The Neuroscience & Mindset of Quitting Alcohol

What is up SDC fam? I'm back with another episode. My name is Barty Arrez. I'm your host. I'm the stop drinking coach and in today's episode, I don't really know what I'm going to talk about, but I want to riff and I want to flow and I want to share with you some of the things that I've been just kind of thinking about and have been coming through lately. Especially with the launch of neuro repaturning and it is about understanding why you keep relapsing. There's a lot of ways we can deconstruct relapse. We can look at relapse from a point of view where you keep relapsing because you're really connected to your social circle. Maybe you keep going back to alcohol because you and your husband or you and your wife have a ritual of drinking together. Maybe you keep relapsing because you keep running into the same stressor at work or in your relationship or you keep hitting a very similar point of overwhelm or maybe there's a wound from your past that's unintegrated or unresolved. So you keep meeting this edge in your brain and in your nervous system and then you try to find relief alcohol is a predictable form of relief. We've practiced it over and over again and the brain is like, okay, this is the best solution in the moment. But in this episode, I want to deconstruct it from a neurological point of view and I've talked about this before but it's really, really, really, really, really, really important that you understand this because so many of you listening have been struggling with alcohol for a while, whether it's something that emerged as a result of COVID or something that you've known about or have been dealing with for the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And maybe you've tried dry January, maybe you've taken time off, maybe you have gone six months, maybe you've tried AA, maybe you've had a therapist, you've done all these things, but that eventually you go back to drinking and you see that drinking is progressive and that it's taking more and more from you while giving you less, it's impacting your health, it's impacting your relationships, it's impacting your clarity, your motivation, your pro activity, your productivity. It's getting in the way of just how you feel about yourself, you're not as sharp, you're not as quick-witted, you're not showing up for your friends, your family, your relationship, your employees, in the way that you would want to, you find yourself missing meetings, like it's taking, right? It's taking from you. And you're smart, you're intelligent, you're able to meet deadlines and you're able to be successful in these different areas of your life, but when it comes to alcohol, you're just like, why the fuck can I not consciously manage this? Why can I not, why can I not will power my way through this? Why am I waking up Monday and telling myself I'm never going to drink again or I'm going to slow down and then I find myself pouring a drink that evening or drinking again on Friday? And all of this has to do with the neurological aspect of addiction, the piece that is not addressed in traditional mainstream recovery, right? You definitely don't hear about it in AA, that's a fact, right? If you talk to your therapist, they're not going to talk about it. If you go to an addiction counselor, they might mention it, but they're going to be kind of looking at other things on a more surface level, psychologically, emotionally or just practically and socially in your life. If you go to rehab, you'll probably talk about it, but again, they're not going that deep. And it's just, it's a conversation that unfortunately isn't had unless you're hearing it from an expert like Dr. Andrew Huberman or you go to YouTube and you look up some professor's lecture around the neurobiology of addiction, right? Where they start talking about the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the neurobiological adaptations that occur when you consistently drink alcohol. And I've talked about this before, but I want to hammer it. I want to reiterate it because it is very important for you to understand this. If you want to quit drinking sustainably, you have to do things that are going to help support the rewiring and repatting of your brain and your nervous system. Your brain and your nervous system run the show, right? So a reminder, as human beings, before alcohol came into the picture throughout hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution, our bodies, our minds, our systems have been adapting for survival. Many, many years ago, people only lived until they were in their 30s or 40s, right? It's like everything that we've been doing has been trying to survive. Now, we don't look at it that way that much because we live in 2026. We live in a modern world. People have jobs. We have grocery stores, infrastructure, government, paved roads, internet access, running water. And so we're not thinking that our life is survival. We're not, you know, it's like we live a much softer, more resourceful experience of life now. But you have to understand that who you are internally, the way that your brain is tuned, the way that your nervous system is tuned, is this survival machine. And when we look at survival, there's two core drivers of survival. The first driver is the pursuit of pleasure. Things that tend to make us feel good, right, that feeling of feeling good, at some level tends to be good for our survival, right? Solving discomfort is good for survival because the extreme form of discomfort is obviously death. And so everything that we do in life is to try to get closer to things that make us feel good and try to move away from things that make us feel bad. Now there's a problem here in the sense that if you do that too aggressively with a substance or behavior, the brain is going to wire that in and it's going to prioritize that over other things because that's the fundamental axiom. And the brain is a predictive modeling system, right? It's very important that we begin to understand how our system actually works. What you're doing here, who you are, as a conscious witness sitting behind the car of what you call your human being and learning how to drive it. I've got a podcast episode that goes deep into this called the brain is a predictive modeling system. So just scroll down in my episodes and I go super deep into it. But you're trying to pursue pleasure and you're trying to avoid pain. Now when you drink alcohol, right, it does both of those things very, very, very effectively. It makes you feel really good via the dopamine response and it's also going to kind of sedate you and calm you down via the response in GABA, which is another neurotransmitter. Okay, so whether you want to take the party up and have more fun or whether you want to release tension and stress or fear or anxiety or sadness, alcohol does both of those things very effectively in the short term. And as a result of that, the brain stamps that in, right? The hippocampus, the part of the brain that's responsible for memories and storing memories and memory formation. Everything is being recorded, right? So you are in a state of stress and then you were able to resolve that stress. You were in a state of panic, you were in a state of discomfort, you were in a state of perceived danger, right? If you're really stressed out or sad