How to change your relationship with alcohol with Annie Grace

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Doun. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. If you have ever tried to quit drinking alcohol, or even just dabbled with the idea of drinking a little bit less, you have probably come across the name Annie Grace. Annie is one of the world's leading thinkers on this topic. She's written two incredibly successful books on how to quit or reduce drinking, plus she started her own foundation and an online thirty day program called The Alcohol Experiment. Annie knows from her own personal experience that trying to quit or even just reduce your drinking can be incredibly difficult. It's often caught up with a lot of shame, fear, self hatred, self sabotage, not to mention all of that social pressure and judgment that comes when you tell people that you're trying to cut back on alcohol. That is why I find Annie's approach so refreshing. It is all about fostering self compassion and approaching quitting with curiosity and experimentation, while she arms you with loads of knowledge about the science behind alcohol's

1:33 impact on your brain and body. I learned so much in this chat with Annie about her own battle with drinking and her truly unique and life changing approach to changing your drinking habits. Here's my chat with Annie Grace. Annie Grace, Welcome to the Crappy to Happy podcast. Oh thanks so much for having me Cas, It's wonderful to be here. Annie. I think anybody who has ever ventured into the alcohol free space, anybody who has thought about changing their relationship with alcohol, who has quit is thinking about quitting, has at some point heard your name, read your book, been recommended your book. Your book is called This Naked Mind, which came out a few years ago, and also your thirty day alcohol experiment is widely known and talked about and referred and recommended, So you're a bit of an icon in the alcohol free space globally. I think it's fair to say I thought that for our listeners it would be just great to start with a little bit of your story and your background and how this all came to be.

2:35 Oh yeah, I'd love to. So it's so funny to hear you describe me that way, because it was almost accidental. To be really honest with you, it felt very you know, I like to say, I'm a bit of an accidental author. So what had happened was I actually didn't drink a lot in college, and not a lot in high school, just sort of here and there, certainly didn't have any sort of hold on me. And then I got married and I moved to New York City and I remember someone taking me out for drinks and the drink was twenty five dollars. I ordered a Cosmopolitan and I just said, right, that is way too much money to be spending on a drink. And so I just sort of stopped going out to happy hour. And fast forward a few promotions, maybe a year or so later. I actually had a boss take me aside and sort of say, well, why aren't you showing up at happy hour? What is the deal?

3:27 And I was like, oh, I don't really drink. I said, oh Annie, no, no, no, let me take you under my wing and tell you it is not about drinking. It is about you know, happy hours, kind of like the golf course. It's where the deals are done. It's where your ideas will be showcased. And so I said, oh, okay. So I actually said, well, right then, I'm going to have a plan. And I would have a plan, which would be drinking a pint of water and then a glass of wine to make sure I never got too tipsy. And I found out that there was a term for this recently, but I thought it was, you know, one of my original ideas, obviously, not that I would go into the bathroom and throw up that last glass of wine just to keep drinking. Because everybody was twice my age, mostly men, seasoned drinkers, and I was, you know, fresh out of out of college. And the thing about alcohol is it is it is a sneaky devil. So what happened to be just happy hour drinking and drinking on work trips, Suddenly I'd come home to my apartment and I'd look around and I'd say, oh, there's my running shoes and there's a bottle of wine. Huh. That looks easier.

4:28 That looks like a easier way to kind of relax. And so you have all these tools that you need as a human being to kind of maintain your sanity and your well being, and I started replacing them methodically with drinking. And you know, fast forward about a decade. I had two young boys, I was traveling in between the UK and the US very frequently and then all around the world for my role at the time. I was global head of marketing for a multinational company. And I was drinking close to two bottles of wine a night. And so I did what anyone else would do in this situation. Drinking started to take its toll and there was more of a cost than a benefit. I said, Okay, well I'll just cut back, no big deal. And the truth was that it was a big deal. It wasn't just easy to cut back. And I think that marks the point at which I became very fixated on alcohol.

5:20 It was the point at which I decided to cut back. Interestingly, I don't think I thought about alcohol as much when I was just drinking it with abandoned as when I started to try and cut back, and then it became fixated is the best word for it. You know, I was thinking about how much I was drinking, was I going to allow myself one drink or two drinks. What if I overdid it? You know, it became this narrative that started to take up so much space in my mind about how much was I going to let myself, creating these rules for myself which I then break, and really almost spiraling into this pretty toxic internal place of our with myself both wanting to drink and not drink at the same time. And you know, if you think of conflict, if we even witness conflict somebody walking down the street, you'd be upset. Your body would feel something.

