Changing Drinking Without Losing Yourself

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I know that it can be easy to think that the act of changing your drinking is somehow a step towards distancing yourself from the person that you once were. For some people, it's a genuine worry, and for some people it might be a bit more of their goal. But drinking mindfully, moderating your intake, is not about abandoning everything about your former self. It's about turning toward who you've already become and who you have the potential to be. Likewise, spending hours the morning after, the night before, regretting your choices and berating yourself for overindulging does nothing to help you prepare for a more productive, more positive tomorrow. There are two yesterdays that we sadly spend our lives giving too much attention to. So this week I want to talk to you about the chronological yesterday. And in next week's chat, we'll be having a look at the more nostalgic kind that gets us all. 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 the

The Power Of The Chronological Yesterday

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chronological yesterday, the one that literally took place before you went to sleep. Now, those yesterdays are raw, intense, and all-consuming. Whether you wake up thinking that yesterday was a good day or a bad day, can paint the entire canvas for the next 24 hours of your life. If yesterday, for example, went well and you got most of your to-do list done, you spoke to an old friend, uh, maybe sorted out your long neglected underwear drawer and any of those bits and pieces you've been meaning to get done, then today is more likely set to feel like it's going to be a breeze. If, on the other hand, yesterday was just a general crapshoot where you stub your toe as soon as you got out of bed in the morning and it all went downhill from there, well then it's likely that today you're readying yourself for more of the same. And the thing is that what we look for in the world is often what we find. So if you've woken up with rose-tinted spectacles, expecting five-pound notes or five dollar bills to be raining from the sky, the odds are you're far more likely to spot them when they do. But if you're expecting the whole world and his dog to be nipping at your ankles all day, you'll be far more likely to kick back, even when things aren't really as bad as they seem. Now,

Doom Spiral Or Data After Overdoing It

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you throw alcohol into the mix, and that bad day takes you from a general malaise into a doom spiral of negativity with very little provocation. So when you're moderating your alcohol intake and yesterday's drinking didn't go as planned, I want you to know that you have two choices. Okay. The first is that you can succumb to the doom spiral. You can beat yourself up for quote-unquote big air quotes here failing yet again, uh, for not sticking to your goals and for overdoing it when all you plan to do was meet the guys for a couple of glasses and then head home, but yet somehow you've woken up hugging the uh empty pizza box or yesterday's kebab wrapper again. Or option two is you can accept that your very real, very normal human existence on this planet means that sometimes things go a little bit wrong. And you can take that as data and you can do something with it. When we drink more than we intended to, no matter how well intentioned our initial plans were, it can be so tempting to throw the baby out with the bath water and think, well, screw it then, I just can't do this. Or why can't I do this? Or why is it so much easier for everybody else? But I need you to hear me when I tell you this, okay? That that is just not true. You can do this, it's not easier for everybody else. We all have our own demons, we all have our own challenges. You just don't see under the hood of other people's lives the way that you think you do. Drinking mindfully and moderating your alcohol intake is a skill. And like any skill, it can be learned by anybody who's willing to put the time and the effort and the patience into it. Because drinking differently doesn't happen overnight, especially for those of us who are working to change decades and decades of ingrained patterns of behaviour. I personally, I know I didn't make the choice to cut back and then instantly find myself on top of some sort of golden orb of celebration of success. There were many, many nights when I forgot myself, when I overdid it, and many, many mornings when I wondered if I could really make a reduction like this stick. After 24 years of drinking daily, for me, it wasn't easy to step back and say, oh, everything's different now. But in time, with practice, with repetition, with iteration on the things that I found worked and the things that I found didn't work, I was able to find ways to do this that stuck for me. And you will be too. Now,

A Practical Tool For System Thinkers

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if you are the type of person who likes to think through a situation and a problem systematically, if you like to see your problems laid out visually so that you can also see a solution in front of you, I've made a great tool for you, which is available inside the Mindful Drinking Vault membership over on my Substack. Now, the vault, um, as I've mentioned before, is where I bring together all of the theory that we discuss on this show so that you can download your own sort of growing resource library to help you however you want with your drinking. So there's a link to that in the show notes for you. So for managing the morning after the night before, before it spirals away from you, I want you to work through this quite personal QA. It's a brief QA, which I'm going to outline for you here, but I do dive deeper into it into the vault. So I've put this as a sort of two-step process for you, which I'm calling catch it and release it. Don't ask me why it's named for a fishing metaphor. I don't know what I was watching on TV, but there you have it. So

