What Are You Leaving On The Table?

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, what's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Stop Drinking Coach podcast. I'm your host. I'm Barti Arez on the Stop Drinking Coach and I'm super excited to be digging into another episode. I am a little bit sick so if my voice comes off a little bit funky, I apologize ahead of time. Over the weekend, I'm not sure what I caught, but have a little bit of congestion and so just trying to eat well and drink a lot of fluids and everything else to try to get through it. I've got a speaking engagement coming up on Wednesday that I'm pretty excited about. I'm going to be speaking at. I think it's McKinsey University in Louisiana in front of I think five to six hundred students and I'm going to be doing a presentation on alcohol awareness which is pretty cool. I'm really excited about it. And so in today's episode, I was thinking about what I wanted to record and something that just came into my mind is what are you leading on the table by continuing to drink? I think this is a super, super, super important topic that by and large, the sobriety space and the addiction space doesn't really tap into enough. And as a coach, it's something that I think about a lot. It's something that I think about for my clients all the time because the way I look at this process is I take a very, very proactive approach to quitting drinking and transforming your life. We don't just quit drinking for the sake of quitting drinking. We don't just quit drinking because we're sad and we're depressed and we have to break up with alcohol because it wasn't working anymore. We quit drinking because we know that our life is more than alcohol. We know that we're capable of more. We know that we deserve more. We deserve more than to just systematically poison ourselves day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out, year in, year out, right for decades. Like, what are we doing? It's crazy. Like, as I dig deeper and deeper and deeper into this stuff, I really see alcohol as a barrier to our spiritual evolution, to our mental, emotional, and psychological and energetic evolution as human beings. If I could just show you, like, do a screen record of my private Slack channel where all my clients are doing their daily updates, like you would be able to see the breakthroughs they're having. And these are individuals that are 40 to 70 years old, right? Like, been around the block and the breakthroughs and insights they're having about themselves and their life are so phenomenal, are so phenomenal. And all it takes is free to remove the alcohol and to work a proactive system that's going to optimize you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, neurochemically and energetically. Like, you have to remember that you don't need the alcohol, even though it feels like you do and you're tethered to it emotionally, psychologically, right? You're in that dopamine and GABA feeding cycle. So you're thinking about it, you're anxious, you're getting cravings. Like, understand that the human body does not need alcohol to operate. And I know that sounds wild because if you've been drinking for any period of time, it feels like the complete opposite. It feels like you need alcohol. But trust me, I'm two and a half years later on the other side and I don't crave alcohol. I don't get cravings for it. Sure. Do I think about it? Sure. It passes through my head. I'm a variety coach. If I go out on a Saturday night, there's people drinking around me, but it doesn't bother me. There's no emotional charge. And what I want to assure you is that you can get to that place too. It takes a little bit of time, but that's the journey. That's your journey of looking inward and learning how to work through the discomfort. I had to do it. Anybody else who has six months or a year or two years or ten years of sobriety has learned to do it. And that's why I say this is like an even playing field. Because when you quit drinking, alcohol doesn't care if you're rich or poor or a man or a woman or where you were born or where you came from or what your education is or anything. We all have to learn how to look within. We all have to learn how to manage our mind. We all have to learn how to manage the discomfort. We all have to learn how to deal with cravings. We all have to learn to deal with a little bit of boredom initially. We all have to learn to keep ourselves busy. But the thing that I want you to really focus on and think about over the next few minutes is what are you leaving on the table? Because what you have to understand is that inherently with alcohol comes opportunity cost. It's inherent in the substance. Because by choosing to drink, by drinking alcohol, you're automatically foregoing and giving up everything that could possibly be on the other side of that with what you do with your time and the way that you're able to show up. Like I've made a couple of videos about this. So let's just say you drink three days a week. Maybe you drink Thursday, Friday, Saturday or you do a taco Tuesday and a Friday and a Saturday, whatever. If you're drinking three days per week, let's say from five to 10 pm at night, right? Because once you start drinking, you're in the drinking zone, right? Like any amount of alcohol you're in the drinking zone. So let's say you drink three days a week from five to 10 pm. That's 15 hours per week. That's 60 hours per month. Isn't it crazy that just by going from the week to the month, it compounds and you're looking at 60 hours where you are drinking and inebriated. You're numbed out to yourself, to your environment, to the people around you and to reality. Right? Now multiply that over the course of a year that is seven hundred and twenty hours per