Quitting Drinking Is a Biological Upgrade

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. What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode. My name is Barti Arez. I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. I'm the host and I'm super excited to be jumping into another podcast. And right now, I'm actually laying down on my couch. I'm sitting on my couch and I'm recording this podcast here, not sitting in front of my computer or my desk where I traditionally record. And I don't know, I just got this insight and download today that rather than sitting down and recording and making it this whole thing, like I'm just going to start recording on the fly and I'll ask my editor to try to clean up the audio. It might not be as crisp and as clear because it's just coming through my phone. But I think regardless of that, you probably don't really care. It's probably negligible in terms of really the difference in sound quality. I think this is fine. So more than anything, I just want to get out another piece of content to you guys to help you and to support you throughout this process and throughout this journey. So in this podcast, I really want to dig in and help you begin to peel the layers of the onion to help you understand why you turn to alcohol in the first place. Now, when we look at addiction, right, let's say if we're building a mind map and addiction is at the very top, there's going to be an umbrella and there's basically two spokes that come down. On the left side, what creates addiction and why we turn to alcohol and why we're in this cycle is the neurochemical feeding cycle. So what happens is, and you've heard me talk about this before, when we drink alcohol, floods are brain with totally abnormal levels of dopamine and also increases GABA, which is going to provide this combination of this pleasure euphoria, motivation/sedation type effect, which what it does for us is it releases or it helps us relieve us of tension and pain. And this tension and pain can be in the form of our thoughts in our psychology, overwhelming thoughts, berating thoughts, mean thoughts, mean voice in our head, negative voice in our head, right, worry, anxiety, or it could be somatic, it could be in our body, it could be sensations of stress and overwhelm and loneliness and sadness and rejection and hopelessness or you know, it really could be any range of negative emotions. So the nature of dopamine, which alcohol directly acts on, is it is by nature, self-free enforcing, meaning anything that produces a high level of dopamine, sends a signal to every cell to say, hey, whatever preceded this rush of dopamine, do more of that. Because normally throughout our biological evolution, our physiological evolution, dopamine would only get produced or secreted when we put in real effort and made forward progress towards meaningful things tied to our evolution, like the meaningful progress towards our goals, acquisition of resources, acquisition of a mate, having sex, eating food, things like that. Those things provide a pleasurable reward feeling back. And as a result, we want to do more of that. That's the nature of dopamine, it's tied to motivation, pleasure, euphoria, forward movement, it's also tied to memory. So these things that are meaningful for our adaptation and survival and evolution, reduced dopamine, are by nature, self-free enforcing, which sends a signal to the system to say, do more of that. Now, when we keep drinking alcohol for decades at a time, we get groomed and farmed like cattle and farm animals through high school and college to basically get really good at drinking alcohol as a way to just cope and numb and quote unquote have fun, we're changing the dopamine set point in our brain. So if we sit at about 50 nanograms per deciliter of dopamine, over time, because we're flooding our brain constantly drinking alcohol, our dopamine set point reserves are going to start to get lower and lower and lower. And maybe by the time we're 30 or 40, that dopamine set point has dropped down to a 40. So we're 10 points lower as an example than the average person. And so what are the symptoms of lower dopamine? Well, a lack of motivation, a sense of lingering dissatisfaction, boredom, a lack of fulfillment, things not seeming particularly interesting or satisfying. These are all symptoms of low dopamine. If you look at people who are depressed, also carry similar symptoms. And that's what alcohol does to us. Is it abnormally floods dopamine in a way we're not even meant to experience? Remember, we stumbled upon alcohol by accident throughout our evolution. This thing is not just part of the millions of years of our adaptation process. Okay. So flooding the brain, 200% above baseline, totally unnatural, we're not even meant to experience it. And it becomes a hack to the system. So normally as a human being throughout our development and evolution, we have to work hard to earn the reward of this feeling of pleasure. And so where the shiasty marketers and advertisers have come in, and the alcohol companies that say, hey, you deserve to relax after working. And this is the greatest illusion is that no, you don't deserve to relax. If you do deserve to relax, yeah, go sit on the couch, go get a massage, go lay in bed. Like that is actual relaxation. Drinking alcohol is not relaxation. What you're doing is you are poisoning your system and hacking your neurochemistry to give you the illusion that you are relaxing by increasing GABA. But just because you went to work and you have a job and you're just like every other human being on earth who has to find a way to make a living and survive, doesn't mean that you just, you just, you earn a drug like it's, it's totally backwards thinking. It's all conditioning from this, this culture and music and movies and media and television and everything that we've been fed through commercials and advertisements and everything else. It's not true. It is not reflective of objective truth, right? That you have to drink alcohol is a way to relax, right? As a mature wise adult, you have to learn how to self-regulate and self-sue the ways that are healthy. And when you have never done that, when you've experienced maybe, you know, an uprooted childhood where you experience all types of things from divorce to maybe substance abuse to your dad working and never being around to your mom having narcissistic tendency traits to your parents invalidating your feelings, telling you to suck it up, having it not be safe for you to express yourself, religious trauma, sexual, like all these different things. And they never teach you how to manage your mind. And they never teach you how to self-regulate, manage the sensations that appear and arise in your body and how to regulate yourself back down to safety, right? You've