6:10 If it was in your own home, you'd be all the more so upset. But what we don't realize is that when you have conflict inside your own mind, which most of us do all the time, it is very toxic to the body, to the mind, to the spirit. But you're not really even aware of that because it's just kind of like as if drums are always playing and you don't even realize they're playing until they become silent. And so all of my attempts to drink last didn't work. And I was coming back from London one day and I had a very very boozy trip. I had had a few in the morning, which was one of my little guardrails in my head. Well, if I don't drink you know, hard alcohol in the morning, then I'm not really it's not really a problem yet. But I'd gone ahead and ran right over that little boundary. And I was coming back from this work trip just so upset with myself and beating myself up, also mostly drunk, and just hysterical and feeling hopeless because everything I'd been trying for years now to get back in control was not only not working, it was arguably making it worse. I was thinking more about drinking than I had been thinking when I was just again drinking with abandon, and I in that moment, decided that I was going to do something radically different, and I was going to stop trying to stop drinking, and instead I was going to find out why Why was it that I used to be able to take it or leave it? Why was it that I used to be able to have a drink and it would be no big deal? And now this fermented liquid and a glass seemed to run my whole life.

7:41 I thought about it probably more than I thought about anything else at that time. Husband, children, job, included and that launched me on about a year long process where I kept drinking because I knew that that internal noise, that internal conflict was so loud that I wouldn't be able to hear anything new if I continued in that way. So I kept drinking. But I made a list of all of the reasons that I drank, and I methodically went through them. And we live in a beautiful day and age where you can actually just go on to Google, scholar or other research databases and find studies and pay fifty bucks one hundred bucks and download these studies. And I really started educating myself about what alcohol really was and what it did in the brain and body. And I had kind of this large body of my own research.

8:27 And about i'd say twelve or thirteen months after that began, I remember walking out of my office one evening and telling my husband, like, do you want to drink with me again? Tonight's to night, because after tonight, I think I'm done drinking. And he looked at me as if, you know, he certainly didn't believe me. But that was really it, And that was over seven years ago. And what had happened was I was like, other people need to know this is this is mind boggling. How do we not know this? How is this stuff not printed on every single bottle of wine? Like how? And I just felt, you know, so incensed by that. I had no intention of putting my corporate job or anything else like that, but I ended up putting making all this research into a very large PDF and along with all my journaling and all my notes, and I just put it out sort of a free download on a website and I shared it in a few different groups, and within two weeks, twenty thousand people had downloaded it. And I started getting emails sort of from all over the world with people saying, hey, this really helped me, This was amazing. And one email in particular stood out and he said, you know, you really should make this a book.

9:32 And I was like, well, I don't know how to do that. I certainly don't have a platform, you know, I'm just going along on my corporate career. But he's like, well, you can self publish on Amazon. So I did look into it, and it took about a year after that for it actually did become self published, because there's quite a long process to that whole thing, which I didn't realize and then so yeah, So this Naked Mind came out in twenty fifteen as a self published book, but then you know, got enough train action that it is now traditionally published because it you know, just organically sold so many copies. And that's where we are today. I think there are so many people listening to this and listening to you who would just be nodding along, you know, seeing themselves in your story and what you talk about, like the amount of time and the mental energy that it consumes. And I think also when people find them in that space, they're asking, well, am I an alcoholic? Does this mean I'm an alcoholic? And that's bad right out? Being an alcoholic is bad because you want to be one of those normal people who can drink normally. That is a really unhelpful question to ask, and I think you would agree with that. So can you talk to that a little bit about this place where people find themselves where they're asking the wrong questions and what should they be asking themselves instead?

10:50 Absolutely so I found myself just you know these Really the brain is kind of like Google, right, Like if you ask it a question, instantly provide a response, and you can do that right now, what color shirit am I wearing? Right instantly? If you can see my shirt, it's going to tell you what color should I'm wearing? Or is it sunny outside? Instant response. And so when you're asking a question to which the answers are just terrible, you're going to create a lot of fear in that question. And as drinkers, what do we do with stress and fear? We either deny it or we drink more to plot it out. I mean, that's sort of what we've been accustomed to. And so for me, those questions were what's wrong with me, which of course my brain would serve up plenty of answers to, and am I an alcoholic?

11:40 And you know, those were super unhelpful questions. The alcoholic one specifically is very unhelpful because what I've learned through my research is that scientifically and medically it is completely imprecise. It is it is not even a term that's used in the text that diagnose disorders. It's actually alcohol use disorder, which is a very useful spectrum of use and abuse. It's just as a tangent, a total aside. But in the alcohol use disorder spectrum, you have mild alcohol use disorder if you answer yes to two questions, and those two of the questions include, do I need to drink more than I used to to get the same effect?

12:22 And every drinker I know would say yes. And another one of those questions is do I ever have moments where I feel like I drink too much and I regret how much I just drank? Again, every drinker I know would say yes. So by that definition, this is not a conversation with this tiny percentage of the population that we've deemed our alcoholics. This is an everybody conversation, every drinker conversation. And when you have eighty five percent of Western adults drinking, it really does become an everyone conversation. But when we create this dichotomy, when we create this us and them black and white, it not only obscures the fact that alcohol is toxic and harmful in addiction to the human body, you know, the one with like brain cells that we all share and the one that breeds the human body, not just the alcoholic quote body, but it also allows us to say, well, if I'm not an alcoholic, then I'm fine, right, And so we do things like take dry januaries to prove to ourselves that we can take thirty days without a drink, then I must not be an alcoholic. Or I had all sorts of little rules in my mind, like I was mentioning earlier, if I didn't drink vodka in the morning, then we're hard alcohol in the morning. Then I certainly wasn't an alcoholic. And so we try to prove to ourselves where we are where we are not, which almost facilitates that we're going to have to fall further before reckoning with our behavior and deciding that we want to change.