year that you are now drinking or under the influence of alcohol. Not to mention, right? So seven hundred and twenty hours per year. Right? Now, if you're in a place in your life where you're not super happy with your relationships or you feel like your relationships are crumbling, what if you took that seven hundred and twenty hours and you reinvested it back into yourself or back into your role being fully present, communicating, showing up for your kids or for your partner. Right? If you're at a place where you're not super happy with your weight, maybe you've gained 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 pounds over the last decade or however many years. Right? If you're not happy with your weight, when you look in the mirror and you don't feel good about yourself, like imagine what if you reinvested just five hours a week back into the gym, not to count the 60 that you're losing. Right? Imagine what would happen over the course of a year. If you're not happy with your professional life, your career, what you do for work, right? How much you earn? If you reinvested seven hundred and twenty hours per year into skill acquisition, into upgrading your mind, into upgrading your ability to be more valuable to the marketplace, whether you got another certificate or you learned some new skills, you learned leadership so that you can move up to management. Right? Or you learned marketing or sales or some specialty fields, you got into real estate. Right? Seven hundred and twenty hours per year for you to be able to go out and maybe start a side hustle or a side business. Right? The amount of opportunity costs that comes as a result of drinking is astronomical. It's astronomical and most people don't even consider it. That's just seven hundred and twenty hours on the front end. We're not even counting the hangover. You can effectively double that for a good hangover. If you're drinking more than four, five, six drinks, you're going to have a hangover. Even if you have three or four, you're going to feel it mildly. Right? Now, I know there's probably a fraction of people listening to this that are quote unquote high functioning drinkers who are going to say, oh, Barty, well, I don't get hangovers. I'm high functioning. I can kill a twelve pack or a twenty pack and then I can go to work the next day and I still wake up at five. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I'm doing that so long that you're permanently in a hungover state and you think that that's normal. If you remove the alcohol, if you, okay, listen to me, if you hear that high functioning, quote unquote, high functioning, where you're getting shit done. and you're responsible and you're working and da da da da. But you've been able to achieve any measurable level of success. Dude, if you remove the alcohol, you do not even know your potential. The amount of mental clarity and acuity and sharpness that you gain, your ability to think on your feet and problem solve and to critically think. Dude, it goes through the roof. Not to mention your ability to really be consistent and sustain and push through. Like, if you're high functioning and you're making it, imagine now taking all that time that you would normally be drinking and reinvested back into yourself, into a skill, into a hobby, into your business, into your health, into your relationships. Dude, you're probably only seriously operating at 10% of your potential. And if you already have any decent level of success, just wait. Just wait. Give it long enough. Give it a six months. Give it 12 months. Give it 18 months. You do not know what you're capable of. You have to begin thinking about the opportunity cost. Right? Like, there's a good quote. In the beginning, when you quit drinking, it feels like you're giving up everything. You know, dude, I know. I've been there. I know the feeling of thinking that literally life is just going to be fucking nonsense, because you can't drink anymore. Dude, it makes sense. Alcohol activates the reward center in your brain. And we're just computers. And when that reward center gets activated, we feel good. It's, dude, it's, it's really simple. Like, when you understand the evolution and the biology of it, it activates the reward center. And the reward center was basically the most important thing to our evolution. It got activated and produced dopamine and in serotonin when we had sex, we ate food, and we made meaningful progress towards resources. Boom. Made us feel good. So we keep doing it. Alcohol does the same thing. It activates that part of our brain. But instead, it pumps it two to 400 percent way above baseline, way abnormal. You're not even designed. You are not meant to feel the type of pleasure and euphoria that you get from alcohol. But once you get a taste of it and you discover it, then you want more and more and more and more. But trust me, the system, the default system that is built that you come born into, it didn't need alcohol to feel connected to life, to feel pleasure, to feel euphoria, to feel joy, happiness, connection, fulfillment. We just got sidetracked with alcohol and now we've conditioned and trained our brain to think that we need it. But it is an illusion that is caused by the consumption of alcohol. Tell any man, I'm two, two and a half years on the other side. I never thought that I could feel the way that I do now and I feel amazing. I feel great. I feel clear. I feel connected to myself. I feel connected to the world. Like I'm present. I've worked through so many different challenges and childhood traumas and I've developed a sense of harmony and homeostasis in my mind. I've learned neurolinguistic programming. I know how to manage the internal representations that I create in my mind. And if my nervous system responds