Your Pain is a Messenger - Stop Running From It

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 in 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. SDC fam, welcome back with another episode. I'm glad that I was able to start this one back up without a huge gap in timeline. Things are kind of finally slowing down as I mentioned that last month, things were a little bit crazy. And so I'm excited to dig back in today. And for those of you guys who are waiting for the launch of my group coaching program, it is coming very, very soon. I just initiated an onboarding questionnaire and things like that. I'm getting my website redesigned to kind of update with just all that has changed and transformed inside of stop drinking coach over the last, you know, almost two years inside, design my website. And there's some backend integration stuff that I just need to get finalized in order for everything to be set up for launch. But rest assured that when my group program launches, everybody who is filled out an application which I encourage you to do that way you are on my list will receive both an email and a text message from me with the details of the program inside and out, the pricing, the structure, what it's what it looks like, everything that's included, how it works and all that. Because I'm very, very excited for that to launch. I really want to open this up to as many people as possible to help you guys get the systems and tools and support and accountability and really connection and community that you need to make sure that this is successful and sustainable for you for the long term. And so in today's episode, it is titled, "Your pain is a messenger. Stop running from it." And in this episode, I really want to dig deep and help you understand that, right, like alcohol is not the problem, right? The problem is our inability to manage our psychology and our emotional operating system. Then we end up in a state of pain or dysregulation, right? The pain that we experience is not designed to be numbed. It is not designed to be avoided. It is not designed to be distracted from. That's why I say, quitting drinking is a biological upgrade. Quitting alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution, right? The pain that you're experiencing is a messenger. It is a messenger, anxiety, depression, boredom, loneliness. Whatever that uncomfortable sensation is, it's not there for you to numb it out. And to the degree that you continue numbing your pain is to the degree that you continue to waste time, that you continue to dig yourself into a deeper hole, that you continue to incur more mental, emotional, physical, energetic, spiritual, and neurochemical debt that's going to make it harder for you down the line, is to the degree that you continue to damage your relationships, that you continue to come short as a mother or father, that you continue to project and vomit, pain and dysfunction onto your children, is to the degree that you prolong your ability to finally get your life together, right? You have to understand that the pain that you're experiencing, it's not just pain for the sake of pain. It's a teacher. There's a lesson. There's a messenger, right? And something that I really want to dig in on this episode and help you understand is that these terms that in our culture and our medicated, pharmaceutical driven society, where we just agree that, oh, I have depression. Oh, I have generalized anxiety. Like, dude, this is nonsense. This is nonsense. The way that we are labeling people in these disempowering ways is nonsense. Okay? Anxiety and depression or boredom or stress, whatever these things are, they're not stand alone agents that have any sort of merit, that have any sort of weight to them. All of those things can be drilled down into specificity in a good coach, a good therapist, somebody, a good mental health professional, a good counselor. The first thing they're going to ask you when you say that I have anxiety or that I have depression, is they're going to say, what are you specifically anxious about? What are you specifically depressed about? What aspect of your life do you feel like you lack control over? What aspect of your life do you feel like you don't have the ability to change? What aspect of your life do you feel is cemented in stone and, you know, isn't solvable, right? This is what we need to address. This is what we need to develop the courage to address on this journey. Again, alcohol is not the problem. Alcoholism, your alcohol use disorder is a symptom of deeper pain. Now, don't get me wrong, right? When we drink alcohol for years and years and years or decades, regardless of whether we had anxiety or depression or trauma or anything else from the past that we were struggling with, now we have to all. 100% of us who develop alcohol use disorder have to learn how to process and navigate the pain that comes from an imbalance in our neurochemistry, a change in our brain, a change in our reward system, a change in our dopamine and GABA, and everything that comes along with that, right? So everybody who goes to quit drinking is fearful of the border. Everybody who goes to quit drinking early on experience as anxiety during the withdrawal process. Everybody who goes to quit drinking, again, regardless of past pain or trauma, has to learn how to process whatever else comes up in terms of discomfort along the journey, right? Some of the social pieces, some of the family pieces, some of the, you know, how you handle the relationship at home, right? All those things we all have to learn how to deal with. But the message here is that the pain that you're experiencing in your life, it's not just pain for the sake of being pain. There's a lesson in it, right? There is a point in time in which that pain, that anxiety, that depression didn't exist, right? So we have to rewind the tape and figure out, okay, what's the source? And that's what you have to problem solve, right? If you just think quitting drinking is putting the bottle down, you put the bottle down, and now your life is just as painful as it was before you started drinking. In fact, now it's going to be more painful because you have tacked on years or decades of significant abuse from a hard drug like alcohol and now your systems out of whack, right? Like, you have to get proactive. And that is the one thing that I advocate for and constantly promote that I think separates the way that I communicate and the way that I share this sobriety and recovery and personal transformation journey over others is you have to get proactive. And the reason that this is so important is because the human operating system, the human energy vehicle, this thing that you are a conscious witness to called a human requires a tremendous amount of maintenance and upkeep in order for it to function optimally, right? Like, you take your car in for an oil change, you know, every five or seven thousand miles, for example, right? Every month, month and a half, you have to put gas in it. Every 50,000 miles, you have to change out the belts or the filters or the, you know, whatever. The human energy vehicle, the human operating system, the thing that you are requires a tremendous amount of proactive maintenance and upkeep in order for it to be balanced, in order for it to be mentally, emotionally, energetically, physically, neurochemically balanced and functioning in a harmonious way, meaning you have to have good sleep, you have to have good sleep hygiene, you have to eat good, healthy food that's not processed, you have to exercise and you have to move your body, you have to get out of just sitting behind screens and you have to get out into nature and you have to be in the sun, you have to get that vitamin D, right? You have to learn how to manage the daily stressors of your life, whether it's work or your relationship or your kids or anything else. If you are not being proactive with these things, That is how you fall into addiction. That is how you fall into a problematic relationship with alcohol. So when I preach proactivity here, it's not just for those who suffer with alcoholism or who struggle with addiction or have a problematic relationship. What I'm advocating for and trying to teach you, the message I'm trying to get across is that you have to be proactive in your life. I mean, let's just look at Tony Robbins, for example, right? The guy who has transformed hundreds of millions of lives. The guy has fed, you know, feeds a billion people every year, right? The face of personal transformation and healing. And he says, happiness