basically never learned these very basic fundamental skills and you have gone out and lived your entire life well into adulthood and have not developed these skills and have just used and relied on alcohols of crutch. Every time there is the slightest shift from what seemed like a safe baseline, you used alcohols away to immediately escape and numb it out, right? So on one hand, as we look at addiction and this dependency thing that we've developed, on one hand, what we're doing is we're managing this neurochemical feeding cycle. High levels of pleasure dip down to low levels of pain. And so what happens is over long periods of time, as you consistently drink alcohol under and your neurochemistry becomes imbalanced and goes into a deficit state, there's this background underlying linger of pain. And it's like this. It's not like actually painful, like acutely, but it's kind of like this boredom or this dissatisfaction or nothing seems that cool or fun or exciting unless it involves alcohol. That's actually not true. All those things that you feel like aren't fun without alcohol are in fact really enjoyable and fulfilling. Had you had or did you have in the moment a normal brain that wasn't altered via this drug that you've been consuming, going bowling, going on a boat, you know, hanging out with friends and getting dinner, going to a comedy show, going to a baseball game. All these things are plenty enjoyable for somebody who's brain chemistry is at a normal rate. But because our brain chemistry is in a deficit state from all these years of basically consuming the proverbial pay date loan and debt, which is alcohol, now we're having to pay back this debt for a period of time, right? And that's why you might be able to go three days or five days or seven days or a week or maybe you get a 30 days alcohol free, but then you always go back. It's because there's that D that underlying level of pain. So how do we address that, right? That's one component. Okay. The second component is understanding the trauma piece and underlying psychological and emotional dysregulation that results from early childhood experiences, which we did not have either the inner or outer resources to fully process and make sense of, to allow those experiences to complete their psychological and emotional cycle back into safety, harmony and homeostasis within our mind and body. And so what trauma is, trauma is anything that goes outside of our stress response window. And so with children that are highly underdeveloped intellectually in every capacity, physically, emotionally, right, we all have very small and sensitive brains and nervous systems, right? So if we go shoulder to shoulder or head to head with a life experience that is too much for us, that's too overwhelming, that's too painful, a divorce, our parents invalidating our feelings, bullying, getting rejected in class, you know, very, I mean, you name it, you name it, you name all those experiences that you have from your childhood that you can remember that you never talked about, that you never processed, right? If we don't understand how to process those and we don't have the mental and emotional resources to allow that energy to complete its natural cycle, so then it can pass through us, our brain can process it and forget about it and our nervous system can return back down to safety and calm, that experience gets frozen in time. And what happens is our psyche splits, okay, as a protective measure, our psyche splits off, creates its own separate part, you can learn more about this and what's called IFS and internal family systems where you learn about parts and parts integration. It our psyche splits off, creates a separate part. And then the brain takes a snapshot, like a photograph, caching of that experience, it records what happened as a memory, this is also a.k.a an internal representation, which through neuro linguistic programming, we have the ability to shift and modulate, to reduce its emotional load, right? It takes a photograph of the memory, that's why you can think back and you can remember those painful moments pretty clearly. And then it also freezes or records the state of the nervous system in that fight or flight mode or that helplessness mode or that overthinking mode or that fear-based mode, that anxiety-based mode, that rejection, whatever it is in that moment, right? You create this story around that pain because you don't have the mental and emotional resources, the faculties to actually make sense of it because you don't have life experience of those early ages, you experience this pain, it's too overwhelming. And so what the child does, and this is not you because you're broken or anything else, this is what human beings do. This is a your brain's attempt at protecting you. It creates a story that I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy. I am, you know, there's something wrong with me. I'm not deserving, right? So we create this negative story that becomes part of our belief system in our self-image. So it's like putting on these glasses that we now look out into the world and these glasses become part of our self-image and these glasses become the filter through which we experience or look out at the world through this trauma. Now a couple of things to realize here is that who we think we are is nothing more than a bundle of billions of neural pathways that get established in our brain. These are like the connectors, the railroad tracks between how we process reality. And when we're born, that brain is a totally empty spud. There are no railroad tracks, there are no ski slopes to travel. And every data point that we collect through our developmental process between our nurturing process, our family, our childhood, our religion, our school system, our friends, our teachers, music media movies. We start to form the synaptic pathways for our perception of self-image and identity. So if we experience a ton of these traumas at an early age and we don't have the tools to fully process that event, allow that energy to pass through us and then just become something insignificant, like what you had for breakfast three days ago, right? It's not traumatic. It's basically irrelevant data that just passes through your system, your brain doesn't need to hold on to it, right? It's not important. Until we're able to process those events, they become these perceptual filters that we then view ourselves and view the world in through. Now what happens is unconsciously, because now we are repeating that trauma through our mind and our thoughts and our beliefs over and over and over and over and over again, hundreds or thousands of times, this starts to create the illusion that this is how I am. I'm just not good enough. The world is just out to get me. The world is just an unfair place. This becomes