or overwhelmed or in a fight, right? That to us in 2026, the brain is recording that, like you're stressed out from work because you got an email from your boss or your husband or wife just disrespected you or your kids didn't follow through with cleaning their room or whatever the thing is. To us, that's how we look at it practically. But the way our brain and our nervous system is producing signals is that we have a lion in front of us that we need to escape, right? We have somebody in our tribe who's about to be, you know, trampled over by an elephant, right? And so the body is producing these really powerful signals that are being recorded. So imagine if this was 100,000 or 200,000 years ago and you've been hunting for days and you've been tired and you haven't had water. And all of a sudden you find this patch of berries and you find this little watering hole with clean, fresh water. You're going to be like, oh my god, you were in this insane state of stress for days. And then you found something that finally resolved it. And now your brain looks back and it remembers the path of how you got there. Maybe you've been hiking 40 miles. You're like, all right, we went here, we went up this mountain, we went down, we took a left, right? Your brain's going to record that. And now that's going to become a memory that's going to be a filter that's going to be a reference point that your brain and body uses next time you're struggling next time you're tired, right? Alcohol is the same way. It produces a very high level of pleasure reward and it also very quickly relieves you of whatever discomfort. So when you consistently drink alcohol for many, many, many, many years, the brain learns that alcohol equals relief. And then it remembers all the subtle cues around it. It remembers where you were the time of day, who you were with, colors, temperature, thoughts, subtleties. This is called salience, right? When you cross a certain level of addiction, the brain starts producing dopamine in response to the cues, which is what drives you forward to seek out the alcohol. And that's why you have to understand that quitting drinking isn't just about willpower. You're not going to maneuver, you're not going to outmaneuver or outplay the alcohol game because you can't win. Every time you enjoy you further reinforce your addiction to alcohol, literally, literally. Like, this is standard 101 psychology and behavior modification. It's really simple. Every time you are presented an opportunity in the moment, you have two choices. You can either go this way or you can go that way. And whatever choice you make is a vote for that neural pathway, in that neural architecture in your brain, to get deeper, to get stronger. And so with repeated exposure to alcohol, you teach your brain and you teach your nervous system that alcohol is a predictable form of safe relief. And the reason that you keep relapsing is because when you go to quit drinking alcohol, you're doing nothing to update the neurobiological changes to your brain. You can will power your way through a week or a month or six months for sure. But you have to understand that if you haven't updated your brain's prediction system, your brain's reward center, and you've done nothing to learn how to deeply regulate your nervous system, and through that process, haven't updated your identity as somebody who's a drinker or a non-drinker, or somebody who has higher standards or a certain set of beliefs about themselves. Right? You have to remember that alcohol is not about the alcohol. You're not just a person who drinks willy nilly from time to time as a way to like manage stress or get relief. When we enter into a relationship with alcohol, we're entering into a relationship with a substance that is literally changing the GPS system. It's like going in to a mechanic and literally changing the structure of the engine and changing the structure of the GPS system. That's what people don't realize. And that's unfortunately the piece that were highly misinformed about when it comes to alcohol. And so the reason you keep relapsing isn't because you don't want it bad enough. It's because you're not doing the things to repattern yourself out of addiction. Right? And addiction is multi-dimensional. Right? You have thoughts, you have feelings, you have emotions, you have sensations, you have the relationship that you have to yourself, you have your identity, you have the way that you think about yourself, whether things are possible or not possible, whether you're optimistic and hopeful or you're pessimistic and generally geared towards hopelessness or that things that aren't going to work out. Right? And all of this goes back to your childhood. Right? Like who you are as an adult, whatever ownership you take for it, like I'm this person or I'm that person, right? Like this and I don't like that. Like you have to humble yourself and realize that much of who you are at some level is baseline formed between the ages of zero and seven. And unfortunately, none of us get to choose that. Like our nervous system and our brain is is a mirror to our environment and the data that we're pulling in. That's just the way it is. And that's why like parenting is such an important responsibility, not only for our collective but like for future generations, right? Learning how to be a good parent, being a good role model, being a good leader. Because if you don't have your shit together, if you're emotionally dysregulated, if you don't know how to model things in a way that's going to support the growth of like a healthy child, then that child is going to grow up and they're going to have their own dysfunctions. And listen, nobody can be perfect and everybody's going to have shit that they got a deal with. Like nobody can be an A plus in that regard. But we can try to do better and we can try to do our best. So when it comes to relapse, like one of the biggest things that frustrates me is when people are like, I don't know why I did it again. It's like, yeah, you do know why you did it again. And I've explained to you why you keep doing it. Right? At some level, you feel like you want to increase pleasure or you want to distance yourself from pain. And even though you consciously know that alcohol is not the best solution to do that, you do it anyways because you've crushed a threshold into some spectrum of addiction. Right? Addiction is the repeated use of a substance or a compulsive behavior that has negative downstream consequences, but you keep doing it anyway despite what's happening on the back end. Right? That's not conscious choice. There's obviously something beneath the show that's driving it. There's something that's pulling you there. There's something that's overriding your conscious mind. There's something that's rationalizing and justifying saying it's going to be okay in this moment. Don't worry about it. We'll handle it later. Right? That's not sovereign. That's not agency. And what you have to remember about quitting drinking is that, dude, it's not about alcohol. It's not about alcohol. We're playing at some level and I don't want this to turn you off. We're playing like a spiritual game here. And what I mean by spiritual is that you are this conscious witness. You were hyper-spaced, hyper-looped into being a human. You were just shot out. You just woke up. You