Summer Series And Big Questions

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Welcome to the Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife six weeks summer series. Everyone's asking six short, practical, summer-friendly episodes to help you answer the biggest questions about moderating your alcohol intake in midlife, as always, with no pressure and no judgment. I'm your host, you can call me Dee, and this is week two, where everyone's been asking, what does moderate actually look like? 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 after five years of drinking differently and helping hundreds of people to do the same, these are the six, I think today, most common questions you've told me you have about what moderation actually means in real life terms. These are the big picture questions that put all the small picture stuff into perspective even more. And of course, we'll be looking at those next

What Counts As Moderate Drinking?

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week. But starting today with question one how much alcohol actually counts as moderate? Okay, now because you are a fabulously multinational audience, this one is a little bit tricky to answer because different governments around the world have their own definitions of what they consider to be moderate or safe intake of alcohol. So I'm going to address this to my two biggest listener groups, which are here in my homeland of the UK and across the pond in the US. So here in Dear Old Blighty, the CMO, the chief medical officer's advice is that adult humans should consume no more than 14 units of alcohol per week for men or for women. And to spread those units out over three or more days in a week to ensure that you have several alcohol-free days and to never binge drink, which has its own definition of more than six units in a single session for women and eight units in a single session for men. For reference, a unit of alcohol is around 10 mils or 8 grams of pure alcohol. In real terms, there are roughly 3 units of alcohol in a large 250ml glass of wine, and the same or just under about 2.8 units in the average pint of say 4.5% lager. In the US, things are a bit different. So your guidance has recently changed to remove a numbered amount. So it used to be one or two drinks, no more than one or two drinks per day. And now your medical officer's advice is just to drink less. Basically, your government is just leaving you to your own devices and you are advised to drink less often to stay away from stronger drinks and to just drink sensibly. So basically figure it out. Now, if you're located in one of the other 120 plus countries that listen to this podcast, thank you so much, by the way, for that. But I would say that this guidance, so even here in the UK where we have a specific number of units that the chief medical officer thinks is safe for you to drink, this is just generic guidance. It's what the CMO says in your zone is best for the majority of the population. It doesn't take into account personal circumstances like your current health, how much you were drinking before, and any of the, I don't know, 620 other things that impact you personally. So you do need to use your own judgment. For some people, 14 units a week might be more than you want to drink. So you are already drinking under the moderate drinking guidelines. For other people, that might seem so far away from what you're doing now that it doesn't seem possible. But you will be amazed at what you can achieve when you try, and I'll give you an example of that in the next

What Does Successful Moderation Look Like?

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question. Okay, so that's the technical stuff out of the way. Let's get onto the more personal side with question two, and that's what does successful moderation actually look like? In Adrian Charles' book, so Adrian Charles is a well-known British uh television and sports broadcaster here in the UK. In his book, The Good Drinker, he writes all about his journey from excessive consumption of over 100 units a week on a regular basis. He used to drink more than 100 units of alcohol per week. And the book is all about how he realized that he probably only wanted and enjoyed about a third of what he was drinking. And it's about how he goes from drinking 100 units a week down to what he drinks now, which is around 20 to 30 units a week. And he is famously happy about that. Now, I'm not advising that 20 to 30 units a week is acceptable for you. Please don't take this as a guideline. But it does show that moderation can look different on everyone, and that reducing your booze count can make a huge impact if you're prepared to take a good hard look at what it's doing to you and for you. Successful moderation might mean only drinking on weekends for you. It might mean only on special occasions, it might be never getting legless again or not having any more hangovers, which, as regular listeners will know, was always my guiding force. The point is that it's not really something that you can checklist in the same way as sobriety. Every moderator I have ever spoken to has their own goals and their own methods and their own yardsticks for success. So to answer this question honestly, what does successful moderation actually look like? I would have to say that successful moderation looks exactly like you want it to look. It's about progress over perfection, it's about a benchmark that you can feel proud of and that leads to meaningful change for you, even if it's not what others would count as the right way. Successful moderation is what gives you what you want out of your evening without taking a fee or a price or a cost from the rest of your week. And I know that's not the polished answer that you might have been hoping for, but it is the truth. And I think that's better. So,

Should I Drink Less Often Or Just Drink Less?

