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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 fam, we are back with another episode. My name is Barti Arez, I'm the Stop Drinking Coach and in today's episode, I really want to dig in and talk about an aspect of our mental, emotional, and spiritual development journey as it relates to alcohol that I think is really important for you to dive into and reflect on and assess and journal about and really, really get clear on because part of this whole thing about quitting drinking, it's multifaceted, it can be really complex, our relationship to alcohol is connected to a lot of different things all at the same time. So you might think, for example, that your relationship to alcohol is connected to loneliness, or you might think that your relationship to alcohol is because of stress, or you might think that your relationship with alcohol is connected to just drinking because that's what you and your husband or wife or partner do all the time. It filmed the blank, it could be one, it could be multiple, but what I'm trying to illustrate and really drive home here is that our relationship to alcohol is dynamic, it's nuanced, and it's not just the thing that we think that it is, it's often times connected to so many other deeper psychological and emotional aspects of our self and our broader life in general. So let me give you an example. So if our relationship to alcohol is connected to just kind of like managing our stress and our overwhelm, let's say from work, from paying bills, from family, from kids, from the business that we're running, the employees that we've hired and we're supporting, whatever the case may be, let's call it stress and overwhelm. So part of our relationship with alcohol is that as a human being, we have what feels like a max capacity for stress. Like once we hit a certain threshold for stress or overwhelm, our body goes into this intense state of craving or fight or flight and then we go and we try to squash it out and numb it out with a drink so that we can get some temporary relief. Now the thing to understand here is that if you're trying to quit drinking and you're on this path and process and let's say you're doing it alone and you're not working a program and have coaching and support and community and accountability and you're not learning new tools to manage your mind and manage your emotions and like you're not like applying and a like better time management strategies to like have better output and right like you're not applying all the actual frameworks and tools and strategies that will help you get better at managing stress. You're not increasing your window of tolerance, you're not increasing your resilience, you're not optimizing neurochemistry, right? And you keep relapsing, right? One, like you're missing the point because quitting drinking isn't just about abstaining from alcohol. It's about addressing and resolving the underlying components that made you believe that alcohol was a good solution to that temporary problem, right? Rather than increasing your skills and becoming a more effective, responsible, dialed in, optimal human, you're just removing the band aid and then you keep relapsing every week or every four weeks or every six months and you're like, what the fuck? Why do I keep going back? Right? Deepest level, you have to understand that alcoholism while as a program will continue to tell you that you can just have one drink regardless of how much time you've been alcohol free. Your ability to get through this comes down to how you learn how to manage your mind and manage your emotions, right? And so these are like practical skills and tools and strategies that you need to learn that you currently don't have if you're turning to alcohol. I now have the tools, skills, mental models and strategies to manage any amount of stress, any amount of overwhelm, any amount of fear, any amount of anxiety or sadness or grief or anything. I mean, I've been through several seasons of life and ups and downs and all types of experiences from stress to fear to loss and sadness and everything in between, right? A lot happens in five years. Your life doesn't magically become 100% perfect and you don't become immune to life just because you quit drinking. You still continue to experience the seasons, but at the same time, there's absolutely no way that I would even come remotely close to the idea of considering to drink because my mind, my body, my nervous system has all recalibrated and adapted and increased its window of tolerance so that I can just be present to and handle all of it without needing to escape or numb out, right? So really, really important for you to acknowledge and understand and realize that part of this journey is that when you go to quit drinking, you're not just putting the bottle down, you're beginning your healing and evolutionary process as a human being to begin addressing the kinks in your armor that you're using alcohols away to numb out and escape from in the first place. Now, the other piece to consider and really the theme of this podcast, the purpose of this podcast is to acknowledge and understand that when you go to quit drinking, it is going to require a different version of you. And it's important that you begin to think about what that version is and what it's potentially calling forth because if you stay unconscious to it, if you willfully hide from it, then you're going to keep relapsing in some unconscious way and then you're going to keep getting frustrated and confused and blaming everything but yourself because you're not acknowledging that in order to actually quit drinking, it's going to call forward a version of you that you currently are afraid to face. So for example, if part of the reason you're drinking alcohol is stress management and overwhelm, right? And let's say you're a business owner, right? By quitting drinking, right, it's not just, oh, I don't get to drink and numb out and manage my stress and overwhelm anymore. What it's actually going to require is for you to step forward and be a better leader. It's going to require you to be more present. It might require you to start focusing on all these projects that you have been procrastinating on and sort of just leaving behind. It's going to require you to step up and maybe reorganize your standard operating procedures inside of your business. It's going to call you for you to step forward and to begin to have meetings with all your upper management to determine if certain people in your organization are actually benefiting the company or hurting the company, right? When