13:46 And I think, you know, it's particularly unhelpful. I had a specific experience about five six years before I stopped drinking, really at the time when I was starting to question my drinking because I did live in that limbo for so long. And the experience was that a friend of mine who I drank with all the time came over to my house and I went to pull out a bottle of wine and she said, oh, I'm not drinking anymore, and I was like really, She's like yeah. I went to an AA meeting and I learned that I'm an alcoholic and I cannot drink anymore in safety and I was like, oh my gosh, well what about me? What about my drinking? And she looked at me and she said, oh no, I learned that I was born this way and you are not. And so in that moment, which is very much And I remember when This Naked Mind was first published, I got some of the most scathing reviews on Amazon, which said, oh, she's not really an alcoholic, so she doesn't actually really have a right to have a voice in this conversation. And who's defining that anyway? Right, Like I was in pain, And so one of the things I'm really passionate about is kind of backing up this conversation, lowering the barrier to entry to where this becomes a well inness conversation, because quite frankly, that's what it is. We should never have an instance where you and I could sit down be having a piece of cake and we'd both say, oh, just give me a little slice, because I kind of, you know, don't want so much sugar. But if we were sitting down and you know, having a glass of wine, we wouldn't say, oh, just pour me a little one, because you know, I don't really want the liver failure and I'm not sure

15:17 about the breast cancer, right, Like, we just wouldn't say that. And if we were to question our drinking, quite likely we would be looked at as if, oh, well, are you okay? Do you have a problem? Do you need me to call someone? Should I not drink in front of you? Hey, cass Annie's not drinking anymore, let's not invite her out. You know, all of those sort of things would begin to happen, which I think is really unfortunate because the truth of it is that alcohol, just like sugar, is an addictive substance to the human brain. It's not just addictive to some subset of the population that we've invented that actually just obscures the fact that it's addictive to everyone. And so therefore, the question that we really should be asking is is this one of the questions that you started to ask yourself? Like is this it's working for me?

16:01 Like? Is this costing me more than I think it's giving me? Like? What are the questions that people should really be asking themselves. I think one of the most useful questions is would my life be a bit better drinking a bit less alcohol? And I think that question allows for an entry point that doesn't feel scary, it doesn't feel forever. I actually think that's another place where we've really gotten it wrong as a narrative. Is this idea that you have to get sober or nothing else, Because maybe that's true for a lot of people, but when that becomes the goal, we don't enter into the conversation. And so actually I like the reframe of thinking about how we want to feel because if we take the goal away from if your goal and you can just think of it for yourself right now, if you think of you know, for anyone listening, if you think of, okay, what's my goal around alcohol? And you think, okay, my goal is I'm never going to drink again. You know, not only is that really heavy feeling, but it also you're not going to know you're successful until you're dead, so you're actually never going to know you're successful. But even if you say, okay, well I only want two drinks a week, or I only want to drink three nights a week, like those are very heavy feeling goals, and they're loaded with failure because what happens if we can't achieve it? What does that mean about us? Right? And so we're almost starting on the back foot with those goals. But if you change the narrative and you say, okay, what if I create a goal about how I want to feel? And for me that goal. When I finally created that goal, it was I want alcohol to be small and irrelevant

17:33 in my life like it used to be. I don't want it to take up all this mental space. I don't want it to be controlling you know my decisions. I don't want it to play a big part. I just wanted to be small and irrelevant. If that meant I drank on occasion, that was okay with me. If it meant I never drink again, I allowed that to also be okay with me. But I didn't predetermine the outcome. And when I shifted to that sort of question and those sorts of goals, then I was allowed to kind of experiment and try what felt good, what didn't feel good without this heaviness. And so I think, would I be happy you're drinking a bit less? Because there's an answer to that. You can try that out, you can take a bit of a break and see how you feel. Right.

18:17 There's an answer to that, and it doesn't come with the oh man, Well, at some undetermined point in the future, I'm going to make an all or nothing decision about my drinking for the rest of my entire life. And the heaviness and that whole idea actually precludes us from even asking the question to begin with. Yeah, you raised a really important point in the midst of that as well. What you said, Well, you were talking about you can say no to the cake, but nobody says, I'll just give me a little glass one because of my liver failure and breast cancer and all the other known consequences of alcohol consumption. Alcohol is the one drug we have to justify not taking. If you go to anywhere socially in Western society and you say I'm not drinking and you previously have been drinking, the resistance from other people is very real. People have a problem with other people not drinking, and that's a real challenge for a lot of people. I experienced it myself.