were born. You don't know why you're here. You don't know where you're going. You don't know how long you're going to be here. You don't know the mechanics of the universe. You don't know the game. And so you're this conscious ethereal space of awareness that is trying to navigate a universe that is indescribable. Right? We've made predictions. We've made measurements around how we think it works, but we don't really, really know. And so that at some level is spiritual. Right? Like you can't define consciousness. You can't grab consciousness. Still to this day, we've got crazy AI, but we can't actually locate where consciousness exists. Is it inside of us? Is it an invisible field around us? Is our soul in our body or is our soul non-local somewhere else? Like, you know, that that that like gets projected in here? I don't know. None of this stuff is super definable. I like to contemplate it. I like to philosophize it. It's really interesting and stimulating for me. But at some level, you have to remember that like, dude, you are just this thing that's navigating how to drive your human car. Right? Why would we pour poison into the car? The only reason is because we don't know any better. We don't know how to manage the 5 p.m. stress. We don't know how to go out and socialize and be confident without alcohol. We don't know how to deal with the overwhelm of our children or the anger and frustration of our spouse without numbing it. Otherwise, if we did, that's what we would apply. Now, at some level, maybe we do know. Maybe you're a therapist who understands everything that there is to know about healthy communication patterns, but you're still numbing. And that's okay. And that's sort of the, I guess, paradox of it all, or maybe dichotomy is the right word. That like, that's the sneaky part about addiction is because you're dealing with a substance that changes the internal architecture and the way things are organized internally that drive your thoughts, that drive your sensations, that drive your decision making, and that drive your output. Right? So if you've tried to quit drinking, you keep flipping back and forth. It's not because you're bad or weak or not strong enough. It's because you have not committed to a system that will actually go in and reverse and repattern and introduce, well, reverse and repattern the changes that have been made, but also introduce higher level concepts of healing and reintegration and expansion. Right? Like, you have to remember that quitting drinking is not this sad thing. Like, it is at some level, right? We all go through the pity party and the sadness and the why me and life is not fair. And I wish I could drink normally and of course, of course, everything in life is in service to neurochemistry. What's part of the reason that I drink this, this coffee in the morning, to get a little hit of dopamine, maybe to increase a little bit of serotonin and to get the caffeine into my brain to block the adenosine receptors that make me tired. So literally everything that we're doing is in service to neurochemistry. Why do we cold punch? Why do we go to the gym? Why do we try to get good sleep? Why do we like foods that are salty and fatty and sugary and delicious in service to neurochemistry? Right? This is why it's important to learn about yourself, understand your human operating system, understand who you are, learn about psychology. Why am I the way that I am? What impact did my past have on my present? Why do I keep quote-unquote self sabotaging? Why do I meet certain edges of my life where my nervous system either freezes or shuts down or constantly gets me to go back into the loop? Like, who am I? How does this thing work? Like, where do I want to go? What do I want to experience? Have I tapped into my intuition? What is the subtle pull that drives me in certain directions and creates these interesting synchronicities in my life where this person comes in or this person leaves or this opportunity opens up? Like, what's the underlying river and thread that's like orchestrating this whole thing? Really, really important. If you want to be a conscious intelligent human being who is like grounded, sovereign, centered, has a level of clarity and awareness where you can direct your life forward and support yourself and support other people in a way that feels good and in alignment. Like, these are the things we want to start thinking about and these are the things that are within neurorepannoning and in my program. You know? It's like we have to, we have to begin looking at ourselves through this higher order lens and it's not about alcohol, right? we get into a contract or a relationship with alcohol unconsciously, right? We don't choose the alcohol thing. It chooses us. It's a byproduct of social engineering and culture going into high school, going into college, right, developing your identity, moving away from your parents, experimentation, rebellion, whatever you want to call it, feeling cool, feeling hot, feeling sexy, dating, whatever the case is, right? And, but when you look at it, it's like, dude, they came in and they're hijacking your system. Your reward system, your prefrontal cortex, your amygdala, the way that your nervous system manages is the most important driver of your life. It is what is going to determine, you know, your caliber of human being. It's going to determine your communication skills, your leadership, what it feels like when you walk into a room. It's going to determine the type and quality and caliber of partner that you have. It's going to determine how you show up and lead yourself or lead your family or your community. It's going to determine how much risk you take, how much money you make over the course of your lifetime, whether you're able to go out and like become the version of yourself that you've always dreamed of, or not. And that's the reality. It's about your nervous system. It's about your brain. It's about your identity. It's about your beliefs. It's about how you structure your days and how you live and your time management and everything in between. It's really, really important to look at yourself not as just this thing that's floating in the wind, but there's order to it. There's structure to it. There's patterns to it. And if you know how to read between the lines, if you can look at somebody and say, "Okay, well, I keep sapet, self-sapetaging here." Or I tell myself this and then I do that. If you understand the mechanics of what's going on, it's really easy to trace it back to identify. It's like, "Why do we have this bug in the system?" Well, at some level we had an experience. We had an imprint. It created a filter. We practiced that over and over again. It became part of our identity. That identity got connected to this social group. And now it's become, and formed the structure of who we think we are. And now we're afraid to break away from it because if we do, we're going to experience a loss of love and feel isolated. And so like, there's a lot to it, right? But I don't want to overwhelm you and make you think that you have to go in and solve all these problems. Neuropatterning, I think, is like 10 years of therapy in 90 days. The way I've structured it is I've reverse engineered alcoholism after working with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people having gone through it myself