I'm illustrating here is it's going to require you to step up and step into a version of yourself that right now you might feel very uncomfortable with. And that's okay because you don't have to become that person overnight. You don't have to become that person in 24 hours. It's a gradient. It's a recalibration process, right? One of the best ways I've come recently to think about this is like it's a gradient. So think of a gradient, right? A color gradient. Think of it going from red to blue, right? It's going to be deep dark red and then potentially, you know, not potentially, but with every sort of sliver that you move over, that red is going to begin to shift in color. Maybe it's going to start to get a little bit lighter. I mean, I don't know the color wheel and the color spectrum of what it turns into before it turns into blue, but I think you get my point, right? You don't go from red to blue immediately. You go from red and then, you know, it just, it gets a little bit lighter at every single half an inch, right? Or every single centimeter, it starts to change and it gets a little bit lighter and it starts to change and it starts to transform and then all of a sudden you hit that first hue of blue. And then maybe it's a lighter blue and then it progressively gets darker. And our healing are changing of ourself, of our psychology, of our emotional operating system, of our neurochemistry, of our nervous system, is the same way. You don't have to go from who you are to 360 degrees, or radically different, 180 degrees different overnight. It's just not how life is, it's not how life works, that's not how actors improve in their career, it's not how DJs go from their first track to spinning it, the world's biggest festivals, it's not how pro athletes go from being really, really good at their craft, to being an absolute master that's world renowned and well known by 80% of the human population, right? That's not how it works. It happens through consistent what seems like it doesn't matter, applied repetition. Day in and day out. And I know that might sound scary to you. I know maybe you've never lived your life that way before, but that's why you are where you are now, because you've been missing the mark, because even though you've been doing your best to get by and maybe reasonably successful in holding it together in many different areas of your life, there's certain aspects of your psychology and your internal emotional operating system and consciousness where you have not been doing that. You have not been applying healthy, consistent repetition. You have not been applying healthy, open forms of communication, like maybe you have in your relationship, right? There's been things that have been misaligned with your internal operating system. And so you've turned to alcohol and you have become dependent on it and are now fearful of giving it up, but you have to understand that you never needed it in the first place. You didn't need alcohol when you were 13. You didn't need alcohol when you were 10. You didn't need alcohol that much in high school. Maybe you drank from time to time, or partied on the weekend, but you weren't thinking about it and needing it 24 hours, 24 hours a day. You woke up, you did your thing, you went to school, you did your classes, you hung out with your friends on lunch. After school, you played your sports or you went home and did your homework and played video games or hung out with your friends in your neighborhood. And then maybe sophomore to senior year, you'd go to a party occasionally and you'd drink, but you didn't need it the way that you needed it now. You lived perfectly fine without it. Remember that? It's really, really important that you try to take yourself back to a state and a moment in your life where you remember being free, being calm, feeling totally okay with yourself in the world and you didn't need alcohol. And you can get back to that state, but you have to have the courage to take the first step and to begin that gradient recalibration process. And to acknowledge that by quitting drinking, what it's actually doing at a deeper sort of meta, spiritual level is it's an initiation process into the new version of yourself. The version of yourself that you've always known deep down your capable of accessing or being or somehow creating, but have been fearful of anxious to do, you've had all these limitations or traumas or excuses, well, I can't be this or I'm not deserving of that, but who am I to do XYZ? Right? Underneath or through the unfolding of this process, it offers you an opportunity to begin to cultivate that version of you. And I know that seems fucking terrifying. It was super terrifying for me. I didn't know if I would be able to do it. What if I failed? What if I'm actually just not cut out for it? All the things, all the things my friend, the same thoughts you have, we're not that different. We're not that different. Don't stop letting the world in politics and fucking, you know, lines in the ground and different ideologies or religion or whatever, trick you in programming, in programming you into like believing that you and I are so different. We're not different. We might have different skin color. I might be a little taller than you, and we might have grown up in a different part of the world and maybe have a slightly different accent towards each other. But that's it, our internal psychological and emotional architecture, the fears that we have, the worries that we have, the desires that we have, the goals that we have, they're pretty similar, pretty similar. I think most of us just want love, we want to feel love, we want to feel accepted by our community, we want to feel a sense of meaning and connection in purpose to our life, we want to have a sense of family or belonging or healthy friendships around us, we want to be able to use our time in ways that feel good for us, we want to be able to contribute something back to the whole. And that about covers it, right? Like you can get into the basic needs that are outlined by Tony Robbins and everybody's, every psychologist has their own model. Some people are driven by love, some people are driven by certainty or uncertainty or significance or contribution or whatever, right? But we're all kind of the same. We've got the same fears. If you are somebody who struggles with alcohol, you have the same fears around this process that I did, that everybody that's ever walked into an AA meeting did, you're not unique, my friend, you're not different. And so it just comes down to you now, what do you want? How long are you gonna kick the