Managing Sensation As You Quit Drinking

What is up SDC fam? I am back with another episode. My name is Barty Arrez. I'm the stop drinking coach. And in today's episode, I want to talk about managing sensation. Because managing sensation is perhaps one of the most important skills to develop as a human being. I'm not just talking about addiction here. I am talking about you as a human being. How much load can you bear? How much sensation can you hold in your mind and in your nervous system without collapsing? And one of the things I talk about over and over and over again, and I've said in so many of my podcasts and in so much of my short-of-form content on social media, is that the reason going alcohol-free is so powerful is because it is the most transferable skill to every aspect in layer of life. When you learn how to go alcohol-free, you are going to become a better communicator. When you go alcohol-free, your relationships are going to become so much better. When you go alcohol-free, you are going to develop the skills and the courage and the tools to finally start that business or to move up the ladder into a management or to a leadership position. Because ultimately, going alcohol-free isn't about just not drinking and exiting the matrix of that lifestyle and culture. It's about developing the courage, maybe for the first time ever, to finally turn inward and begin looking at yourself, looking at your humanity, looking at your consciousness, looking at your mind, looking at your nervous system, your emotions, your sensations, the feelings that you have on a regular basis. It's about developing the courage to more closely and honestly and truthfully examine your patterns and how you think and how you live and what your beliefs are and how you manage your time. And all of these things when you develop the courage to finally do them, basically introduces you to a totally different reality. You hear this time and time again from every stage, from every guru, from every spiritual teacher, it's like, if you want to know how to experience "the divine, God, source, infant intelligence, presence, I don't care what you call it, and I don't want to turn anybody off who might be spiritual or not, spiritual or religious or not religious," it's like they all say the same thing. Stop looking outside of yourself and start looking within. That's like the basic premise. That's the basic premise of all personal development. That's the basic premise of psychological development and emotional maturity. It's stop looking outside of yourself. So when you're doing this alcohol thing, like if you just try to quit drinking by willpower alone, I came up with a couple of analogies today. It's like trying to slow down your heart rate by just thinking really hard. And I said this in one of my later podcasts or one of my earlier podcasts, it's like telling somebody who's a problematic drinker and on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder where they have changed the structure of their brain. They've made real neurobiological changes in the way that their pre-frontal cortex and their amygdala is sort of functions and is online. It's like telling somebody to put their hand on a burning stove and to not have the automatic flinch of taking their hand away. When you move into a state of addiction, it goes beyond conscious mind. You're fully aware of that at this point. If you've been a problematic drinker for a while and you've recognized that like, "Hey, I tell myself I'm going to cut back, I tell myself I'm going to quit," but then hours later, minutes later, that evening I find myself pouring a drink even though in the morning I was absolutely rock solid convinced that I wasn't going to do it. Like, how do you explain that? There's obviously underlying mechanics, there's underlying forces that are driving this thing forward and you're not going to be able to beat it by just using your mind. And the sooner that you come to terms with that and the sooner that you accept that, the sooner that you can cross the bridge and start building your dream life. So in this episode, I want to talk about managing sensation. Managing sensation is one of the most important skills that any human being can have. And I've talked about this before, but maybe for people who are new, let's give a really basic simple example. Let's say you haven't been working out for months and months and months. Maybe it's been a couple of years since you've been to the gym. And maybe you used to work out in the past and you were an athlete in college or high school or whatever, but it's been a while. Maybe you've gained some weight, whatever. So you're looking at yourself, you're looking at your body, you're like, man, I'm not digging this extra weight. Like I need to get into the gym. Okay. So you start going to the gym and it's likely that you're not as in shape. You don't have as much endurance and you're not as strong as you used to be. Right? Or maybe it's your first time really getting into exercise and so it's all kind of new to you. Right? So what happens when you go and you go to do a squat or you go to do some bicep curls? Well, in the beginning, the sensation that you feel is very, very intense, right? Your muscles fatigue very quickly. Your