Drinking Alcohol is Procrastination Against Your Personal Evolution

Hey, I'm Barti Arez and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. Welcome to my podcast where I teach you how to stop drinking, how to quit craving, and how to begin the journey back to yourself so that you can transform your life. After a 14-year binge drinking career, starting and stopping dozens of times and trying everything in the book from AA to therapy, I finally discovered the key to sustainable sobriety. And on this podcast, you're going to learn practical tips, tools, and strategies to help you quit drinking alcohol the easy way so you can finally step into the next chapter of your life and begin fulfilling your potential. For private one-on-one or group coaching, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Stop Drinking Coach podcast. My name is Barti Arez. I'm your host on the Stop Drinking Coach and I'm super excited to be jumping into another episode. I've been thinking about what I want to talk about and what I want this podcast episode to be on and I came up with the title Alcohol is Procrastination Against Your Personal Evolution. And in order to think about alcohol this way, it requires you to really shift your paradigm around what you think alcohol is and the way that it's been marketed to you. Some might say, "Dude, relax. I'm just drinking a beer. I'm just trying to relax after a long day's work." But what you have to understand and hopefully you'll come to this point of realization throughout your human journey is that drugs and alcohol at the fundamental level represent addiction to drugs and alcohol or a dependency or a continual seeking of drugs and alcohol at a fundamental level represent the procrastination against your personal evolution. Because you have to look at this from a root cause analysis perspective. You have to take first principles thinking in mind here. Alcohol is not the problem. Obviously, it's the thing that's causing the problems. But the underlying problem is why are we turning to alcohol in the first place? Like the continual seeking of alcohol as a way to numb out and escape and distract yourself because something inside you is dysregulated mentally or emotionally, that dysregulation that root causes the issue. And so if you continue to drink alcohol, what you're doing is you are procrastinating against coming home to yourself and addressing the underlying problem, the underlying issue, whether it's trauma, whether it's your inability to handle stress, whether it's your inability to handle getting frustrated or anything else. Like alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution. So you have to be honest with yourself. You have to look in the mirror. You have to look inside of yourself and say, "Who am I? Why am I here on planet earth? Why was I born and what do I want out of this experience? Where do I want to go? What impact do I want to leave? How do I want people to remember me?" These are the questions that you have to ask yourself. This is the way of waking up. This is the way of expanding your consciousness, of not just sort of focusing in on the present moment all the time, waking up, going to work and repeat. You have to think bigger. You have to broaden your perspectives. You have to think like, "What do I want out of this experience? If I have 20, 30, 40, 50 years left, if I have kids, if I have a partner, if I got married and I had vows and I looked into my partner's eyes and they looked into my eyes and we said, "Hey, we're going to do this life thing together." All of a sudden you got derailed with alcohol. Well, what about them? What about how your actions are impacting the relationship? You decided to have kids. You made the ultimate, almost self-sacrifice to say, "Hey, we're going to bring another blank slate of consciousness into the world and we're going to make sure that we provide as much support and resources and tools to make sure that they grow up to be healthy, confident, self-actualized, resourceful, productive members of society." All of a sudden alcohol becomes problematic for you and it's like, "Dude, you can't keep running. You're procrastinating and you can't win the alcohol game." This is a rigged, fucked up battle. It's rigged. You can't win this game. You're never going to be able to outdrink the alcohol. You're never going to be able to outdrink your pain. You're never going to be able to outdrink the people who've wronged you or the people who hurt you or your perpetrators. Every time you take a drink, it is an illusory experience. You think that you're escaping pain or stress or frustration, but you're taking in a substance that exacerbates and makes that pain, stress, and frustration in all of the things that you have inside you worse. You're damaging the system's ability to manage and process that original pain and frustration. It's an illusion. You get 20 to 30 or 40 minutes of an increase in dopamine and gaban serotonin and oxytocin, but as a result, you get stuck in a feeding cycle of this imbalance neurochemistry. When you get stuck in this feeding cycle, this is what's called alcoholism or what the 12-step community calls a mental illness or a disease. It's not a disease in the sense that you have cancer. It is a disease in the sense that when you associate yourself with this drug or substance long enough and the imbalance of neurochemistry becomes so severe, it changes you as a person. It changes your priorities. It changes your decision-making. You will forego your children's long-term health or immediate health. You will forego your relationships. You