can down the road? And do you want change sooner than later? Like you have to believe that it's possible because the reason you drink isn't unique. If you're drinking because you're stressed out overwhelmed, lonely, sad, fearful, anxious or fill in the blank, that's likely the same reason at least 25% of other people drink. And of those 25%, many of them have gotten to the other side and have found freedom from alcohol. Tens of millions of people over the last 100 years, right? So it's just about developing the courage to say that like this way of life isn't working anymore and that if I'm drinking because my nervous systems freaking out all the time and stressed out and overwhelmed or fearful or anxious or sad or feeling locked up and traumatized from this past experience or this past memory, it's your next step is to develop the courage to go out and find the right person, the right program, the right support system and to embrace that journey and to walk that path and recognize yes, it might be uncomfortable. But at what point in your life did you like just tell yourself that you can't experience discomfort anymore? I can 100% with my dads like life on the side of the line who passed away promise you that it is way more uncomfortable to be in the vicious hell whole cycle of drinking alcohol and feeling shame and guilt and fucking hangovers and brain fog and to literally watch yourself and your potential and your friends and your family and like your work and to watch all these things like disintegrate before your eyes and a slow burn death by a thousand cuts, that's way more uncomfortable than getting sober and dealing with a craving once or twice a day and then learning how to breathe and manage your stress and then doing some deeper inner work around past memories and stuff that like you're still holding onto and feel like you can't change. Dude, I promise you, it is way more uncomfortable to be in your situation than to be alcohol free. My life is a thousand times easier and more enjoyable now that I'm alcohol free. Then having to deal with hangovers and constant cravings and like just being a slave. I need to tell you that, I need to remind you of that because when you're in it and that's all you've known and you've patterned yourself to becoming dependent on the short term relief cycles because you haven't known how to manage them otherwise or it's been too painful otherwise, you think that like this is the end all be all. It's not my friend. You will adapt to your nervous system, will recalibrate, you'll increase your window of tolerance, your neurochemistry will begin to recover, you'll be able to start to feel again, you'll be able to start getting through aspects of life and you'll be able to watch them actually grow and improve and evolve, which then creates a perpetual feedback loop of increased personal power, increased self-esteem, increased confidence and then it just keeps stacking. What do you think happens when you start to gain more personal power every single day? What do you think starts to happen in your life when you start to develop more agency and more confidence and more belief in who you are? I'll tell you what happens. you start to take better. risks that improve your life. You start to meet more people and sort of gain better quality relationships because your vibe as a person has increased, therefore you're gonna attract a better quality vibe into your life, right? What else is gonna happen? Your health is gonna start to improve. Your mental and your emotional health is guaranteed to improve and you're gonna start to feel like more even keeled throughout your life. Your brain is gonna be clear, so you're gonna see opportunities in your life more clearly and you're gonna begin to act on them because you have more confidence, more self-esteem, more self-worth, in a higher level of personal power. Because you actually believe in yourself and trust yourself more. Dude, every aspect of life gets better when you quit drinking. All of it, even your social life, yes, because you think while you have a social life, you don't really have a social life. You have a place that you go and you have places that you go to take drugs with other people and have relatively synthetic conversations and then have to deal with a bunch of downstream bullshit for that one hour of perceived satiation. Or you don't use drugs and you're able to fucking connect with people in a way that's so much more authentic, so much more vibrant, so much more real, so much more connected to the depth of who you are in your soul rather than it being synthetic, rather than it being filled with drama, rather than you going on these nonsensical tangents that you get into when you're drinking, right? I remember, I remember them. So, like, you have to ask yourself, right? Why do I wanna quit drinking? And how important for me is it in the remaining time that I have left on earth to become the version of myself that I've always wanted to be? Time is running out, my friend. I don't know how old you are. If you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, like, you've gotta act now so that you can save your future, so that you can save the future of your marriage, so that you can save the future of your kids and not continue setting a poor example. Like, dude, this is real. This is your life. This is your life. And you have to be honest. You have to be willing to acknowledge and look at your pain and recognize, yes, I know there might be shame or guilt over it, but it's okay. You're still a good human being. You're still whole and complete. You just now need to learn about yourself at a deeper level. Why you are the way that you are. What are the underlying programs and patterns that drive your mind, the voice inside of your head? Why do you react to the way that you do? Where is that rooted? Where did you learn that from? Why do you believe that that is the best strategy to protect yourself in the moment? What happens if you took a different action or you communicated differently or you said a different set of boundaries or you just met your needs in a different way? Well, I'll tell you, for most people, there's a lack of clarity. There's a ton of fear. You think if you don't handle it, the way that you're gonna handle it, something bad is gonna happen and you're gonna get hurt, but you're just misinformed. You haven't learned that there's other ways to handle every aspect of life and that by doing so, it'll make your life better and easier, it'll make the lives of other people better and easier. There will be more harmony. You will actually learn to get more of what