blood builds a lot of like lactic acid, right? Which is that burning sensation after you get after a few reps. And so the sensation is high and it's hard and it sucks and most people tend to give up after a little while because it just feels like they're exerting so much energy and it's constantly hurting and it's constantly burning. But what happens when you apply repetition day in and day out at the gym? Right? Maybe you go to the gym and you start bicep curling and you can do tens in each arm. And by the time you get to the eighth, tenth, twelve, fifteen, threat, you start getting all that lactic acid, you get all that burning feeling and it's like, ah, right? Your muscles just start to give out. Right? And so that is sensation that is uncomfortable sensation that you are learning to build a relationship with. You're not looking at that sensation as something that you have to run away from. You're not looking at that sensation as something that you have to avoid ever experiencing again. You're meeting that sensation every single day with physical exercise. And so what happens? You go back the next day and you go back the next day and then you continue going for a couple weeks and then you go start going for a couple months. And so what happens? Your body, your mind, your brain, your system gets used to meeting that sensation. And now something that's important about something that's important about sensation that you need to understand is that our our physiology, our systems are highly adaptive. So the more you expose yourself to a particular sensation that's uncomfortable and you're able to meet it and not catastrophize it, not run away from it, not collapse underneath it, but you're able to hold that sensation and move through that sensation. Okay. Literally every single second that you meet and hold and move through uncomfortable sensation and you're not dying. Nothing bad is happening. There's no danger. Right? Every second, you are sending signals to your brain and to your nervous system that you have the capacity and the resilience and the tank to hold that sensation. And every second that you stay in that sensation, it is literally upding your brain, updating your brain and telling your brain that, Hey, I can move through this. This while in fact is lighting up all the alarm bells in my mind and body saying, Hey, you should stop. This is uncomfortable. Get away from this. It's teaching your brain and body that, Hey, you can actually hold this. You can actually do it. You can actually move through it. And so the next time you meet that sensation, you're going to come to it from a greater place of confidence, of clarity, of courage, because you've met this sensation before. And what's interesting about all sensation, whether we're talking about the cravings that you experience with alcohol, whether we're talking about the stress or the overwhelm or the social anxiety or whatever case it may be, or physical sensation that you experience in the gym, every time you meet the edges of sensation where you want to collapse, if you find a way to remain steadfast and hold and move through that sensation, the intensity of that sensation gets smaller. So in the beginning, when we first go to start quit, when we first try to start quitting drinking, right, that sensation of craving or intensity or whatever the case may be, it might be at a 10 or it might be at a 9 or an 8. But every time you meet that sensation and you move through it and you interrupt the pattern and you apply new coping strategies or new tools or you do something to change up your environment or you do something to change up your physiology, you work out, you go for a run, you drop into 50 jumping jacks, you take a cold shower, you change your environment, you get into a car and you drive somewhere into nature, you go outside and take a walk, you put your feet in the grass, you lay down, you breathe, right, there's dozens and dozens and dozens of different types of strategies and pattern interrupts that you can apply to your neural architecture to begin changing, much of them I teach inside of my course, inside of my coaching program, right, what happens is that over time that sensation gets lower, right, so basic example of when you're in the gym and you're doing tens, you keep doing tens three days a week, by your fourth week, you can now do 15s, you can not only lift more weight but the sensation that used to burn is much less, right, your body creates buffers, it develops systems to begin to be able to bear the load, right, all growth, all evolution comes from your capacity to be able to bear sensation so that it teaches your system to expand. That is literally biological evolution 101. That is like Darwinian theory. When you look at history, when you look at animals, when you look at plants, when you look at anything that's living on this planet, right? What happens? It is alive, and then it is met with a hostile environment in which it has to survive, whether we're talking about animals, whether we're talking about humans or ancestors, plants, right? Fish, things in the sea, right? It meets the edges of what feels comfortable in its base survival state, and then it meets resistance. It meets a stress point, right? So it has to outrun a