will take massive risks that can put yourself or other people in danger without logically considering the consequences and thinking it through. That is why they call it a mental illness in disease. When you fuck with this stuff long enough and in high quantities consistently, it changes you as a person. Your decision-making, your logic, your critical thinking, your ability to rationally make good decisions goes out the window because your neurochemistry is so imbalanced. Neurochemistry is what determines you. Your level of happiness, your level of contentment, your level of personal connection to yourself, your level of motivation, your happiness, your joy, your sadness, your depression, how you feel, your constant day to day, how I'm living and how I'm feeling, how I'm feeling connected to my life is basically a result of your neurochemistry. Of course, your mind sent your perspectives and your belief systems. Of course, you take trauma into an account because I look at everything through a trauma-informed perspective. This is a result of the neurochemistry floating around in your brain. If you take things from a top-down approach, meaning you have consciousness, then you have mind, then you have body, and then you begin to look at mind and body, which is this vehicle, this human operating system, basically an incredibly complex supercomputer. The brain is at the helm of that, and then you have consciousness at the very top, which is the awareness of the witness to this experience happening and unfolding before your eyes. You understand that this is just a neurochemistry. An alcohol is a way to hack that neurochemistry, but this is a losing game. This is a losing battle. You're never going to be able to win. In fact, every time you take a drink of alcohol, because you're unwilling to just move through and feel the discomfort, you are digging yourself into a deeper hole because you're further changing the shape of your brain. You're further changing the neurochemical balance and set point of your dopamine and gabba and everything else. If you want to beat the game, the way that you beat it is to stop procrastinating, stop procrastinating against the discomfort, stop procrastinating against the pain, stop procrastinating against the anxiety. You have to feel those things. It is the only way. Think of the millions of people who have quit drinking and gotten sober. This isn't even playing field. It doesn't matter who you are, how much money you make, how much prestige you have, how many life accomplishments you have, I talk to everybody on the phone. It's like I talk to a lot of individuals who are pretty successful, making multiple six figures or whatever. It's an even playing field. It doesn't matter how much you've accomplished or where you're at. If you struggle with alcohol, you're on an even playing field with the person who doesn't make that or who comes from a totally different background or has doesn't have those accolades and accomplishments. This is entirely a personal journey of you holding up the mirror to yourself. and saying, where is the dysregulation? Where is the anxiety coming from? What's the trigger? What am I running from? What am I unhappy about? What am I not being honest with myself about? What am I not willing to learn? What am I not willing to make adjustments to in my life? Whether it's my friend group, whether it's my social circle, whether it's my conversations I need to have with my partner, or maybe I need to go find a new job because this job is just crushing me and I'm so unhappy. Whatever it is, you're using alcohol as a way to procrastinate against doing the work that you need to do internally. And this is why alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution. Because as a human being, you came here to grow, to learn, and to evolve. That is why you learned language. This is why you went to school. This is why you got an education. This is why you read books. This is why you follow good people on social media to grow and evolve and to expand your mind, to gain more control in agency over the human operating system so that you feel you have the ability to control the direction of your life and to create the experience of life that you want while you're here for 70 or 80 or 90 or 100 years. Who wants to go through this experience as a prisoner? Who wants to be a conscious agent in their mind but behind bars because they don't know why they're having the thoughts they're having and behind bars because they don't know why they're having the feelings that they're having. I want to assure you that no matter who you are, what traumas you've gone through, what pains you're currently experiencing, what stressors or what challenges, it's all been problem solved. There's answers for all of it. You're not alone in the challenges that you're experiencing. Are you having an unhappy marriage? Dude, there's tens of thousands of marriage counselors. Hundreds of millions of people have been married and have gotten through the exact same challenges and problems that you have and it all exists. It's all online, it's on the internet. It's on YouTube, it's on Google. There's coaches, there's experts. Like everything that you think that is a challenger, a problem is solvable, all of it, all of it. Or if it's not 100% solvable because whatever it might be a condition or whatever, like there's ways to manage it and there's ways to optimize around it. Whatever it is, whatever it is. But I can't go inside of you and live in your body and be with you every moment to be like, "Hey, you gotta do this." And you gotta do that at