is tied to progress. Everybody is trying to optimize for happiness. Everybody's trying to optimize for these different things. But what you need, what your soul is longing for, yearning for is progress. And the reason you constantly feel all this shame and guilt and anguish within yourself is because you know your worth more. You know that your life is worth more, that your true authentic self didn't come to this earth to just sit and be caught in a cycle, repeating the same bullshit, errors and judgment over and over and over again. That life is more than that, that you have more potential. That life wasn't come in, experience some challenges and pains, hold on to them dearly and not be willing to let go of them and then find a temporary drug that relieves that pain and then do it at the expense of giving your soul to that drug. Deep down, you know that life is more than that. And so that's why you feel shame. That's why you feel guilt. Because you're smarter than that. You're better than this. You're better than the way that you've been operating. And so how do you fulfill that gap? How do you cross that bridge from shame and guilt and knowing you're better and getting to that point B by getting proactive, by following a system, by immersing yourself in a program that provides you a set of guidelines and systems and tools and strategies and mental models and perceptions and problem solving strategies, right? And in all of these different things that will teach you how to cope, how to manage yourself, how to regulate so that you can get through these difficult and challenging periods of time in your life, right? Like that's what we're doing here. Progress is what leads to personal satisfaction, fulfillment and happiness. And when you're not making progress, that is when you're the most unhappy. That is when you're the most unhappy. So the pain that you're experiencing in your life is a messenger. If you're experiencing anxiety, you don't just like if you want to live in generalized anxiety for the rest of your life, then just accept the fact as your identity, as you're an anxious person and watch what that does to you. Like why do that? Why, why, why do that? Why not get to the source of your anxiety? Babies are not born anxious. Babies are not born depressed. Babies are not born with disempowering beliefs. If you take yourself back to your childhood, you will remember that at one point, you were exploring this reality in an infinite way. You didn't know that it was bad to run onto oncoming traffic in the street. You didn't know that it was bad to climb up on a coffee table. You didn't know that it took a tremendous amount of work to become a doctor or an astronaut. You just believed that that's what was going to happen, right? There were no limitations. There were no stories around you not being good enough or smart enough or capable. These are stories. These are experiences that we take on as fact when we're children, when we don't have the context, the map of reality, the confidence, the self-esteem, the life experience to make sense of difficulty and painful experiences. And so they become part of your identity. They become part of your self-image. They become part of your worldview. And then you unconsciously think about them over and over and over again and why you're and cement these neural pathways in your brain. And now you think this is just who I am. This is just the way life is. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. I'm disempowered. But it's not true. It's not true. You are not destined to live with your pain for the rest of your life. All of your pain can be reprocessed. All of your pain can be transmuted. All of your pain can be alchemized into something else. I mean, I am a living, breathing testament to that. I grew up in an environment with tremendous amount of dysfunction, with a tremendous amount of instability, with a tremendous amount of a lack of support and a lack of emotional safety, with a tremendous amount of arguing and fights and all the examples that are the opposite of healthy. And I've taken all of that pain and I've transmuted it into gold. I've alchemized it. I've looked at every pain, every problem, every challenge. And I have found within it the gold that I can pull from it. And now it has become a source of wisdom. Now it has become a source of what to do or what not to do. And now I can give it back to others and I can speak to it so well because I've taken myself through that process. I allowed myself to be present to the pain. And the big macro awakening here is that your pain, although it feels like pins and needles and it's uncomfortable and it hurts, it's temporary. We don't live in a state of pain 24/7. Our sensations are always changing. They're always oscillating. You wake up and you're relaxed. I've told you guys this and then you get hungry. And you have coffee and then you're energized. And then you get frustrated and then you eat food in your happy again. And then you talk to a coworker who makes you laugh and you laugh and you're laughing. And then this and then that. And then by the time you get home and then you're like, dude, it's always changing. Your ability to recognize that you are not your pain. You are not a singular sensation of craving. That these are passing fluctuating forms of energy within the human operating system that you are a witness to. You guys have heard me talk about, imagine there's a camera up in the corner like a security camera and you're up there in the security room watching yourself. Would it you say that during that moment where you're getting a craving, hey, there is a moment right before this where you didn't have a craving and this craving is going to pass, maintain your resolve, maintain your composure, stay present, breathe, eat some food, go distract yourself, go for a walk, go for a run, FaceTime a friend, you're going to be okay. You're not going to be in a perpetual state of pain and craving forever. Just like you're not in a perpetual state of whatever the pain is forever. But if you continue bearing your head in the sand, if you don't have the courage or are unwilling to develop that courage and bravery inside of you to turn towards it and be present to it, then that pain that you want to release, that you want to forgive, that you want to let go, that you wish wasn't there, that you wish you could transmute into something else. It will always remain there and it will grow and it will amplify, especially because you're using alcohol, which is a destructive poison that is digging you deeper and deeper every time you drink. Alcohol is never a solution. If you're in a state of pain and let's say that state of pain is out of seven, okay. So you're like, man, I can't handle this, the stress, the overwhelm, it's too much, the boredom, the sadness, the loneliness, oh, I'm missing out, it's too much for you. So you drink, okay, it takes that pain from a seven to a two or two, one, you forget about it. But guess what? As soon as the alcohol wears off, now you're at a nine the next day, you're at a nine. None of that pain that was there got resolved in a meaningful, permanent way. There was no mental regulation, there was no emotional regulation, there was no strategy put in place, there was no communication patterns put in place with yourself, with your friends with your family, nothing got resolved. And now you've exposed yourself to a drug which further is digging you deeper into a state of dopamine and gabbed deficit, right? Lowering your stress tolerance, your ability to handle cortisol in your body, you're wiring in addictive behaviors and tendencies. That part of the brain is getting stronger. The prefrontal cortex where logic, rationale, decision making, future planning, organization, that part is shrinking. And now you're at a nine and none of your problems went away. You're hung over, you're less motivated to solve anything, right? And so guess what? You had a problem, you didn't learn in any way how to strategically problem solve it. And now you're in more pain. And guess what? An entire human experience is a path and balance between Between pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, everything that you do is in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. And guess what, when you're in a high pain state, you're now at a nine in terms of pain, you are gonna be that much more motivated to seek relief. And guess what, guess what the easy solution is that a child can do. Go drink alcohol. You're not being an adult, you're not regulating, you're not handling