EP 01: Who is Annie Grace & What is a Naked Mind

[Music] This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this Naked Mind Podcast where without judgment, pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture. [Music] It's about 3.33 in the morning and I literally wake up at the same time every single morning and I lay there and I look around and I just know what's coming. I know that I'm just going to be pissed off at myself for a long time until I can fall back asleep. But the kicker is that I feel a huge sense of very messed up anxiety or then energy. It's hard for me to fall back asleep because I just have this surge of adrenaline coursing through my body. I feel like maybe it's just all the carbs so all the alcohol I drink and all of this sudden I'm wide awake. Wide awake at 3 in the morning. Really frustrating when I know I have to wake up earlier when the kids are going to be getting me up at 6 o'clock. But there I am. I'm awake and I just start in on myself because I'm so frustrated. Annie, what is your problem? Why can't you get this under control? Why do you have to drink so much? What is it? I feel so calm and collected in all these other areas of my life. I feel smart. I feel intelligent. I feel in control. I don't feel like such a loser. But when it comes to 3 in the morning and trying to count my drinks and realizing that I can't even remember how many glasses of wine I had, I feel like such a loser. I feel like so dumb and so out of control. And I don't even have any idea what I'm supposed to do about it because I'm so terrified that something really is wrong with me. That I am an alcoholic. That I need to go to meetings for the rest of my life or just decide to just not have fun forever. That's literally what it looks like to me in those moments. When I feel so much regret about my drinking. And so I push those thoughts aside because to me that is on par with just why even why even live if you're just going to live in this complete misery. And that's how I see the other side of the bottle. I see it as misery. I mean I am convinced at this point in my life that alcohol is how I relax. That it's how I connect with my husband. That it's how I become present for my kids. I'm convinced that alcohol is lubricating my career and networking in every other aspect of my job. I am convinced that I need a drink at the end of a day. That I need a drink to fall asleep. And so to not have that the idea of having to give it up is like a sucker punch in the gut. It makes me almost queasy because I'm so afraid of it. And you know maybe you're not there or maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about. But the things that I am so frustrated about and the reason I started this podcast is because there's millions of us asking these same exact questions in the middle of the night. Millions of us waking up the next morning and having to pretend everything is fine and just ignore it because it's not become safe in our society to question how much we're drinking. It's not become safe because people judge you. It's not become safe because if you start to say I feel like I'm drinking too much. That question, oh wait. Oh what's wrong? Are you an alcoholic? I mean are your kids okay? Like you're not driving are you like I mean people get really judgmental and really concerned and it's not safe to just ask the simple question would my life be better if I was drinking a little bit less. When my life be better if I was drinking nothing and because it's not safe to ask that question we force ourselves down this road of rock bottom because we feel like we're faced with this decision is all or nothing black or white decision of giving up drinking forever declaring ourselves an alcoholic and just going down this road of sobriety and that is so terrifying to us who feel really like we're relying on alcohol for all sorts of things that we just don't even ask the question that we put off this question for as long as humanly possible until something in our life happens that makes it impossible any more to deny it. And often that said oh well we're just in denial yeah yeah this alcohol has a lot of denial wrapped up in it but guess what our society because it's no longer safe to question our drinking at the early stages encourages that denial and so I want this podcast to be a place where for once we can just question it we don't have to be alcoholics we don't even have to drink every night we don't even have to get drunk when I stop drinking my mother and Lollick hit me and she said "any I've never even seen you drunk I didn't know you had a problem you can stop drinking without having had a problem that fires me up so much because the only people who stop drinking have a problem no wonder we're terrified to question our drinking because we're basically saying oh look at me put the neon light on me I must have a problem that makes me completely crazy because guess what we can stop drinking before alcohol which news flash I didn't know this I wasn't aware of it I didn't have the education I have now alcohol is addictive and the more I drink the more things changed inside my brain and my body and my emotions to make me want to drink more and to have me believing this lie that I absolutely needed it in other areas of my life to relax to have a good time to have sex all of these things I believed that alcohol was so necessary to me but it's just addictive