tiger. It has to swim faster to get away from the other fish that's trying to kill it. It has to learn to hide better from its predators. Whatever the case may be, every time you meet that stress, every time you meet that edge and push through and get through it, it basically sends a cascade of signals to your brain, to your nervous system, to your muscles, to your tissues, to everything that it needs to adapt. It says, okay, the load that we now need to adapt to in order to survive has to expand. This is bodybuilding 101. This is getting stronger 101, right? When you go to the gym every single day and you apply stress, intention to your muscles, and then you eat enough protein and you recover properly, what happens? The muscles get bigger. They get thicker. They get more defined, right? They increase their endurance and their stamina by applying resistance and pressure, intention to the thing. The same thing is for our psychological and emotional and physical operating system as we're working through addiction or we're going alcohol free or we're moving through this process of recovery. Right? When we look at why we're using alcohol, it's because we're using alcohol as a way to outsource and compensate something. Social anxiety, fear, boredom, sadness, loneliness, overwhelm from work or our family or our relationships or our kids or whatever the case may be. So that means that at some level when you're using alcohol right now, your nervous system can handle a certain load. And once it meets the edges of that load, it can't handle it anymore and it collapses. So the brain produces a craving and it says, hey, we need to find quick relief out of this thing, right? And that's why alcohol is so damaging and destructive is because alcohol actually lowers your stress tolerance. I can't tell you how many people have come through my program and are like, dude, one of the things I'm constantly struggling with is anxiety and stress. And it's like, yes, it's because you drink alcohol. I would say the vast majority of people who come through and go alcohol free reduce their overall baseline level of stress and anxiety by like 80%. Like, yeah, you're a CEO and you're running a huge business or you've got a family and you're juggling multiple kids and driving them to soccer practice. And you know, you've got a relationship and you're getting ready to move and you have all these complexities and things you're trying to manage. It's like, yeah, those things are stressful. But if you're constantly drinking alcohol, it makes you less adaptable to stress. And the nature of alcohol is because it engages your dopamine, your reward system and modulates GABA, which is kind of the central nervous system calming agent, the present, right? And it calms you down. You're now achieving the prime directive of life, which is to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, but you're doing it without self-regulation. You're doing it with virtually no effort. It happens very quickly and doesn't require any resources, right? You can get alcohol for a few bucks at the store. And so even if you're broke, you can find a way to drink alcohol, right? So it's very, very important to remember that that your capacity to bear load to bear sensation is what is going to determine whether you go alcohol for you're not. And that's the game, right? I've got this famous podcast episode called Don't Quit Drinking Do This Instead. And the idea is is that like, we think, okay, I got to stop drinking. I got to stop drinking this alcohol thing is fucking me up. Rather than focusing on, okay, I need to not drink focus on the sensation. When you meet the sensation at 10 a.m. or noon or 5 p.m. or when you walk into your kitchen or whatever, make the goal to not, not drink, make the goal to meet that sensation and to breathe through it and to apply coping strategies and regulation techniques and do things that are going to interrupt the pattern. So literally that neural system, the neural architecture of your brain that says Q trigger craving to alcohol gets gets gets interrupted. Like that is quitting drinking through neuroscience. It's that is that is the process of updating the brain's prediction mechanisms that alcohol equals relief stress equals alcohol alcohol equals relief, right? When you begin to build new neural pathways and you show yourself in your psyche in your soul, in your sense of self that you can get through sensation without collapsing, then your system gets stronger. That's why every single person who quits drinking says life is a million times better, not just because they're not hung over all the time, but because you evolve and emerge into a person who's way more powerful, way more resourceful, your ability to handle stress and problem solve and to keep your prefrontal cortex online and to survey the landscape and to see the variables and to see the different choices and to see the options without collapsing, right? It gets so much better and that's why quitting drinking is so powerful is you're not just exiting the bar scene. You're not just letting go of friends who used to dick around with. It's like you're finally coming to the precipice, the point in your life journey where you are going to level up, you are going to become a