Stop Trying to Change Everything: Why Sobriety Needs 100% of Your Focus

Hey everybody, welcome to the Addiction Unlimited podcast where you get to learn everything you want to know about addiction and recovery. I'm your host, Angela Pugh, co-founder of Kansas City Recovery, Life Coach and Recovery and Alcoholic. To learn more about me, you can listen to episode zero on your podcast app or find us on the web at AddictionUnlimited.com. Hello my friend, happy Wednesday or whatever day you're listening to this. And thank you for spending some time with me today. We're in that weird part of early January, right, where people are still writing the New Year high and some people have already crashed, right? The resolutions are made, the gym memberships are purchased, the meal prep containers are lined up in the fridge like little soldiers of self-improvement. And if you're trying to get sober or stay sober or thinking about getting sober, you're probably feeling this massive pressure to overhaul your entire life at once, right? Like this is it, New Year, New Me, I'm in a quick drinking, I'm going to start going to the gym five days a week and change my whole diet and give up sugar and start meditating every day and fix my sleep schedule and finally deal with all my trauma. And I wanted to tell you something that might actually feel like relief. No, don't do all of that, right? If you're getting sober, just do that. That's it, that's the whole job. This is how I stayed sober. And today, the day this episode actually comes out January 7th is actually my 20th sobriety birthday, 20 years. And the reason I made it is because someone told me early on, your only job is to not drink. Everything else can wait. And I held on to that like a lifeline. It was my north star, the thing that guided every decision, right? I would think everything I was going to do, I would think, is this taking me closer to sobriety or closer to a drink? One monumental thing is enough. It's actually more than enough. It's everything because here's what nobody tells you. When you try to overhaul your entire life simultaneously, you're not being able to ambitious. You're sabotaging the one thing that actually matters. There's a great book called The One Thing and this concept changed my whole mindset, right? Do one thing at a time, especially if it's something huge. Like make it your focus, do it well, master it, then you can do something else. And let's talk about the math of real change for a second. We're not really going to talk about math. I can't even do math. Right? sobriety is not 10% of your energy and focus. It's not even 50%. It's 100%. Early sobriety is a full-time job disguised as just not drinking. And I say that because people who have never struggled with alcohol, they hear I quit drinking and they think, oh, okay, so you just don't pick up the drink. But you know it's not that simple. Property is managing cravings every single day. It's sitting with discomfort you used to anesthetize. It's rewiring every social situation because suddenly you're the only sober person at the party or you're realizing you don't actually like these people without alcohol smoothing the edges. It's finding new ways to cope with stress and boredom and anxiety and celebration and loneliness and Tuesday. It's looking at the clock at 7 p.m. and realizing you have no idea what to do with yourself because this is when you used to drink. That's not a side project. That's not something you do while also training for a marathon and learning to meal prep and becoming a morning person and learning sourdough. Getting sober is the entire project. This is the transformation. Not a stepping stone to transformation, not the starting point. This staying sober is everything. And here's the part I really need you to hear because this is where most people get tripped up. You have to replace the relief. Let me say that again. You have to replace the relief because what we don't talk about enough is alcohol worked. You weren't drinking because you liked the taste. You weren't drinking because there's something wrong with you or your weak or broken or morally deficient. You're drinking because it provided relief from something unbearable. Maybe it's anxiety. Maybe it's rage. You don't know how to express. Maybe it's shame that felt too big to carry. Maybe it's boredom or overwhelm or the feeling of being trapped in your own skin or maybe it was all of those things at once. Alcohol was your anesthesia. When anesthesia serves a critical function, it makes the unbearable bearable. So when people say, "Just don't drink," what they're really saying without realizing it is, just remove your only coping mechanism and replace it with nothing. And that doesn't work. That's not sobriety. That's white knuckling through raw, unmedicated pain. And nobody can sustain that. Your nervous system won't allow it. When you relapse, if you relapse, it's not because you're weak, it's not because you didn't want it enough. It's because your nervous system was screaming, "I need relief," and this is the only way I know how to get it. This is why the replacement work is so critical. This is where the actual work of sobriety lives. You have to find other ways to get relief that don't destroy you. Not because you're trying to become some idealized version of yourself, not because you're trying to be good, but because you literally need tools to survive the