19:16 I haven't. I gave up drinking about eighteen months ago, and I'm one of those people who has not said I will never drink again. In fact, I have had a glass of champagne a couple of months ago. Didn't like the taste of it to be honest, interestingly, but you often when people start to try to set these limits and put boundaries and start to withdraw from that whole social scene involving alcohol, they met with a lot of resistance. Why do you think that is, Annie. Yeah, it's such a good question. It's something that everybody who's trying to change their relationship with alcohol will run up against to some degree or another. And you know, the reality of it, you know, to just cut to the source of the issue is that, well, first of all, changed, no matter how positive, in any relationship, is going to be difficult. It's going to be something that creates insecurity because the person on the other side of the relationship is going to think, oh, well, now are you better than me? Now? Are you judging me? Now? Am I not good enough for you? All of those sorts of fears surface, but even more pronounced. If there's any shred of questioning or discontent in their own drinking, your decision not to drink has held up a big fat marror to say, what about you? Even if you don't mean it, even if there's nothing in you that has any intention of doing that. That is just the dynamic that occurs and how people react to that is a myriad of different ways. But often people would become defensive or they'll start to sort of say, oh, well great. You know, I had a friend who literally told me that she

20:46 was really keep in mind, this woman and I had been friends since kindergarten, so the very first year of school that you could ever go to, and we had grown up together, we graduated high school together, We've maintained our friendship all through UNI and beyond. And when I stopped drinking, she kind of ghosted for a little while, and then she finally came back on the scene and she's like, can I tell you something. I was like, yeah. She's like, I'm really afraid that our friendship is going to be totally different now. And I was like, oh my gosh. We have literally been friends for our entire lives, and the majority of those years neither of us were drinking.

21:28 So but the presupposition was that somehow it was going to be different between us, and I think that, you know, that comes from worrying about all of those things. How are you going to judge me now? Am I going to be good enough for you now? And so I think one of the ways you can diffuse. That dynamic is really to reassure the person that you know, nothing has changed. You know, this is no reflection on you or your drinking. And I would do things like, especially in the corporate scene, where if we would all go out today or something, I would actually go and order everybody the drinks first, so I would say, who's drinking red, who's drinking white, who's drinking cocktails? Order everybody's drink, and then I kind of take the waitresses side and say, hey, I'd like a nice tea, because inevitably, if you go first and you say I want a nice tea, everybody else sort of shuffles and says, oh, gosh, I guess yes, boss isn't drinking, so I guess I have to order a diet coke. And it's all uncomfortable.

22:27 So true, And I think the more comfortable you get with your own decision, obviously the easier it is to deal with that resistance and those challenges. But in the early days it is really hard, especially if you're already feeling uncertain yourself about your own decision, well, you're feeling anxious about going into those social situations. So I just want to say for anybody listening. If you have a friend who says I'm not drinking, can we just like make a rule that that's fine? What will you have? What can I get you and not in question or challenge them, or just want or be will won't hurt? Or you can stop drink next week? Or one that I heard was, oh, you're doing dry July, We'll catch up in August. Oh yeah, I'll catch you next month, like because apparently I'm not an interesting person to be with what I'm not drinking, Like that's the message. Right.

23:16 We touched a little bit on AA, right, and the whole philosophy of AA, and again, one thing I think that people who are questioning their drinking really struggle with is, you know, the label and the stigma of am I an alcoholic? And what we think that means? And then this whole idea that I'm somehow like you said, like it's a disease, I'm born with it, there's no hope for me. I have to quit drinking forever. Your approach is fundamentally different from that, and as you say, like it's much more open, it's got a low about barrier to entry. How do you suggest people in this space start to make a change, you know, without having to go down that. Okay, that's it. From today, I'm an alcoholic.

23:57 I must never drink alcohol again, because one drink and it's all I'm going to end up homeless and living in a strait. You know, how is your approach different? So I think the first thing, you know, as we already discussed, is just some more helpful question. And then I think the second thing for me, and sort of the core principle of everything that I teach and everything that I did to change my own behavior, was curiosity without judgment, you know, really getting curious about why am I doing this without judging myself for doing it. And I know that can be really difficult because the narrative that we've had for so long is that, oh well, if I don't beat myself up, if I don't judge myself.

24:37 I remember waking up at three in the morning just completely you know, the alcohol is leaving my system. I feel absolutely terrible. The hangover is starting to creep in, but I'm wide awake because of this huge car bload that I got from the drinks. Can't fall back asleep, feeling all of this self loathing and literally thinking if I can just make myself see how far I've fallen, and I'll actually wake up and do something about this. And you know, that narrative of shame and blame like it is not useful. And there's so much amazing science that now backs up that a narrative self compassion is actually one of the keys to change. You know, human beings we change in two ways, either away from pain or toward pleasure. And when we change away from pain, you are forcing a situation where the pain has become so great that you need to change. And I would love for us to be able to look at our drinking and say, wait, wait, wait, I've got a little pain now, why do I have to let it be so much more pain? Why can't I get curious about my behavior and not judge myself? Now? Why can't I allow that maybe I can have some questions about these things that I'm doing and are they really useful to me?

