For all my sober-curious friends, this one's for you!
Ever wondered what life would look like without that glass of wine at the end of the day, or that celebratory beer on the weekend?
I can tell you now, it's better than you could have ever imagined.
The decision to take a break from alcohol started with the desire to change my mental health and became so much more than that.
While I don't believe that everyone needs to quit drinking, this episode might just motivate you to stop and consider your own relationship with alcohol.
SHAUNA GREY
www.simplifiedsavvy.com/
Instagram: @simplifiedsavvy & @thesavvyscooppod
YouTube: Simplified Savvy - The Savvy Scoop Podcast
For all my sober-curious friends, this one's for you!
Ever wondered what life would look like without that glass of wine at the end of the day, or that celebratory beer on the weekend?
I can tell you now, it's better than you could have ever imagined.
The decision to take a break from alcohol started with the desire to change my mental health and became so much more than that.
While I don't believe that everyone needs to quit drinking, this episode might just motivate you to stop and consider your own relationship with alcohol.
SHAUNA GREY
www.simplifiedsavvy.com/
Instagram: @simplifiedsavvy & @thesavvyscooppod
YouTube: Simplified Savvy - The Savvy Scoop Podcast
Welcome back to the Savvy Scoop podcast, where we give you the full scoop on all things living your best life. So if that's your jam, you're in the right place. New episodes drop every Wednesday for you to enjoy, as always. I am your host, shauna Gray. I'm a social media marketing and business mentor for service-based small business owners. If you're a fan of the show, I would so appreciate you rating and giving it a review wherever you listen, or you can also watch the show on YouTube Maybe you are right now and you could subscribe there too, so you never miss an episode.
Speaker 1:Okay, so another deep dive from me personal episode. I feel so nervous recording these really personal episodes Again, not because I am nervous to tell the story, but it's just so personal, really close to my heart, and it was an emotional journey. So I touched on this one a little bit in a recent episode about my health and wellness journey over the last two years. So go back and listen to that if you haven't yet. But because it's such an important topic and part of the journey that I get so many questions about, I felt that it deserved its own episode, and that is about my decision to go alcohol-free, which I will be coming up to two years alcohol-free on January 10th of 2024. So we're at, you know, 2021, something like that months at this point. So I've got a lot of questions about this that I'm gonna try and touch on all of it and tell the story. So I will start by saying that I don't consider myself to have been an alcoholic Not that the label really matters.
Speaker 1:But I say this because I want people to know that you don't have to consider yourself to be an alcoholic or hit rock bottom to recognize that maybe alcohol isn't serving you and to give up alcohol. You don't have to have a label, you can just decide that it's not the thing for you. Maybe it's not a problem what society would deem to be a problem, the way that you're drinking? But it's a problem for you. What's becoming a problem for you? And that's where I was at when I decided to stop drinking. So I got asked how much I was consuming before I quit. And I would say, you know that it was up and down over the years. Like it is. You know you're in your 20s, you're drinking whatever. You know when I got into my 30s, you know sometimes I was drinking every single night. I like not to the point of blacking out, but a couple of classes and then other times I would not drink in the week and only on weekends. So really, again, it was like a roller coaster, but I would say that in 2021, I was, I don't know I started to catch myself noticing people talking about, like gray area drinking and people mentioning how they were questioning their relationship with alcohol and I'd never heard it described that way before, you know, questioning if alcohol was really serving them and if it's, you know, was what it wanted to, what they wanted it to be.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of where I started. I just started noticing that I was my ear like instead of like hearing people talking about not drinking, being like, eh, whatever, my ears would start to perk up and I would listen to their stories, listen to people who had, you know, decided to become sober, listen to people who had, you know, quit drinking, whether for a variety of reasons. So I just started to pay attention to things I would come across on social media conversations and podcasts, things like that. So my interest was peaked. Was I ready to quit drinking at that time? No, the thought of not drinking was like terrifying to me, honestly, it was like what am I gonna just like stop drinking? No, but I was starting to question things.