to something gets triggered, I have tools on my tool belt to be able to manage it to regulate back down to safety. My refractory period has significantly reduced. You know, years ago, if I would get triggered, I'd be triggered for four hours, six hours, eight hours a day, two days, three days. Now, if I get triggered, I'm triggered for two minutes, five minutes. You know, I can feel it. I notice it in my body. I acknowledge it. I don't catastrophize the situation. I breathe through it. I take different vantage points in my mind. I play out a few different scenarios. I look at where I'm responsible in the matter, what I could do differently, what I can learn from it, and then I move through it. Right? Like learning how to not catastrophize your life and your situations and your feelings is a massive superpower that like vast majority of society hasn't really learned. Because again, there's no blueprint. There's no, there's no user manual for being a human. You're just born into this family. You're, you get whatever deck of cards you get, whatever, you know, hand your dealt, whatever parents you have, and you just kind of ride the wave. And if they were great and supportive, cool, you got that. And if they weren't and they had their own challenges and traumas. As many of them do, most of them do because nobody's like being taught how to be a parent. They're just doing what their parents taught them. Like, then that's what you got. But now as adults, it's our responsibility to begin to wake up to become self aware of the patterns and programs that were instilled into us without our conscious understanding between zero and seven or zero and 12. When we didn't have the cognitive and intellectual capacity to choose for our self or to process and make sense of those challenging traumas and adverse experiences. And now that we become aware of them, we have to choose. We have to reinterpret. We have to reprocess. We have to be the ones that look back at our past and understand what happened. We have to make sense of it. We can't just continue to just throw it in the back seat and pretend like it never happened. If there was one thing that would completely alter humanity by and large is one standardized high level user manual and blueprint, a parenting system that was designed to raise a high functioning like full use of your capacities and talents human being. But the second one would be some sort of standardized thing where like once you turn 18, I don't know, 21 or 25 like there needs to be some sort of initiation into adulthood. There's no initiation. Right. Nobody sits you down and is like, Hey man, how's everything going? Like, do we need to talk about your upbringing and your childhood? How do you feel? Do you feel ready to become an adult? Do you feel ready to? Do you do have confidence in self esteem? Like how do you talk to yourself? What's the what's the self talk? How's your emotional system calibrated? Like there's no test for that. You just go through high school, then you're hurt it into college. It's like, dude, it's like we're cattle. And then there's the matrix of our society, which is oriented around alcohol and parting and drugs. That's just what you do in your in your late teens teens and 20s. But it's like, dude, everybody just moves through the system and we're moving it moving through it unconsciously unaware that we're consuming a very powerful drug that is augmenting the way that we think the way that we respond the way that we react all of it. Our values, our priorities, our standards. And then it gets it's it gets woven into every aspect of our life, our social situations when we hang out with our friends at work, cocktail hour, like networking everywhere, man. And it's like you look at every movie, every song, every Netflix series that we all watch, we're all connected to our phones, we're all watching these streaming services, every, every streaming service, every show. The heroes always drinking and it's just no big deal. You don't even notice it. You don't notice it until you stop and then you're like, holy fuck, it's everywhere. It's like water to a fish. You know, and when you begin to wake up and finally reclaim a sense of like agency over yourself, you start to develop true personal power, sovereignty, sovereignty over your mind, sovereignty over your body, over your emotional system. It starts with what you consume. Not not consuming alcohol, not consuming toxic nonsense, processed food. The way that you change your life is by becoming conscious of what you consume. Are you consuming the news? Are you consuming nonsense back and forth political banter, just negative stuff on like what are you consuming? And alcohols are poison. So what are you leaving on the table? That's the question that you have to ask yourself. What's important to you? Do you have a family? How many years do you have left on planet earth? What do you like? What's the status of your health? And start to look at the real negative consequences alcohols having in your life. It's going to have a major toll on your time, a minimum of 720 hours per year. So you're not going to be operating at full capacity. You're not going to be able to do that. Easy, easy, because when you wake up the next day, you're not going to be operating at full capacity. Your motivation is not quite going to be as there. You're not going to push to 100%. You're going to do kind of just enough to get by in every area of your life. Your relationships, your health, the way you eat, the way that you show up. out the way that you carry yourself, your motivation to follow through on things, your hobbies, your interests, your passions, those things start to take a backseat and dwindle over time. Okay, so one is time. Second one is money for sure, man. Most people are