unconscious and automatic. That could never be possible for a person like me. I always get the short end of the stick. Getting the career I want, the life that I want, the things that I want, those things don't work for me, right? We start telling ourselves these stories and they build foundation after foundation, layer after layer. Because this is a belief and the way the universe works is that it is a mirror to your consciousness, right? As you dig deep into the world of personal development and psychology, you discover that whether you think you can or can't, you're right, right? The famous quote by Henry Ford. Reality and the experience that we're all having on earth is just a mirrored reflection of the data that presents itself on the desktop of our consciousness and the way that we interpret the sensations that appear in our body. It is all an interpretation. If our early interpretations are limited and preventing the free flow of our most authentic self-expression, then that creates psychological and emotional dysregulation. Meaning our nervous system is frozen in time from those traumas and is always hyper-vigilant or it's always disassociated or it's always getting flustered and activated through things that really aren't even catastrophes. Why is that happening? Because throughout all those experiences, all those traumas, we created as protective mechanisms, all these fractured parts of our psyche. That's why maybe in business, you're really successful and maybe you're making really great money and you smash it in certain areas of life. But in other areas of your life, maybe when it comes to vulnerability or opening up about your feelings or being intimate or being around others in a social situation, you're still operating like a five-year-old or a seven-year-old or a nine-year-old or a 13-year-old or a 16-year-old. It's really conflicting because in one area of your life, you're like, "Holy shit, I'm 40, I'm 50. Why am I not farther ahead or why am I still running into these basic problems?" Well, it's because we have all these experiences in our unconscious or our subconscious which are influencing our deep, deep belief patterns about ourself in the world. And so you can begin to see that when we have all of this dysregulation inside of us psychologically and emotionally, when we don't believe in ourself, when we're at point A and we want to get to point B, but we don't believe point B is possible. We think point B could never be possible for me. But I'm not deserving of making that type of money, of being in that type of relationship, of having that type of business, of having that type of lifestyle where I get to enjoy what I do while also having impact. Whatever those stories are, those types of vacations I want to go on, the type of family that I want to have, having that dream body, that dream physique. When you're at point A and you want to get to point B, but the thought and idea of how the hell you're gonna get there, just seems absolutely terrifying to you. and you don't know what the steps are and what the process is. Or immediately when you think about that, you start getting anxious, you start getting fearful, you start worrying, you start doubting yourself. Of course, that's gonna create a series of sensations that are uncomfortable. Of course, those are gonna start to create anxiety and fear and self-doubt. And so because you don't know why, it's like you can't freely move forward from point A to point B, you grab a drink, because those feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness and fear and pain and rejection and whatever all those other things are that we've repressed as a way to protect ourselves from having to fuel them. Of course, when they start to arise they're gonna be really overwhelming. It's like we're re-experiencing those traumas, right? And so because we don't know how to manage the voice inside our head because all of these things seem to be really confusing, we just go and we grab the drink, right? And then all of a sudden we get ourselves into this drinking pattern for five, 10, 15, 20 years and all of a sudden we're like, fuck, like I just thought this thing was helpful and kind of helping me de-stress a little bit. Now I can't stop drinking, now I have no control over this thing. Now I'm drinking every day and I'm starting to prioritize it over everything, right? So now we've gone from the trauma side over to the neurochemical side. So typically this stuff starts at the base layer of our traumas, right? And so let me place some contrast of analysis here on the other side, right? If you look at our society, imagine how many tens of millions, if not billions of people in our society, have no understanding of any of these things, have no understanding of the human operating system, no understanding of how their mind works, no understanding of how to mentally regulate, no understanding of how to emotionally regulate, no understanding of the nervous system, of neuroplasticity, of behavior change, like we're just born, we're just incarnated, and then all of a sudden, look at the draw, we get a mom and dad, and then they do their best to raise us based off of the data that they have from their parents, and because humans are imperfect, that they can't be there at every second of every moment, during the sensitive developmental period of our childhood and adolescent, we're gonna inevitably experience trauma, and we're gonna have all these experiences that were painful and dysregulate our thoughts and emotional patterns, and at no point throughout our evolutionary process is there, you know, like a ceremony to go from being a child to a teenager. There's no ceremony from being a teenager to an adult. We're just heard it like cattle through the system, and through every piece of media that's coming in through the five senses, conditioning us, saying, "Drink, drink, drink, "this is fun, this is cool, this is exciting." Of course, this is what's gonna happen. We've got all this stuff, we're like this conscious witness inhabiting this avatar, but we have no idea how to manage the psychology of it, and we don't know how to manage the sensations that run through the system, and so the system red lines, and we're at point A, and we wanna get to this point B, but we're not even clear on point B. Why are we here on planet Earth? What's my purpose? Where do I go? Like, what am I supposed to do? What are my gifts? What am I talents? How do I express those things? How do I manage my time? Oh, but I've gotta pay bills. Oh, but I've gotta manage a family. Oh, but I gotta go to the gym and exercise. Oh, but I gotta eat well. And then social media is distracting us. Like, dude, this thing is like the existential crisis of being a human being is enough, is just enough to make somebody say, "What the fuck, man? "What