Catch It Questions For The Night

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the first step, the first phase is about catching it. It's about catching those thoughts and realizations. Okay, so what I want you to do, if you find yourself having had a bit more the night before than you intended, is I want you to look back on last night and answer these questions honestly for yourself. So if you can uh pull over and jot these down, or maybe save this episode so you can come back to it later on when you're when you've got a hand free on time to think about it. But the first question is when do you feel the night started to get away from you? And I think this is an important question because it's not something that we often analyze. We just sit back and say to ourselves, oh man, I drank too much, or oh, it all went wrong. But we don't stop and think about when and why and where and how. So was it when you started having shots? Did somebody bring out a tray of shots? Uh was it one cocktail too many? Was it that you let some other people order for you and you didn't take control over what you were having? Was it because you didn't eat before you went out? Because the night might have started getting away from you before you got into the thick of things. It's going to be different for everybody in every different situation, whether it's a workdo or it's a friends gathering or it's um, you know, a special celebration. So I need you to take the time to think about that specific night, that specific moment. Don't overwhelm yourself thinking about all the other times that you've gone out and things have sort of gotten away from you. Just focus on one moment in time and think about when you feel the night started to get away from you. Then I want you to ask yourself, and this one might be a tricky question for you, but then I want you to ask yourself, how much control do you feel that you had to make a different choice if you'd given yourself some time to think about it? Because sometimes it's not that you make the wrong choice in the moment when you had the shot, when you just drunk what was given to you. It was that you didn't make a choice at all. Quite often we look back on our night and we realize that there was no moment where we stepped back from the thrill of the evening, from the throes of all the fun and the laughter, and actually thought, do I want another drink? So I want you to think to yourself, honestly, how much control do you feel you had to make a different choice if you had given yourself the time to think about it? And then finally, following on from that, I want you to ask yourself, what's one choice then that you could have made differently that could have changed the course of the evening for you? It could be about a different drink choice, it could be about um going to different types of venues, it could be who you were with, it could be why you were having alcohol in the first place, what you wanted that drink to do for you. It could be one of any number of things. And that's why I want you to make sure you come back to these questions when you've got a moment to give it some genuine thought. But what's one choice you could have made differently that could have changed the course of the evening for you? And I'm not talking about a drastic change here. I'm not saying that you know you did one thing wrong, and if you'd made a different choice, then everything would have been perfect. But maybe there was one moment where you made one choice that took you in a direction that led to other things. So perhaps if you could have made a different choice in that moment, what would that have been and what would that have done for you? Now, phase two of this is the release it phase. So that now that you have some idea about where things went off

Release It With One Small Experiment

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piste for you, it's about understanding it as data to inform your next night out rather than a stick to beat yourself with. You know, I really don't want you to beat yourself up for these times. You are human and to err is human, it's okay. So, what I want you to think about now is how you can take the data from those questions you've just asked yourselves and use it to pay it forward to your next night out. So, how can you start your night out better next time? What's something, one thing? Remember, it's always about just one thing at a time. I don't want you to test a hundred different variables because you're not gonna know what's made a difference for you if you start testing lots of different things all at once, if you start changing your drink type and your venue, and who you're with, and what you're eating, and whether you're gonna have food with your with your drinks, and whether you're going somewhere else afterwards, and how your day has been before. You know, there's too much for one brain to comprehend all at once and make sense of. So just pick one thing that you're going to focus on and try for next time that can start your night out in a way that signifies to your brain how you want the evening to go. Okay, the next question in this phase is what's one drinking choice you can action to experiment with? So similar to, as I said before, just one drinking choice. But here I'm talking about the more practical, um, tactile drinking options that you can make. So, would it be um sticking with low-no for the evening or for your first two drinks? Would it be zebra striping where you alternate between alcohol-free and alcohol full? Would it be um only drinking if you're having food this time? So you're only going out to have a drink with a meal? Would it be just making sure you're having more water and that every drink that you have, you also have a glass of water? You know, what's one drinking-focused choice? So, not about the rest of your experience, but just specifically related to the actual thing that you're drinking that you can experiment with for next time. And then the final question I want you to ask is one that I wonder if you've ever asked yourself this before, because I know that I hadn't until

Getting Friends To Support Your Choice

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I really thought about it. And that was, how can you get your friends to help you? Did you even tell your friends that you wanted to drink differently on your night out? Did you tell them what you needed from them, what kind of support you needed them to give you? Um, were they the right friends for you to be with at this stage of your journey? I'm not saying you need to give up your friends or completely replace them, but we've all got different types of friends, right? You've got friends that you party with, you've got friends that you chill with, you've got friends that you talk about deep stuff with. You know, we've got different types of friends for different situations. You've got friends that you would take with you to uh, I don't know, a sporting event and other friends that you might take with you to a museum. So are you spending your time with the right type of people for where you are in your journey? Can you communicate to them why you're making this choice and how they can help to support you better? Because they might not realize how important this is to you. They might not even realize that you're trying to do it. I read an article recently about the shocking amount of people who are drinking low-no but are drinking what are being coined as stealth drinks now, because they don't want other people to know. And of course, that's your prerogative. If you're not comfortable telling people about your choices, then that's fine. I'm not going to say that you have to, but they can't help you if you don't tell them about it. And if you are worried about telling them about it, or you are feeling like the friend group that you spend most of your time with isn't the one that's best placed to support you, and you want to explore a little bit more why that might be. A few weeks ago, I did make an episode for you about why your friends might struggle with your drinking choices. So it's really well worth checking that one out. That's episode 161, The Real Reason Your Friends Can't Take No for an Answer. And that can give you a little bit more insight and help you figure out how to communicate better with them. So, of course, I'll link to that in the show notes for you. So that's it. That's a simple two-step approach that you can use to start unpacking

Progress Over Perfection & Next Week's Episode

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where your night actually went, quote unquote, wrong, but then what you can also do about it to ensure progress the next time you go out. Because remember, this is about progress, not perfection. Uh, the vault tool that I told you about goes deeper on this exercise that we've done, and it also gives you a place to actually write out your answers, a few more questions that you can ask yourself, and then you can do this again and again for each night out until you start feeling that you are moving along your drinking journey the way that you want to be. So these questions are a really, really good place to start. I will link to the vault in the show notes for you as well. Uh, and like I said, remember this is about progress, not perfection. Okay, so stop giving yourself a hard time if you happen to have drunk more last night than you intended to. You are only human, and that's what makes you wonderful. Now, that is all from me for this week. Don't forget to subscribe or follow the pod if you haven't yet, because next Wednesday I'll be chatting about the nostalgic yesterday that can lead us to over drinking when we start seeing uh our past through those rose tinted spectacles. Until then, cheers to a life less intoxicated.