profoundly better human being and that doesn't mean that you're better than other people who still drink. You're just going to become better than the version of yourself that used to drink, right? Very, very important distinction. Weird alcohol matrix culture, they're like, oh, you think you're so cool because you don't drink, you think you're better than us and it's like, no, listen, you're an adult, you can do whatever you want and I don't care how you live your life and what you want to do. You're the one who lays his head on the pillow and then wakes up with a hangover and you've got to manage your mindset and insecurities and challenges and like, I don't live inside of you. Listen, you're free to do what you want. But I know when I look at myself, when I look in the mirror and I imagine my life journey and how much time I have left on the planet, who I want to become and the things that I want to accomplish and the way that I want to feel throughout my day and that I want to, the ways that I want to contribute to the world and the lifestyle I want to have and the way that I manage my time and my life and my resources. I just know that there's a version of me that's way better, way happier, way more calm, way more regulated that has so much more self control than the version of me that's just constantly chasing relief through alcohol through a system that has become dysregulated and misaligned by the alcohol that I was using for relief. That's why I say this game is a black pit. You're not going to win against the alcohol. You can't outmaneuver it. You can't apply secret tools, tricks and strategies to just have it sometimes and just have it not. It doesn't work that way. If you have to outsource a part of yourself to something else that is implying at some level a weakness and it's not a weakness like I'm judging you for it or I'm shaming you for it. It's a weakness like if I can't regulate myself through anger, that is a weakness of mine. It's like let's take the judgment out of it and just look at it objectively. The reason I can't self-regulate through anger is because at some core level I have this wound. At one point, anger was the most adaptive, powerful, useful strategy that I could use to protect myself and to ensure that I wasn't hurt again. That's it. Anger is a response to something deeper. For all of us who drink alcohol, whether it's to manage our stress or our boredom or our fear or our overwhelm or our anxiety, let's use social anxiety. That's the most common one. People use alcohol as a way to connect. That's one piece of it. I just published a short form video on my TikTok and Instagram on this. You're not a social drinker. You're someone who has social anxiety that uses alcohol to manage it. It's really important to remind yourself of that. You don't have to completely collapse into these identity labels. If you really just drink once a quarter, once in a blue moon at a random dinner, it's like, "Okay, you probably don't have social anxiety." You're just drinking alcohol because other people are drinking and you drink half of it. You let the rest go. That's not the category we're talking about. That's not really a problem, drinker. I'm talking somebody who's going out every weekend, two, three days a week to bars or to events and it's like everybody's drinking. It's like, "No, I'm just a social drinker." It's like, "No. You have social anxiety and you have other aspects of your psychology of your emotional operating system that you're using alcohol as a way to compensate for and to find relief from." It's like, "Hey, no judgment with any of this. I'm purely speaking the neuroscience this cycle. and understanding how to connect the dots between these things. And if you're somebody who has a desire to quit drinking, or if you have a desire to live a better life, I should say, if you have a desire to be more in control, if you have a desire to have more capacity to handle responsibility so that your life could get better, then these are the things in sort of the lenses in which you have to really look at and view yourself and view your relationship with alcohol. You know, something that's been coming into my field a lot lately is like military stuff and like Navy SEALs and like Delta Force and like high level military operatives. I just met a group of guys. We're looking to build like a mastermind group, sort of like this brotherhood circle, a men's group where everybody is in some sort of deep union, whether it's with like a girlfriend or like their wife, and it's just like an almost like an accountability group where we come together and we support each other's goals and everybody has a different skill set, and it's super, super awesome. And one of the guys in that group is a special forces operator. And he's been on the other side and has been in country for years and years and years, and it's done some wild and incredible things. And so that's really motivational, that's really inspirational for me, right? Because when you look at really high level military leaders or operatives, they have the capacity to manage an incredible amount of sensation while remaining calm, cool, and collected. They can literally be in war with bombs going off, and IEDs going off across the street, and even like