and if I can get off that train I feel so lucky and I feel like I want to take this message to the entire world with every fiber of my being because guess what I was able to have a moment where I said whoa wait a second I don't think it's it's good to be wanting to drink and not wanting to drink both at once this what's happening inside my brain this internal dialogue of what are you doing but I want another drink but oh don't have another drink but I want one I need one that was not healthy I was at complex in my own self and so when I was able to do the research come to understand some of the truths about alcohol come to get back in control of my relationship with alcohol I feel like I got off this train before it went in the tunnel much less before it went off the rails and it was going off the rails to make no mistake alcohol was changing my neurons in my brain alcohol was changing my dopamine response alcohol was changing things about me to where that train was going nowhere good fast I was developing a tolerance like nobody's business so tolerant that yeah I almost never got drunk but I was drinking so much that it was making me feel so bad not only physically but emotionally and mentally and if I can get off that train before anything tragic happened before it started affecting my family in really profound ways before I started making decisions that I would regret for my entire lifetime I want everybody to have the opportunity to question their drinking without fear without judgment without having to take on a label just question their drinking because hey it's your body it's your life it's your health so let me tell you a little bit about how that happened for me it was this really profound moment of my life when I was back from another work trip I had been in London had traveled all over the world for my job 22 countries in 24 months I was in multiple countries every single month you know for for work traveling all over and I was in London Heathrow Airport and I had just had a vodka screwdriver at breakfast and that was something really new for me because I had felt so bad from the night before we had been up all night drinking we had gone to watch some Australian football games at three in the morning at a pub somewhere and we'd been up all night drinking and so in the morning I felt so bad that I was like I just need something to get me through this day to get me on to the airplane so I can sleep to get me home so I asked for mimosa at the restaurant and they didn't have a mimosa because it was too early she said it's too early it's only six in the morning we don't open the champagne till nine so I'm not only early of the early drinkers I'm too early for the mimosa to even be open then so I said well what's what what can I do what do you have and she goes well you can have a vodka and orange juice that's a screwdriver I guess that's a breakfast kind of drink and I said okay great and so I had two of these and I'm taking the taxi to the airport and then I'm sitting I just gotten off the Heathrow Express I'm sitting in a tunnel and I had a little time before my flight and I'm feeling really dizzy and really uncomfortable and I'm sitting there and I pull out my journal and I start writing and I write these words I write what is wrong with you and how are you going to fix it? Annie this cannot go on and something about having it [BLANK_AUDIO] written down, black and white on a page, I could not deny the fact that I needed to make a change. And everything in society wanted me to deny this fact. I mean, everybody at work encourages, drinking, drinking, drinking, everybody in, you know, our social life was big drinkers, but I realized at that moment that I wanted to make a change. And I also wrote down some other things. I said, I have to make this my own journey. I have to figure this out for myself. Because as much love as I have for people who have found sobriety in AA, and I think it's a really beautiful thing, at this point in my life, you have to understand, this is for me personally, I knew that AA wasn't for me. My brother had spent some time in prison, and he had told me that AA, you have to admit that you're powerless. I didn't feel powerless. I just felt confused. He said, you have to admit you're an alcoholic. I knew enough about positive psychology and affirmations that I didn't want to label myself. And that alcoholism was defined as a lifeline illness for which there was no cure. I wanted another way because I wasn't ready for any of that. So if that was the only way, I would have chosen no way at that juncture. But I promised myself I said, you can find another way. There has to be another way. And I had this moment when I was sitting there, and it was just this moment of, oh my gosh, wait a second. Because at the same time in my life, I had been going through some very, very severe back pain. I mean, severe to the point where I couldn't pick up my kids. I couldn't help my husband when we moved houses. I couldn't do much of anything. It hurt just to walk around, it hurt to sit in my seat. And I had tried everything. I tried acupuncture, chiropractic traction, muscle relaxance. Everything you can imagine, I spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to heal my back between all these various methods. And nothing works. This was a four year journey. And at this point in time, I had just read this book. And I read this book