The Neuroscience of Cravings

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. Hey, welcome back to another episode. My name is Barti Arez. I'm the Stop Drinking Coach and I want to welcome you back to another episode of the Stop Drinking Coach podcast. And in today's episode titled "The Neuroscience of Cravings," I want to help you better understand what cravings are, what's going on inside of the brain, inside of the nervous system, and inside of the body, that creates cravings, that produces cravings, that creates that almost autopilot drive of, "Hey, I know I don't want to drink. I conceptually understand that alcohol is a neurotoxin and that it's damaging my health and my family and it's no way to live and I can see it getting in the way of my potential and all the different ways it negatively impacts us yet I still find myself going back. The cravings just seem to be too intense or too overwhelming. And I think as we begin to really understand addiction through neuroscience and not through the old school paradigm of sort of this disease model of addiction that you get from AA that you know, you hear this rhetoric and this, this lingo around. It's mysterious, it's cunning, it's baffling, it's right, it's like we don't understand it, it's this deep dark black hole and you're just afflicted with it and that the solution is to turn yourself over to a higher power to absolve you of your quote unquote character defects in that in order to stay sober you have to basically attend meetings for the rest of your life. Like listen, while that has worked for you know, a number of people over the last hundred years. The truth is the reality is is that in modern science, in the modern day, in 25 coming into 2026, we need to begin looking at addiction through a modern lens, through a lens that is verifiable that we can understand where we can systematically actually break down what's going on in somebody's consciousness, what's going on in somebody's body, what's going on inside of the brain, what are the different regions of their brain that are involved in this whole mechanism, this whole thing that we call alcoholism and why do we continue to feel this pull to drink despite consciously not wanting to. And so if you go through and listen to my podcast, many of the topics and things that I'm going to cover today, I've covered in other episodes. So today is going to be sort of an amalgamation. I'm going to put it all together for you and explain it in a way that hopefully turns on a light bulb, hopefully speaks to you in a way where it's like, ah, yes, this makes sense. These are things that I've maybe thought about or have heard piecemeal together between Bardia or another content creator or some book I read or some YouTube video, but now it's starting to make sense. And I think understanding logically what's actually happening significantly helps you begin applying what you need to learn and apply to get to the other side of this thing, right? Like if you look at alcoholism and if you look at your relationship with alcohol and cravings as this like deep dark mysterious black hole that you just keep banging your head against the wall over, like, it's like, it's like you're shooting in the dark. You're in this black room, hoping, attempting like, like shooting from the hip, not able to connect the context of all these inputs and outputs and connections together. And so it becomes a lot more overwhelming. And so my goal with all the work that I do is to help demystify it in a way that's like, okay, this makes sense. If I just follow step one, two, three, four, and five and do that consistently, I can get results. I can get to the other side of this thing and I can finally begin to experience freedom from alcohol. So fundamentally, what we need to understand, the primary foundation of addiction all comes down to one simple thing and it's called the pain pleasure principle. See what you have to understand is that as human beings living in 2025 or 2026 or whenever you happen to be listening to this, our physiology, meaning our brain, our metabolism, our nervous system, is that of a hunter gather 200,000 years ago. It has not changed, it has not adapted for the modern times, right? Because biology adapts very, very, very, very slowly, right? Just because over the last hundred years we went from horse and buggy to a Tesla self-driving car does not mean that our brain and that our operating system has evolved at that same pace. So our brain, our nervous system, our operating system, this meat suit that you're like sitting behind, almost like a virtual reality character, you're looking out through your eyes and interfacing with the world, its biology, its architecture, its mechanics are based off of like primitive survival hunter gather society, right? So what I mean by that is that the basic axiom of the human operating system operates on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. And if you heard my last episode titled, Alcoholism is Not a Disease and How to Quit Drinking, I go into this, right? So what you have to understand is that from the moment that you're born until the moment you die, let's call that a hundred years, okay? Every single thing that you experience, every decision you make, every thought that you have, every decision around should I do this or should I do that is like all of it, every single thought that the foundational sponsoring drive behind everything is, is this going to get me closer to feeling good or is this going to move me away from feeling bad? That's it. Every human emotion at some level is rooted on the spectrum of that axiom. Every thought, every belief that we have, every belief that we want to hold on to, everything, every paradigm, every aspect of our personality, every aspect of our identity, every choice that we make and that we have ever made and that we will ever make is rooted in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, all of it. And I talk about this in my last episode, like why do you go and fill up gas? Why do you buy something from Amazon? Why do you go get an education? Why do you try to get a good job? Why do you try to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend or get married or have kids or any, like why do you go buy new furniture? Why do you decide that you want to go to the movies? Why do you watch Netflix? Why do you go out and hang out with your friends and go to a baseball game? Why do you get a car wash? Why? Like everything. I'm telling you, like the reason I'm like railing this is because you have to begin looking at yourself, your vessel, this computer system called the human operating system that you inhabit through the lens of pleasure and pain. That's what everything is rooted in. And it can't be any other way because in order to survive on planet earth, this is how this biological organism has survived. Things that bring us pleasure tend to optimize our survival, meaning it helps us live longer and it makes us feel good and it makes the human experience not this destructive, painful thing that we want to hate and just want to escape all the time, right? Things that make us feel good are generally good for our survival. Things like eating food, things like going to the bathroom, things like connecting with a friend, things like being inside of community, laughing with your family or your friends, going out and traveling the world and having a new awe, inspiring experience. And moving away from things that make us feel bad, obviously also support our survival, right? Things that could make us feel bad or cause pain. If you just take that a few notches to the nth degree to the other side of the spectrum, means death means being a vegetable, means losing access to our senses or our intellect or to our ability to be a self-sustaining productive member of society, right? Like it's really simple, like just look at addiction. The deepest levels of addiction where somebody's in pain all the time or a drug addict on the street. Right? Like, that is the destruction and dissolution of that person's identity and life and personal sovereignty. Like, things that make us feel bad are things like being in an abusive, toxic, dynamic, or relationship. Right? It just wrecks our emotions, it wrecks our mental health. Things that could cause harm, like putting ourselves out in oncoming traffic, like we can get hit by a car and not only die or become severely like mangled and, you know, being a wheelchair for the rest of our life or lose our limbs or lose our arms, right? So it's like, this is the game that we play on Earth, right? Like this is the way this biosphere of survival with all plants and animals and everything else is designed, is moving towards feeling better and trying to relieve or get in fun of or move away from feeling bad. So that's the game. That is what we're all playing from the moment we're born to the moment we die. Whether you deal with alcoholism or addiction or not, that's what you are doing in every single moment of the day. When you wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth. Why do you brush your teeth? You brush your teeth so that for two reasons, one, so that your breath smells better, your mouth doesn't taste bad, right? So you're moving away from bad or pain. And so that when you're talking to people socially, you don't turn them off by having halitosis or stinky breath, right? So having a clean mouth supports social dynamics. And then on top of that, by brushing your teeth every day, what you're doing is you're implementing a habit or activity that prevents downstream pain. If you never brush your teeth and you develop cavities and gum disease, then by the time you're 40 or 45 or whatever, you're going to have yellow teeth, your breath is going to smell, you're going to start to have to incur all these expensive dental bills. You're going to not feel as confident. Maybe not as many people are going to be spending, wanting to spend as much time around you. And also you're going to avoid the pain of having a crumbling oral health, right? So that's like a practice that you do every day to move micro towards pleasure and to prevent downstream pain, right? Really, really simple. So what are other habits for activities? Like going to the gym, right? We all know by now that strength training is the single greatest tool for longevity, right? When we look at people going into their later years, into their, let's say, 50, 60, 70s, 80s, one of the greatest predictors of longevity is muscle mass. So if you work out, if you build muscle and you do cardio and you have a strong heart, right? Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death. By doing that, you are preventing the long-term damage or pain that comes from incurring disease and various types of health conditions that could then cause pain. So what you do is you get in front of it today by working out for half an hour, three days a week or whatever the case is, so that you don't have to deal with that pain in the future, right? And I mean, I could give you a narrative examples. Why do we try to get a good job? Why, why, as an 18-year-old, when you don't know your ass from your elbow, I mean, this goes into like the system and I can do this whole another subject and topic, but like, why do we, like, when we don't know what's good or brain prefrontal cortex, like stops developing at 25 at 18, you're like, you're a senior, right? Like you're going into college. You don't know anything. You think you do. And obviously, it's like you know enough, right? You can, right? But like, why do you then go and get alone for 20 to $50,000 a year for four years to try to get an education so that you can move towards pleasure, which is like being able to live a life that feels good, that's in alignment where you get to spend eight hours a day doing something that like moves you or that you're passionate about or that you're skilled in and that you enjoy. And that hopefully you can go out and try to get a good job or make a good salary or develop the skills necessary to go out and start a business so that you can you know, generate the resources or the finances to be able to support your life because we all know when you're living in poverty or if you're living in paycheck to paycheck, it's really stressful, right? Like, so how can you go out and like during the times where you have the time and the energy and resources for it, like get in front of and do the things necessary to avoid pain later on to make yourself feel better, to be able to support others or support a family or whatever the case may be, right? So everything is rooted in pleasure and pain, everything that you do, like you want ice cream, yeah, you want more pleasure or you're going after the ice cream because at some level in your mind and body, you're feeling pain, you're feeling discomfort, you're feeling stressed, you're feeling overwhelmed, you had a crazy stressful day at work and you think ice cream is going to make you feel better or, right? And this is where we begin to get into addiction or you start consuming so much sugar and you start getting so many spikes of dopamine in your brain, like, man, this is going to go deep. It's like you start to get so many spikes of dopamine and in that moment the sugar makes you feel better and so your brain starts to learn, ah, this is a shortcut. I was just stressed out. I was just overwhelmed. I was just sad. I just got out of this relationship. I was just got out of the divorce. I just got broken up with. I insert the blank. There is seven and a half billion people having a totally wild and unique human experience, but it's also all kind of similar as we begin to understand as we begin to really understand how all this stuff works and connects together in terms of psychology and emotions and behavioral patterns and everything in between. But it's like your brain learns like, ah, this helps me feel better. And because you're spiking dopamine, dopamine is connected to the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area in your brain, which is responsible for motivation, anticipation, movement, pleasure, reward. It's like, ah, okay, the hippocampus remembers that. It codes that experience, right? The hippocampus is the same part of your brain 200,000 years ago when you're out hunting for food and you've been hunting for two days and all of a sudden you find this huge patch of edible berries and you're like, ah, fuck, okay. So what happens? You get this spike of dopamine, this pleasure. Ah, okay. The hippocampus remembers that. It records that, right? Because we have to survive. We have to figure out where we're going to get food next. So it records the sensation, the pleasure, the feeling. You get a hit of dopamine and the hippocampus records that memory associated with that feeling in that sensation. So what happens? It's like, okay, the hippocampus, next time you are stressed, aka next time you are hunting or needing to find food, it remembers. It says, hey, these berries located over here, um, provided food, I remember that. And I remember feeling the cessation going from being exhausted, tired, hunting for food for two days, almost thinking we weren't going to find it to finding it. So it, it codes that experience into your brain and into your body, into your memories and into your nervous system. So what happens there is next time you're hunting, next time you're feeling stressed, it remembers the ice cream. It remembers that that is the fastest path to relief. Okay. So what the brain is always trying to do is either move you closer to pleasure or move you away from pain. And so in every micro moment, this is happening faster than you can think, your brain is going through its database of all past experiences to identify a file, a moment, a memory, right? And this is the other piece is I began to introduce to you this concept of memory reconsolidation, which is the basis of all healing, which is the basis of all therapy, which is the basis of all psychotherapy of helping people move past PTSD and trauma and, um, experiences from the past that were overwhelming and painful, like grief and loss and abuse and everything else. Those things are not cemented and static. They are malleable. They're like clay. Your memories and your experiences are malleable like clay. But nobody ever taught us that. No, we just, we don't know that. We think, Oh, like grew up in this fucked up family where my husband left me or this person passed away or this person stabbed me in the back or my company is this or that. And it's just like, we feel like we can't change it. But it's all changeable. We know through neuroplasticity, which is one of the most profound discoveries of modern neuroscience is that even though your brain fully develops at 25 and most of your like neuronal architecture is kind of there and sort of ingrained, your brain is still plastic. You as a human being is a living, breathing ever changing, ever adaptive, ever malleable, um, living ecosystem. So every time. That's why you can learn a new language at 35. It's not as easy as learning it when you were 8, but you can learn it. And many of you listening know that. That's why you can go and be in a job from 20 to 30 and then decide to get a new job, or maybe you've been in the same industry for 20 years. And then you can switch industries. You can go from insurance to accounting, or from being a nurse to being a sales rep. And you can learn the skills and then become proficient at it. And maybe the first three months of being in training, you weren't able to build the map in context. And you had to keep asking your boss or your manager, what did this mean or what do we do after this step? But eventually with enough repetition and enough conditioning, it became normal and natural and automatic in effortless. You became unconsciously competent at it, where you could just do the thing without thinking about it. And then eventually after working there a couple years and you move up to management, you could then train somebody who has no idea on all the skills and strategies and tools and resources and knowledge and data that at one point you didn't have. Right? That is the same journey with sobriety. But what we're doing is we're looking at ourself. We're looking at our consciousness. We're looking at us as human beings. And we're beginning to have to become sort of the surgeon and the internal architect of our life, of all of the different nuances in layers of our human experience between our mindset, between our beliefs, between the voice inside of our head, and the types and qualities of stories we tell ourself. Like are we always pessimistic and negative and feel like everybody is out to get us and fuck us over? Or are we willing to take a step back and consider multiple options or have empathy or see different choices in a particular situation? Right? So what I'm alluding to here is that this human operating system is changeable and it's malleable and it's very important to understand that as we begin to move into quoting drinking and sobriety. So the pain pleasure principle is like the fundamental axiom that we have to understand. Okay? Now when we go to look at addiction, it's multifaceted and it's multi-dimensional. It's not just stress. It's not just a craving. It's not just boredom. It's like it's holistic. It's how do all these things connect together to create my experience of reality as a person? Okay? And so what we begin to have to really understand when it comes to alcohol is that alcohol is a cancerous neurotoxin. I know we don't talk about it that way that much, but I know that many of you who are listening have begun to understand this. Right? Like it's destructive on every level. Dr. Andrew Huberman, the leading neurobiologist at Stanford University, has come out and said, the latest research studies and modern medicine shows that no amount of alcohol is good. The old 1950s, wine is good for your heart because it contains resveratrol and that is anti-aging. It's good for longevity. It's nonsense. Those were lobbied. Those were paid off by the alcohol companies by big alcohol to push consumption. That's the facts. That's not a question anymore. That's not up for debate. Any amount of alcohol is damaging and it's poison. It's destructive. We're consuming a poison. So what do we do here? So how do we look at this? So what we have to understand is the neuroscience of what's happening. Okay? You're not crazy. You're not insane for not being able to figure this thing out. There's nothing wrong with you. Yes, sure. Addiction is like a, it's a health