their buddies getting shot, and they can radio in remaining calm, exactly what they need, right? QRF, quick reaction force, they can tell them the coordinates, while bullets are coming down rage trying to take their head off. Right? And so it's like this is the skill that you develop, the capacity to manage your nervous system and to hold sensation in load, while still keeping your prefrontal cortex online. And that is basically the opposite of addiction. Addiction is you can barely hold any sensation in your system. As soon as the sensation comes in, it's very intense. You can't sit with it, you collapse underneath it, you immediately go for the drink, and then your prefrontal cortex, the executive part of your brain that is supposed to ideally, right, in a perfect world, stay online. Look at your options, look at your resources, look at what's available to you, to play the tape forward, to consider consequences, to look at your inputs, to look at your outputs, to look at the variables, like if this happens, and that might happen, if this happens, and that'll happen, right? And then for that to connect to other parts of your brain, for you to be able to feel those emotions, and make clear assessments that are in alignment with both your short, medium, or long-term goals, addiction completely wrecks wreaks havoc on that system. And so as a result, you find yourself in these looping cycles of instant gratification. And it feels like you're here, it feels like you're, quote unquote, "high functioning or successful," but internally you're behind bars, you kind of feel like you're a slave. And that's like the worst place to be. Being a high functioning drinker is like one of the worst places to be. Because what's actually happening here is that the reality is that even if you're high functioning, even if you're CEO, and you make seven figures a year or more, or whatever the case is, if you're high functioning while using alcohol, the reality is that you could be doing two, five, ten, maybe 20X what you're doing. Not overnight, but within a few years, or six months, or 18 months. And that's just the reality. I've seen it with my own life, and I've seen it with many, many people who have come through my program. I've coached tons of people who are making multiple six figures, multiple seven figures, like have multiple businesses across the country, like some really impressive individuals. And they've come through my program, and they've been able to find sobriety and be very successful because of the principles that I teach through neuroscience, through psychology, through identity, through managing emotions. It's like individuals like that tend to do really, really well because they've been able to demonstrate some level of competence in some area of life. And so they're like, "Okay, what's this system? What's the structure? Just tell me, and I'll follow it exactly." And they end up doing really, really well. So, managing sensation is so key, and there's so many things that you can do to begin learning how to manage sensation. The first one is meditation, like fundamental. Fundamental is meditation. The second piece is exercise. Exercise is incredibly helpful for doing that. But I would say above all, because meditation doesn't just help you learn how to manage sensation, it uncovers a fundamental truth about reality, about yourself, and about your experience of reality, and the experience of reality you're going to have for the rest of your life until the day you die. And it's that both thoughts and feelings and emotions or sensation are both impermanent. And until we develop a practice of meditation, I'm not saying just meditate here and there, I'm talking daily meditation for weeks, usually takes three to six weeks from what I found for most people, is you begin to discover something that is profound about yourself. And it's that all your thoughts, all the stories, all the voice inside of your head, all of your attachments, all of your grasping, all of your overthinking, all of your problem solving, all of your attempting to make sense of X, Y, and Z, is in fact impermanent and always changing. Same thing with all feelings, emotions, and sensations that flow through your body. Your joy, your frustration, your anger, your happiness, your sadness, your grief, your overwhelm, your stress, your discontentment, your dissatisfaction, your impatience, it is all fluctuating energy inside of your body. There's a moment where it's not there, then it comes in like a wave, it kind of goes up, it peaks for a little while, and then it passes. And this is so fundamental to the recovery journey because so many of us, when we've been in active addiction, it's because we've been operating from our ego, we've been the most important thing in our life, right? We're in a survival state, we're trying to manage all of our pain, our discomforts, all of our life circumstances, and we're very attached to those things, right? We're attached to our patterns, we're attached to our programs, we're attached to our identity, our beliefs, our social, like all of the layers of our life, we're very attached to because that creates a construct of who we think we are. But the truth is, is that if you were to go 10 days in silence and get rid of