How Unseen Drinking Habits Sneak Up

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Nobody plans to overdrink. None of us wake up and say, right, I'm going to purposefully undo all of my moderation efforts tonight. Instead, what happens is the accumulation of a series of small actions, of unseen habits and automatic behaviors that all add up over a week. So that by the time Friday rolls around, you end up feeling like you've made no progress, like nothing's working, and that you might as well knock it all on the head for now and start again on Monday. These are default behaviors. These are the ones that you don't think about, that you mightn't even realize that you're doing, that can all lead to us over drinking more than we intended. But get a handle on one or two of these over the coming weeks and watch as your moderation efforts start to feel less like trying to ice skate uphill and more like taking another step in the right direction. You're listening to the Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife podcast, where it's my goal to help you take back the power of choice from alcohol. I'm your host and mindful drinking mentor, Denise Hamilton Mace, and this is the start of your journey to a life less intoxicating. So I'm going to jump straight into these for you today because I have got six habitual behaviors around drinking that I would put money that you have experienced, that you've practiced, that you've done yourself several times over. I know that these were all really prevalent in what I call my professional drinking days, as you've heard me call it before. But these are things that happen, as I said, and we don't often realize that we are doing them. And even if we do, we don't then realize the impact that it's having on our efforts and all the hard work that we're putting into drinking more mindfully, moderating our intake, cutting back when we know that it's going to serve us better. So I'm going to take you through the six of these. And for each one, because I never like to leave you without some practical advice and solutions, this podcast is all about practical moderation techniques. So for each one of these habits, I'm going to give you a simple one-line solution that you can put into place, that you can start practicing so that you can start to move away from this automatic behavior and stop unknowingly undoing all of your amazing moderation efforts that you've been putting in so far.

Topping Up Before You're Empty

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So, number one is topping up your glass or allowing your glass to be topped up before you've finished your drink. Now, whether it's just you andor your other half at home on the sofa or an overly eager waiter at a restaurant working for that tip, uh, or maybe it's just a generous friend and you're chilling with them for the evening on the sofa. Whenever you allow your drink to be constantly topped up, it becomes impossible to know where one drink ends and where the next one begins. You end up losing track of the quantity, so you don't know how many drinks you've had. You end up just going with the flow, and before you know it, it's three hours later. You're staring at four empty bottles of wine, but there's only three of you drinking, and you're wondering how did that happen again? So your one quick fixer, your one simple solution for this automatic habit that you might not even recognize is happening, is simply never to refill your glass until it's empty. If you don't know how much you're drinking, how can you possibly make a choice about how much more you want to have to drink?

Drinking While Cooking

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Habit number two is drinking whilst you're cooking or other mindless activities. Because let's face it, cooking is normally pretty automatic. I read somewhere that the average household has about seven or eight dishes only that they cook on rotation all the time. And I've realized that that's true. It's sad, but it's true. Um, I don't know if it's the same in your house, but that means that it becomes a pretty automatic behavior. If you think about the dishes that you cook for the kids most often, or even for yourself or your partner most often, you don't have to put a lot of thought into them. It's you know exactly what needs to go where and when, and bish bash, bosh, there you go, you've got dinner on the table again. And cooking while you're drinking is one of those things that we've all done. And it becomes almost like a ritual. Uh, it's part of the performance of producing the evening, is pouring that glass of wine or having that beer whilst you're cooking dinner. Um, but you know, when you have something like a bottle of wine and you're cooking, you know, it's very easy to go pour a little bit of wine for the sauce and then a little bit of sauce for my wine. Um, you end up paying no attention to what you're actually consuming. So by the time that you actually sit down for dinner, you have no idea how much you've drunk already. And the same goes for other mindless activities like scrolling on your phone or watching your favourite soap operas on TV, just about any sort of mindless task that keeps you just distracted enough to not pay attention to your automatic drinking behaviours. So, the simple solution for this one is if you like having a glass of wine with your meal, is I just want you to wait until the start of your meal before you start your glass of wine. So it's not to say that you can't have your favorite red wine with your spag bowl or your favorite servillon with your fish dish, whatever it is, but wait until you actually sit down and start eating before you pour the drink, and you'll find you're able to be a lot more conscious of what you're consuming. Unconscious habit number three is being too accommodating about your drink. This is one for

People Pleasing Your Drink Order

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the people pleasers out there. Um, I've often done this myself. You're in a bar, uh you're at dinner at a friend's house, uh, and somebody says, What are you having to drink? And instead of choosing something that you really, really want to drink, you say, Oh, I'll just have what you're having. In that moment, okay, you're trying to be accommodating. We're trying not to cause a fuss. We don't want to make things awkward, we want to make things easy for everybody. We're people pleasing, uh, we're solution focused, we just want the simple life. But what we're actually really doing is outsourcing our decision making to somebody else. And that's never a good tactic. And while it might feel like we're being polite or easygoing, every time we let somebody else decide what we're drinking, we end up giving away a little bit of that power of choice that we're working so hard to take back from alcohol. So the simple solution for this one here is to be specific about what you want. Know what you want and ask for it. Don't worry about whether it's going to be convenient for the host or for the bartender or for your friend. Sometimes you have to choose you. Okay, automatic habit number four that is undoing your moderation without you realizing it, is pouring