out of desperation. And the book is called Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno. And in this book, in the very beginning of the book, he says this, he says, sometimes, undiagnosed back pain that moves around that cannot be cured is actually repressed unconscious emotion. And this repressed unconscious emotion is so painful that as a distraction so that you don't think these painful thoughts so that you don't deal with it, your body creates pain. And it does this by blocking, cutting off oxygen to your muscles, and that's incredibly painful. And your body creates this pain because you can't handle these thoughts and feelings. And I said, whoa, okay, this sounds totally weird. I don't know. There's no way that this intense pain is coming from my mind. Yeah, right. I don't believe it. But he says, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that maybe this isn't true, but you're willing to entertain that it's a possibility. And I said, yes, okay, I can entertain it's a possibility because the thing is that I can't heal you by convincing your conscious mind. I have to convince your unconscious mind. I have to methodically prove to you that this is true. You have to read this 300 page book where I dissect the entire thing. I prove it to your unconscious mind and then you will have freedom from back pain. And so I read the book because I needed to. I was desperate. And I read this book and I went through it. And literally I kid you not. I finished this book and my back pain went away. Went away. I was able to pick up my kids for the first time in three years. It makes me tear up even today to think about that because it was so profound. And I didn't do anything besides read a book. And so for the first time in my life, I realized the power of our minds. Our minds can create pain. And our minds can do incredible, incredible things. There's a study and it was with 13 participants. And they were all severely allergic to poison ivy. And they put poison ivy on one of their arms. They rub their arms with a leaf. And then the other arm, they said, this is not poison ivy and they rub their arms with a leaf. And the arm that they've told the participants that it was not poison ivy, only two of the participants broke out on that arm. The arm that they told the participants it was poison ivy, all 13, 100% of the participants broke out on that arm. Guess what? They had switched it. So only two people broke out on the arm that the real poison ivy was rubbed on. And 100% all 13 people broke out on the arm. That was just an innocuous leaf, a leaf that didn't have any poison in it whatsoever. So not only did the mind make it so that a rash appeared when there was no physiological reason for a rash to appear, the mind also protected people from the poison ivy when they were told that it wasn't poison ivy. And there's dozens of studies about this kind of placebo effect. And I said, okay, my mind is so powerful. And I knew at that point in time that my addiction was mostly emotional. I didn't feel like I needed it. Yet I was able to give a bell call no problem during my pregnancies. Explain that to me. Why could I just put it aside? No problem whatsoever when I knew I was pregnant. But I felt like I needed it. I felt like it was emotional. And I said, what if I could put this to the test and what if I could undo my unconscious conditioning, my unconscious beliefs around alcohol? What if I could make it so that my conscious desire to drink less becomes in harmony instead of at odds with my unconscious conditioning around alcohol? And I set out to do just that. And this journey, it took me a long time. I set out to do this on March 3rd. And it wasn't until the following December 15th that I walked out of my office. And I told my husband, I said, husband, just what I call him. I was going to get drunk with me tonight is the night because after this, I'm not drinking anywhere. And you could have blown him over. I mean, he looked at me like I was insane. I was completely crazy. And sure enough, we went and we split a bottle of wine. I had planned to drink two or three because that was my typical. But just half a bottle of wine, it was some divine intervention. And I got sick as a dog. And I remember like waking up the next morning and thinking, I never have to do that again. I never have to put that into my body again. I never have to worry about what I said when I was drinking and I can't remember it. I never have to make myself sick. I never have to have another hangover. And that was so freeing and so liberating. It was one of the most euphoric times of my entire life because it wasn't, I never get to drink again for me. I never get to go out with my friends. I'm always going to be sad and alone without alcohol. None of those thoughts have existed. You know why? Because every single reason that I drink, I put to the test. And I mean, the test, the ultimate test. So this is what I did. Is I made this list and it was a long, long list. And I wrote down every single reason that I liked to drink. And every single reason that I thought of reaching for a bottle from, oh, I like the smell of wine too. I like how it goes with my steak too. I like how it makes me feel when we're in the hot tub too. I know that it just, you know, it helps loosen me up to have sex and all of these reasons, dozens and dozens of reasons. And then I went through every single one. And