spending a few hundred bucks a month, at least. I've got people with applications coming in that are spending a thousand, two thousand a month. So three to twenty five thousand dollars a year on average, you would save. Like what could you do with that? Where would you put that? Would you pay off some student loans, get that headache out of your mind faster? Would you put it towards a vacation for your family? Would you put it into the stock market and to your retirement account? Would you want to go on a nice trip or vacation? Is there a country you've always wanted to visit to that's been on your bucket list? If you just choose to abstain from alcohol or figure out a way to do that for a year or two years, you can go try, you can go to Europe for three weeks and have the most amazing time of your life. You know, there's all types of travel packages like, it's not what this is about, but like dude, there's a major, major opportunity cost and you have to begin looking at that because it's ultimately the pain that's going to get you to stop. If you are not willing to look at the pain in all capacities, then you're just going to keep riding the artificial illusory high of alcohol. Listen, you're dealing with something that is deeply biological. You're activating the reward center of your brain, okay? There's been a hundred thousand people that have come before you who have procreated successfully over the last six million years of evolution, however many million years of evolution, to create you, okay? And all of them have been operating via dopamine, okay? And now we're coming in and we're tinkering with a part of our brain that is not designed to be tinkered with. And I know in the beginning it seems rough and it seems scary and it seems hard, but you can get through it. Just think about the millions of people who have gotten sober. They've been able to do it. You can do it too. I was drinking four to six bottles of wine a day. That is an absorbent amount of alcohol. That's a suicidal amount of alcohol. If you're like a hundred pounds, you'd probably get alcohol poisoning. You know? I was like almost 200 at the time, but like, dude, that is insane. Insane. First month was rough. Just two weeks, first 10 days sleep was terrible. Had night sweats, couldn't get good sleep, had wake up multiple times. It sucked. I was tired. I was irritable. I was agitated. But I just knew, listen, that wasn't going to work out anymore. There's too much on the line. The pain was real. And I held on to a vision of who I could be. The person talking to you now. If you've gotten value from my podcast, if you've gotten value from listening to my voice, if you've gotten value from watching me on TikTok, hearing my videos, just understand that the way I got here was I was willing to take the first step and put in the work. That's it. I was willing to do the work. And it was fucking terrifying, the thought and idea of giving it up, just like you might feel that way. But trust me, you don't need to make a commitment that you're never going to drink again. In fact, if you're thinking that's what this is, I would immediately encourage you to stop. Because the only commitment that you have to make is a willingness to take the first step and that you're just going to stay sober today. I'm two and a half years into this thing. And still, the thought and idea of giving up alcohol forever is very emotionally overwhelming. But I don't, I understand that that is the wrong script. You're running the wrong program if you think that. So immediately bring yourself back to the present moment and remind yourself that the only commitment that you have to make is that you're just not going to drink today. And I for sure know I'm not going to drink today. And that's an easy commitment. Two and a half years into it, it's effortless. In fact, it would take a tremendous amount of forward effort. I would have to generate effort and probably start going up with a ton of mental or emotional or psychological turmoil to actually drink, to actually go to that bar like, dude, that would be, that would take a ton of effort. So like, it's effortless at this point. And you can get to that point too, but you have to be willing to develop the courage to turn towards your discomforts. If there's like one major piece of wisdom that we do not get taught as human beings, in fact, we probably get taught the complete opposite is that pain and discomfort is good for us. It is a necessary part of our adaptation. It is a necessary part of our evolution. Have you ever met somebody who has not gone through any adversity? Who just had everything handed to them? They just, everything was perfect. They've never had to lift, you know, a finger and work and earn anything. Have you ever met somebody like that? How does it feel when you talk to them? Does it feel like you can connect with them? Like, dude, pain and adversity and struggle is good. It is necessary. It is how we grow and evolve. We've been doing it our entire lives. You've been doing it your entire life. And this is just another stepping stone to a new, next level iteration of spiritual, mental, emotional, and psychological development, energetic development. And when I say energetic, because I say it a lot of times, maybe you guys don't understand what I mean, by energetic development, I mean the reharmonizing and balancing of your nervous system from a state of fight or flight or even disassociation into a state of safety and calm. Around eight to nine months of my sobriety after daily meditation, specifically when I started doing cold, cold plunges, ice baths, I started to, there was like a one to two month period where I can only describe myself going through what seemed like like a like a spiritual awakening. And I know that sounds like