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Welcome to the Mindful Drinking and Moderation in Midlife six week summit 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 five, where everyone's been asking, how do I handle the urges and the setbacks? 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 plus years of drinking differently and helping so many people to do the same, these are the most common questions you've told me you have about how to keep your resolve when things don't go to plan.

Why Evening Urges Hit On Cue

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So, question one why do I want alcohol at the same time every day, particularly in the evenings? So, this is all down to the habit loops that you've built for yourself over the years. Now, I've spoken about habits quite a few times on this pod, so I won't go into major detail here to keep the summer series short, as I promised, but basically a habit is simply a system that your brain has built to help you find the shortest possible route from A to B. And in this case, A being the trigger or the cue, and B being the outcome that you want, maybe that's to uh distress or to relax or even just to feel nothing. In between those two, in between A and B, we have an action, and in this case, it's drinking. It could be, however, eating or gambling or sex, or it could be going for a run or doing a meditation or cleaning the house. Doesn't always have to be a negative thing. You might not yet be able to change the cue, although that can fade in time, and that 5 p.m. feeling won't always trigger a desire to drink. And the outcome that you want will always feel justified, right? Because you'll always want to feel relaxed or de stressed. So that sort of 6 pm end-of-day automation that is a learned habit from years of doing the same thing over and over and over again. So if you do want to change it, then you've got to change it. So I do go into all of this, as I said, in more detail in an episode. The best one to check out is episode 111, that drinking on autopilot, how daily stress fuels your evening habits. It focuses on stress, but is more about the habits. Obviously, I'll put that in the show notes for you. But that is the reason why, at the same time, every day, that urge to drink kicks in, especially if you've had a stressful day, especially if your boss has been a prat or your colleagues have been incompetent or the kids are driving you crazy, you've walked in and the house is a mess. All those things are triggers. They usually happen around the same time of the same day, uh in the same ways. And so that is what sets off that urge to have a drink.

How Long Cravings Last

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So, question two then is how long will an urge to drink last? And what should I do about it? So, this is another common and totally reasonable question with and often, with an answer rather, that often surprises people, because the truth is that an urge or a craving to drink or a hankering, as my mother would call it, um, actually usually only lasts for a few short minutes. And if you can ride out the way for just five to ten minutes or so, the likelihood is that that feeling would have passed and you can get back to your day. Distraction here is your friend. Remember when your kids were small, or maybe they still are, and they used to get upset and fixated on some major injustice of not being able to do or have what they want. Uh, what did you do? What was your go-to? It was distraction. It was to get them thinking or looking or talking about something else, literally anything else that would work, from keys to a snack to something on the TV, to playing a game with their sibling, whatever it was. And don't hate me for saying this, but you are not that much more sophisticated in this area. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're not, I'm not. Don't take it personally. But finding something else to do that is a genuine distraction for around five minutes will help your urge to drink to move on. It could be exercise, it could be reading a book, it could be cleaning out your knicker drawer, it could be phoning a friend, it could be, I don't know, doing your taxes. Apparently, for some people that's quite soothing. I'm not one of them, but you might be. It's okay, no judgment. Um, but you get the gist, right? It's finding something that genuinely occupies your mind for a few minutes so that you can focus on that instead of constantly thinking about the fact that you're thinking about drinking. And our last question today is question three.

When You Drink More Than Planned

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Does drinking more than I intended mean that I have failed at moderation? This should come as no great surprise to you, but absolutely, 100%, unequivocally not. I don't want to come across as flippant here, but this is exactly what we are here for on this podcast, in this space, at this time together, is to learn that moderation is a process and it is not a pass fail. If alcohol is still in your life in some way, shape, or form, then you will quite likely still have times when you drink more than you intended to. Okay? So first things first, just accept that. Because those moments, first and foremost, are human and to err is human. It's okay to make a mistake, to get things wrong. It's okay to have a few more drinks than you plan to. But what's even better is to learn from those times, to sit back in the morning once the uh the fog has cleared, it's lifted, and to have a real and honest and really important here, non-judgmental chat with yourself about where things took a turn and went slightly off piste. Look at the moments that triggered the change in direction from what you had set out to be as your plan of action for the evening, and look at what you can therefore do differently. Note I say differently, not better, just differently next time.

What Over-Drinking Looks Like Now

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And by the way, drinking more than you intended won't always mean drinking to excess. The good thing about going on this moderation journey down this path is that your drinking habits will change over time. So nowadays, when I drink more than I would have liked, because I am just human and because it can happen to all of us, but when I do drink more than I had intended these days, it means that I've had two or three drinks instead of the one or two that I've planned. It doesn't destroy my day, uh, it didn't do anything to ruin my life, but I do feel the effects. I know I'm subpar, I know I'm not as attentive, as detailed, as energetic or whatever as I'd like to be. And I know that I'm definitely getting a takeaway that evening and having an early night. But because I've made progress and because you will too, over time, what a big night or an overdrink or too much looks like changes. It goes from being, I had too much to drink last night, and I ended up in a skip and I'm an absolute state and I'm feeling sick for a whole day, to, oh, I had too much to drink last night. I'm definitely feeling dehydrated. I'm not feeling 100% myself. I'm gonna get my work done and go home and have an early night. And that to me is a win. That's that's a goalpost shift that's made a meaningful difference in my life. And it also means that I am better able to recognize the benefits of having less, of saying no, of moderating my choices, of picking the moments when it's going to be worth me feeling subpar for a little while and making choices around that, rather than having no say in what happened, going on autopilot, and then throwing away two or three days because I got absolutely rat assed and it's taking me so long to recover. Your boundaries, your limits, your level of what's acceptable to you personally, it shifts. And because of that shift, your actions change too. So remember this: a setback is not a failure. It does not mean that you have to start all over again because there is no pass-fail start-finish in moderation that you have to adhere to. It's just you and your priorities and your choices from moment to moment. Okay, that's it for this week. I hope this is giving you, of course, some helpful insight into the honest answers to your most asked questions about facing urges and setbacks when you're trying to drink differently. This is a huge topic, and obviously, there are far more than just these three questions that come up again and again, but it's more than we can fit into this short summer session. However, I have been a busy little bee this summer, and in between the I think 152 trips to playgrounds and seasides and other activities to keep my littles entertained. I have been working on building a brand new website for you where you can find all the tools, all the resources, all the help, and all the support in one place. Um, you can find that over at the same address, it's lownodrinker.com. If it hasn't launched now, it will be within the next week or so if you're listening to this on the day or week of release. If it hasn't, then make sure you sign up on the website so I can let you know when it has and you can go and check it out. Obviously, it's linked in the show notes for you, along with the episode that I mentioned before. I'll see you next week for our final instalment on the Six Weeks Summer series. Until then, my friend, cheers to a summer less intoxicated.