disorder. I don't know if you want to call it a disease. I personally don't think it's a disease. I think addiction is the brain doing what it was designed to do, which is to try to find ways to feel better and relieve discomfort. But addiction is the extreme manifestation of that. Otherwise, we're doing that all day long. The reason I get up and I try to go to work is not because I'm psychotic and crazy. It's because work at some level is going to get me closer to feeling good and move me away from feeling bad. I show up to work every day so that I can feel a sense of fulfillment and alignment and feel productive and contribute to society. And then I get paid for that. And getting paid for that gives me money and resources so that I can buy food and not go hungry and have a roof over my head and pay for a car so that I can get around in the city and go on a vacation from time to time. Or take care of my friends or take care of my family and pay for dinners or whatever the case is. Buy furniture, have a place to sit. We're already doing that. We're already trying to find ways to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But alcohol and drugs, they come in and they hijack the system. There's a few key regions involved in the brain that are connected to addiction. One is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex sits in front of your kind of in the frontal part of your brain behind your forehead. And it's like it's the most, it's like the newest part of our brain development. The reason we are the dominant species on the planet is because we have the most adapted and evolved prefrontal cortex. Our prefrontal cortex is responsible for logic and decision making and future planning and considering like decisions and downstream consequences or downstream effects from the decision we make. Animals don't have that. An animal is stuck in the present moment and they are not anticipating how eating the food now is going to affect them three hours down the line. Humans have this unique ability. And when you drink alcohol, it damages the prefrontal cortex. That is why at 9 a.m. when you wake up and the prefrontal cortex is kind of online and you're like, "Fuck, I just had this bender. I'm never doing that again or I'm done drinking or I'm going to take a month off from I'm going to quit." But then at 3 p.m. or 5 p.m. when that craving kicks in, like the prefrontal cortex, one has been damaged from many, many years of drinking. It can recover. Mine has fully recovered. It's great. It's all, even after 15 years of been drinking and 4 to 6 bottles of wine a day. So I'm telling you, like all this stuff can come back online. There's hope. But it takes time and it's a process and it's not like, you know, it's not like a computer where the graphics card dies. And you just go buy a new one from Best Buy and Replace and all of a sudden your computer's working again. Like, this is, we're talking meat. You know, meat, your vessels, your neurons, like these things take time to re-adapt. Just like you don't go into gym and do a thousand bicep curls one day and add two inches to your arms. That's not how it works. Right? You have to eat consistently. You have to be, you have to eat more calories than you consume to be able to build muscle. And you have to do it consistently for three to six months. And then you'll see more definition in your biceps and maybe add half an inch or an inch over time. And sobriety is the same way. This is a learning process. You're learning how to heal and re-adapt all the different underlying mechanics and machinery of your operating system that you were nuking and damaging after all these years of unconscious drinking. And it's not your fault. Every single person who is in a state of addiction, like, yes, nobody forced the alcohol down your mouth. But you were misguided and miseducated and you did not know the severity of what you were doing. And what, like, how is going to affect your system? You just thought that because we bought it into the marketing, we were doped. Everybody drinks. It's normal. You drink at movie theaters. You drink at dinner. You drink at baseball games. You drink when you go out with your friends. You drink on vacation. You drink in the evening to wind down and relax. Like, this is all marketing and advertising. Nobody fucking told us that when you continue to drink alcohol every single day, it's going to spike dopamine. It's going to spike GABA. And it's going to begin to wire your brain into seeking the fastest path to relief. That's all that's happening here. Right? And so when we look at the journey of overcoming addiction, the reason so many people fail or stay stuck or never get past two weeks or two months is because you don't know any of the stuff. You're not doing anything to read adapt and recondition that actual underlying biology. It's like we've been driving a self driving car like a Tesla and like the GPS is broken. The GPS keeps driving us to the liquor store even though we're trying to go to our dad's house or to our friends house or to work. And you're like, fuck, like, okay, maybe I just have to like drive a different direction. It's like, okay, but as soon as you let go of the steering wheel, the autopilot's still broken. Right? So it's like you can force your way. You can have your hands on the steering wheel for a week for two weeks or for two months. But eventually will power is going to run out. You're going to get tired. There's going to be a trigger. Something's going to come in. You're going to have to take your hands off the wheel. to rest for a second. And guess what? The GPS never updated. The brain never updated. Your neurology never updated. Your nervous system never updated. The programs in the code that have been underlying addiction never got resolved. And so this is why so many people relapse week after week, day after day, month after month, and then just keep feeling shame and guilt about it. It's like my friend listening to this addiction is not like you've heard me say this time and time again. Oh, like getting sober is not like going to the like in a way. It's like going to the gym, right? You're like there are specific exercises and techniques and things that you do to recondition your operating system, like going to the gym. But it's going to take a lot more like it's not just like, Oh, I'm going to go lose 10 or 15 pounds. Like that's a cakewalk. Like you're learning how to like walking into the gym and sitting down and doing three sets of bicep curls and then four sets of squats and then, you know, three sets of pull ups and four sets of tricep and then, you know, a little bit of back like it doesn't take any skill or intelligence. It's like it's very raw, simple basic movement. But when we're talking about addiction, we're talking about your thoughts. We're talking about your feelings. We're talking about your stress. We're talking about your brain. We're talking about your amygdala. We're talking about the fight or flight response, right? Like it goes deeper and you know that it goes deeper and obviously you listening to this, you, I don't have to tell you that because you know the thought and feeling of like telling yourself you're done and finding yourself driving to the store at 5 p.m. and all of your desires and commitments to quit completely going out the window, right? It's akin. See, the underlying neural mechanics that are driving addiction are the same neural mechanics that imagine if you're standing on the side of the street and you weren't paying attention on your phone and all of a sudden you started to like walk onto oncoming traffic and you were in a lane not realizing it and all of a sudden a car zooms past you at 60 or 70 miles an hour and imagine the adrenaline rush that you get. Imagine the fear. Imagine the intensity in your body of like holy fuck, I almost lost my life. Those are the same mechanics that drive craving. Those are the same mechanics that are underlying addiction. So it's not just like in that moment, you know, when you're like almost about to get it by car, you cannot control the adrenaline response in your body. You can't consciously control that. That just happens based off of 200,000 years or two and a half million years of evolution. This system is designed to keep you safe and it's designed to produce these experiences of like fight or fight. Do I stay in? Do I fight or do I run away? And this adrenaline response that you get that's really intense, like that's effectively what's happening when you get a craving, right? So let's look at some of the different regions of the brain involved. So you've got the prefrontal cortex which gets shut down and it gets damaged and it's not really online when you're drinking as much. That's why you're not performing at the level that you can and you're not making the decisions that are actually part of your character and your identity. You're doing things that are totally outside of that. That's because the PFC is dampened. It's not online working in the way that it should be because alcohol damages that. It reduces prefrontal cortex activity, okay? The next part of the brain involved, you've probably heard before is the amygdala. The amygdala is like the old school reptilian part of our brain that's been driving the fight or fight response and allowing us to survive. Far before we had any level of technology, we'd had the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution. Literally like think of us sitting in caves and sitting in small communities like in the mountains or whatever geographic area like we were basically surviving hunting for food. Our amygdala is what allows us to stay away from danger or to keep us away from threats. That sensation is real. It's raw and it's intense. When we drink alcohol, the amygdala increases activity in the amygdala. If we want to get sober, if we want to quit drinking, we have to apply practices in tools and techniques that calm the amygdala. This is what I mean by we need to take a neuroscientific approach and this is why AA doesn't work for you and why sitting in a room talking about your problems and talking about war stories of alcohol isn't doing anything. It's not doing anything. That's why you look at people in AA oftentimes, they're like dry drunks unless they go out