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question three today: should I reduce how much I drink, how often I drink, or both? Yes. It's probably obvious right now from my previous answer that there is no way for me to tell you specifically what you should do. But there are a few questions that you can ask yourself to help you figure out which of the many, many moderation techniques, whether it is having uh drink-free days, whether it's drinking less when you go out, uh, whether it's going out less frequently, um, which of those many moderation techniques there are out there that will work best for you. Um, including questions like whether you thrive better with structure or flexibility, um, how far along you are in your moderation journey, because things look different in the beginning than they do further along, and that's normal. And what, and this is a really important question that I don't think people ask themselves very often, and that's what has caused past attempts at moderation to fail or not be as successful or not give you what you want. Now, as this is only supposed to be a 15-minute episode, I won't be able to go into all of them in detail here, but I do have two episodes that you absolutely need to go and listen to next to help you with this. Okay, they are episode 163, which is five questions to ask yourself about the pros and cons of different moderation techniques. And then the follow-up episode to that, which is 182, 13 alcohol moderation techniques that aren't zebra striping. Now, I'll link them both in the show notes for you, of course. And even if you don't have time to listen to them now, because the summer series is all about the fact that we don't have a lot of time on our hands at the moment, do save them to your playlist or whatever your app calls it. Spend a little bit of time with each one, and they will help you to dig into whether frequency, quantity, restriction, flexibility, and so on and so forth, which of these elements are likely to work better for you and for your goals?

Do You Need To Track Drinks?

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Okay, question four: Do I need to track every drink? Oh my goodness, no. So this one is a pet peeve of mine, so I have to try really hard now not to jump up onto my soapbox. But the assumption that moderation means that you have to continually count your drinks is so wide off the mark and misses the point of mindful drinking for the long term. Yes, in the beginning of your mindful drinking experiences, you will need to have a greater consciousness about what you're doing. And maybe that does mean setting yourself a two or three or four drink limit for your initial evenings out, and you need to have a greater awareness of how many um drinks you've had. But as I said in last week's Everyone's Asking, the long-term goal of mindful drinking is to become the type of person for whom moderating your alcohol intake is a natural part of who you are. And that eventually includes losing the drink count and relying more on what your body is telling you it does or doesn't need in that moment. So if tracking your specific drink count helps you in the beginning, then go for it. Absolutely. But if it feels like a noose sapping the joy out of your evening, then it's 100% okay to knock it on the head and to try a different approach. And the two episodes that I just told you about will help you to do that. All

Do Low & No Drinks Make it Harder?

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right, question five today. Will low, no, and light drinks help or make things harder? Okay, so this is another really common question that doesn't have a common answer. My personal experience with drinking differently has most definitely been helped by low, no, and light alcohol drinks. Personally, they give me adult flavours and adult drinking experiences that I can enjoy with my friends, with my family, in adult environments, all without those adult consequences that um I'm trying to avoid. Okay, so I'm all in favour of that. But they are not perfect yet. It's well known that there is still a lot of work to be done, particularly in some areas of low-no and light drinks, more than others. And if you're the type of person who's after that exact like-for-like replica of your favourite full-bodied cab sav, you're not going to find that yet. We're getting closer, but we're not there yet. On the other hand, beer drinkers, cider drinkers, uh, sparkling wine, even like the ready-to-drink cocktails are now really, really close to the quote-unquote real thing. For some people, though, that sort of near-miss effect of either the drinks that you want to taste like the real thing but they don't, or the ones that do taste really close to what you're used to drinking before, from either either side, um, those sort of near-misses can leave some people sort of hankering after the stronger stuff. So this is going to have to be one of those trial and error experiments for yourself. You need to figure out what works best for you, just like I figured out which alcohol-free drinks work best for me and in which situations. This is a personal journey. This is a personal experience. So, by all means, go out there and give these things a try. If you do find them triggering, then of course you can move on from them. There are drinks that are created to remind you of drinking alcohol, and there are drinks that are created to replace that moment, that experience, that ritual of drinking alcohol that tastes nothing like them. So there's something out there for everyone. There are literally thousands of low, no, light, adjacent, similar, related drinks out there. So there is plenty to choose from.

