SPEAKER_00 1:51

Welcome to day eight of your mindful drinking audio advent. Today we are looking at your moderation toolkit. So I know this can be a hot button issue for some people, but moderation isn't about willpower alone. It's about knowing what you want from your experience, from your life in general, and being able to make decisions about the best way for you to get it. Now, I have uh released an episode for you just a couple of weeks ago about willpower and why that's not enough to get you through Christmas by itself, and it's about changing your belief system around where and how alcohol fits into your life. In terms of moderating, I see it in two different ways, two clear types of moderating. There is passive moderation and active moderation. Active moderation is things like dry January, sober October, and some of the techniques that we're going to look at below. Passive moderation is the next level. That's when you have come to accept that alcohol is no longer serving you the way that it used to. And your choices to drink are based far more on an understanding of what it is that you are achieving with your life rather than a choice in the moment about whether or not you allow yourself to have this drink.

Active Moderation Techniques

SPEAKER_00 3:18

But that is a place that we have to get to. If you do want to dive deeper on this, because it's a very big and important topic, I do cover it more fully inside the four-week midlife mindful drinking reset. So that's ready for you whenever you want to dive deeper, and you can click the link in the show notes to find out more about how you can participate in that. It could be a great option for you for January if you're not necessarily going to do a fully dry January, but you do want to change the way you drink and start the year off on your own terms. But some of the techniques that a lot of people are looking at include things like zebra striping. So zebra striping is alternating between a full strength drink and a low or no strength drink all night long. So you are switching back and forth between full strength alcohol and low no drinks. This is a great option if you are only having a couple of drinks because obviously as the night goes on, you might start to lose track of where you are, but it's a great way to halve your alcohol intake. Another option is what's known as bookending, and bookending is starting and ending your evening with an alcohol-free drink and consuming alcohol-full drinks in between. Now, uh, bookending is an interesting one. I I think it's a great idea if you're only having, say, three or four drinks in total on your night out. But if you start with an alcohol-free drink and then have eight pints and then you end with an alcohol-free drink, you're not really going to notice any benefit. So don't think that it suddenly just undoes everything if you have one AF drink at the end of a bender. The next one is coasting. Uh, coasting is a slightly newer term that you might not have heard many times before, uh, and that is choosing light or mid-strength alcohol drinks throughout your evening. Now, this is a great option, I think, because it um allows you to just make one choice. And the choice is uh I'm having this mid-strength gin or this mid-strength wine throughout the evening. You don't have to keep track of what your last drink was or what you're going to have next, and you will automatically cut your alcohol intake in half. Um, the only thing to be wary of here is that because we're not quite used to mid-strength drinks just yet, you might struggle to know exactly how much you've had. So, of course, if you're driving or you have to do something that's really important and requires clarity, then I don't recommend that for you. And then one other technique that you could look at is pacing. And so, pacing is consuming only one alcoholic drink per hour and the rest of the time having alcohol-free or low-no drinks. The reason why this works is because generally the human body can process one unit of alcohol per hour. And so, as long as you are having relatively light drinks, um, then you should be able to process the majority of the alcohol that you've consumed before you start taking in your next drink. Like I said, I do go into these in far more detail inside the four-week midlife mindful drinking reset. Um, if you've opened today's day on your advent calendar, you will see a selection of mid strength drinks that I personally recommend. I've tried all of these. Uh, there are some spirits, beers, and wines. Um, so I want you to give them a try, and I'd love to know what you think. Uh, I will see you tomorrow for day nine, and until then, cheers to a Christmas less intoxicated.