Alcohol & Anxiety - What You Need to Know

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Transcript

Welcome And What We Do

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical, and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools, and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol free. If you want to learn more about Stop Drinking Coaching, then head over to www.soberclear.com. When I stopped drinking alcohol just under eight years ago, the first few months of not drinking alcohol, I was euphoric. I'd never felt better before. There were a few days where maybe I felt a bit trash, but I can't even remember it. But basically, the first three months of stopping drinking alcohol, honestly, I felt like I could take on the world. And I had so much optimism and confidence because I knew I'd finally defeated the final boss, right? The thing that I knew was holding me back in my life, because I knew I'd defeated it, everything just felt better. So I immediately quit my job in a restaurant because my life had tumbled apart. I started a personal training business. I'm on the gym floor, I'm talking to people, I'm feeling good, I'm learning, I'm educating myself, and then I moved to Thailand, I booked a one-way flight because I felt unstoppable. And it was one of the best feelings ever. So you better realize that the first day that I was not drinking alcohol and I couldn't get out of bed because I felt so anxious. You better think that came as a surprise because it did. I was so surprised because I'd had this amazing run of just like success after success after success, win after win after win. And then that day when I just couldn't do anything, it was such a shock. Because I thought I'd conquered it. I thought I'd solve the human condition by stopping drinking alcohol. So I want to break this down. I want to talk to you about what you can expect when it comes to anxiety and stopping drinking alcohol because it's something that you'll face. In fact, it's something I faced yesterday after almost eight years of not drinking. It will come up, maybe not for everybody. Depends how much caffeine you drink, I suppose. But it's probably going to come up at some point. So I want to talk to you about this topic. I want to tell you about my experience, and really I want to talk to you about a breakthrough that I had yesterday. Because it's these anxious days, they're so few and far between now. But every time I have one, I learn something new. And I want to share it with you. I want to be vulnerable. I don't really care if people think it's weak to have anxiety. Whatever. I don't care. I I I'm gonna share it with you to try and help you. So when I drank, and this is universal, I believe, this is my opinion, but people who drink, they're not used to feeling things. At least that was what it was like for me. You name an emotion, and I've had our goal paired of it. Finishing a shift, uh hard day of work, drink, right? Relief. I've paired it with that. Happiness, I don't know, getting some result in a in a in a test, and you've won and you've got a good grade, drink. Grief, family member dies, drink, done it. The list goes on and on. Loneliness, drink, sadness, drink, depression, drink. Good and bad emotions. I've used alcohol for them. So what happened to me is that I almost forgot what it was like to feel things, negative things, and not have a form of escape. So I've had anxiety and I had it a lot worse when I drank because obviously alcohol disrupts the chemicals in your brain, the GABA, the glutamate. If you've read my book, The 48-hour alcohol reset, you'll know all about this, but it disrupts them. So it naturally makes you feel more anxious because of the glutamate levels have increased, the GABA levels have gone down when you're rebounding and coming off alcohol. So I think that every single alcohol drinker will have had some experience with anxiety at some point. So the thing is, is that this is why people do the hair of the dog, right? Where they drink the next day to feel a bit better. Awful thing, but it is what it is. But it makes sense if you read the book of why people do it, because of the chemicals in their brain. Now, what I'm trying to say though is that all of my life, adult life, I would have a negative feeling, stress, anxiety, whatever, drink. So what ended up happening is as I got further into this journey and stopped drinking for a prolonged period of time, is I'd have negative emotions and I wasn't used to it. It was a really strange feeling. So maybe it was, I don't know, six months into my journey of not drinking, three months in, I had a day where I just felt this terrible anxiety, just terrible. And it was like this tight feeling in my chest that was there all day. And this was when I was really starting to try and learn online business and YouTube and coaching and trying to figure things out. So on those days, I had this big list of things that I wanted to do that day, and I'd be in bed, and I get out of bed, and I'm like, I can't do anything. All I could do that day was go for a massage and take the pressure off myself. Very strange feeling, uh, especially because I wasn't drinking now, so I thought, why am I feeling this way? And I figured it out. I'll explain it in a second. But it happens, right? It happens because you're gonna get bad days, right? Everybody's gonna get bad days. It's life. It's not always win after win after win. You're gonna get these lucky streaks and you're gonna get these these waves of success and waves of luck, but you'll have bad days. You'll have days where you don't know what you're doing, where you know your partner's upset with you for no reason, and it affects you. You will have negative things that happen, family members, illness, it's all coming. It's all coming. It's it's what the Buddha said, right? And life is suffering, and it's okay. That's what somebody never told me before. Is that if you're feeling anxious, stressed, bad, it doesn't mean you need to get rid of that feeling. It's okay to not feel great 100% of the time, and that's that's really hard for