Free Pouring Your Drinks

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your drinks without a measure. So I was a terror for this. I was a bartender, I worked in hospitality for 24 years. I could pour a measure of any drink by sight, at least that's what I told myself. Um, but we were always taught to use measures uh for the sake of the business and for the sake of the customer. But when I was at home, I had no restrictions, of course. So I could pour whatever felt right. And obviously, I always think I know um exactly how much I'm pouring, but of course, the more I had to drink, the more liberal I'd be with those measures. And so pouring a drink without a measure is a really, really easy way to drink more than you intended. Because at the end of the night, you could say to yourself or to your friend, oh, we only had three drinks, but how much alcohol is going into those three drinks? So the one simple solution here is pretty obvious. It's to use a measure, use a jigger, use a pourer, use a lined glass. Don't guess what you're pouring, no. Okay, unconscious habit number five is slightly connected to number four, and it's about glassware.

Glass Size

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So interestingly, I found this fascinating that over the last century, the average dinner plate size in Western cultures has grown by roughly 30%. One study I found showed that when you double the size of your dinner plate, you eat 41% more food. Now, I don't think you need me to dissect this one for you any further. If you want to eat less food, you use smaller plates. And conversely, if you want to drink less alcohol, use smaller glassware. Your one simple solution here is obvious. It is to use smaller glasses. We've got a habit at the moment of uh of everything being bigger, haven't we? Everything could be bigger and better and greater than it was before. Gin and tonics are no longer served in a nice tall Collins glass, they're they're served in a bubble. You know, if these glasses that feel like you could dive into them, they're so big. I've even seen wine bottle-sized wine glasses that allow you to pour an entire bottle of wine into one glass. Now, I don't know about you, but if somebody was to pour me an entire bottle of wine into a single glass and put it down in front of me, I would have absolutely no way of knowing how much alcohol I've actually consumed. If you want to drink smaller quantities of alcohol, use smaller glassware. Simples. And the last one on the list today is the habit of drinking to avoid wasting alcohol. Um

Not Wasting Alcohol

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I was always brought up not to waste food, not to waste resources. You know, if it's on your plate, if it's in your glass, you should finish it up. It's known as a sunk cost fallacy. It's the belief that just because you've put time, money, or effort into something, that it would be wasteful to walk away from it. Examples when it comes to drinking are things like, you know, you're in the pub and your friends have decided it's time to leave, but you've still got half a beer that you paid for, so you neck it. Or you're at home and thinking of going to bed, but there's just a glass of wine left in the bottle, and you know it won't taste as good tomorrow, so you might as well drink it now anyway. My question to you here has got to be a little bit blunt, but it's got to be so what? I know, I know we're in a cost of living crisis at the moment, we're all feeling it. But if the cost of finishing the drink is going to be greater to you than the cost of the wasted £3.50 or $3.50 of not consuming it, then maybe that's just the price that you have to pay today. Maybe today that drink cost you an extra $3.50 because you threw half of it down the sink. But what you get back tomorrow is worth so much more. One simple solution for you here. I want you to practice leaving your drink half finished this week, just once, and see how you feel. Notice how you feel about it. It might feel a little bit uncomfortable, but after you feel uncomfortable, I want you to notice that it's all actually okay. The world isn't going to come to an end, you're not going to lose your house or the mortgage or your job because you didn't drink that last bit of alcohol. So, how many of these six have you found yourself doing? Topping up your drink before you finished,

Pick One Small Win for Big Change

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drinking whilst you're cooking or doing other minds activities, being too accommodating about what you're drinking, pouring without measuring, using large glasses, or drinking unwanted drinks to avoid wasting alcohol. Because I'm guessing that you've probably identified two, three, maybe even four things on this list that you do throughout your week on a regular basis. So I've got some homework for you, and that is I want you to pick one thing from the list to work on for the next couple of weeks. And I say one thing because the final mistake here would be to try to change everything everywhere all at once. But if you've recognised something that you could work on over the next few days, couple of weeks, then I want you to focus on it and apply your simple solution to it. Now, it could be the simple solution that I gave you. Obviously, that is my guidance here, but you might have another solution that you want to apply. As you know, a lot of mindful drinking and moderation is about trial and error to find out what works for you. But what I want you to remember is that you don't have to try and fix all of these things at once. That's why I want you to just pick one. Because sometimes starting with the easiest win, with the lowest hanging hanging fruit, is actually your fastest route to change. And when it comes to moderating your alcohol intake, it's these series of small wins that actually build up the biggest shifts over time. Because what they allow you to do is to change your behavior and therefore the related beliefs that go with that behavior about drinking, and that's what allows you to take back the power of choice from alcohol. That's it from me for this week. I'll see you next Wednesday. And until then, cheers to a life less intoxicated.