this point. This is your personal journey. And honestly, you don't want me to be, you don't want me to be inside you. You don't want it to be just a snap of the fingers easy because this is your soul's evolution. This is why you were put here on earth is to figure this out. And trust me, it is the most profound hero's journey that you will ever be on. The way that your consciousness will expand, the way that your mind will awaken, the way that you will discover the fabric, the totality and fabric of how to manage your emotional state. Like, man, it's crazy. It's crazy. But you have to continue to remind yourself that if you are struggling with alcohol, that's what this is. Alcohol represents procrastination against your personal evolution. So you have to look in the mirror and ask yourself, how much longer am I gonna procrastinate? How much longer am I not going to just work through and feel the root cause, whatever it is? The discomfort, the anxiety, the stress. Because the thing that you have to remind yourself of is that like, dude, if millions of people have gotten sober and we all have an even playing field, we all have to, when we quit drinking, feel the withdrawal. Feel the shitty sleep for the first few days. Feel the anxiety, feel the craving. We have to move through it. We have to breathe through it. Everybody's, that's the thing about this game. It is an even playing field. Nobody is exonerated from it. Sure, some people have a different starting block in life and they have a different level of mental and emotional capacity and some people have more trauma and so, sure, like, it's a little bit different for everybody. But the playing field is pretty even. We all have to feel the discomfort and move through it. And it has to be earned. It has to be earned. That's why I say getting sober, once you get to the other side and the mind, body, and emotional system and energy system starts to find balance and regulate, it is a nectar that nobody else can take away from you and only you can taste because you've been through the fire. And it's like, what else are we here to do as human beings? We didn't come to earth. You didn't become an adult after evolving from childhood to an adolescence to just run from pain and discomfort. And I know that that's like the default programming of the mind and body through our evolution over the last million years because that's what the nervous system does is it activates into fight or flight constantly in order to keep you safe or what it thinks is keeping you safe or protecting you. But that's what expanding your consciousness is is evolving to understand that, hey, I have a nervous system. It is the command center of my feelings and emotions. And in this moment, when I feel like I'm getting triggered by my mom or my coworker or my wife or my husband, my life is not on the line. Even though in my body, it feels intense. There's actually no real threat or danger here. And by learning how to reprocess and reinterpret my relationship to my memories, you heard that correctly. By learning how to reprocess and reinterpret my relationship to my memories, I can change the fabric of those memories, how I experience them, and the emotional tie that I have to them. I can change the way that my nervous system feels when I retrieve that memory in my mind. And you can get to a place eventually where you find a sense of homeostasis, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. And this is what I help teach my clients to do. Doesn't happen overnight, doesn't happen in 30 days, and sometimes it doesn't happen in 90 days. This is a long-term journey. The person that I am speaking to you now, you hearing my voice is not the same person I was 90 days into this game, or even six months, or even potentially a year. Just this year has been full of massive growth, like on its own, in so many different ways. And so you have to look at this as like not as a sprint, but it's a journey, and it's taken one day at a time. You hear that term all the time. You hear it in the 12th step deal, or the AA communities. You hear it in just kind of the addiction and recovery space. But it's true. And that one day at a time philosophy doesn't just apply to alcohol, it also applies to understanding how you interface with yourself, how you interface with reality, right? Being present, staying present, understanding that the only thing that you ever have to manage and take care of is what is here right now in the present moment that you can do with your own two hands. If you're caught up in your mind thinking about the past, I mean, what's that? You can't do anything. The past is done. And if you're future-tripping, anxious about the future, creating all these internal representations and projections about what might happen, you're mentally masturbating yourself because you don't know what's going to happen. We suffer more in imagination than reality. Just think back. Do a simple, simple thought experiment or exercise. And think about the last 30 days or last week of your life and all of the things that you have worried and tripped up about in your mind. Now, I guarantee 90% of them haven't come true or haven't even come to fruition. Now, the question becomes, okay, Barty, why am I constantly compulsively overthinking? Why can't I just be present, right? Okay, well, let's look at this from it through a trauma-informed lens. It's because if you look at root cause analysis, you just trace the timeline back. There was a moment where you had an experience in which your nervous system and cognition did not have the resources to make sense of