as well. And if created a system, a 90 day system where every single day you just press play and listen to a guided experience, and it's going to take you through a profound evolutionary journey. And then you just smoke here, like feel the sincerity in my voice. Nothing exists like it. And what's beautiful about it is that like you don't have to think, okay, what's the next step? Just show up the next day and do the next exercise. And the other piece is community support and accountability. When you don't have accountability, like that's where addiction re-emerges. You know, addiction thrives in privacy. So if you've tried to do this before a bunch of times, you flip, flop back and forth, it's because you don't have that strong sense of accountability. And that's really, really important. So looking at yourself through the lens of like, okay, am I tracking myself? Do I have a sense of structure? Do I have a sense of accountability? You know, when we think about alcohol, right, it's not about the one drink. It's never about the one drink. It's about looking at yourself through your maturity, through your evolution as a human being and asking yourself, am I sovereign? Or are there other things that are controlling my thoughts, feelings, emotions and decisions? And listen, this isn't a matter of morality. It's neurochemistry. Like I said, everything we do is in service to neurochemistry. Addiction is the most human thing possible, right? If the axiom of life is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and then you find a few things that exist on this plane, like porn, potentially sex, gambling, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, alcohol, marijuana, various types of pills or benzos, right? Like, if it helps you in your unique makeup, experience more pleasure faster and with less effort, and also helps you relieve pain faster and with less effort, than other things that you've been exposed to in your life, that becomes a propensity for addiction. An addiction is just the extreme end of your brain doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is to get closer to feeling good and get closer to the relief from feeling bad. Because you're not a bad person. I really want to make this clear, like demystify this, like let go of the shame, let go of the judgment. That doesn't mean just keep doing it. Shame in judgment, the reason they feel icky, the reason they feel like shit is because this system is intelligent enough to produce a series of sensations, right? Hundreds of different varying degrees of sensation from joy to happiness, empathy, to compassion, to generosity, to excitement, to fear, to disgust, to everything in between. But the reason shame and guilt don't feel good is that it's very simple. Your heart already knows, your soul already knows, you're not operating in alignment. You're doing something that at some level is outside of your integrity, is outside of your truth, outside of your like core sense of self. So it's feedback. It says, hey, okay, if we feel shame, if we feel guilt, just let's turn around, let's rewind the tape. What series of events let us hear? Oh, well, we told ourselves that we had these commitments and these responsibilities, and then we went out and we drank instead. And then you feel like shit the next day and you don't feel resource enough to be able to move through or follow through on those. And so it's like, yeah, you feel shame and guilt. Not as a thing to wallow in and say, well, I'm just a piece of shit, and I'm not good enough. And I should have known better and I did it. It's like, yeah, of course you knew better. We all know better. But based off of how the drug has interacted with our system for long enough, there's been neurobiological changes to our pre-fonal cortex. Our pre-fonal cortex can't fully be online and look at our inputs and outputs. Our amygdala is over activated and our insula is sending really intense and interoceptive messages in the form of anxiety and the form of withdrawal and the form of craving that now feels really overwhelming for our nervous system. And so it's not just a matter of consciously willpowering your way through it. You have to apply practical tools and strategies like neurorepaterning where every single day you retrain your nervous system. You retrain your brain in order to learn how to think about and interpret and relate to your consciousness. And when I say consciousness, that is the encompassing field of your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your sensations, your desires, your goals, your beliefs, everything that encompasses your experience of reality. We have to learn how to repattern those things. We have to learn what they are, the root of them, how they came to be, how to change them, how to update them, how to reintegrate them. Then we need to figure out who we want to become, where we're going, the direction of our life. And then we need to re-teach our brain in our nervous system what it's like to embody that. When you look in the coaching world, there's thousands of coaches that are called embodiment coaches. And the only way that they coach people, I mean there's a lot of different ways, but embodiment coaching is about teaching people to say, okay, you're at point A and you want to get to point B. Who is point B? What do they think like? What do they feel like? When they wake up and they go about their day, how do they do it? How do they react to stress? How do they problem solve? When they get into this situation, how do they show up? And more importantly, how do they feel? What is like the energetic and neurochemical signature of their body? And coaching is about learning to say, learning to experience that like, if you want to be this, embody it now in the present moment. And as you do, and this is where we get into quantum and some of the more multi-dimensional, maybe spiritual stuff, it's like when you embody the energetic frequency of who you want to be and what your ideal is, your brain starts thinking in reference to that. And then your thoughts and your decisions and your beliefs and your behaviors start reflecting that. And then as a result, you're going to notice different opportunities. You're going to be able to engage with people differently. And then at some level, depending on what you believe, this is what I believe in almost every really highly successful person I've ever met, is that the universe in one shape way or form is going to begin to reorganize itself to bring you energetic and frequency matches to that embodied state. The people, the opportunities, the experiences, the things that match that frequency. And so that's also what neuro-repounding offers. And that's you're not getting that in AA. You're never gonna get that through talking to an addiction counselor. You're not gonna get it paying $50,000 a month in rehab. And what you have to remember is that learning, learning how to become an alcoholic and learning how to stop being an alcoholic or whatever label doesn't matter, right? Somebody who drinks versus somebody who doesn't drink at the level of identity is about repetition. Don't be afraid of repetition. You've been applying repetition to everything since you were born. You applied repetition to learn language. You applied repetition to learn math. You applied repetition to how you hang out with your