me to accept. I want to feel good all of the time. I coach people, I make content. You know, I have to be on. So when I don't feel 100%, it gets to me. And it kind of spirals. So this is exactly what happened yesterday. I'll tell you what happened yesterday and how I fixed it. Yesterday was one of those days where I said so. We're in uh Devon right now. Don't know if you've ever been to Devon, but it's it's it's really nice where we are. And uh me and my wife came to England and we wanted to really just get a feel for it. Maybe we'd want a move here, who knows? But we really decided to to go to some properties in the countryside and and uh because we've got a baby uh coming, and uh we just wanted to see what it would be like in in an area like this, and we really like it. And I said, because we've been driving a lot, we've been to Edinburgh, we've been to Scotland, to the to the Highlands, uh to Lancashire where I'm from. So we've been driving around, and uh, and I said, alright, when we get to Devon, let's just rest the next day. And it was a bit of a mistake because I opened up my laptop and at first I felt good, and then I started thinking about work. And I started I got all of these ideas, and the problem when you are an entrepreneur or an executive, anyone that does any kind of knowledge work, is there are literally infinite things that you can do at any point in time. It's not like somebody says, here's the playbook, right? Here's how you grow your YouTube channel, here's how you write a book. You've got to figure it all out. And there's infinite things that you can always do. And I heard this uh entrepreneur say that anxiety comes from having too many options and not knowing which one to choose. When you like I this is gonna sound strange, but when I've been in England, when we were in Edinburgh, I had this realisation, so I've been very uh let's say stress-free while I've been here. And I'm walking around this castle and I thought, man, we live in such a weird time where you just have infinite choice, you can just go and do whatever you want to do whenever you want. And I thought about these people that lived in this castle that were at, I think I don't know how to pronounce it, it was like Urquat or something, or Euroquat. I'm sure someone will pro will correct me. And I and I was like in this castle thinking, if you were born in this area and your family were all blacksmiths, you're a blacksmith. You don't have choice, there's no upward social mobility, maybe in the military, but probably not even them. So you've got no choice. But I bet you those people had no anxiety, no depression. Maybe they would get stressed, but I think day to day was probably very calm. No screens, no 100% connectedness, and they had no options, so there was no thought of a thousand different things that you could do. Anyway, going back to yesterday, I have this day where I'm like, I'll just rest. And when I rest, I think it's a good time to think of ideas. And then I start thinking of ideas, and I'm like, oh my gosh, there's a million things I can do. I don't know what to do. I'm not gonna do any of them while I'm here, so it's a waste of time even thinking about it. But I could feel throughout the day that by having a million options, not making any decisions, and not doing anything, just sat there thinking, thinking, right, planning in my head. I'm just, I'm just, you know, replaying things that's just going nowhere. And I'll tell you what fixed it for me yesterday. And the reason why I'm telling you this is because I just want you to be prepared for this when you don't drink. Bad days, anxious days. Anyway, what I did yesterday was I got out of my head and went out with my wife. I did something. I I did something and stopped sitting there thinking. Because that's what it does, it's it's like you get into these thought patterns, and you think that the only way that you can get out of it is with more thinking, which makes it worse. You gotta snap out of it and get out there, do something, stop making it about you and your thoughts, and go do something for somebody else. And I took my wife out for dinner, and that was it. That was it. It was just a few hours where I just was spiralling in my thoughts, and uh, and then I realized as soon as I got out of the house and went out with my wife, gone. It was like this, just this instantly, just all of it just disappeared. And I think it's important to talk about something like this because you know, everybody wants to look strong, everyone wants to look like they've got life under control, that then they they've got all the secrets, they've got all the answers. Most people don't, most people have hard days, people just don't like talking about it. And I think it's it's good to talk about these things because you you you know, it's just gonna happen. Like you're gonna have bad days. In fact, I have a lot of, I don't want to sound boastful, but I have a lot of like young, successful friends, and if you saw them, you'd think, wow, these people have got their life together. And then when you you know start to open up and talk to them more, you know, some of these people they're they're they're in their 30s, they've got 20 million dollars, and I talk to them and they're crippled with anxiety. It's universal. So if you have a bad day after stopping drinking alcohol where you do feel anxious, it's okay. It doesn't mean you need to drink, it doesn't mean you need to escape it. Probably means you just need to get out of your head and take some action, do something. I think it will help. Anyway, if you've not read the book yet, the 48-hour outcoat reset, head over to Amazon, search it. I'll put a link in the description to buy it. If you want to apply for coaching, if you want to work together, click the link down below. There'll be a place where you can fill in an application, you can book a free call to speak with my team.

unknown 11:23

Speak with the team.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking podcast by SoberClear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit www.soberclear.com.