in process that experience. So the brain takes a snapshot like a photograph of that experience and it records how your nervous system is feeling in that moment and it freezes it in time. And think of it almost like putting on glasses. If you experience any sort of trauma and you are not able to process that trauma, mean make sense of it and then regulate your emotional system, your energetic body back down to calm and safety and you don't have the tools cognitively to say, "Hey, this means X, this means Y." Right, you will just create. Your body will go into fight or flight or it will disassociate and then it will create a story around what happened. In that story, when you're 3, 5, 7, 8, maybe not 3, but 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14 years old, is probably not going to be accurate and reflective of actual truth and you're going to internalize it. And then the body is going to stay free. frozen in time, right? Think of it like now putting on a pair of glasses permanently. If that thing that happens to you between 0 and 7 or 0 and 14 or whatever it is, even if you're 25 or 30 or 35 or 40 and you go through a terrible relationship and you know, your partners and narcissists or you know, as cheats on you or abuses you like and you don't know how to make sense of that and process that. Think of it, the brain takes a snapshot, it records the state of the nervous system and then think of it like putting on glasses and those glasses now are permanently etched onto your eyes and now you are looking out into the world through the lens of that trauma. Now you're looking out into the world through the lens of, "I'm not good enough. I'm worthless. I'm not capable. I have to not trust people and always be on edge." You know, and so you're looking out into a reality where you are mistrusting and unconfident and have low self-worth and have low self-esteem. And so this is your reality. This is your experience of three dimensional space. And so you think objectively as you look out into the world, you think objectively the world is chaos and mistrusting and painful and everybody's out to get you but it's not true. I mean, maybe in your subjective experience, it's true for you but objectively it is not. Objectively the world is neutral, objective, and really has no meaning. It is three-dimensional matter moving around in space colliding into each other. There's no meaning. But because we've experienced these traumas, they, you know, we look out into the world and our relationship, subject and object, is now intertwined with that trauma. And so how do we find homeostasis as an adult? Well, the first thing is education. We have to understand this human operating system and how it works. Ideally, ideally somebody who is regulated and healed and understands the human operating system. Let's say in your 30s or 40s or whatever, like throughout your day, 24 hours a day, you should feel safe in your body. You should feel confident and empowered in who you are. You should feel like you are resourceful and can figure pretty much anything out or at least find somebody or connect with somebody who can. You should feel confident enough to be tapped into your own personal truth, whatever that is and feel safe enough to share it with others. You should feel, have the capability to be consistent in your actions. You should have the integrity to say something and follow through with it. You should have the ability to imagine something in your mind, to take something unmanifest, pull it from the quantum field and to be able to manifest it through your words, through the vibration of your words and your energy and through your hands, whether it's creatively or whatever you physically do to make that thing a reality. And if we're unable to do that, it's likely because we're still living in our past. And that is why the healing journey is so important. And as I share all this with you, hopefully it will help you begin to understand that quitting drinking has nothing to do with alcohol and alcohol is not the problem. The reason we are turning to alcohol has nothing is for no other reason than we have a dysregulation inside of us, mentally or emotionally. And that dysregulation is rooted in a state of pain or discomfort. And until you are willing to develop the courage, the bravery to begin addressing, confronting, and working through that with an expert, with somebody who you trust, it will continue to live inside you and waste years of your life. Like with this problem, dude, it's crazy. Like when you work with the right person, you can often have transformation in an instant. And you will say, holy fuck, like this has been something that has been plaguing me for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. And then instantly you feel better. Instantly, the weight is lifted off your shoulders. Instantly, that energy moves through your body and you feel 10 pounds lighter. But you have to understand that none of that's going to happen until you look in the mirror and are honest with yourself. What is it that you want? What is it that you're so afraid of? What is it that you're not willing to make it a change around? Like you can't compare yourself to the person down the street who can drink your coworker, the neighbor. Like this is your game, this is your journey. You have to honor your soul's incarnation. And you have to stop feeling bad about yourself about, oh well, why me? Why can't I drink? Why can't I just, like, dude, you don't want it. You don't want it. Alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution. You are better off