feelings that alcohol used to handle. You need a new survival system. So what does relief actually look like with the out alcohol? Let me be really specific here because I think we get to abstract with this stuff. Sometimes relief is movement. Not a workout. I'm not talking about optimization here, but movement that helps you discharge the anxiety or rage, a walk, a run if that feels right, shaking out your body when the feelings get too big to hold. Dance in your kitchen. Whatever gets the energy moving. Sometimes relief is sensory, cold water on your face, a hot shower, loud music, wrapping yourself in a weighted blanket, anything that brings you back to your body and out of your spiraling thoughts. Sometimes it's connection, calling someone who gets it, going to a meeting, texting your sponsor or your sober friend at 9 p.m. when a craving hits, insane. I'm feeling crappy right now. Sometimes it's letting yourself cry or rage or collapse on the floor, actually feeling the feeling instead of numbing it away, which sounds terrible. Sometimes it is terrible, but it's temporary and it's also the only way through. Sometimes, honestly, relief is just the tiny dopamine hit of a sugary drink or a stupid TV show or scrolling your phone for 20 minutes. That's okay because it's not killing you. That's the bar right now. It's not killing you. Part of just staying sober means getting real specific about what you need. You have to do an inventory. Not an AA inventory. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about an inventory of your pain points. When do the cravings hit hardest? What feeling precedes the urge to drink? Is it the 4 p.m. anxiety, the Sunday scaries, the social overwhelm, the loneliness at night, the anger after a work meeting, the emptiness on a Saturday afternoon when you have nothing to do? You have to know what you're treating so you can find other treatments. If you don't know what you're meditating, you're just going to keep reaching for the medicine that you know works, right? So get specific. Journal about it if that helps. Talk about it in therapy or in meetings. Pay attention to the patterns. Because once you know what you're treating, you can start building a toolkit. If 4 p.m. anxiety is your trigger, maybe you need a 4 p.m. walk or a 4 p.m. phone call with a friend or a 4 p.m. snack in a stupid video that makes you laugh. With loneliness at night is the issue. Maybe you need to schedule a connection during that time, a meeting, a call, even just texting back and forth with someone. You're not trying to fix the feeling. You're just trying to survive it without drinking. And here's the permission I want to give you. In early sobriety, your replacement coping mechanisms don't have to be elegant, right? They don't have to be impressive. They don't have to look good on Instagram. They just have to work. If eating ice cream at 8 p.m. keeps you from drinking, eat the damn ice cream. If you need to take three showers a day because the hot water calms your nervous system, take three showers. If you need to leave every social event after 45 minutes because that's your limit, leave. Fuck those people, leave. This is your sobriety, your life. You can do whatever you want. If you need to watch the same comfort show over here. an over because it's the only thing that doesn't over stimulate you, watch it. This stage isn't about optimization. This isn't about becoming the best version of yourself. This stage is about survival and survival is enough. It's more than enough. Leaving the social event after 45 minutes is not going to kill you, drinking will. So again, that's the bar. It's not going to kill you. That's how I want you to think about it. So you see why this takes all your energy. Learning to feel your feelings without numbing them is one of the hardest things a human being can do. Building a new relief toolkit from scratch while actively craving your old one. That's expert level emotional labor. That's why you can't also be trying to transform your body and your career and your relationships in your entire personality at the same time. The relief work is the work and it takes time. And your first attempts at replacement coping are going to be clumsy and imperfect. That's normal. That's learning. Some things that work today won't work next month. Your nervous system is constantly recalibrating. You're essentially teaching it a completely new language. Be patient with the learning curve. Give yourself the grace you would give a kid learning to ride a bike. They're going to wobble. They're going to fall. It doesn't mean they're doing it wrong. And this is why trying to change everything at once is such a setup for failure. When you stack too many changes, you create multiple failure points. Miss the gym. Now you feel like a failure. Eat pizza instead of your meal prep and other failures. Skip your meditation failure. Sleep in instead of waking up at 5 a.m. like you said you would. Failure failure failure. And each one of those small failures erodes your confidence. Each one makes you feel like you're not doing it right. Like you're not strong enough. Like maybe you're just not capable of change. And that feeling that accumulation of small failures, that makes the big thing more fragile, more vulnerable. It makes things sober feel harder because now you're not just fighting the urge to drink. You're also fighting the voice in your head that says