I went through and I said, okay, why do I believe this? Where did it come from? And is it internally true? Objectively, like if I asked myself questions, Annie. So you had that glass of wine last night to relax yourself. And by the way, I did all this while I was drinking. I didn't quit drinking until I had gone through this entire process, which took me, again, from March to December, this process of research. I did not want to make myself feel deprived during this journey. So I just kept drinking, but I kept researching. My commitment to myself was that I was going to try to understand this and understand my behavior. So I said, okay, Annie, you're thinking you had this glass of wine to unwind tonight to relax yourself, because you've had a really hard day. And let's be honest, three, four glasses of wine. And then the next morning I'd wake up and I, how do you feel? Do you feel more or less relaxed? Oh, yeah, in the moment I felt a little bit more relaxed, but now the next day I feel less relaxed. And guess what? The thing that was stressing me out was this massive presentation I had due for the board. And I didn't do it because I was drinking. So now I'm more stressed out than I was yesterday. Oh, wait, wait a second. This isn't making me feel as relaxed as I thought, not cumulatively at least, sure, in the moment maybe, but not over time. But then where the real magic happened was I put every one of these things to the external test. And I said, what does the science say about this? How does it say alcohol reacts in our brains, in our very neurons? What happens when we drink and why does it make us feel relaxed? And there's all sorts of fascinating stuff that we will go into in this podcast. I mean, it is truly, truly fascinating. But the truth is, and I'll give you one little example. They gave, you know, there was all these studies, but they gave mice alcohol for 30 days. And then they had a control group where the mice weren't drinking. and then they put them through some stressful experiences. And the mice that had been drinking alcohol were much less able to deal with the stressful experiences than the mice that had not been drinking. Oh my gosh, well wait a second, I can't unlearn that. I can't unlearn that. I can't unlearn that I have a physiological body made up of flesh and bone and neurons and synapses. And so do the mice and guess what? We're really similar. That's why they use them as test subjects and the mice were less able to deal with stress after alcohol. Maybe I'm less able to deal with stress when I'm drinking. And then I started wondering like, am I more less stressed now after drinking every night for the last few years? Hi, I think it's because of my job is more stressful, but maybe it's because of the alcohol. Maybe I'm making my life. It became a chicken in an egg. Like, am I making life more stressful with the alcohol or am I drinking because my life is so stressful? And the only way to answer that was really taking a break from alcohol. That was the only way to answer it. And now I can definitively say that I was making my life incredibly more stressful by consistently putting something in my body that stressed it out. Really, truly, literally stressed it out. It is a stressful experience for your body to process alcohol. But one of the reasons you build a tolerance is immunity. But after this year, after I found this freedom, what did I do next? I said, oh my gosh, I'm on to something. I couldn't believe it. I felt so free and so amazing. So I actually went and I put all of my journals out for download. And I just put them up on a webpage. I had no idea what I was doing in terms of digital marketing people laughing me because I didn't even get email addresses for this. I just put them up for free because I just wanted people to have them. A crazy, crazy, crazy thing happened. In three weeks, 20,000 people downloaded these journals of mine. People are desperate and hungry for this information. This is, we are at a change where we're becoming more mindful, more thoughtful about our health and our wellness and our well-being and our place on the planet and our purpose, just as a humanity. And alcohol doesn't always fit. I meet people all the time who are like, I didn't have a problem, but I don't drink anymore because I want it to be more productive because I can't do what the hangovers. Or I barely drink anymore. I used to drink every night, but now it's maybe, you know, a few times a month or a few times a year for the exact same reason because I want to show up as the best version of myself in my job, in my family, in all areas of my life. It is incredible what is happening in our culture right now. You know, 20-somethings, millennials, they're drinking less than any other generation of that age ever has in recent history. I mean, so much less. And there's a lot of reasons. They're more mindful of it. They're more health conscious. Social media really plays into it. They don't want to be drunk on Instagram or on Facebook. So they're really careful about getting drunk because everything in their lives has been recorded. It's just what's happening in our culture right now. And they just say, "Hey, that's our parents' drug." We saw that. That doesn't look fun. So there's this amazing culture shift that's happening around alcohol. And the beauty is that no longer has to be this terrifying question of, "Do I have a problem?" The