without the alcohol. Just think about it, man. Like this incarnation, this 3D matrix, whatever you want to call it that we live in, it's hard enough, right? Trying to evolve and grow and move up the ladder and make sure you have enough money for retirement and to like make sure that your life feels good and balanced, like exercising well, eating well, so you don't die of cancer early. Like there's enough challenge. There's enough for you to stay on top of. And now if you're drinking multiple days per week, man, you're just siphoning life force. You're siphoning the incredible sensitivity of the balance in your brain to keep you motivated, to keep you energized, to keep you moving forward. Dude, it's a suicidal form of procrastination against the pain and the discomfort that you hold internally, the dysregulation. Now for some people, there's a lot of pain and dysregulation from their past. And it's a journey to learn how to move and manage your consciousness, to understand and make sense of your past, to reinterpret the past, to actively work every single day in the present moment, to calm and balance your nervous system. For other people, maybe there's not so much trauma from the past. I've also got a lot of clients who were like, yeah, I had a great upbringing. My family was pretty good. I still have a great relationship with my parents. And it's like, for them, it was, it's maybe not so much that. It's just they found alcohol super exciting. And they discovered it in high school in college and there wasn't a ton of pain there, but it's like they just fucking love the part of your half fun. And if you've gotten to the point where that was you or that's you and you're listening to this, but it's become problematic, it doesn't matter. Now you have to, like, it doesn't matter whether there is a trauma or, you know, you still have to learn how to manage and move through that craving. You have to learn how to rebalance your neurochemistry. You have to find ways to get dopamine and ways that are healthy. And I've talked about this before in some of my videos. Like, let's talk about the neuroscience here a little bit because understanding the neuroscience, obviously, I think most of you listening to this were probably found me in one of my videos talking about dopamine. But I wanna talk about and help you understand. And maybe I'll do a separate video on this, but like while I'm riffing here and we're on topic, like here's the thing. There's this great video on YouTube and it talks about addiction and neuroscience. And the way this guy explains it is that he's like the three most important things in life are food, water, and dopamine. And he's like dopamine is everything. It is responsible for our motivation. And without motivation, you would die. You would not have the will to live, to grow, to evolve, to procreate, to pass your genetics. Like dopamine is the underlying driver of our evolution. You need to understand that. You need to really understand dopamine. Read dopamine nation and look up Dr. Anna Lemke's work. Dr. Anna Lemke, dopamine nation. She's got tons of content on YouTube, on Spotify. She's been interviewed on all these different podcasts. She is the absolute expert, which I've learned from and expanded my understanding of. So on average, a person has about 50 nanograms per desoliter of dopamine floating around in them. And he's like, okay, now understanding the nanograms per desoliter is important. Just look at these phrases, look at these metrics. The average person has about 50 nanograms per desoliter floating around in the brain of dopamine. The way he explains it is if you have like a terrible day and you get fired from your job, and now you're really just kind of feeling low and kind of depressed and unmotivated, like just you just got hit with a curve ball. Your dopamine's going to drop down to 40 nanograms per desoliter. So you're going to lose about 10 points of dopamine here. Okay. Now he then goes on to explain if you are like clinically depressed and cannot get out of bed, literally like can't get out of bed, you're at about 10 nanograms per desoliter. Okay. So your dopamine has gone from 50 down to about 10. Okay. So, you know, 5X decrease. Now on the flip side, when you are having sex, right, or eating your absolute favorite food, your dopamine will increase to about 90 to 95 nanograms per desoliter. So it's almost doubling. Okay. Now alcohol increases your dopamine, he said to about 190 to 200 nanograms per desoliter. Okay. So like, dude, that's major. That's major. Think sex and then think your favorite food activates the reward center in your brain and increases floating dopamine to 90 to 95 nanograms per desoliter. So he says humans are not meant to go above 90 to 100. Like this is the max that we're supposed to experience. This is what three-dimensional reality through natural extension of resources and behaviors affords us. Eating food, your absolute favorite food and having sex are like the top. That's the max. And alcohol increases up to 200. So it's doubling the max. Okay. Now the way dopamine works is it's tied to our evolution and our biology. Okay. It is responsible for everything without dopamine, without that motivation to move forward and make progress. And then the activation of dopamine, which is the reward center, it's sending a signal to the body to say reinforce that behavior, repeat that behavior. Reward center is being activated. Good, good, sex, food, sex, food. You're not doing this consciously. This is beyond you. This is beyond your choice. This is what's happening within you. This is the computer