Speaker 1:I would say, you know, it did get me thinking when I was drinking. Why was I choosing? Like, why could I not just have one? Why could I just have one? And why couldn't I take it or leave it? Some people can take it or leave it. I was not one of those people. I wasn't just gonna have one. If I was gonna drink, I was gonna have a few drinks. So, or like, why couldn't I? If I said on a Friday night I'm gonna have two glasses of wine, why do I have four? Why couldn't I stop at one? That was the questioning I was doing. It was also Mental gymnastics. Like, okay, I'm not gonna drink tonight. Oh, maybe I will, maybe I will. Well, I just have one. Will I have a few? Like. It was constantly thinking like, will I drink? Oh no, I said I wasn't gonna drink tonight, so I'm not gonna drink tonight. And then it was thinking about when did I say I could drink? Like again, why was it consuming so many of my thoughts? Even if I wasn't drinking, I was still thinking about it in some way, when I was gonna drink and when I was gonna drink, how much was it gonna drink and what was I gonna drink? Like it was, again, just it was all consuming. It consumed so much of my, of my brain. So I Was also realizing that.
Speaker 1:You know, even though people say like I acted totally fine, I was out with friends or something, if I had a bunch of drinks I would wake up with crazy. The term is anxiety. Again, I would know that I acted fine because I could read, I would think about it, I could replay the night in my head, talked to my friends, everything seems good. But I hated that feeling of waking up and wondering like, oh, I Drank a few too many last night. Like what, what did I do? What did I say, even though, again, it was usually literally nothing and I could replay. Like what? If I thought about it, I could replay the night. But I hated that feeling of the, the anxiety, anxiety, and also in the fall of 20, cut to fall of 2021, my anxiety Was out of control. And that's ultimately when I started working with my health coach, lisa. I did a full episode on this as well, so go back and listen to that, but when I started working with her.
Speaker 1:You know I changed a lot of things and one of them was I did start to cut back on alcohol and all of it, together with the movement and eating better and just generally taking better care of myself, was having a great impact on my physical Health but really also my mental health. I said Before we started working together my anxiety had gotten to an all-time high. I was very paranoid, constantly thinking the worst thoughts. So the effects of of all of these things were Really great for my mental health and I was feeling really good. So, cut to now January, my 12 weeks with Lisa is wrapping up and I was okay, how am I gonna keep all of this going?
Speaker 1:And I started decided to Give 75 hard to go and, if I'm honest, the reason I chose 75 hard I knew I needed a challenge to keep going with, like the workouts and the eating well and stuff, but really it was because part of 75 hard is no alcohol for 75 days and that when I got to that point I knew I needed a break from alcohol. I Just, for whatever reason, I knew it. In my head I was like I have to take this break because I'm doing really well with all the things, but I just knew that alcohol was Still, at that point, too much of a presence in my life, whether it was actually consuming it or just thinking about it, and I really just knew that I needed a break. So you know, I was Like, I said I was doing so well, but then like I would have a couple glasses, or like you know too much wine on a Friday night and I wouldn't want to get up and like do anything on a Saturday, or I just I knew that it was holding me back. I knew that like I would make these promises to myself that I would get up earlier and do something and then I wasn't always following through with it. I knew part of it was because I was so tired from like eating like crap and drinking alcohol before that.
Speaker 1:And then, even as I was Getting healthier, I was eating better but still I was like having wine, you know most like At that point, not most nights, but I was having it, you know, a few nights, which is totally fine for some people. It wasn't for me, because I would have a few glasses. Then I would wake up in the morning and be like I don't want to do anything. So I knew it was holding me back from really reaching that like full potential, really becoming the the person that I had always known I could be. I just didn't know how to get there and I saw myself getting there, but I knew there was something holding me back.