yourself, you're not taking responsibility and ownership for the circumstances in your life. What are you doing? You're just numbing, you're running off into the corner, you're hiding, you're going into the closet. Dude, this is like real talk, that's what you're doing, you are running. And what you have to remember is that you're strong enough, you're strong enough to be present to, and to handle and process whatever pain or challenge, that pain or challenge that you're experiencing, whether it's your anxiety or sadness or loneliness or disconnection or boredom or whatever it might be. I label all of them the same, man. I label all of them the same, it's just discomfort. They're pins and needles in your heart and in your stomach and in your shoulders that don't feel good for a period of time. So what you wanna label it and package it as is up to you if that makes you feel better in the moment. It's discomfort, it's discomfort. And the discomfort isn't just there for the sake of discomfort, it's a message. There's a message inside of the discomfort. So you're feeling anxious all the time because of your work, it's great, stop numbing to it. Become present and discover and take an inventory and say, what is it about my work that's constantly making me anxious? Is it my boss? Is it my work environment? Is it my coworkers? Is it the fact that I feel that I'm overworked and underpaid? Is it that I wanna continue to increase my earning potential? And I'm capped here and I don't see an opportunity out. What makes you anxious about it and begin to develop the courage within yourself to solve for that by figuring out what you need to do, what you can control and focus on that. Tony Robbins says there's three things that will help you immediately understand where anybody is at in their life. Based on how they process these three things. And the first one is, are you focusing on what you can control or what you can't control? Most people are focusing on what they can't control. And if you're constantly focusing on what you cannot control, you are gonna feel disempowered, anxious, depressed and sad. But if you focus on what you can control, what's in your power through your time management, through your organization, through your mindfulness, through how you invest your time, through how you invest your energy, through your intentions, through what you do in your free time, through who you talk to, who you network with, who you network with, you're gonna be in a much better state. So are you focusing on what you can control or what you can't control? Are you focusing on the next thing? Is are you focusing on what you have or are you focusing on what you don't have? If you're focusing on what you have and everything that's within your network and all of your resources and all of your connections and the gratitude for your health that you still have, for your family, for your kids, for your job, for the roof over your head, for your car, for this phone in your pocket that has access to infinite amounts of information for virtually free. Where you can learn skills, you can problem solve things, you can find support groups, networks, get connected to people like myself who can help change and transform your life or put you on a path to do so. Are you focusing on what you have on what you're grateful for or are you focusing on all the things that you don't have on what's missing, on how things could constantly be better, on what everybody around you is doing that pisses you off. That's a question to ask yourself, what are you focusing on? What you can control or what you can't control in every instance and every situation? Are you focusing on what you have and what you're grateful for and you're available resources and tools or are you focusing on what you don't have or are you constantly comparing yourself, or are you looking at the Joneses, or are you comparing your life to where you think you should be when you haven't gotten there yet or you haven't earned it yet. Okay, and the third thing is, are you focusing on the past, the present, or the future? We know that if you're overly focused on the past, you're gonna feel depressed and disempowered. And if you're constantly focusing on the future, you're probably gonna feel anxious because neither of those do you really have a ton of control over. What you do have control over is the present moment. And if you can learn to deploy your intentions, your conscious energy, your mental and emotional resources, and your skill sets towards the optimization of the present moment, that is how you build and create the future that you want. And this comes back down to the philosophy of one day at a time. This is what one day at a time means. You don't think about the past. You don't think about the future. You just deploy all of your resources mentally, emotionally, and physically into making today. This next step, the present moment, this next breath is good and is optimized as possible based on what you know in your resources. And if you do that, then you're effectively laying a good foundational brick today. And guess what, six months from now, if you continue to deploy all of your resources into making the best decisions today that are in alignment with your greater values, not short-sighted, instant gratification, instant relief from pain, instant things that ultimately create greater downstream consequences. If you deploy your energetic resources on a mental, emotional, and physical, energetic and spiritual level into choosing and making good decisions now, guess what, a month from now, 90 days from now, six months from now, you're going to have built really solid bricks that form a good foundation. So that six months from now, your physical health, your emotional health, your mental health, your family health, your work health, your financial health is in a better position. But if you're focusing on the wrong things, and you're giving all your energy and power away to things that you can control, or in operating out of the figment of your imagination, in these narratives and stories that aren't real, dude, the pain is going to perpetuate. So the pain is a messenger, right? Life evolves, humans evolve, animals evolve, nature evolves, in accordance to how it responds to stress and pain. That is what we're doing here on planet Earth. That is why we are here. Okay, nobody said life is easy. Nobody said this is going to be a walk in the park. Nobody said that you get to just show up and everybody comes to your aid. Everything has to be earned. You don't deserve anything. None of us deserve anything. Everything has to be worked for. We have to take personal ownership and responsibility for our self and our life. And once we learn how to do that, we can then get to a place where we become dependable, reliable, and now we can go out and provide that sort of support for others. But if we're falling short on just managing ourselves, how do you expect to truly be there and to truly lead and guide your wife, or your kids, or your business, or your employees, right? You have to focus on you. You have to get yourself in order. You have to get yourself to a good place so that you can then go out and lead and guide and support and be a role model for others. Isn't that what you want? When you go to pass and people are at your eulogy, don't you want people to say, he was a stellar, she was a stellar human being. They were kind, supportive, generous, her energy, his ideas, the way he showed up, the way he led, the way he was always there for me. It's impossible to do those things and to be remembered in those ways if we're constantly running from our own pain. Your pain is a messenger. It's there to teach you something. What is it about this pain, circumstantially within the context of how it's appearing in my life, that why am I avoiding it? What do I think is going to happen if I'm present to it? What if I were to hire support and coaching and have tools and strategies to manage this pain? Who could I be on the other side of it? What would happen if I could free myself from this pain? Imagine if this pain was no longer lingering in circulating in my body. Who could I be? And what if I were to work through this pain, figure out how to work through it, and then get to a place where I turn this pain into my power, my prayer. purpose or wisdom. Who could I help? Who could I support? Who could I guide? Who could I lead to not make the same mistakes? How could I save people years of trouble and heartache within my family unit, within my community, with my friends, with the people that I