you can't even stick to a workout plan. You can't even eat healthy. You're failing at everything. What's the point? But if your only job is to stay sober and you do that, you succeed every single day. You succeed. You can eat pizza. Skip the fucking gym. You can stay up too late and sleep in and watch too much TV. As long as you don't drink, you're winning. That's not lowering the bar. That's protecting what actually matters. Here's what's wild though. When you actually focus on just staying sober, when you give it all of your energy and attention, other things start to shift naturally. Not because you're forcing them, but because sobriety creates conditions for change. Eventually, you sleep better. You have more energy. Your thinking gets clearer. You start to notice what you actually want instead of just reacting to what you're running from. These things emerge as byproducts of the one thing you're doing. But only if you protect that one thing fiercely. Only if you don't dilute your focus by trying to also become a completely different person in 30 other ways. Trust the process. Not the people on social media who are documenting their perfect morning routines and their macrobalanced meals and their 75 hard challenges. I love all of that stuff. Think about this. Someone doing 75 hard, they're making that their one thing. All of their focus and energy is on that one thing. They're crushing it. That's why they want to share it. But it's their sole focus. Trust that doing one hard thing consistently will change everything. Here's what I want you to take from this. You are allowed to say no to everything else right now. No to the diet, no to the gym membership, no to the meditation challenge, no to the person who wants you to be different faster, no to the productivity, hacks and morning routines and self improvement content that makes you feel like you're not doing enough. Your only job is to not drink. Everything else is negotiable. If you set 2026 to be your year that you're finally getting serious about sobriety and you can't take the starts and stops anymore, then make it your one thing. Everything else gets measured by, is this getting me closer to sobriety or closer to a drink? You're rewiring your entire nervous system. You're learning to survive without your survival mechanism. You're building a new foundation from scratch. That's not nothing. That's everything. So for right now, make this your one thing and you will change your entire life. This is the same premise I use in my business too. I only have one major thing, each quarter, one huge project, one big undertaking that is hard with a lot of moving parts and a thousand steps. If I finish early, cool, then I can move on to something else. If it's a behavior or a new habit I'm working on, once it becomes pretty easy and it's just lifestyle and I don't have to think about it so much or set reminders in my phone to remember to do it. When I'm doing it pretty naturally, then I can move on to the next thing. That's how I want you to think about your sobriety. If it's your one thing right now, just do that. Don't water it down with a bunch of other things that you don't have the bandwidth to do. If you want to not drink or not smoke pot or not whatever, then make it your soul focus. Is this getting me a step closer to sobriety or a step closer to a drink or a joint or or whatever? That's your North Star. All right, let's bring this home. If you take nothing else from this episode, remember this. You don't need a new year. You don't need a complete life overhaul. You don't need to become a different person overnight. You need stability. You need focus. You need just one thing. And if that one thing is sobriety, then that's your whole job right now. Alcohol worked as your relief system. That's why you used it. So you have to build a new relief system that doesn't destroy you. That's the work. That's what takes all your energy. And when you protect that one thing fiercely, when you stop deluding your focus with 10 other transformations, everything else starts to shift naturally. 20 years ago, somebody gave me permission to make my sobriety my only job to say no to everything else to measure every decision by that one question. Is it getting me closer to sobriety or closer to a drink? That permission changed my life. And I'm giving you that same permission today makes sobriety your North Star your one thing. Do it well, master it. And when it becomes stable, when it's not taking everything you have anymore, then you can add something else. But right now, just this. Here's what I want you to do. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Send it to a friend who's struggling, posted in your recovery group because someone in your life needs this permission as much as you do. Thank you for being here and spending time with me today. Thank you for doing the hard work. I love you guys. I hope you're having a fantastic day and I will see you next week. You've reached the end of another great episode of the Addiction Unlimited podcast, Candid and Honest Conversation about Addiction and Recovery. Be sure to visit us at AddictionUnlimited.com to join the conversation and access show notes and links to everything we talked about. Love this episode? Please take 30 seconds to subscribe, rate and review on iTunes to help us improve and give you the information you want. Thanks for listening. See you next week. [Music]