25:50 Is this really helping me? Do I really feel better? And start to ask myself these useful questions before it gets really bad. But the societal narrative is such that especially you know, and this is even true with our doctors to some degree is that it's almost as if so, say you're drinking is kind of like causing a little bit of pain in your life. So it's a little bit like your wrist is hurting, right, You're like starting to see a little bit of pain, and you go into the doctor and you say, hey, you know, I've got this sore wrist. What can I do about it? And the doctor says, you know what, well, you need to amputate at the arm. You need to go to ninety meetings in ninety days. You need to declare yourself an alcoholic. You need to spend the rest of your life fighting this disease in you know, somewhat miserable, sobriety as society paints it for us, and basically your life as you know it is over. You have to reidentify yourself.

26:39 You have to admit that you're powerless, and you know, so it's kind of like saying you need to amputate at the arm. So of course we walk right back out of the doctor's office and we say forget that, I'm not going to do that. You know, a few maybe months years later, not only is our wrist hurting, but now our wrist and our elbow is hurting. We go back in. We say, okay, now, now I've got, you know, two symptoms. My wrist is hurting, my elbows hurting. What do I need to do? And the doctor's like, no, you need to amputate at the arm. And so of course we leave again, and we are unwilling to engage in the conversation. And it isn't until we're really in so much pain that we're willing to amputate at the arm that we're willing to engage in this conversation. And so I think by saying forget all of that, let me just be curious about my behavior now without judging myself for it, we open up all of these doors to Okay, what might my life look like if I'm treating a bit less. Maybe it's going to be terrible, But I actually don't know that because I haven't had a sober happy hour in my adult life, So I actually don't know that a sober happy hour will be absolutely horrible. You know, I'm not sure yet, But let me be curious. Let me see how it is to go out and not drink. Maybe it's going to be miserable, but I'm not going to presuppose that maybe it's not going to be miserable and just allow that, you know, maybe we don't know, and let ourselves start to question that approach of all or nothing.

28:05 I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you apps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. I think that what you're talking about really is so useful, that curiosity without the judgment. There is so much judgment, and there is so much shame and self loathing, and alcohol exacerbates that, right. Alcohol makes that worse. It makes everything feel worse. So coming to it with curiosity, I mean, I found myself and I think this is useful for everybody. And I know you talk about this as well, so, oh, you can't have fun without alcohol. When you go to a party, it's fun to drink. And then actually stepping back and saying, well, for how long is it fun? You know, when does it because it's when does it stop being fun? Is it still fun when you hung over and throwing up the next morning. If it's still fun when you're a wide awake at two in the morning with you know, horrified and wondering what you did the night before, it is really fun. And it's that really being curious, isn't it about what? What is the thing that I'm believing here and that I continue to believe and act as if it's true, and what might actually be the truth instead?

29:34 And taking that kind of approach. Yeah, I love that, and I think that, you know, just to expand on that a little bit, I would actually have people because this is one of the things I did myself, but people who who work with us would actually have them time how long they enjoy that first drink and you know, how long does it really make you feel good? Because there's an undeniable sort of buzz that you get from that drink, and so I'm like, okay, I want you to time it. And you know, the average time that people would report is between eighteen and twenty four minutes, and then they start to kind of come down off of that, and between eighteen and twenty four minutes later they want to reach for that next drink to keep that going up, but it never quite reaches the same level of pleasure as that first drink, and so they're sort of on this cycle. Interestingly enough, how the brain works is that alcohol is both a stimulant and a depressant. So for that first eighteen to twenty four minutes, your brain is actually being stimulated by alcohol and your blood alcohol content is rising. And what's happening there is that you're feeling, you know, those feelings of lightheadedness, a little bit dizzy, everything feels softer around the edges. You kind of, you know, maybe feel a bit more energetic, a bit more outgoing, maybe your inhibitions are lowered a bit. But research shows it's about twenty minutes later your body says, hey, hey, hey, this is a toxin. We want this out, and so it starts to purge the alcohol and your blood alcohol levels start to fall, and you feel all of the associated emotions with your blood alcohol content falling, which are uneasy, anxious, tired,

31:10 not comfortable in your own skin, paranoid, upset, sad, all of these feelings. And the kicker is that you feel those feelings for two to three hours, because that's how long one drink takes to leave your system, and so you just you know, and we don't realize this because we reach for another drink eighteen to twenty minutes later, we have a little bit more of a pick me up, and then eventually we get ourselves drunk. And most of that really nasty time happens when we're asleep. But anybody who's woken up at three in the morning knows that it does not all happen when you're asleep, and you know that you wake up the next morning still feeling your blood alcohol content, you know, lowering, and those quite nasty feelings of purging the alcohol from your system. And so you have to almost look at a twenty four hour day and say, okay, if I have six drinks, and let's say I average, because it does it does less and drink. If people measure that first drink, it's eighteen to twenty four minutes, That next drink is I think it was like fifteen to nineteen minutes, the next one was less, et cetera. So if you say, okay, let's give myself an average of fifteen minutes a drink, and I have six drinks, and then what is that an hour and a half maybe of nice feelings in my twenty four hours, Like how many hours of worrying about my drinking, regretting my drinking, feeling hungover, having a hangover, being you know, mentally obsessed with drinking or not drinking, Like what is the real cost here? What is the real trade? And those are things you can start to explore when you approach it with curiosity, without judging yourself