and start doing their own healing and therapy and stuff like that to actually get to the underlying neurobiology of what's been sort of like altered. You've got these people who are still restless, irritable and discontent. Restless, irritable and discontent is not how people are born. These are byproducts of our experiences, of our traumas, of things that we were never able to fully resolve and is a byproduct of somebody, a consciousness living inside of a body which is unbalanced. You've got the amygdala, then you've got the ventral tegmental area where the nucleus accumbens, this is like the reward center. This is the area that's connected to and produces dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in our brain that some neuroscientists say is just as important as food and water. When you look at our history, when you look at our evolution, we would not have gotten to where we are without dopamine. Dopamine is the key neurotransmitter. It's the key chemical that we feel that moves us towards or creates the anticipation or forward movement towards the thing that's going to make us feel good. It's also the teacher chemical. When anything that produces dopamine gets stamped, it's like imagine, I eat sugar, I have sex, I watch porn, I hit some nicotine, I drink alcohol, I smoke weed, I do cocaine, I do methamphetamines, I do heroin, dopamine increases, you get this, "Oh, this is nice, this feels good." Boom, stamp. Then the hippocampus remembers that. It records that experience. hippocampus is connected to memory. We have to have a part of our brain that remembers things, right? So that every moment is not some crazy problem-solving novel experience. It's like, "Oh, yeah, I remember this, I knew this before, I learned this before, this is familiar, I understand this." That's connected to the hippocampus. Then we have the insula. The insula is the part of the brain that is responsible for sending what's called interoceptive, which is like your ability internally to understand or interpret interoceptive sensation through the body. So when you feel sensation, call it stress or boredom or overwhelm or craving or happiness or joy or whatever, it's the insula that's sending that message and is sort of perhaps dictating or controlling the intensity of that experience or that sensation, that feeling or that emotion. Obviously connected to all these other parts of the brain and they're all working in tandem together. So my new program, Neurore Patterning, actually each of the guided experiences that you go through, literally, you just press play and follow along, it's taking you through these experiences that actually target the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, the insula, the hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens and they're taking you through these guided experiences that will either increase them if they need to be increased or turned on like the prefrontal cortex or they will help activate them in a certain setting to activate memory reconsolidation, which is this neural plasticity window. It's like think of it like this. It's like on a computer, you download a file or you have a file, right? You have like a, you save a word doc, right? Our experiences of our life that you had with your mom and your dad and the bullies on the playground and when you went through your divorce and you experienced loss or grief or anger or resentment or whatever the case is, these are just files. Literally every memory, every experience. In fact, every projection of the future, when you say in a week from now, I want to show up to that meeting and I want to be confident and I want to be certain and I want to be clear and I want to articulate super well. That's a file that you're creating. You may have not known this. 99% of the human population doesn't because they don't understand some of the deeper mechanics of psychology and neuro-regrogram, neuro-linguistic programming and like how the brain works, but everything is a file and the files are editable, right? So we can bring up the file and through different psychological, emotional, somatic and advanced modality practices, we can go in and we can repattern and we can recondition and we can re-associate and we can re-imprint the files, right? So as an example, one of the most powerful tools and techniques that I have in my program is a program that can help neutralize cravings and the way that works is we identify, Okay, what is the what is the moment you get the craving? It's like okay the moment is when I walk into my house or when I get into my car or when I'm sitting at my desk and I see that it strikes 430 or when I walk into my kitchen and I see the island and it's like, "Oh, that's the trigger. That's the cue." It's like, "Okay." So before that always used to produce a craving and a sensation and a path and an experience that would want us to get closer to pleasure or to relieve the discomfort of that craving. And so alcohol was the solution because we've practiced it a thousand times and alcohol and drugs are fast, they're cheap and they're low effort. That's what the brain is always trying to do, right? It's like, would you rather work a job that requires you to work construction eight hours a day, lifting concrete, getting, you know, using these heavy machine relief and tools for 200 bucks or would you rather know how to day trade where you can sit behind a computer, understand how charts move, how the stock market works, and how the technical skills and technical analysis to be able to recharge and put in a buy order for $5,000 and then based off of the patterning of the charts, know that it's going to go up or have a really strong prediction that it's going to go up and then it goes up several points and then you exit that position and you make $5,000 and the whole trade took 25 minutes. Like, what would you rather do? I don't know anybody who would say I would rather work back breaking to, you know, eight hours for 200 bucks. I would rather sit behind the computer, have some advanced skills and make $5,000 in 25 minutes. Like, of course, of course, that's the only thing that makes sense, right? I mean, unless you loved construction, beautiful and there's no judgment here. All I'm telling you is that 99.9% of people, unless they were just the 1% passion of bunch that loved construction and being physical and making their money that way and they didn't care about a surplus of resources. Like, that's what they would choose. That's what your brain is choosing. It believes alcohol is going to help you feel better. But what you have to understand is that alcohol is a neurotoxic poison that is damaging you and destroying you. And when you feel a craving, it's not a command to drink. It is not, it is not a command to drink. It is the old residual patterning from the past that is now presenting itself in the moment. It's like the debt collector coming to the door saying, hey, at somewhere in your mind or in your body, there's discomfort. There is pain. You're stressed out, you're overwhelmed, you're fearful, you're anxious, you're sad, you're in a state of grief, you are worried, you were feeling hurt, you're feeling isolated, you're feeling disconnected. This sensation in your body is on the axiom, on the spectrum of pain. Therefore, you want to feel better, right? You would rather instead of feeling disconnected, you'd rather be connected. Instead of feeling sad, you'd rather feel neutral or calm or happy. Instead of feeling overwhelmed or stressed, you would want to feel confident. You could figure out and problem solve, but you had to problem solve. Right? Your body wants to go back into a state of homeostasis, which is a state of balance. And we have to look at the picture, right? If you start drinking in high school, if you start drinking in college, and throughout your 20s and 30s or 40s or whatever, and you never really understood any of this stuff, and you've programmed your system to be like every time I feel stressed out, overwhelmed, insert pain, you drink over it, your body, your brain is predicting, right? Addiction is a prediction error. That's what I'm bringing forth into the recovery space. It's a prediction error. Your brain is predicting that alcohol is going to make you feel better. And while it does momentarily, it does it by also keeping you a slave and making you basically deepening the connection to alcohol, right? Because everything is neural pathways. Everything is neurophysiological pathways between your brain and your body. They're all connections. They're triggers, cues, signals, memories, moments, sounds, smells, pictures, movies, and then a sensation and then behavior, and so you've patterned it over and over and over and over and over again. So what we need to do is we need to re-pattern this experience, right? So going back, like you identify what's that cue, what's that trigger, what's that craving? It's like, okay, it's when I walk through the arches of my kitchen and I see the the the island. It's like, okay, how do you normally feel in that moment? Well, I feel a craving. What does the craving look like? What does the craving feel like? It's in my chest. It's like a sensation that's moving down my arms. So what what we're talking about here is a psychological term called affect labeling, right? The very act of being able to bring your prefrontal cortex online, your logical consciousness online and create a little bit of distance from the intense emotional overwhelm that you're catastrophizing, feeling like you have to drink. The very act of labeling it and saying, ah, this sensation of craving is appearing in my stomach or in my chest and it's moving down my arms. And it's like, okay, well, what color is it? Most people have never even considered asking themselves, what is the the color of the discomfort? It's like, ah, it's like a it's like a dark brown or black or like a metallic gray, all right? It's like, okay, got it. Is it moving or is it still? No, it's definitely like moving. Which way is it moving? It's like kind of moving counterclockwise. Okay, great. Okay, this gives us like a baseline. Like where you add on a scale of one to ten. It's like, ah, the craving is like an eight or nine. Okay, great. How would you like to feel instead? This is a question most people have