friends in the way that you communicate and the way that you contribute to the conversation. You applied repetition when you learned Spanish in high school or college. You applied repetition when you sat behind your computer and became an expert at using your specific software within your field of work. That is how you learn. All we are is a bundle of neural pathways. That's it. I know it's hard to believe who you are, what feels normal, what feels regular, what feels easy, what feels predictable, what feels automatic, is because you have applied something with repetition over and over and over and over again to let moves up the different levels of learning. You have unconscious, what is it, you have the levels of learning. You have unconscious incompetence. You don't know what you don't know and you don't know what you're bad at. You're just disconnected from the field. Then you have conscious incompetence. That's when you try playing guitar for the first time and you've never played. You're like, I'm consciously aware that I'm incompetent at this thing and I'm not good at it. Then after enough practice, you move up the next level of learning. Now you're building more neural pathways. You have conscious competence. Maybe you've been practicing a language. Maybe you just started writing a motorcycle. Maybe you just started playing a new instrument. Maybe you just started. Whatever the case may be. You've now developed some neural pathways where the thing that you're doing feels okay but you have to pay close attention to it. You have to stay engaged. You're aware that you're getting good at it now. Then the next level, which is sort of like expertise, not quite mastery but maybe like expert level, is unconscious competence. Now you're competent at something unconsciously. You've developed the repetitions and neural pathways for it where it is just normal. You don't have to think about when you go up and brush your teeth. Where do I pour the toothpaste? If I have an electric toothbrush, where's the brush? How do I brush my teeth? You've done it a thousand times. You do it with your eyes closed, holding a baby on the phone. It's like same thing with driving a car. Subride is the same way. Meeting stress is the same way. Managing overwhelm. Being a great leader, leading your family. Communication skills. Staying calm under the face of threat. Like everything's about your brain and your nervous system. And so if you haven't been able to stop drinking, you're not addressing your brain and nervous system. You're just trying to white knuckle and you're like, it's fucking hard. Yeah, it's hard because the addiction thing and coming out of addiction isn't about willpower. It's about learning the underlying neurological, psychological and emotional architecture that makes you you in the present moment now that drives what feels automatic. It's like you're trying to apply a handbrake to a car that's going a thousand miles an hour one way. It's like, dude, it's, you can do it. You might get some screeching tires. Might slow it down a little bit, but it's like, dude, a thousand miles an hour is a thousand miles an hour. And you have to understand that, right? Like, get over your high horse of like, no, I'm gonna do it myself. You've tried doing it on your own. Dude, if you listen to my podcast and you're like, and this guy's already seen this stuff make sense, you know, one plus one equals two, this seems to be adding up. I was not able to do it alone. I tried doing it alone for a decade. I tried the AAs, I tried the things, I was like, that's whack, it doesn't make sense. I don't wanna label myself an alcoholic. I tried. I went six months, that was the longest I went and then I had dinner. I took out my ex girlfriend to dinner. And I was like, oh, it's celebratory, we're sitting on the beach, it's night, candle lit. Like, I'll just have one. She's like, really? Like, are you sure? Like, you've been doing really good. Like, I'm like, yeah, it'll be fine. Like, I'm just gonna have one tonight and I probably won't drink again. I just wanna celebrate you for your birthday. Bullshit rationalization, we've all done it a million times. And I was right back in the cycle, drinking just how I was within days or weeks. I can't remember, it was like six, no. This is like when I was 27 now. So it's been seven or eight years ago, you know? And so, like, and then the last level of learning, sorry to be jumping around here is, conscious, unconscious, conscious competence, I think is the last level. And that's when you're so good at something that you can easily teach it to others, you know? And that's what sobriety is. But the reason it feels hard is because you haven't developed the neural pathways for it yet. Your brain is still constantly signaling stress, unsafety, something bad's gonna happen. It's producing intense sensation, it's producing craving. That's because you haven't learned how to repattern and create safety in your nervous system. You haven't learned and you haven't repatterned the prefrontal cortex to bring it more online so that it gets better at working with you and playing the tape forward and consciously, like supporting you and looking at your downstream consequences based off of your available options, right? You haven't practiced things that calm the amygdala, right? Like for example, meditation, they've done hundreds of studies. If you go to Google right now and look up the benefits of meditation on the brain. Meditation helps reduce amygdala activity. Amygdala is the emotional sort of reptilian part of your brain. It's one of the oldest regions of our brain that's responsible for like our fight or flight response, right? That is core to survival. And what you have to remember about the amygdala and the fight or flight response is because it's based in survival, it's part of the autonomic nervous system. It's part of the nervous system. You don't really get to choose, right? If I'm standing at the edge of the street on my phone looking down about to cross a crosswalk and I think the light turns green, but it doesn't. And I start walking and a car zooms past me 50 miles an hour, there is going to be an instant cascade of adrenaline that I can't, I don't get to choose that. I don't get to control that. My heart rate is going to go from 55 beats per minute to 160 beats per minute. And I'm going to be like freaking out for a second thing and I just died. I don't get to choose that. That happens beyond my conscious willpower and control, right? Same thing with alcohol. When you experience pleasure or you experience relief from deep levels of sadness, grief, disconnection, isolation, rejection, fear, overwhelm, anxiety, whatever, the brain remembers that. That is survival. That like 2026 is what that's what's happening now. Your brain, your body is interpreting it. Like you just out ran a lion or a tiger. It's going to remember that. It's important. It stamps it, right? Anything that produces dopamine is naturally reinforced. I want you to remember that. Things that produce dopamine, the more dopamine they produce, the more they become reinforced. That's why they say that people who do methamphetamines or crystal meth, the chance and likelihood of being addicted is extremely likely on the first or second time, like addicted for life until you go to rehab or you figure out how to overcome crystal meth. Like it's wild. That's because crystal meth produces a thousand nanograms per desoliter of dopamine. Alcohol produces around 200 nanograms per desoliter of dopamine. Cocaine raises your dopamine to around 250 nanograms per desoliter of dopamine. So when you see people who are addicted to coke, who are looking like these little ghouls and goblins who are constantly doing lines, and you're like, damn, that's a hard drug and you've got this whole aversion to it and you think like, oh my god, they're addicted to cocaine. It's not very different than alcohol. 