woo, woo, we're like corny or like whatever, but like, dude, you guys know me? Like, I'm not here to fucking bullshit. Like, there was a, there was a baseline, like my baseline state of energy shifted. There was a shift. It started to feel like I was inhabiting a new body and I felt unfamiliar, whatever I is, right? I could do it. I could sit here for another four hours and talk about I and ego. There's rabbit holes here because half of everything we're saying is a construct in the story. Okay. All of it, in fact. But let me not get to sidetracked there. We'll save that for another time. Okay. There was a baseline shift in my energy and I, and it's like, I didn't recognize myself and it felt weird to be in my body because I went from kind of this heightened state of always a little anxious and not really connected to the present moment. And like, I was always trying to change it and didn't quite feel right to like sinking into a state of like safety. And everything just started to feel more alive and more connected. And that came as a result of around eight or nine months of sobriety, daily meditation, and then ice baths. It was the ice bath thing that changed it for me. They are so therapeutic. They're so healing. They're so powerful. And I would encourage you to do them. You know, look up, Wim Hof, look up to Iceman. Ice baths are taking tons and tons of, they become super popular over the last three years. There's so much like research and studies and evidence to support the benefits of ice baths on so many different levels for us. But going back to what I was saying, like, you have to think about what are you leaving on the table? Do you have kids? How much money are you leaving on the table? What's the state of your relationship? If you got married and now you've developed an alcohol problem, like, to some capacity, you have to begin empathizing and looking at this thing from like, how is your partner experiencing this? Like they probably didn't sign up for this. And I know that maybe adds more pressure and it makes you feel more guilt. It adds more shame. But it's like, okay, do you want me to not say it? Like I'm the stop drinking coach. I'm not the stop drinking coddle you tooth fairy. You know, I kind of have to fucking tell you how it is so that you can wake up. It's like, we kind of need that slap to the fucking face. Like I've said this once before, I wish. I wish somebody came up to me and fucking slapped me across the face and his body is like and said, "Bardi, what the fuck are you doing?" You know, you've got all this potential. You're fucking smart, dude. What are you doing? Why? Why are you fucking drinking yourself to oblivion every weekend? Like sure, I get it. You crave it. You want it. You like the dopamine. But what the fuck are you doing, man? There's no redoes here. You don't get a second chance. Time is ticking. The clock is ticking. We're four months into 2023. You've got 30 years left, 50 years left, 60 years left. What do you want to do? There's no redoes. You don't respawn. Okay. I'm blessed with one life. And so it's like, what are you going to do? Look at what's important to you, your kids, your job, your health, your health, man. Dying with liver cirrhosis, somebody just jumped into my life yesterday and said his brother just passed away last weekend from wet brain. I forgot the technical name for it. But it's like when you drink so much, your brain turns to mush. Two, permanent brain damage, permanent brain damage. It lowers your IQ. It makes you dumber. Alcohol makes you a dumber human being. It's not good for your brain. Even though if you think after that first drink, you become more creative, no dude, this should is poison. It's not just a metaphor like, oh yeah, alcohol is bad for you. If you haven't watched it yet, just go look up YouTube and look up Dr. Andrew Huberman, how alcohol affects the brain and body. He came out with it a few months ago. And it's debunked to all the fucking nonsense about, you know, wine's good for your hard and like all that shit. Here from a neuroscientist at Stanford, leading neuroscientists at Stanford. All his shit is up to date. The medical research, the science, the publications, like watch that. And you will understand that you are poisoning yourself systematically. You are drinking gasoline. You're drinking ethanol. That feeling of being drunk and buzzed, that is you being in a poisoned state. But it just happens to tap your dopamine, causing you, causing a cascade of signals to go into your body to reinforce that behavior. It's a Trojan horse, dude. It's a trojan horse of our society. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what our society would be if everyone wasn't drinking? Dude, we would live in like a utopian society. Imagine if 70 to 80% of the population was no longer numbing out in the evenings and the weekends. Then they would be forced to mentally, emotionally, and spiritually progress and evolve and face their trauma and become more elevated human beings that are more conscious, more compassionate, more connected, more self-aware. I mean, that's the only thing that could happen. Like that's what's waiting for you on the other side of this is for you to become more self-aware around your mind and your emotional system. Dude, like that's what's on the other side of this thing. You're not quitting drinking to give up fucking barbecues and vacations and wine at a steakhouse like, dude, that's all fucking nonsense. What's on the other side of this is your awakening as a human being. You have to understand that. You have to trust me. If you have any capacity, if you have gotten value from the energy that I'm exchanging with you, trust that what's on the other side of this is your awakening process. It is not you grinding through being