never considered when they're in a unresourced, full challenge state, call it stressed out, overwhelmed in conflict with their partner or whatever. And it's no fault of your own because when you're in a fight or flight state, the only thing is you're trying to get back to safety and homeostasis, right? So you're prefrontal cortex shuts down like you you're in survival mode. That is what craving is. It's a survival mode, right? So you have to consciously learn how to not catastrophize it because guess what? If you sit and move through a craving, nothing bad happens. Now, unless you have been drinking so much that if you don't have alcohol, you go into DTs in which case you need medical detox and supervision and support. But if you're a drinker who is an alcoholic or alins spectrum of alcohol, you're not drinking that much to wear like it's a handle of vodka. And you're going to go into DTs if you don't drink for a day. If you just sit through that sensation and you apply some tools and strategies and techniques, you can begin to re-condition your brain. You can begin to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and you can move the intensity of that from eight to a nine to a six to a five to a four to a three to a two in the matter of minutes in the matter of minutes. I know you're like "Bardia, that's bullshit." But you just don't know the techniques and you haven't tried it before and you haven't actually stuck through it. Okay. So how would you rather feel instead? It's like, "Man, I would rather feel calm." Or "I would rather feel neutral." Or "I would rather feel empowered." Great. Can you think of a time in your life where you felt really calm, neutral or empowered? Yeah. Six months ago. Last month when I got to raise at work. Three weeks ago when I was out to dinner with my friends. Four years ago, I remember there was this moment where XYZ happened and I was on a family vacation. Yeah, actually yesterday at work when I closed that big deal and it felt really great. I felt that. Great. Bring that into your body now. What does that feel like? Okay. How do you know you're feeling confident? How do you know you're feeling calm? How do you know you're feeling certain or neutral or empowered? It's like, "I kind of feel it in my chest." Great. Amplify that. Bring color to it. What color is that? Great. Amplify the sensation. Then there's a technique where you can identify the craving and then you can bring in that other sensation and you can basically rewrite over it. You can neutralize it through this very specific technique that I teach in my program and it's part of neuro-repatterning. So what would it feel like for you? If you knew that every day at 5 p.m. you got cravings, you can practice this very specific unique exercise that is designed in a way to be able to help deconstruct, identify exactly what the trigger is, what the cue is, what the sensation, what the feeling, what the thought, what the emotion is, that's difficult for you, and then replace it with the thing that you want and then re-condition that in through neuro-repatterning while it's targeting the specific parts of your brain that need to come back online and then you test it. I've done this literally a hundred times with clients where we go through this process. They're like, "Okay, it's the archway, it's the kitchen, here's how I feel, here's how I want to feel instead." I take them through this very specific practice and then at the end of it, they're like, "How do you feel when you think about walking into the archways?" It's like, "I feel good, I feel really empowered." Then they text me the next day or two days later and they're like, "Barty up, things are great. Haven't had cravings, I've gone out, feeling really confident about the next week." Beautiful. right? Like this is modern neuroscience based addiction recovery that nobody is running, nobody is running. This is not what you find in a hundred thousand dollar a month Malibu rehab and it's really sad and it's really unfortunate. I just got off a call with a lady the other day who joined my program who was like she paid $70,000 out of pocket, out of pocket, $70,000 to go to a rehab that was like, dude, a glorified jail cell and I'm not like like chitting on rehab. Like there's a time in a place for it and sometimes you need to go and be in a room and be in group meetings all that, like, I don't know. Like everybody's different. Everybody's got a different architecture and things that they might need at different parts of their journey. But it's like there's once you understand what's going on here in your nervous system, in your brain, the different regions involved, and then you look at yourself like a computer and then you're like, "Ah, okay, I'm having a craving. I'm meeting an edge. My body is producing a prediction error. It's creating an anticipation signal that feels very uncomfortable and it's telling me and it's trying to convince me that alcohol is the only solution because that's what I've trained it to do. If you've trained a dog to do something in a very specific way for the last five years or 10 years or 30 years and that dog looks up at you, he's going to be confused. He's like, "Yo, where's my meat? Where's my bone? Where's my food?" That's what you're doing when you get an alcohol craving. You're anticipating and you're expecting that this thing is going to make you feel better and it will for five minutes or 15 minutes, but at what cost? And this is where you, my friend, as a logical, intellectual, sovereign adult have to be willing to look at yourself in the mirror and see the fucking facts for what they are. Yes, it makes you feel better for 15 minutes, but at what expense? At the expense of modeling a version of yourself where basically your daughter or son will then model that and become an alcoholic and through like, it wasn't your fault. You didn't know. You were misguided, miseducated, undereducated, doing your best, trying to manage your own pain. Now, set a system in modeling experience for somebody to go out and get caught in the same fucking cycle. At what expense is it coming to your relationship, to your marriage? Like, divorce is expensive. Do you want to lose half of your assets? Do you want to lose the job that you've worked so hard for that sustaining your life in the life of the people around you? Like, do you want to have to get cancer and then be stuck with like a faulty liver that's not clearing toxins that's then going to lead to other diseases down the line? Or are you willing to get your head out of the sand to stop being in denial and see it for what it is? You never needed alcohol to cope. Your brain, your body, your nervous system, there are hundreds of techniques and strategies and tools if you're only willing to look at yourself and to stop throwing everything into the back bed of your fucking truck and begin looking at the parts of yourself in your life that you haven't been dealing with and that you've been avoiding. Right? On one hand, we drink alcohol as a way to avoid and numb out the parts of our cell for our memories or our past or our current life experiences that we're like, I don't want to fucking deal with this. It's too overwhelming. I can't handle it. It's too confusing. I'm scared of the repercussions. So I'm just going to get drunk. I'm just going to get fucked up. I'm going to go into my closet. I'm going to hide. I'm going to drink. Right. And that's evident and clear for almost all drinkers to some capacity at some level, whether it's some business aspect or some relational aspect or some part of yourself that you're unconfident or unclear about or insecure about or whatever or anxious about. The other piece that we all have to deal with is the neurophysiological debt that we incur from consuming a substance like a drug over and over and over and over and over and over again, what it does to our brain. It teaches our brain that, hey, like you are now a machine to seek the path of lease resistance and you are now my slave to seek basically like, yeah, like the like the shortest path to relief. Your brain, when you've trained it for 20 years to seek alcohol and you're having a craving is going to be hard press to want to go work out instead. But guess what? Like part of sobriety, part of evolution, part of maturity is learning how to do that. Getting off the nipple, getting off the bottle. And I know like my tone in the way that I'm coming at you here is like, or I'm sharing this like, it's a bit of tough love. You're not going to get this from your therapist. You're not going to get it from other people. Like there is an element of compassion and empathy and I understand the craving is hard and I understand that you're in grief. I get it. I was too. But at what cost? At what cost? How much longer are you going to keep playing the same game with yourself? Or are you going to take action and be willing to do something different? Listen, if it's not me, go find something else but do something different. Like definition and insanity, please say same thing over and over and over and over again, expecting a different result. You have to be willing to meet your edges. That is why you're on earth, my friend. Please, if you have gotten any value from my podcast ever, get this. Please integrate this. You did not come to earth to get a job, to fuck around on the weekends, to watch movies, to just make a paycheck and fucking eat dinner. You came to earth to learn. You came to earth to expand your consciousness. The basis of all philosophy, the basis of all spiritual text, the basis of what keeps the backbone of our society alive. So we're not at each other's throats killing each other. The basis of what is built modern life are these like fundamental philosophical and spiritual principles, which comes down to your evolution of consciousness. That is the main thing that's evident beyond everything else. You had a different level of consciousness when you were five, then when you were 15, then when you were 25, then 40 or 55 or 70. Your consciousness continues to evolve. That is why you're here. You are here to learn how to drive your human car. And you were swindled. You were duped. The alcohol companies made you and put you on their fucking balance sheet. They can expect 20 bucks a day from you, $400 