system that's running the show. It sends a signal to say repeat it. That's why we get hungry every day, you know, because we need that reward center going off. And why we're all driven towards sex and sexual beings. This is at the core of the human evolutionary process. This is bigger than you. This is what our species is doing. And dopamine is at the core of it. And when you drink alcohol, it doubles maximum circulating levels of dopamine. Now the way that you have to think about dopamine is that it's a teeter totter. And the brain is always trying to maintain a level balance. It's trying to maintain homeostasis, which is a level balance. So when you begin to drink alcohol, it floods your brain with dopamine way abnormally high, just like cocaine, way abnormally high. And it makes you feel pleasurable and you fork and good in the moment. Makes you feel motivated. That's why you take a couple of drinks. You start cleaning your house and doing all this shit. Okay. Now, your brain is recording this. This is not natural. This is not a natural way of living. This is not a natural way of life. This your, you are drug induced. Alcohol is a drug. Okay. Even though it's hard for you to think about it that way, it is a drug, just like Xanax or cocaine or heroin. Okay. You're in a dopamine euphoric state. Before it comes back down to baseline of 50, it's going to go negative 200, negative 195. And that's why the next day you feel like shit and everything is 10 times harder. Okay. Before it comes back up to 50, okay. And so here's the thing. It's not going to come back up to 50 now. It's probably going to go to 48. And then it's going to go to 45. Your dopamine set point, your brain's natural ability to produce dopamine. The endogenous production, its natural production is going to lower. You're damaging the dopamine receptor sites because you're flooding them with way too much dopamine that it's not designed to handle. And so your brain starts becoming dependent. It's like, hey, now I'm getting all this dopamine from alcohol. I guess I don't need to produce that much. It's the same thing with steroids. You know, when you start pumping your body with steroids, all these bodybuilders, your natural testosterone production shuts off because now you're getting 2 to 10 X, 5 to 10 X, normal testosterone levels being injected. So it's like shit, I don't need to produce natural dopamine anymore. And so as you continue this cycle, your natural dopamine gets lower and lower and lower. And as a result, life becomes more dull and less motivating. Everything starts to take the back seat. Your relationships, you being there for your children, you showing up at work, you smashing it at work, you smashing it in your business, you making sure that you're eating well, that you're motivated, that you're sticking to your long-term plans and goals. Dude, all of those things take a back seat. And now you just become a fiend for the dopamine. This dopamine feeding cycle, this extreme imbalance of neurochemistry is what the 12-step recovery community, when they were established 100 years ago, AA, calls a mental illness in a disease. But it's not like you're not mentally ill, okay? You just have an extreme imbalance in your neurochemistry which changes the structure of your brain and the way that you make decisions, which changes your filters and perceptions around self and reality, which changes your decision making, your priorities. And extreme, that extreme shift in your brain functioning and the way that you have a relationship to yourself, have a relationship to the people close to you and have a relationship to how you manage pain and your internal emotions. Because it's so extreme, they call that a mental illness or a disease. Okay. But when you look at all of this through a trauma informed and neuroscience-based perspective, you can, it makes sense. You can trace it all back to a root cause. You can make sense of these things. And so the process of quitting drinking is a macro process of learning the human operating system, learning how your brain, emotional system, nervous system works, understanding your brain and how your personality is formed and produced through childhood experiences. And beginning the healing journey of re-optimizing and rebalancing mentally and emotionally and spiritually, which is our birthright, how we should be. You should be, ideally, a balanced human being, which has an understanding of the blue, has an understanding of the user manual, right? It's like, look at this from a top-down perspective. Your consciousness, your awareness of reality happening within you is like you sitting behind a computer, managing a keyboard and a mouse and looking at a computer screen. But imagine if you were from 1800 and somebody put you down in front of a keyboard and a mouse and had an LCD screen in front of you and said, okay, go ahead. They would look at you like, first of all, they'd be confused. They wouldn't even know what the hell a keyboard and mouse and a computer is. They wouldn't know that you're supposed to press buttons. That if you move here and click on this icon, it opens up a file system that an internet exists like the subconscious mind, right? An internet exists. They don't even know what the internet is. They don't even know they have a subconscious mind. They don't understand how to move files around. And that every memory is like a file that gets installed on your desktop. But you can go in and you can change that file. You can delete that file. You can change the way that you retrieve that file by going into its properties, shifting the