support? That's what we're doing here, but as long as we avoid our pain and we make our pain this deep, dark, black hole called generalized anxiety, depression, we're not going to get anywhere. Remember, you're not born anxious or depressed. Anxiety and depression is a symptom of feeling disempowered and feeling like you have an inability to change or control or optimize your circumstances. So rather than just continuing to blame the anxiety, but what about the anxiety? Yeah, be present to the anxiety and ask yourself, what am I specifically anxious about? Is it my work? Is it my relationship? Is it my kids? Is it something? Whatever it is, get to the source in bottom of that and begin to develop the courage and get proactive around putting some tools and strategy and support and structure in place to begin to address that. I know anxiety makes you feel like it's hard to act. I know depression represses your energy and makes it feel like it's hard to be proactive, but you don't have to solve it all overnight. You just have to take the first step. So if you're depressed and you feel like you can't get off the couch, step one is to just go to the bathroom and brush your teeth. If that's too much, just go to the fridge. Take tiny baby steps. The reason things feel hard and overwhelming is because you're creating a standard for what you think the resolution or solution has to be. But the way that you get to that bigger goal is by taking tiny steps. So whatever problem you're experiencing can be broken down into 10 steps. If that's too much for you break it down into 15 steps and just take the first one. So it's totally painless. Right? You have to remember that the world in and of itself, this objective universe that we live in is neither depressed nor anxious nor impossible nor disempowered and nobody is holding a gun to your head saying, you can't be exactly who you want to be and that you can't show up exactly in the way that you want to show up in the world. But throughout your childhood development or through certain experiences, whether we experience trauma or just some kind of painful event, we create a story. We develop a set of patterns and programs as an adaptive way to try to survive and not re-experience that pain. And so now our system gets dysregulated and it produces some anxiety or some depression or some disempowering thoughts or behaviors because it's trying to protect you. But guess what? The big cosmic spiritual awakening or the big cosmic spiritual realization is that your pain, mental or emotional, it's not going to kill you. Yes, I know it feels like pins and needles. I know it's uncomfortable. But that is your spiritual curriculum. That is your journey. That is your personal journey. The exact problems that you are specifically experiencing in your life with your family, with yourself, with whatever it is, your business are for you. My problems were for me. My family dysfunctions, my losing of my father, my whatever I went through. Those were mine. And whatever your experiencing is for you, specifically for you to learn, to develop courage, to develop bravery, to find it within yourself too dig deep and to search for more answers. That's your journey. That's why you're here. You're not just here to have a job. You're not just here to make money. You're not just here to raise kids. You're here to learn how to alchemize your pain, to turn it into wisdom so that you can pass it back to the rest of the people around you to make their life easier. That's why we're here. That's the basis of capitalism. You start a business in a free economy with little to no rules. And the basis of capitalism is to create businesses, entities, organizations and structures that solve problems and make life easier, more effective and more efficient for people. That's what we're all doing at a macro level. But now we get caught up in all of our disagreements and how we're different and it just nonsense. You're here to make your life better. You're here to make the lives of the people around you better. That's why you got an education. That's why you tried to go to college. That's why you got a good job so that you can continue to make progress. At what point did you stop making progress in your life, mentally, emotionally, physically, energetically, spiritually within your family? The reason we suffer is because we're not making progress in our learning, in our growth, in our perspectives. We're staying stagnant and stuck. Nobody wants that. And what you want deep down, what you really want is progress. But if you don't allow yourself to recognize that in order to make the progress that you so deeply want, that you so deeply long for, that that progress comes by developing the courage to walk through the fire, you're never going to make it. Right? It's like going from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Do you think that caterpillar has any idea what's in store for it? When it can just travel one one hundredth of one mile per hour across a two dimensional plane, and it doesn't even know what wings are, do you think it has any idea what's waiting for it on the other side? And do you think that if that caterpillar, when it goes to cocoon, and it has to be in a cocoon for, I don't know, four weeks, six weeks, and it's stuck and it's claustrophobic and it's all bent up and it's back its back is sore, and it's beginning to dissolve and who it knows itself as is beginning to dissolve and change, and its skin is changing and its legs are changing and it's skeletal structure is changing. Do you think that if it was not willing to endure that metamorphosis process that it deserved or earned, the ability to be a butterfly and to be beautiful and colorful and to be able to fly hundreds of feet up into the air and to have a completely altered experience of life, one that's free, one that's empowered, one that's creative, one that's admired by other humans and animals? Do you think if it went a week or two weeks and then said the pain was too much and it just left the cocoon that it would get to earn and experience that other thing, it wouldn't. Our pain is a teacher. It's a teacher, biological organisms on this planet evolve in response to how it handles pain. Those who learn how to become resilient and handle pain the best and most effectively are the most successful. And those who look at the pain, wallow in the pain and are not willing to do anything to begin to try to problem solve the pain are the ones who are the least successful and the ones that are the suffering the most. But what you have to understand and recognize is that no matter what the pain is, anxiety, boredom, sadness, feeling like you're missing out, whatever, it's temporary and it can be changed and it can be transmuted and it can be reprocessed and eventually that pain becomes your power. It becomes your power. All of my pain is now my power and it's not pain anymore but it was painful when I was 14 and I lost my dad and it was painful going through my adolescence without a good role model and it was painful to wake up twice a week to the cops coming to my house because my dad was yelling and raging when he was drinking. That was painful. That sucked. And all those years that I held onto that frustration and that anger and that sadness and I was just drowning myself in alcohol, that was painful. That was painful. But once I got to a point where I recognized then maybe you're at this point that the pain of alcohol has started to significantly outweigh the pleasure that I'm getting from it. I just recognized dude this game is over. It's over. If you're at that point where the amount that you're drinking is making you really sick, right? Like maybe your tolerance was increasing and now it's gone down. You get really messed up after just a few drinks. That's because you're at the end of the video. the road here. You're at the end of the road. Your body is enough is enough. This strategy, this spiritual human journey, you're at the end of the road here. It's time for change. It's not working anymore. And I know it feels scary. And I know the thought and idea of not being able to feel that pleasure, that dopamine, or that euphoria is scary. I know. But guess what? You don't have to quit drinking forever. I haven't quit drinking forever. You just take it one day to time. You can go a day without it. You've done that already. Maybe you've gone weeks or even months without it. Remember how incredible you felt at 30 days. Remember when you went six months or eight months? How incredible you felt? Sure. Were there times of challenge or