bored on the wheat like, sure, that's an infinitesimally small part of it. But once you begin doing the inner work, reading the right material, being exposed to the right type of information, your map of reality, your consciousness is going to expand. And I hope that doesn't sound woo-woo and silly. I say consciousness expanding all the time and I think people who maybe haven't dove into the world of personal development or consciousness or spirituality probably can't understand what that means. But very simply, think back to when you were 10 years old and then think back to when you were 30. Your consciousness at 30 is significantly different than when it was at 10. Would you agree? Your map of reality, your map of understanding, your self-sufficiency, your responsibility, how you handle yourself, how you show up, your resourcefulness, your physical strength, your stature, it is different. You are experiencing a totally different aspect of reality. Your senses are open, more engaged. You have more context, more experiences to relate things through, to filter things through, to compare things to, right? Like significantly different than a 10-year-old, wouldn't you agree? A year of your sobriety is going to be almost similar or two years of sobriety, almost similar when you work a proactive program. And that's the key, is being proactive with it. The addiction and sobriety space by and large is reactive and not only reactive but disempowering. You go to 12 step groups and they just hammer into your head that you have to show up every day and reaffirm that you're an alcoholic, too, very disempowering. You've got a ball and chain for the rest of your life. And I get it, they created it 100 years ago and 100 years ago, they didn't understand neuroscience, they didn't understand trauma and they basically didn't have technology. I don't even know if they had phones in 1914. So what did you have to do? You had to basically get people to come back to the same meeting every day and you had to make sure that they reminded themselves every single day that they are an alcoholic, so they wouldn't forget. Because this shit is sly and tricky. Because alcohol is everywhere. Because it's literally lurking in every corner. So you have to show up to the same place and reaffirm it every day around the same group of people so you don't forget. Like I get it. When I look at their stuff like I get it, it's outdated. They don't like, they're not looking at it through a new lens, a new lens that's available. And when you take a proactive approach to this stuff, it's going to be different. It's going to be different. Every one of my clients, when they come to me, they're like, it feels different this time around. There's something about it. I just, I know it. It feels different. But you have to be willing to take the first step. You have to be willing to take that first step and you do not have to commit to never drinking again. I have not committed to never drinking again. And almost anybody who sober has not made that commitment because it is not, it's the wrong program. Eventually you'll understand what that means. Because here's the deal. I don't know if I'm going to live till next week. What if a plane crash is into my building tomorrow? Highly unlikely, but it might happen. So if I'm spending all this time anxious and worried about what the trajectory of my life is going to be with alcohol and I'm just wasting the present moment when I could be focusing my attention and energy and resources and voice and creativity into service and helping people and creating and doing things that are productive. But instead, I'm just anxious about something that I don't have an answer to that I can't, how am I going to control whether I drink a year from now? The only thing that I've control over is this present moment and there's no drink in my hand. And I can make sure that from now, it's 4.38 pm until when I go to sleep, I can make sure that I orient my day that doesn't involve alcohol in my hand. And if I've done that, I've added another day of sobriety and that's how you do it. Staying sober, living an alcohol-free life, I made a video on this recently. It's all about learning how to manage. It's not like, you know, like in so let me backtrack. If you took 100 people who are alcohol, extra developed alcohol use disorder, a very small fraction of them, very small, are the ones who are maybe waking up and drinking right at 6 am all throughout the day and if they don't have any alcohol, are shaking and going into DTs, right? Most are maybe drinking after work or on the weekends or are binge drinkers, right? But regardless, okay, it's not like you're the thing that I'm trying to, the point I'm illustrating here is that you're not craving alcohol 24/7. Maybe there's some of you, right? In which case you may want to look at an L-Trek zone or Vivitrol or maybe a pharmaceutical drug and maybe rehab might be a better option there. But like getting sober and staying sober is about learning how to manage the uncomfortable 30 minutes to one hour periods that happened once or twice a day the first few months. That's it. It's not like you're craving alcohol 24/7, right? You get a craving or a trigger at 6 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm, 5 pm when you get off work, you have a craving for about an hour and then it passes and then you're good. Like maybe you'll get one more before you go to bed or maybe you get two more, but that's it. Like you've gone your whole day the first 8 to 10, 12 hours and then you get a craving and you have to learn how to manage that discomfort. That is your spiritual, psychological, emotional, mental evolution is learning how to recalibrate your system to deal with a little bit of boredom, to reestablish and re-align your