50 points of dopamine response. Now for context, sex in your favorite food is raising your dopamine to around 100 nanograms per desoliter. So the normal human operating system over the last several million years has been only exposed to sex and food. Like your max threshold for natural dopamine is 100 nanograms per desoliter, maybe a little bit more in certain instances. And so alcohol's coming in. It's coming in at 200. But guess what? You don't have to fight for it. You don't have to court anybody. You don't have to hunt for it. You don't have to. to potentially put your life on the line or potentially lose community members for it. You're getting programmed by television and movies and media and commercials and everything in between that this is good for you, that everybody that you look up to is good, that it's going to increase your status, it's going to make you more money, it's going to make you hotter and more attractive, it's going to move you up the ladder and it's going to be a great way to socially bond with other people. So you're like, yeah, fuck it, let's do it. And then your brain's like, great, it's awesome at relieving pain and it's great at providing me pleasure. It provides social inhibition, I can feel more like myself and that and that and so that becomes the thing. Listen to what I just said, it helps me feel more like myself. So if you haven't been able to stop drinking and you keep drinking around your friends because you feel awkward around them, then that becomes your medicine. You're using alcohols a way to compensate some aspect of yourself that you don't feel connected to or you feel as unresolved or you feel as disconnected or that you don't want to acknowledge or as painful. So how do we resolve that? The way that you resolve that is you understand that, dude, being an adult and being afraid of sitting at a table and talking to other people is a little ridiculous, right? And I'm not shaming you or judging you. Like yourself should be like, yeah, why do I feel anxious around other people? It's because at some level through your development, either with your parents or at school, in middle school or in high school or you had a best friend or you gave a presentation or something happened where at some level you're safe, right? Like remember, when you're born, you're this empty sponge. Babies aren't born with social anxiety unless there's some deeper disorder that they're born with. But most social anxiety, I don't know what the number is, 90 plus percent of social anxiety is a learned adaptation in response to big-tier little T-trauma. We have an experience where we are vulnerable, where we are just fully ourself, and then we are exposed. And some aspect of our humanity, our truth, our essence, our authenticity was then denied, rejected, shamed, repressed, told it was wrong, told it was bad, told that it was whatever. And so through that experience, when we experience it as a kid or a teenager, we didn't know how to process it. We didn't know that that person was just vomiting their own insecurity and lack of emotional capacity onto us. And so they projected their own dysregulation onto us, and we took it as fact, we took it as truth, and so we shut that part of ourself down. And so now every time we go into an environment that the brain, because the brain is a predictive modeling system, it's looking at everything that you can see through your five senses and experience through your five senses, and it's predicting what might happen next. It's predicting what might happen next. And so as a result, the brain sees something that's closely related to the shirt that your dad used to wear, or how your mom used to do her makeup, or the look on this person's face, or whatever the case is, right? Like you're sitting at a table and somebody, you know, people have to introduce themselves, and the one time that you did, you stumbled on your words and everybody laughed, or you gave a presentation, or whatever the case is, right? By first developing the courage to recognize that you are not your limitations, you are not your dysfunctions, you are not your fear, you are not your anxiety, you are not your not good enoughness, you are not your unworthiness, you are not the, it's not possible for me. These are learned concepts that we then take on, practice unconsciously, and then the world reflects because of how we engage and interact with the world, right? There's something called confirmation bias, where when you believe something, without knowing it, this is just what your brain does. It's a heuristic, which means it's a shortcut for your brain to try to understand and interpret the world, right? It's at some level it's part of the survival circuit. Confirmation bias says, "Oh, well I'm not good enough and I'm not worthy." So then every time you go into a conversation or you hang out with friends or the person cuts you off or you get the short end of the stick, you're like, "Oh, see, I'm just not worthy." You look for evidence to support the internal experience of reality that you have confirmed to believe true. Dude, it's really simple. Why is it that when you look at anybody who's really successful, you look at Conor McGregor, the famous UFC fighter, you look at Will Smith, you look at actors, athletes, actresses, sport stars, people who are really high level in business. They all say the same thing. I believed in myself, even when nobody else believed in me. I had my sight and my vision set on a goal and I executed it relentlessly despite all the odds. I saw it and I felt it and I believed it and I embodied it despite no evidence in my life and nothing even showing up for months or even years at a time. But then something happens and they break through into the stratosphere. And we look at those people and say, "Oh, they must be lucky. Oh, they must be more talented. Oh, they must have some skill set that I don't have." And it's like, "No." They in their mind, the way they talk to themselves, the way they relate to themselves, the way they believe them about themselves in the world is more positive. It's more resourceful. And that's it. They believe. And then they align their identity, thoughts, beliefs and actions in accordance with that, despite the fear, the anxiety, the resistance, world-throwing curveballs and challenges at them, it not working out. They're a partner leaving them. They're business partners screwing them over. They just keep going. And it's like at some level, you've got to think about yourself and say, "What is your orientation? What is your compass? Are you just moving through laxodaisically?" And that's fine too. Not every, it's not all about performance or success. You can just chill and coast and be comfortable too. But you have to remember that at some level, there's opportunity