Speaker 1:So, um, I was paying attention a lot to how I felt at that time, how when I ate certain things, how I felt when I worked out how I felt when I got a certain amount of sleep, how I felt. So I knew that the alcohol was what was making me tired and unmotivated when that was happening and I wanted to change this. So, like I said, I needed a challenge To keep me going. I knew that was how I was gonna keep myself going if I didn't have the accountability of Lisa anymore. But I also wanted to have this challenge as an excuse so that if people asked why I wasn't drinking, I could use while I'm doing this challenge, I'm doing the 75 day challenge. It wasn't just like I've made a decision to stop drinking for now. I just While people probably wouldn't have cared, in my mind they were going to care, so I needed to be able to have an excuse around it so that until I fully, like, really decided in my head what I was gonna do with it, I needed that as my reason for not drinking.
Speaker 1:So during the time of 75 hard, I wasn't drinking, and then again you have to follow a lot of things. So 75 hard is like sticking to a meal plan, drinking a gallon of water, reading for 15 minutes an actual book, taking a progress picture every day, two workouts every day of 45 minutes each. At least one has to be outside and they have to be separated by three hours. And then no alcohol. So doing all of this and some of the reading and listening I started doing on, you know, reading at night, but the listening when I was doing my outdoor workout for 45 minutes every day. I was listening to sobriety podcasts and I learned so much from these and it just completely changed my mindset around consuming alcohol and I realized honestly, very early into this 75 day experiment of not drinking that I probably wasn't gonna go back to drinking again. When it was done I think it was maybe 30 days and I just knew. I was like this is it. I learned too much and I was like how can I go back knowing all of this now and by the time, it was like ending.
Speaker 1:People were used to it and so I was asked if, like, my social circle changed and if people had a bad reaction. To be honest, nobody cared. I cared. I, more than anyone else, worried I wouldn't be fun and that my relationships would, people would change, and I can honestly say that they haven't. Everyone in my life has been so incredibly supportive. Will that happen for everyone? Maybe not, but I would say, if you're thinking about it and that's what's holding you back, like, just see, because you might be overthinking it and thinking that everyone's gonna care and I was shocked at how much they really didn't care. It was totally all in my head. Like I said, I know that won't be the experience for everyone, but it was the experience for me. My people in my life were, like I said, so incredibly supportive and I will say I have had some of the most fun times of my life, sober.
Speaker 1:So you know, I went, I had a weekend away with girlfriends last weekend and I, when I tell you we got a noise complaint because we were laughing so hard, like I, like full belly laughs. I go, have gone to concerts and now I can actually experience. I'm not worried about like well, I'm gonna have to grab a drink during the next. What song am I gonna duck out for to get a drink? No, I'm just watching this concert, experiencing it all the times with my family, my children, my friends, everybody. It's just all. My experience have been heightened because I'm present in them. I'm not distracted, I'm not doing mental gymnastics, but when my next drink is gonna be, I'm focusing on what, like the conversations, the experiences. It's all just been more than I ever could have imagined. I know that sounds scary, because it scared the crap out of me too, honestly thinking about never drinking again. And now I just don't really think about it.
Speaker 1:So I was asked about things that like have replaced it or how did I replace it? So I will say at the beginning I needed the, the replacements, the alcohol-free versions of the things I liked. That is not for everybody and that can actually be very triggering for some people. Oh, excuse me, so some people can't have any of the alcohol-free the beers, the wines, the cocktails because they find it actually makes them want, like crave, the real thing more. But for me, having the alcohol-free version, I think, is what made me able to stop because I felt like I was. It was a replacement. So I would always have red wine on a Friday night and watch my shows. So all I did was my alcohol-free red wine poured into the same glass I would have and I still had my same tradition of watching my shows doing my nails in front of the fire, but I had my alcohol-free red wine in my glass instead of the you know the real thing, and that was really key for me in the beginning to help me. Just like I think I would have felt deprived if I didn't have the alcohol free versions. I would have just felt like if I was just drinking, like you know, water or soda, I would have felt I would have felt deprived. So I did need those replacements. That was really helpful.