a month from you, $700 a month from you. They got you hooked and they gave you marketing and advertising around people sitting on a fucking beach to play to like your psychological desires, which is to relax and have fun and be carefree. But guess what? You can relax and have fun and be carefree without alcohol. I know it doesn't seem that way, but that's because you've patterned and conditioned yourself and you're identity and your personality within a different frequency. Because you experienced childhood trauma and getting laughed at and getting rejected and you never healed that. You never went into the file system of your brain and your nervous system and rewrote the memory. You didn't know that you could do that. You never had the right therapist with the right tools to guide you through that experience or you never work with the right coach or you were never willing to invest in yourself and get support from mentors or people who were further along the human experience who you were like, man, that guy or that girl seems like they've got it figured out. Let me try to get closer to them. Let me get their transmissions. Let me help have them feed their data and knowledge into me. And I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I'm just trying to figure this thing out. Let me just like do what they tell me to do because they're obviously living a life that I aspire to deliver model from or experience. You never did that. So your brain and your nervous system stayed stuck in the experiences and the memories and the frequency of your past and because you didn't know any other way to manage it, you drank. And so now you've developed alcohol use disorder or alcoholism and it's damaging and it's destroying your life and it's causing shame and guilt and you're like, man, why can't I just stop? I'm functional. I run a business. I'm a professional athlete. I'm, you know, seven, eight figure earner like whatever the case may be. I've got a family. I go to the gym three days a week. Like, I play sports, but why the fuck can I not stop drinking? Because it's not about willpower. Like, there's some element of that. There's an element of consciousness and sovereignty in understanding and interpreting your sensation and what's going on internally and being able to process and like delineate that. But what you have to understand is that when you consume substances or behaviors that significantly alter your brain and neurochemistry, it's like, dude, you're trying to fix a car that like the pain The engines are not working. The engines are misfiring. And you're like, "Well, let me just fucking press on the gas harder." Like, "Does that like, ask me, like ask yourself logically. Does that make sense?" If your car is breaking down and like there's smoke coming out of the hood, or yeah, like the hood in the front, does it make sense to just press on the gas harder or to squeeze the steering wheel tighter? No, obviously not. Yet that's what, like the world of addiction is trying to do when all they do is attend meetings, or all they do is try to like, will power their way through it. Listen, I've been at this thing for 15 years in my own alcoholism. I tried willpowering. I got a week. I went a couple weeks, and then I started to feel good again, and then I was like, "Oh, maybe I'll just have one." And then I would go a month, and I'm like, "Fuckin', I don't have a problem with alcohol. Clearly, all my friends, non-sensives, bullshit. It's gonna be different this time. Maybe it was different that one night, but then I'm right back into it. It's because who you are, like you, as a con-- like you're looking out through your own eyes right now as we speak. I don't know what's in front of you. You are a consciousness. You are an ephemeral space of awareness that resides within a body that has profound underlying mechanics that produce how you feel moment to moment, second to second, that literally like produce, like literally. If you're low on a subtle colline, which is another neurotransmitter, your thoughts are gonna be really slow, and it's gonna be hard to be very articulate and verbally fluid. If you're low on serotonin, you're not gonna feel like really joyful. You're not gonna even feel neutral. There's gonna be this cloud over you. If you're low on dopamine, you're gonna feel unmotivated, and the thought and idea of going to the gym, or taking care of projects in your house, or doing laundry, it's just gonna feel like a million fucking pounds up against you. Right? But you're drinking alcohol, and you're doing it unconsciously, just trying to manage the craving and the stress, and like, what are we doing here? Like, would you get behind the vehicle of a-- I don't know, in aircraft without any training? Like, you had to get a license. You had to read a manual and an instruction manual, and then you had to like go, and you had to like, take the test to get your license. But why do we treat ourself, our mind, our body, our consciousness, this experience of being alive for an unpredictable amount of time for 100 years, or whatever, if we're lucky enough to live that long, as like this willy-nilly fuck it, like, I'm just gonna drink, and just keep our head in the sand and not actually understand what's going on, and look at it like intelligently, insurgically, and logically, and understand the bounds of what our toolbox is, and what the buttons are, and which buttons we push at what time, and what the repercussions are, and what the alternatives are. Right? Like, you don't just-- if you've never-- you don't have your pilot license, like, you don't get into an aircraft, you don't sit behind like a helicopter and just start driving. Like, impossible. You're not gonna be able to get off the ground. You're not gonna be able to turn it on. You're not gonna be able to fly. You're gonna crash. You're gonna kill yourself. Right? And in a way, like, our modern society, when it comes to our brain, when it comes to the neuroscience, when it comes to substances, dopamine, neurochemistry, the nervous system, trauma, psychology, like, people just have no idea. And it's okay, being a human is hard enough. Like, just trying to get through school and college and just trying to get a job and fucking manage bills and politics and, you know, like, it's-- that's enough. You know, it's like, we're not like these insane supercomputer fucking highly resilient bioelectronic, like, half human, half robots. You know, we don't have chat GPT fully integrated into our brains yet. Who knows? It's like, some people still struggle with their time-- like, their time-- time staples, like, as an adult, right? Like, we're-- we're just trying to figure it out. So, like, I encourage you, if you're listening to this, to start to get fucking passionately curious about who you are, about what you are, about what this operating system is, and, like, begin putting in the work, like, invest in yourself. Like, I had a professional athlete come into my program the other day, and he was, like, party of the part of you that, like, you were like, "Man, invest in yourself." He was like, "Man, when I look at my life, like, yeah, I've been an athlete, and, like, there's been a lot of people who have invested in me, like, coaches, and trainers, and, you know, I've been able to, like, move up the ranks, and there's been all these people around me supporting me, but, like, I've never-- I've never personally put my money down, and invested in myself." And it's like, I'm having this conversation with you, because I know that you've probably been working for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years, and you've been trying to put money aside to save. In case, your tire pops, in case somebody gets sick, in case you, you know, your family member needs their mortgage payment covered, or, you know, you want to go on a vacation in six months. Like, you've put resources aside, so when shit hits the fan, and, like, something, like, an emergency occurs, you can invest in it. If you are on the spectrum of alcohol, you used to sort her, and you're listening to this podcast, and you haven't been able to quit drinking, and you don't know what the path is, and what the structure is, and the tools and strategies, and you need support, and you want more accountability, like, now is the time to invest in yourself, and do the thing, you know? I know it's scary. It's like, "Oh, well, what if I invest in-- it doesn't work out, or what if I relapse? It's like, dude, you get access to my program for a year. You have support, like, this is a non-judgment, shame-free zone. That's why I say, we're not quitting drinking. We're learning how to live alcohol-free, just like you're learning how to fly a jet if you get your pilot's license. That's why, like, you go to university to learn how to become proficient in becoming a nurse, or a doctor, or, you know, a business analyst, or a computer programmer. You're learning. And if you haven't lived alcohol-free for a significant period of time, you don't know how to manage your mind. You don't know how to manage your overwhelm or grief or sadness. You don't know, like, some of these deeper underlying, like, reconditioning protocols and tools and strategies that I'm talking about, you just don't know them, right? And so you can choose to piecemeal them all together, or you can join a program in a system that, like, has reverse engineered it and lays it out for you with structure and routine and support and accountability and check-ins and coaching, and integration, and accountability partners, and course material, and videos, and guided experiences. And so it's like, you don't have to be like, "Okay, what do I do next?" Just follow the curriculum. And if you have questions or need support, like, "It's there." You're in a room full of people who are doing it, and with coaches who have done it, and who understand the depth and the trial and the error, and, you know, how to course correct and how to refine, and, "Okay, like, what's the next step?" So it's really, really, really, really important that you look at this journey through the lens of science, through the lens of, "Okay, I am a conscious witness inhabiting this body. I've got this brain, I've got this nervous system. It produces sensations. It produces craving. It