submodalities using like neural linguistic programming, which is something that I do and I help my clients like, dude, this whole thing is so much bigger. And you have to think bigger. You have to understand that if you have tried to quit drinking on your own several times with no success by just doing nothing other than abstaining from alcohol, you're not going to get super far and you're going to stay stuck in the cycle. Being alcohol free is a learning process. Getting sober is a learning process. It is not a light switch for many people and that's okay. So if you've tried multiple times and you failed and fail is not the right word, fail is if you just give up and forget about it. If you've slipped up, then that's just feedback in the process. That is feedback within your human avatar in this three-dimensional reality. And the way that you apply meaning to the data of that feedback is what determines your experience and how you move forward. This is an input/output system. We live in a cause and effect universe. The sooner that you can begin to look at reality from an independent, objective, neutral perspective, and you begin to audit the meanings and interpretations of all things within your sphere of consciousness from a higher vantage point, that is when you will begin to develop agency over this experience. But as long as you are committed to those old stories, as long as you are committed to keeping those painful narratives alive and not having the courage to revisit them and reprocess them and reinterpret them. And then in the present moment, work to re-condition your mental and emotional operating system, you will be a slave to them. So what you are here to do as a human being is to learn everything that I'm sharing with you. That is the game. That is the game. It is about expanding your map of reality. And NLP, they call it the map is not the territory. So the territory is everything that is outside the confines of your own skin, which is basically objective reality, objective meaning it. It's story-less, it has no meaning. It is three-dimensional matter moving into itself, spinning. The map is your personal interpretation of it. And that map is limited until you expand it, until you expand it, right? It's like, think about when you were 10 years old and then think about when you were 30 years old. Your map of the entire spectrum of reality at 30 years old is 100x that of a 10-year-old, right? Your understanding of self, of relationships, of the world, of the government, of language, of whatever it might be, work, different skill sets, different tools, like, you know, you're a different person at 10 years old than you are at 30 years old. And you're a different person at day one or day seven at day 30 or day 90 of your sobriety journey than of month 12 or month 24 of your sobriety journey. This is a personal evolution. It is a profound personal evolution. And really, there isn't that many things that you can do in life that will help you grow and evolve more, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, energetically and within your complete scope of consciousness than learning how to live alcohol-free. Because learning how to live alcohol-free means that you no longer procrastinate against the problems and challenges in your life. You don't have an out anymore. You can't run to the bottle and to the nipple anymore. So you are forced to grow into adapt. That is how adaptation happens when there is sufficient stress and force on the system that the force that the system has to adapt and get stronger. It has to increase its capacity. Same thing, simplified analogy of going to the gym. The only way that your heart is going to get stronger and have a better cardiovascular function, run longer, run faster. And the way that your muscles get more defined and toned and thicker is by inducing stress onto the system. It's the only way. There's no other way. It's not that the muscle does not get thicker and stronger and more defined unless you induce stress on the system. That is what sends a signal to the proteins to double and to grow. Like, and your consciousness, your mental system, your psychological system, your emotional system, is the same way. Learning how to live alcohol free is the catalyst to your growth and transformation as a human being in so many different ways. But the way through is by walking through the fire and developing the bravery and courage to do it. So understand that at a macro level, alcohol represents procrastination against whatever it is. It could be stress from work. It could be the relationship that you're in, being annoyed with your kids, whatever it is. It is time for you to step up and begin aggressively, aggressively with a curious, compassionate nature begin to problem solve those things. And if you don't know how to do it on your own, read books, watch YouTube videos, hire a coach like myself, join a community, and be part of another like system and group of people who are all doing it together. Every single one of my clients, say having this community, being tapped into this community, seeing everybody's updates every single day, is worth gold, diamonds. Because man, like when you've got all these challenges and internal struggles, a lot of times it feels isolating, and I know that. I know how lonely it feels. So to be in a group where everybody is operating on the same wavelength and frequency and doing their best in supporting each other is dude, it is priceless. It is priceless. And then you have a coach like myself who's always learning, who's always growing and who's further down this