boredom or you felt like missing out? Fine. Yeah. Sure. But guess what? Who told you that you have to always feel like you're in the party having fun, not missing out every like you get what you want all the time. That's not how life works. If you want to be functional, if you want to be dependable, if you want to be reliable, if you want to be a role model, if you want to actually move towards progress and growth in the fulfillment of your potential, and you want life to be better, and you want to have more control, and you want to be able to create your life, and you want to be able to serve others and be a role model or an inspiration, or you want to motivate, or you want to help other people, or you just want to have a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and fulfillment. You can't always just go down to the bottom of the barrel and just say it's all about short-term instant gratification and relief, because that's what alcohol is. That's what alcohol is. It's instant gratification. And so what's the surprise? You're learning how to delay gratification. Really simple. Really simple. And guess what? When you become the person who develops the courage and fortitude and commitment to commit to a process of continued delayed gratification, just one day at a time, who you become along the way over time, you will not recognize my friend. But most people don't do that. They don't think about it that way. They think it's a huge loss. They think it's going to be a little mole in the corner. The odd one out. Dude, it's 2024. Okay. Everybody is waking up to how disgusting alcohol is. It's dog piss. It's the devil's piss. Look at people when they're drunk. Look at how they act. Look at how they show up. Look at how they stand. Look at their eyes. It's not attractive. It's not cool. It's not fun. It's not sophisticated. It's not luxurious. Just look at someone in their eyes when their eight drinks deep. They can't even look at you as they're sitting there wobbling. What's cool about that? What's life of the party? What's enjoyable? What what is attractive about that? There's nothing. It's kind of gross. It's kind of gross. Look at how they talk. Look at what they say. Look at the energy they give off. Look at the decisions they make with the people closest to them, with the opposite sex. Look at how they're willing to just not even willing because they're in a completely different state of mind. Look at how they're willing to just destroy personal or family values. Look at how this this drug, this virus clouds their rationale and judgment so much that they put themselves at risk and put their families at risk and put their employees at risk. Dude, there's nothing cool about it. It's not what we were led to believe. It's a hard drug and it causes real permanent damage. And so like play the tape forward always and never forget about the pain. What we have to learn how to manage through this process is that when you develop alcohol use disorder alcoholism, this little three pound meat between your ears and behind your eyes will try to convince you. Listen, let me just lay it out for you. It will try to convince you whether you're three days sober or three months sober or three years alcohol free or 33 years alcohol free. It will try and convince you that it's going to be different this time and that you can just have one. This is the game. It will try and convince you it's going to be different. And so if you can just accept that, if you can acknowledge and if you can integrate within yourself that this thing is always just going to try to get you to make a left turn. Always, it doesn't matter who you are or what you do or how much time you've had. So just don't believe it. Play the tape forward. Take yourself back to the pain. When you think about alcohol always bring up the two or three most painful toxic fucked up dysfunctional things that have happened as a result of alcohol. And that's what alcohol is. It's not the one drink. It's what the one drink leads to. It's the cycle. It's the trend. But the brain of an alcoholic or someone on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder does not let you see that. It just focuses on the drink. I don't know why. I don't know. Nobody has understood why this is what the addictive brain does. I don't know. It just it's seeking that relief. It just it just wants to feel that thing. But you as the intelligent conscious agent has to be present. You can't let your guard down. You have to remain vigilant. You have to maintain context and you have to play the tape forward and you have to see it for what it is. And if you relapse or if you go back to drinking, there is a hole that you haven't learned how to plug. That's what a relapse is. Right. I just posted a video on my tick talk about this. It's like seven minutes long. It talks all about relapse and I'll come out with an episode where I really dig in on relapse. But alcohol use disorder alcoholism. This is signified as a chronic relapse disorder. So quitting drinking this journey that you're on is you are going down a path which many people may may have or haven't gone down where you are learning how to live a life free from alcohol. And sometimes people fall and sometimes people stumble and sometimes people scrape their knee. And when that happens, they're shame and they're skilled and you get all emotional about it. But it's not that emotional. It's an input output system. It's objective. Just like if you were to come home and start yelling at your partner, you could clearly see very clearly that that would end up in an argument when it's not called for. Even if it is called for, you don't solve conflict through yelling or just being angry. Right. That's not how you get to resolution. You get to resolution by understanding, by listening, by empathy, by compassion, and by coming up with a strategic solution together while you're both standing on the same side of the street trying to get to the same goal and you find something that works for both of you with clarity, with understanding, and with a healthy productive strategy. But for some reason with alcohol, we don't see that. It's a very simple input output, but the clouded alcohol, like alcohol use disorder mind doesn't allow you to see it. So when you relapse, it's very simple. You rewind the tape. Where were you? What were you thinking? What sensation was flowing through your body? How did you rationalize? How did you justify? At what point did you make the decision? Who were you with? What was the environment? Got it. So these were the circumstances and had you known some of these things previously, 99.9% of the time, yeah, I did. Well, why didn't you do it? Well, there was this thing. Great. Solve for that thing. If it was a person, if it was an environment, great. Remove that. And if you commit to removing that for a prolonged period of time, then you'll remain sober. And if there's another leak that causes you to go out a different way, well, then address that. It's about learning how to plug the gaps, the leaks energetically, mentally, emotionally, physically. And that's a learning process. Every person's unique. They have a different life. They have a different set of circumstances. They have different people. They have, they're just at different parts of the human experience. We're not all the same. We're not all equal. Okay. As much as we all want to like think and believe, inherently at a soul level, we're all equal in value and important. But not everybody's the same in which we manage ourselves and the way that we make decisions. Some people take a long time to learn. Other people learn more quickly. Some people have a lot more pain. Some people have a little bit less pain. Some people have commitments and attachments to certain experiences and stories. and some people are a little bit more flexible and resilient and are able to navigate things a little bit. better. But either way, it's your journey. And so how do you be successful in that journey when you haven't found a way to be successful on your own? Work a program of some kind. If you haven't been able to do it by yourself, you got to work a program. Whether it's my program or somebody else that you feel energetically resonant with in the way they share and communicate and the way they look at this journey, you got to work a program. And the reason I say that is because I could not have done it without a program. I needed a system. I needed support. I needed community. I needed accountability. And I needed to get to the source and bottom of why I was the way that I