produces fear, it produces anxiety, it produces overwhelm." Like, "How do I begin to resolve these things? How do I come home to myself?" Right? That is the journey of sobriety. You were not put on earth to just fucking drink your life away. You were put on earth to expand your consciousness, to learn how to meet your edges, to expand into who you can become. You were put on earth to fulfill the potential that is unique to you. That's why you're on earth. When you're laying on your deathbed, when you're 80 or 90 or 100, you're going to look back on your life, and you're going to look back on your childhood, you're going to look back on your adolescence into your teens, into your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, your 70s, and you're going to say, "What did I do?" Then you're going to ask yourself, and you're going to compare to, "What did I fucking want to do? Who did I want to be? What was the flag that I wanted to fucking plant into the ground while I'm here alive before I go back into oblivion for, "Who knows how long?" None of us get out alive. So any fear that you have around, "I can't be this person, or I can't put myself out there, or I can't stand for this, or I can't recreate myself that way," "I'll bullshit. You can be, do, express, create, anything you want." And it's like, "We don't get out alive, but it's like in that moment, are you going to be satiated, or are you going to be like, fuck, and feel the deepest, darkest, like, heaviest regret of your life. Like I just kept fucking giving into cravings because I wasn't willing to just breathe through it and apply tools and techniques and strategies to recondition my mind and my brain and my nervous system to learn how to feel safe and calm. It was just the grief like that breakup that motherfucker that left me that person that dipped out, you know that company that screwed me over is just Like you're just gonna hold on to that forever You know it's like dude When are we gonna move forward? When are we gonna do something different and I know forward and different to the brain as extremely terrifying The brain would rather rot in its own poison and its own misery if it's familiar and it can grasp on to some level of safety than change That's just the mechanics and the biology and evolution. That's just the part that we have to accept But what calls you forth Your hero's journey The chapter of your book is about you your consciousness coming online and saying enough is fucking enough dude I've played this game a thousand times and it ends the same goddamn way Like I'm not gonna do this anymore. I know I get a craving every day at four I don't have a craving at 10 or at nine or at 7 a.m. When I wake up it happens at four great What am I gonna put into place so that I can start moving through that and Re-conditioning my mind and my body and my nervous system to become stronger and more resilient I'm telling you that's how this thing works. I know you don't believe me, but please hear it through like my passion When you first go to the gym and you buy if you've never stepped into to a gym and you bicep curl 25 pounds It's gonna be hard and your muscles are gonna burn and there's gonna be lactic acid and it's gonna suck Do that every day or four days a week for three months and you're gonna be repping 25s with ease by month three What happened your nervous system got stronger you got more resilient You learned um the mechanics and the motion of a proper form bicep curl Right like your tissues got stronger your muscles got more resilient. They got thicker They could bear more load You as a human being That is the track that you're on with sobriety. So whoever you are now Whatever you've been able to accomplish in your life when you get sober You are going to be an even more powerful resilient Calibrated clear Strong resourceful version of who you are now and who you have been in the past That's what sobriety is But the thought and idea of that for a lot of us is scary and we don't see that we just see it as like uh. I'm losing safety I'm losing the dopamine. I'm losing the party Know my friend you are evolving into a higher spiritual Experience a higher vibration of experience and I know that tangibly like again like that's Wishwashed you that doesn't make sense but just like when you try to explain um I don't know like how the government works to a four-year-old it makes zero sense Right in the same way the version of you that you become in terms of your consciousness your calibration your clarity your ability to synthesize Thought feeling emotion reality the total expansive like substance of life When you get sober That that's what it is it it it it transformed like you you like you can't perceive it yet Just like a three-year-old like it just doesn't make sense it doesn't compute Right when you try to explain something a little bit like different that like that level of consciousness cannot compute or calibrate So I just want to remind you that every person who quits drinking and gets sober and doesn't know way where they actually heal and do the work and like do the right Protocols to like become sovereign and and like Update their mindset and their beliefs and like all the things develop confidence in self-esteem Not the ones who like quit drinking and raw dog didn't our eight-man center and I'm like this is the most brutal thing of my life It's like yeah, but have you done anything besides put the bottle down I can almost But my life's work that they've done none of it You know it's because it's like okay. Well, where in your nervous system what part of life is still so Judgery It's like oh well fucking I can't get a job. It's like okay. Well, then you haven't developed skills It's like ah, but fucking everybody hates me. It's like no you just haven't learned proper social dynamics and social relating It's like oh no, but this like the world is fucked. It's like no You're giving all of your your conscious attention energy away to news and you're not just focusing on yourself and your own health and your own mindset and your own neurochemistry and your own clarity and your own lifestyle Like dude, there's an answer for all of it There's a technique and a strategy and a support system and a protocol to solve all of it But you have to be willing to get to that place where you say enough is enough You know and nobody can do the work for you. I can lay it all out step by step by step by step I can lead the horse to water, but you have to drink and I can't force the thirst That's the unfortunate side of addiction. You know, there's this arc. There's this curve If you don't want to quit drinking you're not going to quit drinking But you have to get honest with yourself What's happening? What are the repercussions? What's happening to your health your mindset your kids your family your spouse your work your potential How much time do you have left? How many reasonable years do you actually have left to accomplish all the things that are on your bucket list and that you want to do before like You don't have like the time and the energy or clarity or motivation or your health doesn't allow You know 10 years 15 years 20 years to like start that business To save up the money for retirement to do the fucking things that you want to do like dude You never need it the alcohol Like and I've said this before another podcast like get frustrated about it get angry about it that like you wasted fucking time Like now you're aware. Okay this system operates almost like a computer and if I can begin to understand the different mechanics and regions and components involved and I can Make a commitment to applying the right tools and techniques and begin reconditioning my mental emotional physical neurochemical operating system compounded over time it gets better and it gets easier and then you become free Telling you I hit five years alcohol free in august and I don't have cravings for alcohol alcohol is a non-issue. It's like I was never an alcoholic in the first place It's a distant reality. It's a distant like it's lifetimes ago And I never would have imagined it when I was still drinking but it's possible This is coming from the guy who grew up in an unstable Majorly dysfunctional family with addiction between my dad my sister and my mom I saw things I heard things I felt things that kid should never have to feel and basically grew up in an environment without parents and was like fending on my own and trying to figure shit out and like Was a heavy heavy heavy binge drinker annihilating myself multiple days per week for 15 years And then drinking four to six bottles of wine a day for six months during COVID Getting to the point of like Yeah, like severe severe damage You know to every aspect of my health and I did it and you can do it But I can't do it for you you have to do it you have to develop the courage To take action to be willing to do something different and if you tried over and over and over and over again on your own There is no shame my friend in getting help and getting support and getting community and getting accountability and getting the path forward it's like why do that? Like would you rather like if you're trying to become a doctor would you rather go through like a prestigious university that teaches you the curriculum of what to do what to study Everything you need to learn in the right order or would you be like nah, fuck it. I'm just gonna um I'm just gonna read like this medical textbook and see if I can figure it out and then try to pass the the exam It's like Okay, but What do you think's gonna be more helpful? What do you think is gonna speed up the process? What do you think's gonna be more effective? I don't know about you but as a guy who's like a coach who considers myself a high performer who's always trying to learn or evolve or get better or Create better circumstances for myself and for the people around me and for my clients and for my friends and for my partner and for my You know my family and I'm like trying to learn. I'm trying to find hacks I'm trying to find shortcuts and strategies. I'm trying to come up with different protocols. I'm trying to be proactive like I would rather try to get to the solution in the most streamlined way Rather than have to like piecemeal 45 different things together