personal values. If you're a mom, if you're a dad, if you're a leader, if you're a business owner if you're an executive, whoever you are, like again, there was no period and time where somebody came back to us and said, "Barty, how are you doing? What are your values as an adult now that you're going out and creating your own life?" So if you're not clear on your values and your standards and what's important to you in terms of higher-archically, what you want to give most of your attention and energy to and to make sure that those things are taken care of, you're just going to be floating. You're going to be floating in the ether. And if you don't have a concrete sense of direction and you don't have a concrete set of goals and if you don't have a ton of self-esteem or confidence in yourself to be able to move forward and execute, if you haven't sufficiently developed personal power, then the easy button is, "Okay, well, when I start to feel stressed out and overwhelmed, let me just numb it out." And you see how that is, it's not like when you learn how to overcome that, can you see what is waiting for you on the other side? Can you see who you can become as a man, as a woman, as a leader? What's waiting for you on the other side of this is the version of yourself that you've always dreamed about. That is what's waiting for you on the other side. It's going to be impossible for you to tap into that while you're drinking. It's like, "Dude, you're poisoning the system. You inhabit as far as we know, the universe is most infinitely profound and unexplainably complex supercomputer that spontaneously produces conscious experience." Like, "What?" And you're just pouring poison into it. Like, can you see how that's a major error code? Like, zoom out for a second. And if funny exercise, a buddy of mine, like, used to do, not funny, but like really interesting, as he's like, "Whenever, I'm like at home or like, whatever I'm doing my thing." He's like, "I always imagine there's like a camera in the very top right corner of the room, and I try to put myself in the camera, and I look at myself." And then I assess, "How am I acting? What's my body language? What am I doing?" That's a really interesting exercise. So if you come home every day and you start drinking at 5 p.m. and then you just sit on the couch and scroll, imagine a little camera in the corner. And imagine you sitting in the camera room watching yourself sit there and scroll and drink for five hours. Once you be like, "Yo, what the fuck are you doing?" Go. Get up. Go to the gym. Go for a walk. Feed your dog. Take care of your kids. We're doing. Sometimes we need to step outside of ourselves to see the implications of how we're showing up. And so understand that every time you drink, having a relationship with alcohol is in of itself a massive opportunity cost. Okay? So we already established the money and the relationships and the time that you're losing, the damage to your health. Now compound that. Compound that over a year period, a three year period, five year period, ten year period, and play the tape forward. I know many of you love that episode, so let's do it again. Follow the drink through and play the tape forward. What do you think is going to happen? In every area of your life that you care about, your health, your relationships, your finances, your career, your kids, who are they going to grow up to be when they watch? The God, your God to them because you birth them. If you remember being a kid, you looked up to your parents and they were basically gods. What are, how are they going to model reality? If all they do is they watch you have a drink in your hand all the time in your free time when you get off work. I know every parent wants their kid to have a better life than they did. So as adults, it's our responsibility to begin finding answers, to begin getting help and working through the things that are in our closet that we've ignored because we have a responsibility now when we bring in another blank slate of consciousness to grow into evolve. And if we're the ones responsible for helping guide them and shape them and mold them and instill and install programs into them, then we better make sure that our consciousness has the right type of programs in every capacity. So play the tape forward and let it scare you. What are you leaving on the table and let it scare you because pain is a good motivator my friend. It is a powerful motivator. The reason I don't go back to drinking is because I know how painful it's going to be. It's like burning my hand on a stove. I've burned my hand on the stove so many thousands of fucking times that like I just know it's not going to be different. And you need to get to that place, man. You just need to accept that it's not going to be different. No matter how many times you try to, you know, okay, I'm not going to drink in the house. I'm only going to drink on vacation. I'm only going to drink on the weekend. But like there's a million and a half strategies that you can apply. It's not going to be any different. You have to get to the point where you develop the capacity and courage within yourself to say, I'm going to give up this totally fucking nonsensical artificial dopamine rush that I shouldn't have ever felt to begin with. Shouldn't have gotten involved with drugs. There's many people out there who just never drink, never tasted, never touched it. You know, we shouldn't have ever fucked with it. Like, you're going to give that up the one thing to gain everything back. That was the quote I was talking about in the beginning. It's like quitting drinking is giving up one thing to gain back everything. So just imagine who could you be if you are no longer tethered to alcohol? If you gain that 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 