was. I needed to make sense of my past, which there was a lot of pain. I needed to better understand childhood development. I need to better understand the brain and the nervous system and the subconscious mind and beliefs and how beliefs are formed. And I need to learn tools and strategies to begin to move through these things to get to my ideal state, to my ideal vision. But if I didn't have a map or tools or structure systems or accountability for any of that stuff, I would have just put the bottle down, been left with the same blueprint of what I was, and then just been unhappy and frustrated and bored and sad, which some people are like that. You know, I advocate a proactive approach for recovery because that's what it needs for this to really be successful for the long term. But not just in recovery in life. I believe as human beings, we have to be proactive in our life. Otherwise, we're going to take the curve ball's life throws at us and then we're just going to wallow in the pain and blame the world and how it's unfair and how God doesn't love us and how we got the short end of the stick. Quitting drinking is a major, major step in learning personal responsibility, ownership and accountability. Something that a lot of adult struggle with. Many of them, many of them, because it's hard. It's hard to hold the mirror up to yourself and to see where you fucked up or where you're falling short. Nobody wants to believe that they have any defects. And I don't like the word defect or any aspects of their personality, which they may be unconscious too. Right? It's a better way to say it. So recognize that the pain in your life, it's there. It's a teacher. It's a lesson. It's there for you to move through it to understand it, to reprocess it, to reintegrate it and to pull from it the wisdom that you can. Look at all the people who experience major traumas and sexual abuse who then go on to become speakers and go to high schools and colleges and do TED talks. And as a result of going through such painful horrific experiences, are able to synthesize it and process it and transmute it in such a way where they're then able to then go out and communicate it and share a message to other people in the world, which helps tens of thousands or millions of people not only prevent themselves from getting in sticky, dangerous situations, but then at the same time allows all of those who have had and been through a similar experience to feel like they're not alone, to feel like they're understood, to feel like they're validated. Right? But if that person continued to run from their pain and wasn't willing to look at it or work through it or find resources or support, to begin to reprocess and reintegrate those tens of thousands or whatever people like wouldn't have gotten that wisdom, wouldn't have gotten that value. And in your life, whatever it is that you're going through, that is what your pain represents symbolically. It is a challenge. It is a point in the chapter of your life book where rather than sticking your head in the sand, you turn towards it and you work through it, you allow yourself to feel the anxiety, you allow yourself to feel the boredom. And to recognize, okay, so your bored? Great. Boredom isn't just this thing that you just sit and fucking complain about. So get proactive. Get proactive. There's a million things to do. Go for a walk. Watch a YouTube video, watch a documentary. You know, go to some community event. There's hundreds of them in every city. You just have to reach out. And so boredom is a signal that you're just sitting on your ass making excuses. There's so many things you can do. But Bardia, I live in a bum fuck part of XYZ, some part of the state where there's nothing but a gas station for 20 miles, for 40 miles. Okay. Did anybody force you to live there? If you're that bored, maybe it's time to consider relocating. Is it going to be hard? Do you have to make some sacrifices? Do you have to maybe work some extra shift to save up some money to do so? Maybe. But what are you going to do? Wallow and use boredom as an excuse to the day you die. In the moment you're sitting in your deathbed, reflecting on your life, you say, wow, I just sat around and was bored for 30 years. Or you're going to take your fucking life into your own hands and say, enough is enough. This pain, I'm done with it. There's no more. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to play this game. I'm tired of it. That is what pain is. Pain is a teacher and it will come back in the same form over and over and over again, ruthlessly and relentlessly until you spiritually develop the conscious capacity in yourself to say, enough is enough. I am upgrading from this and you will go out and you will do whatever you have to do to not re-experience that pain. That's what rock bottom is. You say enough is enough. And so as a result, I will open myself up to any other sort of pain that I have to go through or deal with so I don't have to go back to this one. That is when your life will change. Otherwise, you won't. Poverty is a teacher. You will continue to live in poverty without resources until you say enough is enough and you take all your extra free time and become more skillful, more resourceful and more valuable to the economic marketplace. Or you don't. And then you just sit in poverty and continue to use it as an excuse. Every pain has within it the seeds of profound change in transformation. And when you learn to process it and synthesize it and it becomes part of your character, you can then go out and use that in a way to make your life in the lives of other people better. So I really want to reiterate that like these deep dark black holes of discomfort and pain that we give our power away to is not designed for us to just sit in wallow in them in emotion, a feeling, it's feedback, it's feedback, it's not the thing to wallow in. Okay. The human operating system, the human energy vehicle, you as a person, you are designed to make progress in life. Whatever that progress looks like for you, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you are a creative, whether you are a parent, whether you are whatever it is an athlete, musician, you're designed to make progress. And when you're not making progress, you feel like shit. And I know it's hard to push outside of your comfort zone and to make progress. But guess what, you don't have to do it alone and you're not alone in whatever problems you think you do have, you're not alone and you're not unique. Whatever it is that you're experiencing in going through, whether it was toxic relationships, family life, that was x, y, or z, a work struggle, some other aspect of your personality or whatever it is. There's millions of people out there who are currently at this very second going through very similar experiences and millions of people who have learned to cope and problem solve and regulate through them. That's what this is about. We're here to learn. We're here to grow. We're here to evolve. And your pain is a stepping stone in that process. It is a stepping stone turning towards the pain and then getting support and systems and tools and strategies to learn how to cope and move through that pain is the game. And the more of that you're able to do, the more confident you become, the more personal power you develop, the more more your self image and self-esteem raises and your belief in yourself increases. And when those things begin to increase, guess what, you experience less anxiety and less depression because you feel more resilient and more empowered and you have the confidence within yourself to know that as you're moving through this experience and game of life, whatever happens, you can handle. And it's not gonna crush you. And you don't need anybody else to come save you because you can handle it yourself. But I know when we go through a lot of pain from our past and we have what feels like crushing experiences, we carry that in our heart and we feel as if we're disempowered. But I'm telling you, this is the time as you're listening to this now is the time to begin to make that change. That's what sobriety is about. Alcohol represents all of the pain and stories and commitments and narratives to our disempowerment of our past. And while some look at quitting drinking as just this, oh, I'm gonna be left out now. The way that you need to look at it, the way that I encourage you to look at it is that use this as a springboard as an excuse to finally become the person that you've always wanted to be. That's what this is. You finally have the