path and understands the path and process who can be there to support you and guide you and point you in the right direction, give you the right resources like, man, it is wild, it is insane who you could be in 12 to 24 months, in six months, in 90 days. Man, like the transformation and growth I see in my clients in just 90 days is wild. So that's how I want you to think about this journey. And so be honest with yourself, reflect, where are you not being honest enough? What are you avoiding? That's the thing that you have to work through. And listen, that thing that you think you're avoiding and that is scary, dude, that is the signal. Think of yourself somewhere 20 years in the future, 10 years into the future, a year into the future. You've got to take a macro positive perspective, a spiritual, almost perspective to this thing. The universe, your incarnation, your destiny, this journey that you're on, imagine that there's a part of you in the future who's already figured all this out and is living sober. Okay. It's like the system is intelligent. The system is intelligent. Okay. Whatever energetic force is beating your heart, digesting your food, keeping you alive, mending your wounds when you fall down and scrape your knee, whatever intelligence is having trillions of cells communicate simultaneously 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 80 to 90 years, guiding your intuition, there's an intelligence there that you need to begin to learn to tap into, that you need to pay attention to. Because it's real and there's something there. So the things that you're afraid of, of confronting, of feeling, that is the internal guidance system saying, hey, if you work through this, that is where your freedom lies. The things that you are most fearful and most anxious about are on the other side of that, contain your evolution and freedom. So you already know it's not even a question. You don't have to like, you can't say like, there's no what do I want or what should I do or what is the next step. You just have to quiet the mind enough and feel and pay close enough attention. Do you have a thought that says, well, I just, I don't even know if I can do it. I'm not confident. Great, start with that. Start with you not feeling confident and explore that. Why do I not feel confident? Well, dude, when I was 10 years old on the playground, some fucking kid pushed me down and made fun of me for, I don't know, something. And that, and in that moment, I just felt like nothing. I felt like my whole personality was pulled out of me 'cause they all laughed at me. Boom, start with that. Some inner child work, reparenting yourself, reprocessing that event. Whether you hire a coach or a therapist or a counselor to like move through that and to reestablish confidence. And then understand where does confidence come from? Confidence comes from doing something over and over and over again so that you get the experience to know that you're unconsciously competent at it so that you can deliver, that you can follow through. Like, everything can be traced back to a root cause and a source and you like, you know it, you know it. And if you're not entirely sure what it is, that is why investing in a coach or a mentor or a guide or a therapist is gonna help you because they can help guide you through that process. So, I think I'm gonna finish it off here, guys, but I appreciate you listening. I hope this episode was enlightening and helpful for you. And just remind yourself, like this process, this process is a personal journey of learning how to move through your discomfort. It is a personal journey of learning how to develop the courage and bravery to address the underlying things that you know have been problematic and have been causing you challenges. And the good news is, the good news is, is that almost all of those things can be problem solved and you can eventually get to a place of homeostasis, safety, calm, confidence and wholeness. If you look at my new logo, it starts out as a really kind of, like half of a quarter of a circle and it's really small and then it evolves and it expands into finally the last circle being large and fully whole. And that's the way I see this process. We all know that. All start out, this process is just kind of only tapping into and accessing a small fraction of ourselves. Our map is limited, our understanding of the human operating system is limited, our ability to have agency over our system is fairly limited. And as we go through this process, we eventually grow into wholeness and completeness. And you take this from a spiritual perspective and it's, hey, you're already whole and complete. You're not broken, you're not missing anything. But it takes a journey of evolving your consciousness and learning how to manage your psychology and mind to discover that. And man, that's why this journey is so powerful and so profound and why so much transformation and growth comes from it. So thank you for listening. Share this podcast with somebody you know who might benefit from it. Because if you haven't, I would really appreciate if you left a five star review on Spotify and Apple. Thank you so much. And if you're at a place where you're ready to really step into the next chapter of your life and really do this thing and you're tired of being sick and tired, go ahead and visit my website www.thestobdrinkingcoach.com and fill out an application. 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 for 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.thestobdrinkingcoach.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.