is this thing? "Why am I here and what am I supposed to do?" Right? And so first it starts as the ability or the attempt to self-soothe unclear and dysregulated psychology and emotions, but we do that. We didn't know what we were fucking with. Nobody told us, right? We took the dare class in fifth grade and that's about it. Nobody told you that alcohol is incredibly emotionally addictive. Nobody told you that every time you drink alcohol, you're throwing off the dopamine set point in your brain, which is like one of the most important aspects of your brain that's responsible for your evolution and your motivation and your forward progress as a human being. Nobody said that. But now we find us in this place and we have unconsciously sort of created this life for ourselves where this substance has woven its claws and its tentacles into every component of our lives. Now we're like, "Fuck, man, like I'm a slave to this thing." So what's the answer? What's the answer? Okay? The answer is understanding that this process of quitting drinking is not just putting the bottle down. And if you think that that's what it is, you're gonna fail over and over and over and over again. You're gonna get a week, you're gonna get 10 days, you're gonna get 30 days, and then you're gonna go back to drinking because you're not understanding what alcohol is and what it represents spiritually on this progression of evolving your soul as a human being. You have to understand and see through the matrix. When you look at this structural society that we live in, alcohol is the thing used by human beings who do not know how to manage their mind and manage their emotional system. It is the quick fix, it is the cop out. It is the cheap hack that keeps you perpetually slave to going back to it. So the process of quitting drinking is this process, not of missing out on barbecues, and you hear me say this all the time, you know, oh, I don't get to go to the bar and I'm gonna have to miss out on hanging out with my friends and laughing and going to the country club and playing golf. That's what the surface level seems, but I'm trying to, like, I'm like a time traveler here. I'm trying to come back and tell you the wisdom to assure you to trust this process. What this is, it is a process of developing the courage, right? And so I want you to understand that the vibration and energy of courage is really powerful. If you go to Google and you look up Richard Dawkins' levels of consciousness, he has this book that actually explains the different frequencies and vibrations and energies of consciousness all the way up into, like, enlightenment and beyond. So the lower levels of consciousness are anger and shame and guilt and fear and victimhood and things like that, right? There are these low-dense vibrational forms of energy, right? That's why when you are in a state of victimhood and blame and shame and guilt, you are slow moving. You're not making forward progress towards the evolution and expression of your highest energies and moving into the possibility of your potential. You are the opposite of that when you are in those lower vibrational states. So our evolution as human beings is about rising up and ascending into higher vibrations of consciousness. And this isn't woo-woo, this isn't party of what the hell are you talking about, this is. this is the experience of life. I remember when I was in my drinking phase, I was operating at lower levels of consciousness. I could not see the things, I could not fathom the things that I'm in explaining to you. I didn't have access to them, but I'm explaining them to you now as I've come to understand them. So as we move up these vibrations or energies of consciousness, we finally get to a point where we develop courage. And the way he explains it is that when you get to the point of courage, that is when the tables begin to turn and the second half of your life opens up. Because courage is the vibrational energy where despite, this is important, despite the pain, despite the challenges, despite the fear, despite the anxiety, despite the shame, despite the guilt, despite whatever representation you want to place on it, aka the painful energies, despite whatever is there, you develop the courage, the openness, the bravery, to turn towards and be fully present to investigating in a non-judgmental, compassionate way what those things are. And if you think about it, that equally translates to you being in a moment where you are brought forth a decision point, where do I drink or do I not drink? Drinking is the automatic easy solution. It's the unconscious solution that keeps you in a vicious cycle slave to addiction. The not easy decision in the moment at first, which eventually it becomes absolutely easy and effortless, but in the moment is that moment where you are gonna rub shoulder to shoulder with that level of pain. And that pain could be boredom, it could be discomfort, it could be feeling like you're missing out, it could be anger, it could be resentment, it could be sadness, it could be loneliness. Whatever that data point that is presenting itself within the desktop of your mind via a story, a thought pattern, a thought loop, a narrative that you're telling yourself or percepting or within the somatic layer of your body, right? The sensations that are appearing, aka, I like to call feelings and emotions sensations, because through this early developmental process I'm taking you through, being able to objectify your feelings and emotions is gonna help you gain a greater degree of control and flexibility over them. Because early on in the process, when we have not adapted our ability to be able to regulate ourselves, these "feelings and emotions" or sensations have all these stories and narratives tied to them, right? So we feel this sensation of, let's say, anxiety and we feel it in our stomach, but then we tie that to the mind and then the mind says, "Oh, I'm anxious. Oh, what's gonna happen? Oh, that's unsafe. Oh, something might happen." Right? So by objectifying anxiety, we turn off the story and narrative and we get to just simply observe the sensation that arises in our stomach. And maybe for the first time ever, that's gonna be a shift in your paradigm because what all of reality is and always has been and always will be is simply an experience that is filtered through two modalities. Our psychology and our sensations. So reality is filtered through the stories and narratives that we tell ourselves about it, how we interpret and percept using language, right, the voice, the self-talk, and the second layer of reality that we experience is filtered through our sensation system, our emotional system, so feelings and emotions. So how do we get to a point where we can quit drinking and enjoy the process and actually look at this and be like, "Dude, this is good. This is a good thing for me." So what we need to do is there's a few different, I mean, there's a lot of different things as you can begin to kind of construct the map here. And this is why if you've tried to quit drinking on your own or have only done it unsuccessfully for a month or two months or a few months and then you always go back, it's like, "Dude, putting the bottle down is step one." This is a major level up. This is a biological upgrade in the avatar that you inhabit, that you express. You know, the person speaking to you now is not the same person in any capacity that I was three years ago or a week into my sobriety or a month into my sobriety. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually, energetically, in any capacity. I'm a different, completely different person in the way that all of reality is perceptive and filtered through me and expressed out of me. So, so there's a few things. One is you have to get clear on the pain. You just have to get fucking blisteringly clear on the pain that alcohol is causing you and you can't be in denial, even one bit. You have to look at every facet of life that alcohol is negatively impacting you. You have to see alcohol as a source of pain. It is not a source of pleasure. And the default operating system is always going to trick you into thinking it is, but where you develop your maturity and wisdom and intellect and capacity to self-manage and self-regulate comes from your ability to redirect your mind to pain every time you think about alcohol. Because the brain is always going to default to like, oh, it's going to be fun and exciting in just this one time and we can relax. Everybody, we're all the same when it comes to alcohol. Okay, we're not that different. Okay, so your ability to get super clear on the pain. How is this negatively affecting your health, your mental health, your emotional health, your physical health, your energy levels, your motivation, your ability to go out and make forward progress towards your goals, your communication with your wife, with your husband, with your partner, your girlfriend, your boyfriend. How are you showing up and what type of role model are you being in front of your children or your kids or your teenagers? What example are you setting for them about how you handle life in your free time? Right? You have to get clear on all those. What is the opportunity cost? How much time are you wasting? How much money are you wasting? Right? How much is just being pissed away in every capacity? How much are you leaving on the table as a result of being hung over and operating at 10 to 20 to 30% of your capacity? And that is what you are operating at. If you think that just because you're in business or making good money or whatever, that you're operating and high functioning at 80% are your fucking swirling mistaken. You remove the alcohol over a long enough time frame and you are going to compound, multiply your performance and output and your ability to enjoy and appreciate all those things that you're working so hard for as well. Because you're actually going to start to begin to feel again in a positive way as you come home to yourself and start to find safety and comfort in your own skin where you're not numbing out all the time. So you have to get super, super clear on the pain. The second thing that you have to get clear on, you have to begin thinking about this and most human beings just don't. This is just, and it's not a fault of anybody is it's just that as based off of our development, very, very, very few people have the ability to really just think long term. And it's not like an intellect thing or whatever. It's just like it's a small percentage of people based off of the way our brains have adapted. The parts of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, like generally speaking as adapted as it is to help us build the society that we live in, generally speaking, we just can't really think that far out into the future. It's just hard. It's a small fraction of people. So it's going to take some effort for you to start thinking about, okay, what do I want? Where am I going? What seems like a good vision for my life? What seems like a good ideal? Right? What's my target health? What's my target family life? What's my target relationships? What's my target lifestyle? What seems like a good income that would make me happy to support the life that I want? Like, how do I want to spend my free time? Like, just basic stuff. You don't have to get super complex and have a five year plan, but you've got to believe, you've got to believe that the future and life can be better. And you have to begin reflecting on the deep, innermost essence and authentic version of you and imagine that, like, dude, you have more potential than you're currently expressing. In that, whatever you want to have for yourself is absolutely possible. And I think, like, I don't want to get preachy and motivational here, but that's just the facts. Like, if you're willing to put in the work and get around the right people and have the right support and systems and tools and skills and accountability and you make a commitment to something, I mean, in the world that we live in in 2023, it's all kind of possible, you know, with social media and with access to knowledge and experts and support and YouTube and podcast, like, just the very act of listening to me. Like, you probably yesterday didn't know any of this existed or even an hour ago, but now you're here and you're like, holy shit. So all those things that we want for ourselves are absolutely possible. Right? And so we have to believe that, like, hey, life could be better. And so when I was shoulder mangled in the pool, the day of my rock bottom, there's two things that were glaringly clear. One was the pain. I was like, okay, look at what my life has become over these last six months. I'm drinking four to six bottles of wine a day. I'm literally killing myself. I could barely walk straight. I was drinking at 10 or 11 a.m. stumbling into the grocery store. Like, just getting way too emotional. You know, and now I physically hurt myself and my physical body is in excruciating pain. So I was like, okay, pain is clear. Like, okay, yeah, there's no denying it. There's no weaseling my way out of it. There's no like, oh, well, maybe it'll be different. Like, no, evidence is clear. Bardi, you had all the free agency to manage and control and do what you wanted to do. And this was the result. It's not going to be different next time. It would have been different. If it was, but it wasn't. Like, you played your cards and you have to psychologically accept that. That if you've gotten to a place in your life where it's like, do the alcohol things not working. When you look at the data, like, like