cost and life will give you what you ask of it, what you demand of it and what you're willing to work for despite the challenges. So I say all that to say that. The inner architecture of your consciousness, the way that you think, the way that you choose to interpret how you're feeling, the story that you give to the emotion that's coming up matters and will influence and dictate your life. If you are in a conflict with your partner and you're telling them one thing and you feel disrespected and that they're not listening or you're sharing something and you feel like they're not willing to hear you out and they're overpowering you and talking over you and telling you what they think is best for you versus hearing you and feeling you. And so you feel angry and withdrawn. You have two options. You can pause. You can do, excuse me, I'm clearing my throat. First thing you can do is you can allow that adrenaline to build the anger, the frustration and you can tell them to fuck off. You can tell them to get the hell out of the house. You can storm out. You can cuss at them and you can tell them they have no idea what they're talking about. They never care about you. They never listen and you can meet that energetic frequency at the same level and amplify it and turn it into a storm and turn it into chaos, which is what a lot of people do. Because they haven't learned how to slow down and hold sensation in their body. This is part of the sobriety journey. This is why you quit drinking. This is how you evolve into a next caliber of human being is you learn how to maintain the sensation without losing your shit. You learn how to bear the sensation. You get stronger at it. The sensation in the beginning is a 10 out of 10 and it sucks, but you do it. You practice it. You learn how to apply these strategies and tools and techniques to your human operating system that most people just don't know about and they're not doing. And as a result, six months later, they can bear the load and it only feels like a three. The first option is you meet fire with fire. The second option is you wait until they're done. You hold space and you say, "Hey, I won totally acknowledge that in this moment what I'm feeling right now is a lot of like intensity inside of my body. Based off of what I shared with you, I feel like you're not really hearing me and I feel like before I got to complete my thought, like you just jumped in and started overriding like what I was bringing to you. And for me, that doesn't make me feel good. It feels like for me that you're, it feels like I'm feeling not cared about. I'm feeling a little bit disrespected and honestly, like I feel a little disappointed. And so, like intelligent, healthy communication is about you. It's not about me, right, if I'm like the person. It's not about pointing fingers and saying, you're a disrespectful person. You don't care about me. You don't listen. It's talking about what's coming up internally for me, right? This is healthy. communication, this is healthy leadership. Right? And then we pause and then we open space for them. Right? And if they're not at a place in their life where they've learned how to communicate, if they haven't learned how to manage their sensation, they're going to say, "Well, you always do this, you always play this game and it's you, you, you, you, you, and it's never about that. They're not taking emotional accountability for their sensation. They're not taking accountability for how your words stimulated something inside of them." And then speaking to it in a way that's healthy so that there can be more, like, healthier resolve and harmony. Right? Like what feels good for me is being spoken to like this. And this is what supports my nervous system and keeps me open and keeps me mutually collaborative so that we can solve our problems together. What works for you? Right? Maybe I did approach this in a way that didn't feel good for your nervous system. So help me understand in your perfect world what would that look like? Right? And so it's like, that's kind of on topic. Now we're talking about like some relationship coaching and healthy communication patterns. But I want you to understand that all this stuff is connected. Right? The reason we're drinking alcohol is because we don't know any better. We fallen into a pattern with a substance that has hijacked our operating system and now we feel dependent on it. We feel sad to let go of the dopamine hit. We feel sad to let go of the friend group where all we do is fuck around and not be productive and not be shit that's good for us. And then we feel like shit the next day. We're operating a fraction of our potential and we're like all this sucks. It's like, yeah, we were fucking with a substance we shouldn't have been fucking within the first place. We never needed it. And the reason that we got hooked on it is because it became a compensation pattern to meet one of our needs. We were afraid socially. We wanted to fit into a friend group. We felt like we had to do it for work. We used as a way to manage our breakup or our loss or our grief. And or we're working in a job. We don't like like whatever fill in the blank. Right? It's a little different but also very similar for all of us. And so yeah, I hope this was helpful. I want it to create context. I want it to help you understand the map and the picture because quitting drinking is not about putting the bottle down. That's obviously what it is at some level. But once you put the bottle down, once you're not drinking and you don't have alcohol in your mouth, it becomes about you. It becomes about your thoughts, your feelings, your relationships, the way that you interpret your reality, the way that you interpret your mind, the way that you interpret the sensation, the story that you tell yourself about it. And whether you have clarity on who you're becoming and why it's important for you to remove alcohol or not. And if you don't have clarity, you're going to relapse again. And that's just part of the journey. Right? That the dark part of addiction, I want to remind you guys is that like you can't force anybody out of addiction. It doesn't matter. It's a deeply, uniquely personal, spiritual, neurological journey. If you're in a relationship with a man or a woman who is drinking and it's ruining your life, like you have to remember that the axiom of life is pain and pleasure. And so for them, if they're not ready to give up drinking, it's because at some level, the pain of alcohol has not outweighed the benefit and pleasure that they get from it. The reason anybody quits drinking is that they get to a place in life where they are deeply honest with themselves and they recognize that the pain outweighs the pleasure. Like yeah, the pleasure is great. Getting the relief is great. Fucking off after 5pm is great. But dude, this is taking so much more from me now. It's really affecting my relationship. Things are on the line. It's potentially affecting my work. It's affecting my money. It's affecting my health, my liver enzymes. I just got my blood work back. Like I've got 10, 20, 30, 40 years left to live. I want to accomplish this. I don't want to be a fucking slave, constantly filtering every thought around when my next drink is going to be like I'm tired of it. It's fucking bullshit. And I know it feels scary to let it go, but