't there a period of time when you were younger that you thought like, "Ah, my life is going to be this and I'm going to go do that and I'm going to be an astronaut and I'm going to run a business and I'm going to have this beautiful family. Things are going to be amazing." When the fuck did you get off track and when did it become okay to not just not keep pursuing that? Dude, you're going to go back into the void at some point, undisclosed. So what are we doing wasting time here? Don't you want people at your funeral to look back and say like they fucking did it? To be proud of you, to remember you for who you truly are your authentic self? Rather than somebody who just love to fucking drink. You know? That's so easy. That's so, that's so nonsense. There's nothing respectable about that. You have to fucking start taking it into your own hands. You have to find that fire within yourself that says enough is enough, dude. I don't care what I have to be open to, right? As long as I don't have to go back to that fucking hellhole of waking up with a fucking hangover again, I will expose myself to any boredom, to any anxiety, to any other thoughts or stories or narratives that come up and I will remain present to it because I know what happens when I take a drink. I have a second and a third and a fourth and a sixth and a eighth and then I'm drinking again the next day or the next week and I find myself in the cycle over and over and over and over and over again. The good news is whatever comes up temporarily in the present moment is going to pass and this is the nature of the human experience. This is the nature of surrender. This is the nature of patience. This is the nature of self-awareness. This is the nature of wisdom. You are a conscious witness to fluctuating and passing tornadoes in your life. Sometimes the seas are calm. Other times there's nice waves that you can surf. Other times there's fucking tsunamis. That's fine. That's the nature of the sea. And it's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. I think that's what we all need to remember. And so if you try to do this on your own and you've struggled time after time, reach out for help. I have a one-on-one, 90-day coaching program you get access to my community for life. So once we're in this thing, you'll always have my support. You'll always have a place you can stay plugged into, connect it to me. You'll continue to get access to all of the ongoing resources that I'm going to build. My group coaching program still isn't launched. Working on finalizing details on the website. So stand by for that. But fill out an application and get support, get accountability. If you try to do this on your own and you haven't been able to, that means there's gaps. There's leaks. There's things that are missing on this journey for you. And having somebody like myself, having other community members who are operating on the same wavelength and frequency, taking a proactive approach to this process. And absolutely change and transform your life. I can't tell you how many people have come into my program and have said, "Man, I came in here to quit drinking and I've gotten so much more." And I've learned so much more. So hope this episode was helpful. Again, remember, it's not about not drinking. It's about remaining curried, remaining resilient and developing courage for today. And share this with somebody you know. Share it with somebody who you think it'll help. If you have not left a review on my podcast, I would deeply appreciate it both on Spotify and on Apple. Alright guys, hope you have a great rest of your day. I'll talk to you soon. 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.