you want, more of the time and actually help people get more of what they want, more of the time. It's insane. It's insane. There is so much to learn about yourself on this journey. There's so much to learn about being a more whole and complete and higher caliber and quality human being. It's not to say that people who don't drink are better than those who do, not at all. It's that when you stop drinking, you simply become a greater version of yourself in every sense of the word. So I wanna tie it back to this point that like, listen, if you keep relapsing, if you get a couple days, couple weeks, couple months, like whatever, and you keep going back and you're frustrated and you're confused and you don't get it, it may be because what quitting drinking calls forward from you is a part of yourself that you haven't explored, you haven't acknowledged you're fearful around, you don't have the confidence or self-esteem to believe that you can actually fulfill an embody, you don't feel like you can truly step up to that version of yourself. And so when you hit a breaking point and your walls start to stretch, you unconsciously self-sabotage through the lens of, oh, but it's a nice blue, sunny sky out and day drinking would be awesome. But actually you're on the verge of like completing that project or having to have that hard conversation or you've lost 10 or 15 pounds and your physique is looking great, but you're at that baseline level of physique where you feel comfortable and you know that you could lose 10 or 15 more pounds to look super optimal, but you're like, no, this is good enough, right? So understanding that inside each and every one of us psychologically, emotionally within a nervous system, we have these windows, we have these sort of places that we feel comfortable in, that we feel safe in, that we feel secure in. But then life, God, universe, your higher self, whatever you wanna call it, is calling forth a version of you that is in your timeline for you to embody, for you to express, for you to get to. But you've got all this gunk, you've got all this programming, you've got all this conditioning that you might not necessarily be aware of in how it's all connected together and what the deeper unconscious fears or limitations are. And so you keep drinking alcohol. And this is why I say over and over and over again, you have to work a program because if you're trying to do this thing alone, you have no idea what you're trying to even solve for. If you did, you wouldn't have been drinking in the first place and you would just continually make progress in your life, right? So you don't even know what you're trying to solve for shooting from the hip, attempting to make this thing come true. Which to me, that seems like a really poor strategy, right? You wanna go from high school to just being a surgeon and like operating on people and cutting people open without walking a deep, clearly defined path where you have to learn the tools and skills and strategies to be able to execute at that level. And similarly with us in our life, if you wanna become the wife, the husband, the leader, the entrepreneur, the whatever in your life, the creative, the loving mother, the inspired father, the best friends, the best employee in your department. Like whatever the case is, it doesn't matter what thing you wanna call it. If you wanna become that version of yourself that's somewhere in your heart and soul you're longing for, it is through this path, it is through this process. There's no other arena where you're gonna be able to gain the skills, tools and evolution that you need to become that version of yourself. So yeah, I'll keep it there. I hope this episode helped you gain some insight or clarity or helped you make a couple connections around your personal path and process and relationship to alcohol. Remembering that as we go to quit drinking, it's calling for us to initiate into a higher version of ourself and that can feel scary. And there might be parts of ourself that is uncertain or unsure or doesn't believe that we're cut out for it or if it's possible. And I can tell you that that's normal to feel that way. We all feel that way when we are met with a new caliber of life that were, it's totally unfamiliar, right? It doesn't matter if you're trying to go from being, you know, an employee to all of a sudden starting a business, right, like you're gonna have those same doubts, those same fears, but that's why you don't do it alone. That's why you do it in a step-by-step path and process with community and accountability and coaching and all the tools and resources to guide you to be like, okay, you're at this step. Here's what you should consider next. Here's an exercise. Here's a reflection prompt. Here's a guide to meditation. Watch this video, read this book, talk to this person, right? So yeah, visit www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com. And I've got a ton of content on there, a ton of resources for you to consume. There's a Google slide presentation at the top. You can click through and read each slide that'll give you kind of an overview of the program. Scroll down, there's an application you can submit and then you can book a call with me. And there's also a 40 minute video presentation if you just prefer to kind of watch the video. And then there's dozens of video testimonials and screenshots of people who have worked with me inside my program. These are people just like you who found me through Instagram, TikTok, or Family Podcast. And they're no different. And I encourage you to dig deep within yourself and ask yourself, like, would it be worth it to have freedom? Would it be worth it to no longer have cravings? Would it be worth it to, walk a path in a process that can reduce my cravings by up to 80% compared to any other program or system out there. Would it be worth it to not constantly obsess over where or when my next drink is going to be? And would it be worth it to expand my mind, my emotional operating system, my spiritual connection to life to feel more connected and fulfilled, to be happier, to feel more empowered to feel more sovereign in my choices? And would it feel better to be able to look in the mirror and feel proud of myself and to say that I did it? And if the answer is yes, reach out, reach out. This program, it changed and transformed my life, and I sincerely believe that it can do that for you as well. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star review and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.thisstopdrinkingcoach.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. you