the reason it feels so scary is because you've never worked a good, proper system and structure in program that supports recovering the way I believe and the way I've come to understand recovery should be addressed. You go to a couple meetings here and there and you have people call themselves an alcoholic that feels disconnected and crazy. You have people share some more stories about alcohol. You go to a therapist and a therapist asks you about your childhood and you don't feel like you can connect the dots around how it's actually relevant. You go talk to an addiction counselor and then they ask you, okay, well, what's going on in your life? And it's like this, this and that. But they're not giving you actual daily structure with accountability and practical tools and strategies to go in and like do all that. You have one 45 minute or hour long session and then you see him in a week or two weeks later and you're right back into the environment with all the same bullshit, with all the same cues, with all the same triggers, with all the same people, with all the same stressors. Like that is not sustainable, my friend. You need an immersive experience where you can go in and do the work and repattern and reprogram and learn the things. And that's what neuro repatterning is all about. Like I've deconstructed all of the most important healing modalities within neuro-linguistic programming, somatic work and many, many others into these systems where every single day you just press play, you go through the guided experience. You've got two weekly coaching calls. You've got a community chat. We have a daily sobriety blueprint that like re-regulates your nervous system, creates calm and safety in your brain, supports healthy dopamine recovery, like teaches you the fundamental skills to learn how to drive your human car better. So I hope this episode was helpful for you. I hope it gave you some light, some inspiration, some hope. I hope it connected the dots and that you're able to look at yourself and really reflect at a deeper level and just better understand who am I? Why am I here? Why are these my patterns? Why do I keep going back to the same things despite knowing consciously that I don't want to or that I want to change it? And that's why. It's a layer of psychology. It's a layer of emotion. It's a layer of your broader kind of identity. And it's your neurology. It's your brain, right? Our brain drives us. But so many of us just totally discount that part and don't think about it. We're like, I just have to force not doing it. And it's like, yeah, at some level, just like, you know, you want to go have a cheeseburger, but you're like, I might just do the chicken grilled salad instead because it's probably going to be better for me. It's like, ah, yeah. But what if there were things that you can do every day to reprogram your thoughts, your beliefs, your identity about who you are? You're like, I'm the person who just has the healthy chicken salad. And that feels good and that feels natural because that's an alignment with my values and who I am and where I'm going. And I feel connected to and excited and pulled and motivated and embodied, ah, by that tether of who I am and where I'm going because I can see it. I can feel it. It's clear. I feel good about it. And I've been able to work through the limitations of fear and anxiety and undeservingness. Like, dude, just imagine the possibility of who you can become. I want you to start dreaming again because that's what sobriety is about. It's not like, it's not recovery. It's the rise of your potential. It's the next iteration. It is the next evolution of your energy, your consciousness and the, um, possibility of the whole spectrum of who you can be and how you can think and how you can feel and how you can relate and who you hang out with and how you manage your time. And I know it feels hard or scary to break away from that old identity. But it's like, dude, that's what a caterpillar has to do to become a butterfly. And if the butterfly, like, if the caterpillar, if, if, like, if it new, that it's like, okay, like if I go through this shit, I'm going to become this whole new evolution, this whole new iteration, it would be much more motivated to get into that cocoon, right? And that's what you have to remember. Every single person minus those few, those couple that don't do shit after they quit drinking, they change nothing, right? They do no work on themselves. Every single person, remember, I promise you, every single person says life is way better. So I want you to hold on to that hope. There's so much light at the end of the tunnel. And, um, yeah. Thank you for listening. If you stayed this long, leave a comment on this episode below. Let me know your thoughts, what stood out to you. If it was impactful, what specifically, um, you liked about it. And, um, if there's any other topics you want me to cover inside of my podcast, if you can leave a review on Spotify and on Apple as well, that would mean the world to me. And if you want to work with me, I have two programs. I have one on one coaching and I have group coaching. Um, Neuroreep patterning is launching here very soon. The structure of a lot of things are changing very soon. But right now group coaching is 2500. Um, and, uh, that covers the entire year's worth of access to the program to group coaching calls per week full access to neurore patterning. Um, and yeah, actually, neurore patterning is, is, is separate from that. It's not, it doesn't include neurore patterning. Um, it's five, I think neurore patterning is going to be $500 and you'll be able to access that as well. So 3000 total. Uh, one on one coaching is 5500. Um, and that's 90 days of working one on one with me and also includes a full year of access to the group coaching program as well. And at super comprehensive in detail, there's way more that's included, but that's just the high level structure. Um, You can pay it on a credit card. You can also, if you have a credit score of 650 or higher, you can finance it through a firm and pay like a couple hundred bucks a month. Super doable, super feasible. And I just wanted to put that out there for those who have been contemplating on the edge or are interested. So if it feels like something you're ready to do in 2026, if you're sick and tired of dealing with the same problems, the same pains, you wanna get a grasp on this thing. And you feel like there's a calling to like finally expand and make life better, happier, more connected, more clear, more fulfilling, healthier relationships, more chemistry, more connection, more intimacy, more trust, more money, more adventure. You can do all these things plus so much more when you aren't drinking a poison that is fucking you up all the time. I promise you, I promise you. If you guys knew who I was over five years ago versus the man showing up and leading this podcast today, you wouldn't have believed it. So have hope, keep fighting the good fight. And if you wanna work together, www.thestobdrinkingcoach.com, share this podcast with a friend, a family member, somebody who you think it'll help. That'll be your good deed for the day. And yeah, subscribe if you haven't as well already. I love you, I appreciate you. Thank you for the continued support. Thank you for continuing to listen and I will see you in the next episode.