your phone and get rid of everything else, and you were to just sit there and close your eyes, and simply observe, no agenda, you don't have to try to not think, you don't have to try to be a monk and make it go black and make this space of not thinking five minutes long, like literally, just close your eyes, and imagine you have two domains of reality, which I've talked about in my last podcast. You have your thoughts, you have the voice inside of your head, that place where imagination is stored, right, like your consciousness, the voice where you talk to yourself all day, and then you have your body where you feel sensation. Those are the two core driving forces of reality. You have your thoughts, any of your sensations. And you sit there in meditation, the point of meditation is to not not think. So many people try and begin to practice a meditation, and they're like, "Oh, but I can't," and I'm frustrated, and it gives me anxiety just thinking about it, and I'm a compulsive thinker, and it's like people wear that as this badge of honor, which is so weird to me. Like, "Hey, I get it. I love that for you, that you just are always in your mind, I guess." But like, can you try at some level to just soften and surrender that? Like, it's actually not something to truly be proud of, because when you're constantly in your mind, then you're not present, and who enjoys having a friend or a loved one who's not present, who's constantly in their mind iterating and planning and strategizing and not listening, right? So your mind is a tool, but most of us have become slaves of our mind. And the sensations we feel in our body aren't your fault, and you're not bad for having reactions. These are patterns and programs that come from the past that have been practiced consciously or unconsciously over and over and over again. And meditation is one of the first opportunities to actually begin to witness yourself as a pattern and as a program. And so as you sit there for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, you just close your eyes, and you just watch. You watch, and you're going to start to have thoughts within seconds that say, "Did I feed my dog? Did I forget to turn off the night lamp? Did I text back John about the project at work? My back is kind of sore from yesterday's workout. Why am I doing this? This is so boring. I have better things to do. Oh, wait, I think I need to follow up on that email, etc., etc., right? And then you can literally, you can watch that. You can watch yourself have thoughts. And you'll notice that over the course of those few minutes, those thoughts are going to keep changing. And by the time you have the next fourth or fifth thought, you're going to have forgotten what you thought about before. Same thing with sensation. As you sit there, you might have impatience or you feel a sense of anxiety or boredom. Look at that sensation, where does it appear? What are its qualities? Is it intense? Is it moving? Is it still? What color is it? Right? Is it turning? Is it moving fast? Is it moving fast? moving slowly, right? And then just notice the sensation without judging it and then bring yourself back to observation. And so in a 15 minute meditation, you might go back and forth noticing and bringing yourself back a hundred times and that's okay. And that in fact means you're doing meditation in some respects, depending on the philosophy of meditation, you're doing it right. Because what you're doing is you're creating distance from yourself, the true witness, consciousness, from the stories of the mind and from the patterns of the body. And what you'll notice is that they all continue to fluctuate and then you eventually come back and you're just left with presence. And so I think I'm gonna cut the podcast there. I know we're getting to like the peak and you probably wanna hear more, but I notice the battery is dying on this thing and I wanna cut this off before it just ruins the podcast. So learning to manage and hold sensation through sobriety is one of the most powerful skills that then transfers into every other aspect of your life. If you can learn to meet the sensation of yourself, your cravings, your dissatisfaction, your overwhelm and your stress and you learn how to get through that, you best believe that the person you come out as on the other side is gonna be way more resourceful and way more equipped to go after your dreams. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you found this helpful, make sure you subscribe, leave a comment below, leave a rating on my podcast that'll just help maybe push it out to some more people who need it, that'll be your good deed for the day. And if you're interested in working with me one-on-one or joining my group coaching program, go to www.thustoptrinkingcoach.com. There's a video there, there's tons of testimonials of people who found me on Spotify and social media just like you and fill out an application and you can book a call directly with me. Neurore patterning is also launching very, very soon. So if you're on the fence, if anything, just fill out an application so you can get an email once neurore patterning launches. Okay, thank you so much. I love you, keep fighting the good fight and I will see you in my next episode.