32:40 for your behavior. Anie, Most people, like you said, you know, start to do this thing where they put rules around drinking and I set a boundary, or they start to limit the number of drinks cell have, and it takes up all of this mental space. And then even when people actually stop drinking, and even if they decide that's it, I don't want to do this anymore. I understand it's really bad for me. Many people take a long long time before they actually completely make make like a lasting change. And I think this is the thing that where people come unstuck as well, because they they feel like such a failure. There is so much of that shame and self judgment. How long did it take you to eventually quit?

33:26 And I guess from the research that you've done in the thousands of people you've talked to, like what is there an average? Like how long does it take people to make that change stick? So it really truly depends on the approach. And I think that there's let me explain this in a different way, because you could look at my own journey in two different ways. So before I sort of had my moment of, you know, asking myself a different question coming back from Heathrow Airport, I five or six years of struggling, were trying to drink less, right, and beating myself up about it. After that, once I did the research, change was almost instantaneous. And so it's fascinating because I have people who will read my book and they will, you know, two days later, never have a drink again. I have people who go through the alcohol experiment, always free, by the way, and they will stop drinking after thirty days, no problem. And so I really started asking myself the same question and say, okay, well, what is it that makes this successful? When gosh, I struggled for so many years, and by the way, I was in anywhere near getting out of my struggle. It wasn't as if change was imminent or on the horizon, right, And so what I've realized is that we look at behavior change kind of across the board as I want to change my behavior, so I'm going to try to change my behavior, and I know that sounds logical. Okay, So I want to start running, So tomorrow I'm going to put on my running shoes and I'm going to go out and start running. And the reality is that all of the latest neuroscience shows that behavior change it

35:00 doesn't come about because we've done it for twenty one days or sixty days or ninety days. Those things are correlated, but they're not causal. It actually comes about because of how we feel about the new behavior. And if you feel like I did, that alcohol was absolutely the glue holding my whole life together, and my life would be completely miserable if I didn't drink, and I was trying not to drink it, there was probably no point in time where that behavior change was going to come easily or quickly. But what I realized is that behavior change really takes three things. It takes changing the behavior, but it also takes learning something new to feel something new.

35:40 And so what I do in all my work is it's just completely packed full of knowledge, just like what I shared with you about the blood alcohol content, because I promise you now that you know that you feel a little bit different about that glass of wine. There's nothing you can do to feel exactly the same about you. There's nothing you can do to unlearn what you just learned about the unfair trade right, and so you feel differently about it, and enough of those pieces of knowledge that are all based in science, you actually feel differently about picking up a drink. And that's where I was at. And so once I felt like I wanted to drink. And I know it's so hard to conceptualize when you are deep in the place of feeling like alcohol is your only friend, or alcohol is the key to loneliness and the key to networking or having a good time or destressing. But you can learn enough information to where you feel. For me, I felt about picking up a glass of wine like I felt about if I would drink a glass of motor oil. There was no benefit.

36:40 And so the truth is without desire, there's no temptation. You do not desire something you do not believe provides a benefit. And so if you can actually reverse the order of change, so instead of just trying to change your behavior, you pack your front load all of this new knowledge, which inevitably knowledge changes your emotion. Then when you feel something new, change can happen on a dime. It can happen very quickly. The average time that somebody takes to change, you know, in the alcohol experiment, really is in thirty days. You know, drinking is reduced by sixty five percent. And if you wanted to, if people are really stuck and they actually work with us on a deeper level, it's within the first ninety days that people change and then they you know, the program is a year because then there's all of this work you need to do to actually build a life you don't want to escape from in the first place. It's a whole layer after you change your behavior to like, okay, why you know, am I really peaceful? And that's not true for everybody. Some people are not drinking to self medicate, But if you are drinking to self medicate, there's work to be done there. But the change can happen really quickly when it's with the right method.

37:48 I would say, yeah, I think that is gold right there. That is so key. You don't desire something that you don't desire. It's not. It's not challenging to not do something you literally don't want to do because you've changed the whole way that you see it. Think about the way you see it. I say the same thing and know it's different. But I've used this example before. I was vegan for a while there, and I still feel like guilt. But I'm not a vegan anymore. But I I was vegan there for a while. It was you know, you see people, Oh, I couldn't give up cheese or I couldn't give up this. As soon as I fundamentally changed the way I saw that food and I knew the suffering that was involved in that, like I had no desire to consume it anymore. You change the way you see it, the meaning that you give it, and it's not hard. It's not hard. Annie. I just mentioned before that I haven't drunk alcohol for about a year and a half. I think today I worked out that I think today is actually literally eighteen months. But eighteen months ago I stopped drinking, and a few months ago we moved house and we sold a house. We bought a house. My parents sold a house. They bought their house.