you're a private equity firm looking up to buy a business. And so you're looking at the businesses, financials, and you're looking at their marketing analytics to see their performance and you're looking through their reports to be like, okay, should I buy this business? Is it worthy? Is it going to turn over a profit? If you looked at your track record with alcohol, would you buy it? It's like, come on, don't bullshit yourself. It's like, no, of course I wouldn't buy it. So you have to get clear on that pain. It has to be glaringly obvious. And then the second thing is, the second thing that was in my mind as I was like, dude, if I try to fuck with this thing again, my potential, that vision that I have for what life could be, not possible. Instantly, I'm giving it up because I know that I can't do both at the same time. When alcohol comes into my system, I become a fucking fiend for alcohol. It becomes my main priority. I take care of everything so that I could drink. It's everything gets filtered through alcohol when alcohol is in my system. So the way that I win the fucking game is that I don't go near the alcohol. And like, when you do all of these things between healing and upgrading your psychology and learning dimensionally and emotionally regulate and doing parts work and parts integration and identifying the parts of yourself that have limiting beliefs that aren't true, that are just parts of your traumatized seven-year-old and eight-year-old. And then you reintegrate them and your nervous system starts to relax and you feel more safe in your body. And you learn to work through things and overcome social anxiety and develop confidence in self-esteem and clarity around your future. And you start being more authentic and self-expressive. And you move up higher degrees of consciousness and to gratitude and to love and your energy changes. And you lose weight and you become stronger and pain goes at like, dude, this is what happens when you quit drinking. It's, and you have to surrender to the fact that like, yeah, sure, you might lose some relationships. Sure, maybe you're not gonna go to the same bar that you used to. Sure, maybe when you get home, you're gonna be bored for a while as your neurochemistry starts to rebalance. But like, what's the alternative? The alternative is you keep going down the path that you're going down and I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I lost my dad at 57. He just died in the sleep one night. He got alcohol poisoning. 57, that's young, man. He left a family in a 14 year old son behind and two daughters. And like, I don't know if he knew that. I didn't know that. Like this thing's impermanent, man. This thing, you don't have all the time in the world. Stop thinking that you're gonna be the lucky one to go of old age. That's such a small fraction of people. Like, you have to, you have to say enough is enough. And developing courage is about getting to a place to say it's non-negotiable. It doesn't matter how frustrated I am. It doesn't matter how bored I am. Those things can't hurt me. If I'm sitting on my couch or in my office and I'm frustrated or bored, guess what? I'm still safe. I'm still safe. Nobody's holding a gun to my head. And if I breathe through it and I exercise and I call a friend and I go on a walk and I drink some water and I eat some food, guess what? Those sensations, remember we talked about feelings and emotions, those sensations of boredom or whatever, are gonna pass in an hour. Because that's the nature of reality. Is that everything is changing all the time. And our inability to surrender and let go to the flow of life is what keeps us perpetually stuck, reliving our nightmares over and over and over again. Your ability to surrender and trust the process and the universe and this three-dimensional space of existence that birthed you and contains within you 80 billion cells that are all working in perfect harmony and unison to beat your heart and digest your food and mend your wounds. And that that thing, it's there for you. It's trying to support you. But until you're willing to open yourself up to this deeper level of intelligence and begin really understanding and processing and synthesizing and committing to working through all these different layers that I'm telling you about. And you just say you just wanna say fuck it, it's easier to drink is to the degree that you will stay stuck in this cycle of hell. We have to develop the courage to be willing to walk through the fire. And to remember that, hey, you're not walking down a bridge of fire forever. This isn't a forever thing. The first one to two weeks withdrawal, yeah, sucks. Sleep sucks, you toss and turn, some night sweats, you know? You get these cravings, you feel bored, you feel agitated, you feel anxious. But by day 30, your neurochemistry is significantly more balanced, you know? Think back to the times when you got sober or you had a few days out, call for you. Remember how much better you felt? Imagine compounding that over weeks and months and months and months and months. Imagine who you could be if there were no more blockages preventing the free flow of authentic self expression to come out of you in every capacity, in your love, in your vulnerability, in your skill sets, in your leadership, in your ability to lead, in your ability to coach, in your ability to guide your family, your kids, your business, your community. Imagine if you could take what was inside of you that fire, that burning passion, that vision to be the one, to whatever it is. Imagine if you could just free flow express that without there being limitations if I'm not good enough, I'm not deserving, it's not possible. I could never do it, I don't have the network, I don't have the backing, I'm not cut out for it. They'll never listen to me, they'll never trust me. Imagine if all those things were gone and you were fully connected to who you are because you knew the truth of who you are, that you're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing you need to fix. You are whole and complete unto you. You are a divine expression from the universe. And you are a conscious witness to a system that works based off of a set of principles that none of us were ever taught regarding our consciousness, regarding our energy, regarding our psychology, regarding our emotional system. And so it's like we were inhabited and incarnated into this thing and then just push through this cultural model farmed in through the system, through the school, through high school, not knowing what's good, not having the right coaches or mentors in guys because nobody knows it, nobody knew. We were just following monkey-seeing, monkey-do, modeling in our environment, that's what humans do. We're just data processing units. We're data processing units. We're