Should You Take A Full Booze Break?

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Okay, our last question in today's Everyone's Asking is question six. Should I start by taking a complete break from alcohol? Now, this one has pros and cons, as with everything in life. So some of the pros. Starting with a clean break gives you a clear, straightforward, uncomplicated process, and it only requires you one course of action: don't drink alcohol. So things like a dry January or sober October or sober spring, you know, there's a lot of the prescribed month-long breaks, or just when you've decided that this is a good time for you to take a break. These can really help you to assess your current relationship with alcohol and where you want it to go. It's really important that if you do take a clean break, uh uh, you know, a solid time off, that you don't just sit there white knuckling your way through it. You actually use it as a positive experience to figure out how you want your relationship with alcohol to look going forward. On the flip side, there are cons to this as well. Um, is that what you want? Do you want to just remove alcohol from your life for a moment? Is this something that you're looking to build towards? Um, you do run the risk, or some people might run the risk, of teaching themselves that uh drinking is all or nothing. If you're not good with rules, if you're not good with being told what to do, even if it's by yourself, uh, and then the very human fact that you might um slip up from time to time and have a drink when you weren't supposed to, uh that means you might end up giving yourself a hard time and not giving yourself the grace that you need, uh, and then throw the baby out with the bath water in that moment and sort of then think, oh well, shove it all, I'll just go back to as I was before. So there are pros and cons to taking a complete break from alcohol. I think that there's no right or wrong here, as with everything that we talk about on this show. It's about what's right for you. But if you find that when you're first starting out, you can't quite see the width of the trees, and maybe taking a complete break for even a couple of weeks might be a good stepping stone for you. So, what I'm gonna do here is send you again back to those episodes because in those I have time to take you through the questions that you can ask yourself, particularly the one about the pros and cons of different moderation techniques, because I do discuss taking a month-long break in that one as well. Uh, so that episode will really help you decide if taking a break is the best way for you to start.

Get More From the Mindful Drinking Quiz

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Okay, there we have it for this week. I hope this has given you some helpful insight into the honest answers to your most asked questions about the bigger picture of moderation. And I know that these aren't always clear-cut, you should do this, you should do their answers. But I do think that anywhere that you find somebody telling you exactly what works for everyone, it's likely to be throwing in a bit of snake oil with that, because there is no possible way for anyone to know what's going to work well for you until you're in the thick of things, until they are sharing the journey with you. So, what I'm hoping to do is give you all of the resources, all of the information, all of the support that you can then put into place so that you can figure out what actually works well for you. In next week's Everyone's Asking, we're tackling some of the more in the moment questions about drinking differently and how you can make this all work for you when you're actually standing at the bar wondering what to do next. Now, in the meantime, if you would like some more personalized help with your midlife uh mindful drinking journey, then I highly recommend starting with the newly updated mindful drinking quiz. I've spent several weeks updating it for you. I've redone the questions, I've redone the answers, I've included some more information, uh, and uh another persona in there to really help you to figure out what it is that could be driving your overdrinking as you see it and what you can do about it. It's just nine quick questions, takes you less than two minutes, and you'll have your freakishly accurate uh results in your inbox straight away. So click the link in the show notes to go and take the quiz now. You'll also find there the links to the two episodes that I mentioned earlier. And until next Wednesday, cheers to a summer less intoxicated.