38:54 When you buy a house of sell a house by the way, Like everybody just gives you bottles of champagne, like it's that you get the big basket. It's always a bottle of champagne. That's another thing, the people who make the gift baskets. Can you please start making some alcohol free gift baskets for those of us who are not interested in the champagne. But I said, oh look, I'll have a glass of champagne. You know, like I hadn't had a drink for over a year. I had never said I will never drink again. And I tasted the champagne and it actually tasted off to me. It tasted this is really expensive, nice champagne. It tasted gross. And I finished the glass. And I haven't had another drink since since. And I still sometimes think, oh, well, I could, like if it was a special occasion, maybe I would have a drink. But it actually has no appeal to me anymore. You put yourself in a situation.

39:41 I know, I read this a couple of months after you quit drinking for good. You actually drank deliberately. Can you tell us about that? Yeah? So, And first of all, you know on that it's really interesting because let's just just back up for a second and pein a picture of two different scenarios. Right. One scenario is you're free. You don't really see it provides a benefit. You have a glass of champagne, it doesn't taste good, and you're going to like, yeah, maybe I'll have another one if it's a special occasion, but I don't know, I'm not really feeling it. Alternate scenario, your entire mode of changing has beaten into your head that you can never again have a single glass or sip in safety. If you do, all bets are off.

40:23 You're certainly on your way to prison, jail, or death. And it is the most tragic thing. You will lose all credibility in any sort of time that you've gained. And you might as well just drink five bottles, because man, you are screwed, Like, how likely are you to keep drinking and then, by the way, abandon the very thing that's helped you get this far. So I just want to highlight that I don't think that it is ever the behavior that's the problem. I think it's what we make it mean and when we make it mean. Man, if I have one glass of wine, that means all of the time all of those eighteen months are for not I've totally let myself down. I've let my whole community down. I've you know, become this person who is untrustable.

41:10 Like all of that stuff can create such a different experience there, which, by the way, is going to make you drink more. Whereas if you make it mean like yeah, so I wanted a glass of champagne, fine, who cares? Like really, who cares? Right? And then that meaning is so different. So anyway, that's very true. That was totally a tangent, and I forget your original question. No, but it's a really good point. And I would also actually add on that we are off on a tangent. But had I done that after thirty days or sixty days, if not drinking, had a glass of champagne, I can guarantee you I would have had a glass of champagne the next day and the next day and the next day. Because it took a lot longer. It took over a year before I was at a point and I knew that in myself, before I could comfortably have a glass of champagne and not feel that fear that oh I'm going to be straight back down that on that drinking cycle again. My question was, are you you deliberately put yourself in a situation? Oh, yes, right, and you've had you drink, not just one glass.

42:06 No no, no, I intentionally got drunk. I actually set up I set up my phone on a little tripod, and I filmed myself getting drunk. Because what had happened was it was about three or four months after I stopped drinking, and Saint Patrick's Day, for whatever reason, is a big deal in the US, and it's a big drinking day. So we went over to a friend's house and we're all out for dinner, and they had all their green beer and whatnot, and I, for the first time, was feeling quite left out and feeling like, huh, maybe I made too big of a deal of this, Like maybe it's maybe it's not that big of a deal. Maybe I was wrong, you know, maybe drinking is fine, Like why did I even stop? And so I said, you know what, before, I just pour myself this drink in this situation, because I knew enough to know that if I was to have another drink in a really happy, joyful situation, my mind would just create all the associations that already existed like, oh, alcohol is important and for fun, Oh, alcohol is the key to having a good time in this holiday. And so I said, I'm not going to do that. But what I am going to do is I'm going to go home. I'm gonna buy myself two bottles of wine and I'm actually just going to get drunk where there is no external thing that can get confused with the drinking. I just want to know what it feels like to get drunk, What does that feel like?

43:20 How does that make me feel? You know, because so often we create these associations where we are drinking at some of the most naturally enjoyable points in our life. Right We're drinking at the weddings or the vacations or you know, all of these really beautiful experiences, and so our brains get super confused and they say, oh, those two things they go together. And actually the reason that that's fun is the drinking. But you know, nobody ever came home from a soccer match and said, oh, my gosh, that beer, you know, that was the best beer, Like, no, we're talking about the goal and how the you know, experience was so yes, I locked myself in my room. I proceeded to get very drunk on camera, and it just sealed the deal for me. I couldn't even watch the video for about four years. I now have edited down probably the four hours of footage into kind of a fifteen minute video that's available on the twenty eighth day of the alcohol experiment. But it was it's humiliating.