excuse because you're letting go of something challenging, of something difficult, as something that seemed like it helped you. You're changing your lifestyle, you're learning massive amounts of new information. It's gonna require you to become very conscious and aware and mindful. And you're gonna have to learn new tools and new skills like, dude, use this as an opportunity as a springboard to totally transform everything. Is this all gonna happen overnight? No, you just do it one day at a time. You don't have to make all of these changes and solve all of these problems now or next week or in the next month. I know your relationship might be in shambles and even just having a conversation with that person might take you to a 10 out of 10 fighter flight. I get it. But you're back as against the wall at this point. The only way forward is forward. It's up. And so all you have to do is take the next right step forward. If you don't know what the whole journey and path looks like, that's okay. I didn't. I had no idea. I just knew I couldn't go on the way that I was going on. And so you just take the next right step forward. That's what my mentor told me, Sean. And I tell that to everybody. Just take the next right step forward. Meaning what do you think is the next best step from here? Is it reaching out? Is it filling out an application? Is it sending somebody a text message? Is it calling somebody and telling them you're sorry? Is it making a commitment or a process to yourself? Is it grabbing your journal and getting clear on the pain? Is it beginning to journal out who you could be and what's available for you on the other side? What's the next right step forward for you in your journey based on where you're at? With your health, with your family, with your career, with your business, with your goals, with your finances, with your dream. You don't have to problem solve all of it overnight. You just take the next right step forward and then you take the next right step forward. And every time you're met with a choice point, that could either take your life this way or that way, you make the one that's the most aligned to your heart, to your values into the greater good of your potential and the lives of those you care about most. And you allow yourself to move through in process and regulate the temporary discomforts that pop up along the way, knowing the way that you feel in the beginning isn't reflective of how you're gonna feel a year from now. It's not reflective of how the rest of life is gonna be. The alcohol recovery journey at a macro level is a reconditioning process of your mental, emotional, physical, energetic, neurochemical and spiritual operating system. You've been living and operating and thinking and behaving within a tiny finite frequency for years or even decades. So have compassion with yourself, have patience and recognize that it's a long-term journey. Right, if you've been drinking for 10 years, give yourself at least a year of courage and bravery and commitment. But I don't even wanna say a year because that again trips you out, it's too much. Just today, just make it a goal to be alcohol-free today no matter what happens. How pissed off, how stressed out, how frustrated, how angry, just for today. And I promise when you wake up in the morning, you're gonna feel better. And you're gonna feel grateful and happy that you didn't drink the day before. And guess what, now you're half a percent or one percent more confident. You have a little bit more self-esteem. You have a little bit more self-respect. You have a little bit more personal power because you got through a moment that was hard, that was tough, that you would have normally caved or folded over. And guess what, now you're a little bit stronger. You're a little bit more resilient. And so just imagine who you will be as you go through all these different challenges and points in your life and you stop folding, you stop giving in, you maintain, you maintain your composure in presence. You stay still despite the hurricane. You allow yourself to feel and be present to the human experience. And you open yourself up to the wisdom of what it's trying to teach you when you read in between the lines with your partner, with your kids, with your work, with these challenges. What is it trying to teach you? What is it calling for? More patience, more presence, more calm, more empathy, more compassion, more organization, more pro-activity, more commitment to some aspect of your life that you've been letting go and which you're responsible for. It's okay, life's not here to berate you. Life isn't here to pummel you. It's trying to teach you, it's trying to open you to help you evolve into a kinder, wiser, more self-aware, more conscious, more resilient, more powerful version of yourself. But if you keep running, if you keep blaming, if you keep deflecting, if you keep pointing fingers at the pain, at the anxiety, at the boredom, and you make those the problems, rather than holding the mirror to your self-analysis for how you're living and your level of pro-activity, you're never gonna get anywhere. And the pain and the anxiety and the boredom is just gonna get worse. But trust me, the buck is gonna stop somewhere. It has to, or it doesn't, and you play the tape forward. And if it doesn't, we all know how that ends. Lost my dad at 57 to alcohol poisoning in a sleep, left behind me, left behind a family. You have to play the tape forward. And if your life isn't in shambles and you haven't hit rock bottom, that's okay. But if you know it's headed there, use wisdom. Apply the wisdom. Wisdom is being able to see something before it happens. Why destroy your life? Why cause irreversible damage? Why wait until your partner leaves you? Why wait till the D. why? Why wait till you hurt yourself or you hurt someone or lose your job before you make a change? The pain that you're experiencing your life holds within it the seeds of powerful transformation, powerful wisdom that you can share with the world, that you can share with your friends, with your family. The journey of the human experience is about learning to synthesize your pains, to become more resilient, to become more loving, more compassionate, more empathetic, to become a more conscious human being. Those who have the most pain and are the most committed to it are the people we like to associate with the least. They're the ones who are the most negative. They're the ones who are the most judgmental. Those are the ones who make our life worse, who bring in and project pain and dysregulation upon us. Right? So the goal is not to just keep wallowing in the pain and to keep pointing fingers at the anxiety and the boredom and the craving. It's about holding the mirror as an adult and recognizing that you are where you are because of you, because of your. decisions? Sure. Did you have a crazy background? Sure, did you have family dysfunction? Sure. Did you not have people to show you the way? Sure. And as a result, did that pre-dispose you to a certain set of thinking patterns and behavioral patterns, tendencies, and decision-making? Sure. But now we're here. And so what are we going to do? Are we going to keep pointing at the past? Keep pointing at the dysregulation that's come up as a result of the series of decisions compounded over time? Are we going to hold the mirror and say, what do we want instead? What do I want? What's the ideal? What's possible? You have to start thinking about and getting clear on a vision for the future that's better than what it is now. I always say, what's going to happen if you take somebody who's smart, successful, relatively well-adjusted, productive, somewhat member of society, and you just stop pouring poison into the system. It's not a metaphor. Alcohol is poison. Acid aldehyde, which is what alcohol gets converted to in the liver, is a class one carcinogen that causes multiple different types of cancer in disease. It's just like, oh, it's poison. No, it's, it's, you're drinking poison. That feeling of being drunk and wobbly, you are in a poisoned state. You can't keep your balance because you're poisoned. You're seeing double and triple because you're poisoned. Your brain shuts off and you black out because the system is overloaded and poisoned. It just happens to tap the reward center like a Trojan horse comes in like a shiny bow, marketed to you by the media and culture as this high fine bottle of wine nonsense. It's the same shit, whether it's a hundred years old and $5,000 a bottle or a freaking $3,000, but like same shit. And for you to sit