hours a week back into your life where you were clear, consistent, hangover free, sharp, energetic, motivated. Who could you be? What would you do? How would you show up? What kind of leader would you be? What type of impact do you want to make? What sport or hobby or passion or interest would you want to get into and explore? Being able to wake up every single weekend, completely hangover free and have 48 hours, two full days to do whatever you want to plan your day any way you want without having to feel like shit, without having to feel guilty, without having to feel shame. Dude, it's available for you, but you have to develop the courage to take the first step. And when you do, you're going to be met with support, right? Like, dude, I've got an amazing private community of amazing people who all support each other, who have made friends, who text each other, who call each other, right? Like, you'll be connected to me. I'm just getting started with this. I'm going to continue creating and pumping resources into this thing. This stop drinking coaches, I've, it's, it's, I'm just scratching the surface. And I've worked with hundreds of people and I've held tens of thousands of people that I don't know get sober. And I'm just getting started. So getting in now, making the decision now, like, there's always a reason to kick the can down the road. Oh, summer's coming up. Oh, weddings coming up. Oh, New Year's coming up. Oh, birthdays coming up. Dude, culture we live in, the world that we live in, there's always a fucking reason. There's always a new holiday. There's always a new birthday. Someone's always getting married. There's always a new, that's all fucking excuses. It's nonsense. When you make a decision, that means you burn the fucking boats and you just take it one day at a time, you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. You can absolutely do it. But you have to trust that it's going to be different this time because every other time that you've tried in the past, you didn't have help, probably you didn't have support, didn't have a proactive system in structure to follow. You didn't have the right information. You didn't have the right tools on your tool belt. Like doing it with the right system is everything. That is the key. I have my clients fill out different forms and weekly check ins and I read all of them. How are you progressing? Surprisingly well, how are you progressing? Better than I expected. How are things going? Amazing. Love this program. Can't believe how much it, how perfect it is. Haven't had a craving. Eight out of ten of my clients when we do meetings like the first week or two, they're like, I'm just waiting for the shoot to drop. Like this, what's going on here? You know, and I'm like, well, good. It sounds like the program's working. So play the tape forward. Play the tape forward and let it scare you. And get clear on where you don't want to go. If you're not entirely sure on where you want to go, if you can't quite imagine yet a life without alcohol, that's okay. That's what we'll do together. We'll work on that together. We'll ask the right questions. We'll create structure. We'll have some accountability. We'll have you start doing some things. We'll get feedback. We'll iterate. We'll optimize. We'll do that part together. But at least get clear on what you don't want because you're already feeling the pain. If you're listening to my podcast, you're already feeling the pain of it. So get clear on what you don't want and use that as your measuring stick to run away from. And if you do. don't know where you're running towards, just take the first step and reach out. So I hope this episode was helpful for you. I appreciate you listening. If you wanna work with me, one on one, go ahead to my website, it's www.thestoptrinkingcoach.com and fill out an application. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there are tons and tons and tons of, just testimonials and snippets and screenshots of stuff inside of my community and what other people have said about working with me in my program, so check that out. If you're on the fence, if you have doubts, if you're like, who's this party a guy? Like he sounds good, but I'm not really sure. Just look at what other people say. Those are unbiased. I just, I screenshot those from my community. And if you've gotten value from my podcast, but haven't had a chance to leave a five star review, either on Spotify and Apple, I would really, really appreciate it as a way to give back and say thank you. If you could leave a five star review, it'll just, I think, probably boost it up and help it reach more people who need help and who need support and who could get value from my podcast. So if you could leave a five star review, I'd be really, really grateful. And share this with somebody you know. If somebody you know is struggling with alcohol, send them my podcast. Recently, I started posting on YouTube as well, so you can, if you like watching these in video format, you should be able to watch it on YouTube. And if you haven't connected with me on Instagram, follow me on Instagram. It's @thustoptrinkingcoach. The stop drinking coach on Instagram. Shoot me a message. Let me know you've checked out my podcast and if it's been helping you, I love getting messages like that. So thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode. (upbeat music) Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star review and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.thisstopdrinkingcoach.com and vocal call with me. I offer private one on one and group coaching to make letting go of alcohol easier and more sustainable than you ever thought possible. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. (upbeat music)