sponges. We take in data, we filter the data, we do something to the data based off of our conditioning, our early nurturing environment, our values, our belief systems, our paradigms, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, what our parent said is okay, what's not okay, all these things are filtered, then we form these ideas and these beliefs and these stories. And at some point throughout the process, we started to create these maladaptive patterns. Alcohol became this solution to manage the social anxiety. Alcohol became the solution to manage the loneliness. Alcohol became the solution to manage the asshole boss who you worked for. Alcohol became the solution to manage the kids who you're like, fuck, I've got kids now and they're being crazy and I don't know what to do or they don't listen to me. And so let me just have a glass of wine. It became this thing and temporarily it worked. It worked, you know? The intention was good. You're not a bad person. The intention to use alcohol originally as a way to self-sue the system because you didn't know how to do it otherwise, it was good. But now we've gotten to a place where that strategy and solution no longer works. And not only is it not good, it's harmful, it's detrimental, it's suicidal and it's destroying the very essence of who we are as human beings and our capacity to grow collectively as a unit and our capacity to be present and our capacity to feel and our capacity to be connected to our self and our capacity to be tapped into our guidance to our own source, to our own intuition to be able to express at the highest level our own. expressions of creativity and love and support and guidance for one another. Because it's not about you or me individually. It's about us as a collective. It's about you leading your family. It's about you contributing to your business. It's about you taking all of the data points inside of you. You say, "What's my mission? What's my purpose? What am I supposed to do?" You look at every person who's on whatever. What they've learned how to do, every story is about people developing the courage to turn towards their pains, their challenges in traumas and to develop, go through that spiritual alchemy process to turn that lead into gold as I have done. As I've taken these experiences that were so painful that destroyed me and I've synthesized them and I've processed them and I've looked at the map and I figured out all the different nuances and pieces. Because this thing, man, it's the bane of my existence. It tore the essence of my family apart. It killed my father, the only person I looked up to as had any respect for as a young child. This whole experience has been trauma from the beginning. I found my solution through alcohol but through time I saw that, "Hey, this thing that's been peddled to us, man, it's not the thing." The entire time I was drinking, I was running for myself. I was running from my feelings of inadequacy, of feeling not good enough, of feeling that I'm not worthy and that I'm not deserving. Because if I was good enough and I was deserving and all those things, then why would God give me this family? Why would He take my dad? Why would I grow up with no money? Why would I. Whatever, whatever. All these internal representations and stories that I told myself that weren't true, that I discovered weren't true, that I was whole and complete the whole time, that I had experiences in the moment as a small human that had a limited capacity for understanding a limited consciousness, a limited sensitive nervous system, and just had normal life experiences. "Hey, I came from an immigrant family. They moved a year before I was born to the U.S. Dad already had some substance abuse issues because he had a lot of trauma. He was one of nine brothers. He was the oldest. He had to take care of the family." Mom, unfortunately, didn't really develop an education. Father wouldn't let her come here and learn English. She never worked. I missed that second source of income. Mom, despite her having anxiety and OCD and everything was fearful and be careful, loved me, but was emotionally immature and didn't know how to get to know me. She told me she loved me, but there was never a conversation beyond, "Are you hungry? And be careful and come home soon." So that depth, that range of emotion in me was stunted, it was never formed. I didn't know how to process sensation in my body. Nobody ever came to me and asked me how I was doing or how my day was going. And so my psychology was, well, I must not be important, or the things that I have or who I am isn't valuable. So as a result, that affected my confidence in self-esteem and the free flow expression of my energy. Now I've learned all those things. I've made sense of all those things. I've reprocessed all of those things. And now, all of those limitations that I once had are completely gone. I believe in myself more than anyone can believe in me. I have higher standards for myself than anybody could set for me. I love and appreciate this gift of life. I understand its fragility and how I'm always learning about space and science and how I'm just going to disappear back into the void and what a gift it is to be here. And now I am connected to myself and I'm not afraid anymore. I'm not afraid of other people's opinions. I better understand my consciousness. I used to be so afraid of expressing my voice and using my voice and being on camera. And now it's when I feel the most alive. And when I do it and I'm in this podcast with you, I'm just channeling. It's just the universe, something is using me as a conduit to express truth, to express the essence of this human experience and how to move forward in a way that allows us to collectively heal and express our potential. And if you would have told me these things three years ago when I was just getting sober, I couldn't have imagined it. It was not even in the scope. I thought I was destined for a life of boredom. I thought I was destined for a life of misery, a destined for a life of missing out, a destined for a life of being on the outside. And now it's the opposite. Now it's the opposite. Now I'm on the inside looking out and I can see the culture, I can see the energetic expression and the level of consciousness amongst our human brothers and sisters and how everybody is just turning to alcohol because there's these things inside them that they never learned about and never made sense of and never processed. And yeah, acutely in the moment, is it met with pain and discomfort and a withdrawal process, neurochemically, physiologically? Yeah, alcohol is a hard drug. It's like cocaine or heroin. And to the degree that you're able to accept that and look beyond the cultural facade of hey, it's acceptable and legal and you can buy it at the store. So it's