there and mentally masturbate around it being different, it's nonsense. Do that with yourself if you want and see how far it gets you and where it leads you to, a disempowered, uncontrolled lack of personal power and sovereign you. Because the story of what this bottle of wine means is more important than your health, than your goals, than your vision, than your longevity, than your future, than your personal agency. You have to choose what you believe in. You have to choose what information you take in. You have to choose what you want as part of your map of reality. And so if you want to play into those marketing games, then do it. If you think life has more to offer than the culture of alcohol, then go explore that because I will tell you the culture of alcohol represents less than a hundredth of one percent of the available lifestyle and opportunities that you can embrace in this thing called life. So your pain is a messenger. Whatever it is in that moment, it is a teacher. Get proactive. Find support. Find solutions. You know, you're responsible for it. Remember, nobody's going to come save you. I can't come save you. You have to reach out to me. You have to fill out an application. You have to join my program. And once you're in, you'll get the support in the path and the systems and tools and the things that are going to help support you, but I can't go inside of you and do the work. I can't go inside of you and muster the bravery and the courage to turn towards your discomfort. You have to do that. Nobody can go inside of you and work through the craving. That's your job. And you wouldn't want anybody to because they'd be stealing the most precious thing from you, which is your ability to grow, to evolve, to adapt, to become more resilient, to become bigger, stronger. Right? The things that you want, the things that you most deeply long for in desire, comes through doing the work, comes through turning towards the parts of yourself that you keep running from in denying. And to the degree that you keep running in denying those things is to the degree that those things control you and your life and the direction of your life. And I want to remind you that whatever it is that you're going through, there's support out there, relationships, family stuff, personal stuff, specific events or memories or challenges, whatever it is, there's support. You're not alone. You're not alone. Even if you feel like you're alone, you're not alone. You're not alone. We're the same person living in a different body when it comes to this alcohol thing. All right. So remember, don't give your power away to the pain and then just put the pain out here and sit there and wallow in it. Get proactive, anxiety, boredom, depressed, lonely, sad, about what's specifically about this XYZ. Okay, great. What's in your power? What can you do? What can you change? How can you become more proactive? How can you take tiny little baby steps towards that? How can you just open up a line of communication with somebody? How can you ask reach out and ask somebody for help or support? How can you, you know, join a program, find a group, find a community, find something local. It's out there, but you have to develop the courage to reach out and you have to want it. You have to want it deeply. As I say this all the time, like quitting drinking, it's not like I'm just going to hire a personal trainer and just like lose 15 pounds in 90 days. The tenacity, the vigilance, the commitment, the composure is like trying to lose 100 pounds in six months. So imagine, imagine what type of energy and effort you would apply to that. And if that sounds overwhelming for you, listen, I'm just giving it to you straight. But the good news is is you don't have to lose 100 pounds in a day. You just have to do your best today to maintain how many calories you're supposed to have. You get a good workout in today and you optimize all other points of hygiene that support weight loss today. That's it. You don't have to lose 100 pounds today. You just have to do your best in making sure that you hit your diet and exercise requirements today. And you can do that. You've done it. And you just take it piece by piece, bit by bit, step by step, brick by brick. And it all becomes possible. A mountainous climbed, Mount Everest, one step at a time. And your ability to step into that next chapter of your life where eventually it all clicks, the cravings nearly dissipate if that none at all. And you start to become an embody the person that you've always wanted and have dreamed of happens day by day, step by step, bit by bit, brick by brick. And recognize that this vehicle that you inhabit is more intelligent than you can beyond than you can begin to imagine. Like listen, your conscious mind has a hard time putting IKEA furniture together. Yet you have 86 trillion or billion cells inside of you working in perfect harmony and perfect unison doing everything it can to manage thousands of functions simultaneously. The fear, the pain, the anxiety, it's a signal. It's a compass. It's saying, hey, these are the aspects of your human operating system, your human energy vehicle that if you approach it strategically and you move through it and you reprocess it and you heal from it, you will experience a biological upgrade. So guess what? Who would you be with less social anxiety? What are the possibilities that would open up in terms of your friends, your network, your sense of community? It's not what you know, it's who you know. So if you got over or work through your social anxiety and just felt more comfortable around people and you could go up and have more conversations, imagine what one friend or what one person could lead you to within your work or your network or your business or another opportunity. Dude, this life is so infinite, it's so big, there's so many opportunities. But we can only access those, those only become available when we develop the courage to stop running from our pain and to recognize that the pain in whatever form it is, just call it discomfort, it's all kind of the same. Okay, boredom, frustration, it's just pins and needles in your body that doesn't feel good for a period of time. Breathe through it, remain present, self-regulate, apply some tools or techniques, go for a walk, go for a run, work out, call a friend, take a breather, eat some food, relax, throw on some your favorite song, dance out a little bit, shake it out, go for a drive. It'll change. Your energy system doesn't stay the same 24/7. It's constantly shifting. Learn to ride the wave, learn to become the conscious witness to the fluctuating flow of this experience. And as you do that and you commit to this process, I promise you that life will transform and it will become something better than you can begin to imagine if you commit to the process. So I'll keep it at that. I trust that this episode was helpful, was enlightening, was supportive for you in your journey. And if you found this to be helpful, please share this episode with somebody who you think it'll help. If you'd like to work with me one-on-one or if you'd like to join my group coaching program that again is going to be launching here very soon, go to www.thestoptrinkingcoach.com and fill out an application. And if you haven't yet, I would deeply, deeply, deeply appreciate it if you left me a five-star review both on Spotify and on Apple. Spotify doesn't allow you to leave a written review, but Apple does. So if you have an iPhone and you just go to the search bar and type in podcast, there's a native podcast app on every iPhone. Type podcast, look up Stop Drinking Coach. Once you find my podcast kind of scroll down, there should be a section that'll set right a review. Just leave a five-star if that's how you feel, hopefully. And just write a review about your experience of listening to me and the podcast. The more reviews we can get on there, the more it'll kind of push the podcast out to help reach more people who could get the value and the support that you've received from me to hopefully change and transform their life. So thank you so much for listening. I appreciate all of you for taking the time to listen to me. You guys helped me just as much as I help you. And yeah, I will see you guys in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five-star review, and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. I offer private one-on-one and group coaching to make letting go of alcohol easier and more sustainable than you ever thought possible. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. [MUSIC]