with no structure support or accountability And again, if it's not me, find some someone else, but do something. And I say that like almost like unselfishly because my mission is to continue to let my words and my energy reverberate out into the field of consciousness to reduce addiction, to help increase and expand consciousness. That's my vision, that's my goal, that's why I'm here on earth. I was given the right, the exact family, the exact fucked up painful experiences, the exact loss of my dad at 14. All the fucking my past architecture was perfectly, divinely orchestrated for me to be the unique version of myself to speak the way that I do. And for years, I had resentment and frustration and sadness and anger towards my family and getting the short end of the stick. And why did he have to leave? And why did I not have a mom and dad that's functional who I could fucking call and ask for advice? All I moved through all of that. But guess what? That led that pain I was willing to alchemize to turn into gold, which is me sitting on this podcast, sharing these insights and knowledge and passions and ideas and and and modern wisdoms and understandings and the science of like this thing that is like severely under resource and unattended to in our society, which is sad and it's unfortunate because all it comes down to is a highly undereducated population of human beings who are being through marketing and through the matrix of our society being fed information around gamble, then on sports themes, watch porn, smoke, do this, drink alcohol, have fun, like we don't fucking know, we're like monkeys. Literally human beings like are not that different. We think we're so intelligent. We think we're out here making all our sovereign decisions. We're highly like like impressionable and highly like we can be influenced very, very easily, you know, and people are seeking out these substances because they they never learned how to manage the car that they're driving and never got to address and understand like the mechanics and components of like how to self drive their car in a way that allows them to meet their goals and create the vision for their life. And so they're in pain and the system is dysregulated in the in the check engine light is on all the time. And so it's like everybody suffering families are suffering. Kids are not getting their best version of mom and dad because mom and dad is stressed out and doesn't know how to manage it in drink. And now their system is like the neurochemistry and their brain. It's like it's all wired and pattern to create craving and intensity and it's too overwhelming. And so they just like they keep setting a bad example and then generational trauma. It's like dude, if we can begin to wake up and see this thing for what it is, our society would be better. Like if alcohol did not exist, we would be significant. Like there would be so much more consciousness online to move our collective into a better direction. And so I'll leave you with that. Okay. Very, very, very important to begin to like understand and look at the stuff through like a modern lens. I know it's overwhelming. I know when you relapse, you want to bang your head against the wall. I know it creates shame. Listen, craving. It's just in it's it's this anticipatory energy that feels intense. But moving through craving, cravings, last 15 minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes, then they pass. Every single person who's gotten sober discovers that and every single person who comes to my program, they're like, oh my god, I was drinking for all that time. I just never allowed myself to get through the craving. You know, I just never applied the tools and techniques that you're like teaching us here to get through it. And then when you get through it and you do some of the neuro repatterning exercises where you're like activating memory reconsolidation, you're reprogramming stuff, you're editing the file, you're teaching your brain, you're teaching the amygdala, you're teaching the insula, you're teaching the prefrontal cortex, you're teaching your nervous system, you're updating it. You're like, oh, okay, like I can be present to a sensation and I can move through it in a way that's actually healthy and I can cope through it. And then you do that over and over and over again, it gets easier and it gets less intense and it gets it's not as long and you get stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger until you get to the other side and then sobriety becomes normal. But there's all these other dynamics to consider. It's like, oh, party, what about social or what about my family who pisses me off or what about this relationship that I feel really disconnected. And it's like, okay, all that will be addressed along the way. You're going to learn the tools and skills and strategies around communication and whatever else needs to to come through through coaching sessions and through, you know, through the community and through nor repatting in the course material. But just be willing to take it one step one day at a time. I was just talking to somebody who joined the program today. It's like, they're like, man, when I listen to your one day to time episode, it really like gave me a sense of like, okay, maybe this thing is possible. You don't have to quit drinking forever. I don't say that because I'm leaving the door open for you to drink after a year. I say that because I'm the stop drinking coach, like I'm the guy. I am five years alcohol free. And I haven't committed to never drinking again. Not because I want to, not because I have any desire to, not because I ever want to go back to that. But because in order to go from four to six bottles of one a day to now five plus years alcohol free and have my life radically transform beyond my wildest dreams and imagination, I all I had to ever manage because we're stuck in the present moment. There is no tomorrow. There is no past. There is no Friday. There is no weekend. There's no there's no upcoming holiday. It's just now all I ever had to manage was, can I just not drink alcohol right now in this moment and figure out a way to get to bed. I'll call free. And then let Bardi, when he wakes up tomorrow, deal with that day. I don't even fucking have to deal with that. I just have to manage this moment. And the next 30 minutes while I'm feeling a little uncomfortable into bed. And if you can do that, which you can, you've demonstrated it, you've proven it to yourself, you've gone days with that alcohol, you can learn to extend it. So I've got a few things coming up as I've been talking about neuro repaturning. I'm, I just finished the 90th day of it. And I've handed it over to my next production team member who is voice over background music. It's going to be mixed. It's going to be mastered. It's going to be a beautiful life changing, absolutely transformational product for you. And for people who suffer with addiction. There's nothing like this on planet earth. It just doesn't exist. I mean, I could, I could bet everything on it. Nobody has created what I've created with neuro repaturning. It's 90 days where every single day, and it's reverse engineered through neuroscience, through specific regions of the brain, through all the different layers and nuances of your nervous system, and, and the anxieties, and the pains and the cravings, and all of it. And it like, it takes you through the system that addresses all of the points that like you didn't even know needed to be addressed. And you just press play every single day and it you, it takes you through this guided experience. And it's profound. So that is going to be integrated here into the program very soon. We're coming up on a new year. I want you to seriously think about and consider like, did you tell yourself you're going to get sober last year? And if you did, how did that go? And is this year going to be the same repeat of last? Right. Get ahead of it. Go to my website www.thustoptrinkingcoach.com. I've got some information on there. I've got a bunch of video testimonials from clients. I've got tons of, I've got 2500 screenshots at this point. A lot of those are from a little while ago. I've got so many. I'm about to update my Instagram with with a bunch of new things. I've got like a whole new brand coming. I'm updating my logo. I'm going to start running ads here at the start of the new year like stop drinking coaches growing. It's evolving and it's going to be expanding out to a lot more people, a lot more people. And so I really encourage you to do something to take action. Go to my website, fill out an application. And you can book a call directly with me. At least 25% of people when they get on a call are surprised that it's me. Like you're going to talk to me. Eventually in the next one, two quarters. I'm going to have a sales team. And it's like it's going to be harder and harder and harder to interface directly with me as my program grows and scales. And I'm bringing on co-coaches. And it's like this, this, this neuro repatoning. What I'm building is going to create a shift in the addiction recovery space. I've got team members that are going to be reaching out to rehabs and like adding this in as a protocol. I'm going to be getting like statistics and studies and data like there's going to be a lot. be a lot that this is bringing into this space. So you try day A, you've gone to rehab in the past, you've tried IOP, those things don't work, they don't resonate with you. And what I'm sharing does, like take action, go to my website, fill in application, book a call directly with me. And I would love to connect with you. I would love to learn a little bit more about you, hear your story. I have both group coaching and I have one on one coaching. And the prices of those over time are just going to steadily increase, is more and more people come in, more and more demand comes in for my attention and everything in between. So yeah, I appreciate you listening to this episode. I hope it was insightful for you. I hope it connected some dots or at least gave you an aha at some point through this. And yeah, share this with this podcast with somebody who you think needs to hear it. And I will see you in the next episode. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.