Speaker 1:And then stuff that's replaced it. I mean I now like work out most days. I really focus on my health. That's been the biggest replacement. Some people say that they've found they have so much more time when they quit drinking, and I didn't find that I suddenly had so much more time, to be honest, because my life was very full before and it's still very full now. But I will say I keep the promises that I make to myself. So when I say I'm going to get up and work out, I get up and work out because I'm not exhausted from, you know, having wine. So, like I said, I don't find that I have so much more time, but I do find that I pay like I'm just much more focused on, like the things that I say that I'm going to do. I also have less FOMO.
Speaker 1:I would always like, want to be like. When I was drinking, I always wanted to be like out and about and doing all the things and like I would never want to miss a minute. And now, like, sitting at home and hanging out is just like my like I love that too, whereas before I'd always be like and it's boring sitting at home. So another question that I got is do I regret it? Hell, no. Quitting drinking is honestly the best decision I've ever made for myself in my life. There is not one part of my life that hasn't improved since I stopped drinking. So how can I have a regret? And a lot of people you know will ask like oh, will you maybe go back to like having one or the here and there? And I just at this point I'm like, why? Why would I? If I've seen that every part of my life has gotten better since I stopped drinking? What's the motivation to start again? I just, everything is better, all my experiences are richer and fuller and it's just. It's just the best thing I've ever done.
Speaker 1:Honestly, do I miss it? How long was it until I didn't miss it anymore? I will say don't miss it. I honestly, like I said, I don't think about it anymore. It's not like some people really talk about their sobriety a lot. I don't, because I just find it's just something that I do. Now I really don't think about it and I don't think, oh, it's Friday night and I'm not having a drink. I just like go about my days and again there's no more mental gymnastics of how much to drink and what to drink and when to re-drink, Like it's all gone. All of that is gone. So how? I mean of course I missed at the beginning. I really really did.
Speaker 1:How long till I didn't miss anymore? I can't remember how long it was until I didn't miss it anymore, but I want to say six months, kind of my response to when someone asked how long it took for me to get, like you know, working out and all that to be a lifestyle. Six months, six months seems to be the thing for me. So, yeah, cause I mean the first you know, time out with your friends, the first family get together, the first of a bunch of things. You think about it and you do miss it, cause you're like I wish I could just have a glass of wine with my friends right now. So, yeah, for sure, at the beginning I missed it, I really did.
Speaker 1:But again, like I said, I mean I'm almost two years in now and I don't miss it anymore. I really don't think about it. I just don't think about it and I will say the greatest thing that it has done is this sense of peace that I have. Like I said, I was so, so anxious and don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm never anxious anymore. I mean I'm still very high, strong, very type A, but I just have such a sense of peace in my life that I have never had before. My brain, like my brain, still goes about a lot of things, okay, like it's over working itself on a lot of things, but I, overall, like I just I can't describe it again it's like something you just have to feel. That sense of peace. I never, I always felt like heightened, like ready to go, and and I'm like, I felt like heightened, like ready to go, and and some parts are still that way. But there is this underlying sense of peace that not drinking has given me and I just it's, it's the best, it's, that is what keeps me going in it, cause I just I'm so happy and I feel so peaceful and you know, like I said, all my experiences are richer, I am more present and every part of my life is better.
Speaker 1:So again, I'm not saying that everyone has to quit drinking. Some people really can take it or leave it. But this was to say that if you have ever questioned your relationship with alcohol, then maybe it's something to explore and think about. And if you decide not to give it up, that's totally fine. You decide to cut back or you decide to keep going, whatever it is. But if there is, are those questions in your head, go towards them and and think about it and see where it might be coming from. So that's all for me on that. If there's anything I missed or you have other questions about it, you know you can always reach out. I am an open book and I'm happy to share my experience. I will share. I have shared my experience with many people in the DMs, so if you have more questions, please let me know, and that's it. I will see you next week.