okay, it's to the degree that you'll begin to see and really associate alcohol to pain. And when you make that fundamental switch in yourself and your psyche and your subconscious, the underlying belief beyond your actual conscious belief, you tell yourself because you can bullshit yourself, but the subconscious belief, the root, the original file on the desktop. When that one in the folder sees alcohol as pain and it's like just like burning your hand on a stove, I see the stove as pain. So it's so easy and effortless for me to not go near it and to not feel like I'm missing out of putting my hand over a burning flame. You know? And so I want to invite you to first and foremost, if you've made it this far, thank you. Thank you for holding space for this expression of energy. Thank you for holding space and receiving something I'm deeply passionate about. Something that has been the underlying fabric of my entire human experience. And I'd invite you to really allow not even so much the words to sink in, but the energy. The expression of my energy to you allowed that and sit with that and see how that feels. And if you feel like you're at that place where enough is enough and you feel like you're gotten to the place where you're ready to invite courage into your life, then I would say you're ready to take that next step. Courage is powerful. When we get to courage, we are willing to be present to and to confront and to acknowledge fill in the blank despite, despite. It doesn't matter what's on the other side of despite. Courage holds true unto itself. It stands firm. It plants its flag. It's soared into the ground. And it is willing to pursue and confront and acknowledge despite. That's why going to war is an act of courage. That is why laying your life down in pursuit of something bigger than yourself and in something more meaningful than yourself takes the greatest act of courage. And people who quit drinking aren't the weird ones. They're the ones throughout their evolutionary process and spiritual development as human beings who finally get to a place where they develop courage. Encourage is the turning point. Courage is the bridge into the second half of your life that is, in my experience, and from what I have seen, more amazing and more incredible than you can begin to imagine. When you just stop systematically poisoning yourself, when you start to honor the essence and expression in Avatar that you have been gifted by source, by creator, by God, by divinity. Remember, none of us asked to be here. This is a gift. This is a profound gift. And the process of quitting drinking is about honoring your truth, honoring that source, despite, despite. And whatever on the front end is on the other side of that, despite some boredom, some sacrifices, some changing of a friend group, some trying to make new friends, some confronting our shadow, some, you know, applying new tools and techniques and strategies, and the developmental process of our psyche and our emotional system and consciousness, right? It all gets easier. It all normalizes over time. You become better, you become stronger, you develop more capacity, you become more resilient. That's just, that's just how it goes. When you step into the mental and emotional gym, for the first time, you can rep two pounds on each arm and those two pounds feel hard and heavy and lactic acid burns and builds up and you say, when is this going to be over? But you keep pushing past walls. You keep feeling the discomfort and you reprocess it. You take a break, you slow down, you breathe through the reps, you change the angle, you do a different bicep exercise, and you do that for a few weeks. And then you come back and all of a sudden you find that the two is really easy now. That underlying level of stress that you are so spun out at work, don't really notice it anymore. Why? Not because the stress has changed or the boss has changed, but because you have become stronger, you have developed more muscle, you have become more resilient. Your window of tolerance has increased. You can carry more weight on your shoulders. And that's the evolutionary process. That is, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As we work to put into place and resolve and fortify and solidify our basic psychological and emotional needs, our relationship needs, our social needs. As we start to put those things in place, we work through the false limitations and maladaptive protective mechanisms that were created at an early age. We begin to integrate those parts back into ourself. We begin to operate at a higher frequency. We begin to move into the process of self-actualization, which is the expression of our highest potential without limitations. Sure, there are going to be limitations that pop up from time to time. Yeah, absolutely. But that's the human experience. That's why we have a network. That's why we invest in coaching. That's why we find people within this space, this journey, this human evolutionary journey, who we energetically connect to and align with and say, "I want you in my corner and I want you on my team." Because the way that you seem to be handling this deal and processing and moving forward seems good. I respect those insights. I value the way that you're processing things and I feel safer, more connected to you. And when you have those people in your life who can be there for you, who can lay down a foundation, who can help hold you accountable, who can help you make sense of things, who can help you problem solve, who can provide wisdom. When you still need it, that is, I don't know, what do you want to call that? It's time-traveling. It's quantum jumping. It's being able to move more freely from point A to point B with less restriction. And I think that's what we all want at the end of the day. We want to continue to grow and build a life for ourselves that we can be proud of, that we can be fulfilled by, that we can feel connected to. And doing that around other human beings who are on the same track, that synergy process transmutes into something really powerful. So I appreciate you listening. If you found value from this episode, please share it with somebody who you know might be struggling. And if you haven't yet, I would appreciate it if you love a comment on Spotify and Apple to help this reach more people. And if you'd like to work with me one-on-one, go ahead and fill out an application, www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com. If you scroll down to the bottom, you can see bunches, screenshots and stuff from my community. I've probably got 300 more that I haven't added. A lot of those were from, you know, months back. But yeah, I appreciate you 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.thestopdrinkingcoach.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.