only question we need to start asking ourselves is, "Would I be happier? Would my life be better if I started to drink less or stop drinking altogether?" And you don't have to even make a decision about stopping drinking altogether. You just have to start to question and become mindful about your relationship with alcohol. And that's what this podcast is all about. It's all about making this question something that we can explore together, no matter where you are on the spectrum, no matter where you are on your goals for alcohol or your intentions, no matter if you want to just keep drinking on occasion or keep drinking regularly but just less. Or if you just want to have the dialogue but you don't want to change your behavior at all or if you want to have the dialogue for your kids, whatever it is, this is the place where we are just going to explore our culture's relationship with alcohol, our own relationship with alcohol. And we're just going to ask this simple question, "What does it really do? What does it look like? Is it helpful? Is it harmful?" And so I put this book out for download. And it got crazy, crazy downloads, 20,000 downloads. And I started getting letters from all over the world. One of those letters was you should start to get email addresses with this, you should make this a website. And so I did that, I made it a website. And then I realized I was like, "Wow, I need to make this a book and publish it and actually hire an editor." So it's not just my journals. And so I did that. I hired an editor and I self-published this book. And you know people are like, "Well, you could probably get a traditional publisher and you know what I did." I reached out to one or two agents and said, "You know, this is my idea." And they're like, "Oh, this is a really cool idea. I love it." Traditional publishing takes 18 to 24 months and I said, "I do not have that kind of patience. I don't. This is a message that needs to be out. People need to know this. People need to hear this." And so I didn't have that kind of patience. So I just self-published myself. And the book has gone insane, huge, huge. And people all over the world are reading it and it's called this "Naked Mind," just like this podcast. And people's lives are being changed because it is not scary to ask the question, "Would my life look a little bit better if I drank less or drink nothing?" It's scary to ask the question, "Am I an alcoholic?" But the interesting thing about that question, and I think I'll leave you with this thought, is that according to the DSN, the diagnostic and statistical manual, the term alcoholic is not even recognized. It is not a medically recognized term anymore. Why? Because they recognize that this is a continuum. It's a spectrum of use. And so this black and white, you're either an alcoholic and you're totally destined to have to stop drinking and never be able to drink again. Or you're not an alcoholic and you're totally safe and you can drink as much as you want to, which was, that's where I thought I was. I had a woman, she was a good friend of mine, and she'd gone to AA and she'd said, "Oh, I stopped drinking. I've gone to AA." And I said, "Okay, what does that mean for me? Because we drink together. I mean, you and I, like we're drinkers. We drink together. We drink all the time." And she goes, "Annie, no, no, no. Like I've learned that I'm an alcoholic. I've learned that I'm different." And so in my mind, I took that as permission. "Okay, well, if she's different, then I can just keep drinking." Because nobody was saying, "Oh, wait a second. Alcohol is addictive to human beings. And if you're not careful with it, you will become addicted." That message was not being told anywhere. And so I just said, "Okay, well, I'm not an alcoholic, so I'm fine. I'm cool. I'm safe. I can keep doing whatever I want to be doing." And it took me three years after that before I started, before I had that moment in the train and he threw our report when I said, "Wait a second. What's happening here is something I don't like, and I want to change it." So there's so much to talk about I could talk forever. And I'm going to, that's what the podcast is for. So this podcast, I had so many different ideas about it. I wanted to interview all the experts that I cite in my book. I wanted to just tell my own stuff and just go off on these tangents about different things that I'm seeing in the media. I wanted to answer readers questions because I get dozens and dozens of questions and readers and I just really wanted to respond to them all. And I wanted to interview people who have gone and changed their entire life, you know, like I have and have really come into this new awareness and said, "I'm not drinking and I'm really happy about it." Or, "I'm only an occasional drinker now and I'm really happy about it." So I decided, I couldn't decide on any one thing. So I just decided that I'm going to do all of those things at once and that's what this podcast is. So you might get a readers Q&A, you might get just me, you might get a story that I've interviewed a reader, you might get an expert just tune in and I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you. This has been Annie Gray, so this Naked Mind podcast. Thank you so much for listening. You can learn more at thisnakedmind.com and please remember to rate, review and subscribe as it really helps us spread the word.