44:17 I mean it was. It was in the moment in the next day, like I was just so certain there was nothing there for me. The only thing that really happened was I felt like the room got a bit fuzzy, everything got a bit softer. I felt really dizzy, and then I proceeded to just turn into like you could see the light going out of my eyes. You could see, you know, I'm generally can put string together words, all right. I couldn't do that anymore, you know, I thought I was funny. I'd totally lost my sense of humor. It was. It was really painful. I mean, you can see if you're sober and you watch somebody else get drunk, you can see exactly what I mean. But how alcohol changes the human being, and that the human becomes less and less present. And it's funny because we think that alcohol actually makes us more of ourselves, but it doesn't. It actually turns off the part of our brain that is the most human and allows us to have more impulses and more animalistic impulses, allowing the part of our brain that's least human to take over. And so it feels like, oh, my inhibitions are down. That must be how I really am. No, no, no, that's how you really are, with the prefrontal cortex, with the very human part of your brain where you make the good decisions turned off. And so yeah, for me, that was that. I every time I was tempted to have a drink any moment after that, all I think about was, well, that's how it makes me feel. That's a no.

45:41 Yeah. And you made a really good point there about just these associations we have, and we have a most of us have a whole adult lifetime of alcohol and weddings alcohol and Friday night alcohol and relaxing alcohol. So it just becomes alcohol and everything. And I think too, you know, part of the process that most people go through, certainly the one that I went through, is experiencing some of those occasions without alcohol and again just being curious and realizing that it's just as fun and you can be just as much. You and Bonus remember it all the next day and Bonus not wake up and horrified wondering if that thing that you said was maybe offensive or rude. And most of the time, I mean, I think in my case, I was never offensive. I didn't.

46:27 But that's what our brain does to us. It puts us in the state of, oh my god, and then we were in this anxiety kind of shame spiral of what did I do? And you can still have the fun without any of those negative consequences if you just give yourself the chance. So the thirty Day Alcohol Experiment is available at any time for people to jump on for free. Yes, so it's always available at alcohol experiment dot com and you just go in and you choose your own start date and yeah, just go for it. For thirty days. Every day is a video and email and it's really information. So that knowledge that changes your emotion, that is what it's packed full of. Yeah, one other thing just before you go, Annie, So, one thing that people have said to me when they've tried to make changes to the way they drink is I feel so boring. I feel like I feel like I'm boring. I feel like life's boring. I feel like there's this flatness to life when I don't drink, and I would. I think that's a common experience, and I would.

47:26 I know that you understand why that happens, and I was wondering if you could maybe just explain that. Yeah. Absolutely, And I actually have a video that I did on this. If you search on YouTube this Naked Mind channel for boredom, it will pop up for you. And I go deep into this because it's such an important thing in our experience, and the reality is that the boredom can be the very thing that we need to really realize where we are and get to know ourselves better. Actually opens up the space. In fact, the research says that nothing great or beautiful or impactful would ever have been created without human boredom, and all creativity happens on the other side of boredom. And if we're not allowing our minds to rest in that way, that you know, we're really doing ourselves a disservice. And so if we're always either turning off our thoughts with something like alcohol or social media or whatever the case is, we're actually disallowing the parts of ourselves. That allows you know, us to evolve and create all of the beautiful, incredible things, from art to technology to science, all of the things comes from that feeling of boredom. And so practically, when I feel that feeling, I just really like to go into the observer mood and be like, oh, interesting, this is how my brain reacts having nothing to do. Let's hear it chatter about that. Oh, it feels really uncomfortable in my body. That's interesting, you know, And especially when I was first trying to meditate, you know, sitting there and just watching myself be uncomfortable and actually find and

49:00 entertainment in the watching of the discomfort. Yeah, if that makes sense, but it allows you to sort of break through that, and on the other side of that you discover this just depth and richness of life, where every moment has so much texture and quality that nothing is ever boring. Again, Like I can't even imagine using that word. There's not There's not been a moment in my existence for probably five years, and I stopped drinking over seven years ago where I would have considered myself bored. Because when you break through that, yeah, it's like everything is fascinating I know that sounds weird, but it's really the truth.

49:41 It is true, it is true, and I think you know, like you said before, sometimes after you've quit the alcohol, then you realize all of the things that you were drinking to avoid, and so there is obviously, possibly for some people more work to be done there, but you cannot make that realistic appraisal and make any kind of change fundamentally to your life. And unless you remove the alcohol, that's kind of masking. Yeah, all of the problems. So true. Annie, I'm so grateful for your time. Everybody's going to be rushing to find you and connect with you. Where is the easiest place to find all of your resources and everything that you have available?

50:22 Awesome? The best place is This Sneaked Mind dot com. And then if you are curious about the thirty day Break, that is again at Alcohol Experiment dot com. Perfect. Thank you, Annie, it's been such a pleasure. Well, thank you, thank you for having me. Annie's books are called This Naked Mind and The Alcohol Experiment, and they are available at all good bookstores now. You can find the links to order those in the show notes. Even before I personally stopped drinking, I had referred many people to Annie's work based purely on word of mouth recommendations. I personally know several people who credit Annie's books and her alcohol experiment with fundamentally shifting the way they think about drinking and dramatically reducing their alcohol intake or helping them to stop drinking altogether. So if you or someone you know is looking to make a change in your relationship with alcohol, I hope that this has inspired you to check out Annie's work. Thank you so much for listening, and as always, I look forward to catching you on the next episode of Crapy to Haby Listener