Predict your next drink before it happens: How to spot drinking triggers and stop emotional drinking using a simple sobriety plan that actually works

If you feel like your drinking “just happens,” this episode will change how you see it.

In this episode of the Sober Vibes Podcast, I break down how drinking triggers and emotional drinking follow predictable patterns and how to interrupt them before they turn into a drink.

If you’re quitting drinking and stuck in the same cycle, this will help you get ahead of it.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• how to identify your personal drinking triggers
 • Why emotional drinking feels automatic
 • how to map your patterns (time, place, people, emotions)
 • how to identify your top 3 triggers
 • how to create a simple plan before cravings hit

Once you can predict your patterns, you can change them.

Ready for Support? Here Are 3 Ways to Work With Me:
• Stop Starting Over Program
• Sobriety Circle
• 1:1 Sober Coaching 

Gain access to my Masterclass when you submit a review on iTunes. Email me sobervibes@gmail.com with a screenshot of the review, and I will send you the code to unlock my Masterclass for free!

Thank you for tuning in!

Thank you for listening! Help the show by Rating, Reviewing, and/or Subscribing to the Sober Vibes Podcast.

Connect w/ Courtney:
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Transcript

Welcome And The Real Question

Courtney Andersen 0:31

Hey, welcome back to the Sober Vives Podcast. I am your host and sober coach, Courtney Anderson. You are listening to episode 274. I hope wherever you are in the world, you are having a kick-ass day. Okay, so if you have ever found yourself drinking and thought, how did I end up here again? I was doing so well. This came out of nowhere. I want to challenge that thought today. Okay. Because most drinking moments don't actually come out of nowhere. It's few and far between of sometimes when you're just on like autopilot, right? They usually follow patterns and patterns tied to your stress levels, patterns tied to certain people, patterns time to specific tied to specific times of day, right? And even to certain emotions. So think people, places, and things, okay? And once you learn how to spot these patterns earlier, you can interrupt them before they turn into action, right? So that is what we are diving into today. And we're gonna dive also into how to predict your next drink before it happens by identifying your personal triggers, understanding emotional triggers, and creating a simple sobriety plan that actually works in real life. Because this isn't about, again, having more willpower, it's about becoming aware of what keeps leading you back to the same moment. So you can finally respond differently. And of course, that awareness, because that awareness is where a lot of real change begins. And that's why when you start having time without alcohol in your life and periods of sobriety, and then you go back to drinking and you're like, yuck, I feel like I should, I feel bad, the guilt, the shame. It's because you started living in alignment, even though it was really difficult. You started living in alignment to what your soul has been telling you. I've stated it before. My soul was telling me at 20, at 25 to quit drinking, but it took me four years until I was 29, almost 30 years old, to finally give it up. So again, that's not to shame. I'm just sharing my with my experience, but it is really true. Once you get those those breaks between you drinking alcohol, you start becoming aligned with where you should be going and what you should be doing, right? And and for so many of you, you know that alcohol, you don't want it anymore. And that's good. That's a good thing. Okay. Also, too, before we get into today's episode, if you are needing help in your sobriety journey and looking for sober coaching, check out all of my information in the show notes below. I have three different ways you can work with me. One is my self-guided program, the stop starting over. My second is the sobriety circle that is membership, and that is for women only. Okay, there's meetings in there, all types of resources that you can't get anywhere else other than the sobriety circle. And of course, if you are somebody needing more help on your journey, there's my one-on-one coaching. So let's get rocking and a rolling, good people of the world. Your drinking likely follows these repeatable cues. And I'm just gonna say this once. Not only it's the repeatable cues, but it's also too don't forget that this is an addiction. And this is this is a substance you've been putting into your body on a day-to-day basis, or insert how long you've had it in your life. Okay, whatever your relationship looks like, the pattern of your drinking. Now you might just be a weekend warrior, right? But you it's still you're putting that highly addictable substance into your system. But I'm just gonna go based off of the cues, okay? So let's follow this pattern. So the examples would be like time of day, right? Stress, certain environments, specific people in your emotional states, right? So your brain learns when this happens, alcohol follows, right? That's why drinking can feel automatic and it's not random, it's patterned behavior. And why, when so many people try to quit, they're like, GD, man, this is like this is harder than I thought. Because not only in the beginning there are you fighting going into pause and and fighting that part of it of the addiction to it and the toxicity of a substance. You are then understanding, like, this is now, this is why I drank and how it became the coping. But you guys, I never knew how bad my mama triggered me. You can tell I have a four-year-old if I say mama, how she triggered me when I went to dinner with her a couple months into my sobriety, and I was like, holy shit, this is why I would crush wine in front of you. And I didn't know it until I got sober. So that's what I mean. A lot of these things, too, you will understand more after you have the clear clarity of sobriety. And sometimes you don't even figure out that a person triggers you until months down the road. Okay. So patterns can be interrupted, which is glorious because there is a solution to this problem. So the pattern map. I want you to ask yourself time. When do you when do cravings usually happen? Right after work, on the weekends, late night. The place, where are you when these cravings come up or when you start drinking? Right. Where are you? Are you at home? Are you out to dinner? Are you on vacation, a friend's house? I have to say for the vacation thing, because I just had somebody email me and ask me a question about vacations. Vacations is a huge trigger for people. It is because of that association. And this particular person was asking about a cruise and how they uh didn't they don't want to go. And there's that's quite a right, especially if it's in your first year of sobriety, even though the first couple of years, it's okay if you don't want to put yourself in that situation. There's other types of vacations you can go on, but like vacation is a huge, huge, huge trigger for people because what you have been doing on vacations all of these years prior have been most likely drinking, drinking from sunup to sundown, right? Other associated friends' houses, right? And then people come into play. So who tends to trigger drinking? Is it your friends? Is it your partner? Is it your family? Work advances, your your co-workers, right? And then we get into the emotion of it of what are you usually feeling during the time of wanting to drink? Are you stressed? Are you bored? Do you feel lonely? Do you have resentments? Is there anxiety coming up? Is there is it a celebration of some sort? So this becomes your personal drinking pattern map. And that's where you have to go through these and answer these of when is my drinking happening? So you're gonna want to identify your top three triggers. So don't try fixing everything at once, right? Start with your most frequent trigger, your hardest trigger, your most damaging triggers. Here are some examples of this: afterwork stress, weekend boredom, social pressure, the day-to-day motherhood. Yeah, if you're a stay-at-home mom and then that witching hour of the after school before bedtime, maybe you were a single mom and all the responsibility is on you, and then the kids go to sleep, and then that that is your time. So your pre-decision planning. So most people wait until the cravings hit, and then that always becomes too late because then you're in it and you're like, F it. I'm already, I already had one sip. Like I I didn't prepare for this. I've already had one sip. I'm just gonna keep continuing, and then tomorrow is a new day. So I want you to ask yourself before you even have that one sip, and before when you figure out the triggers, before even that witching hour for you comes about, what will I do when this happens? So, examples. If I feel stressed after what after work, I go for a walk. If I go to dinner, I decide my drink beforehand, right? If I feel lonely, I'm going to call somebody. If I feel overwhelmed, I'm gonna cancel unnecessary plans. And this stuff you have heard from me before, especially of the last couple episodes, like the stacking of go, go, go, go, go, go, you cannot do this. So that's why you have to really truly look at your calendar. And if a month feels too overwhelming, just look at it in the week. And it's like, I don't have the capacity for this anymore. And if I want to fully give up drinking, I'm gonna have to say no to certain social events or add to or in some work obligations too. Like, and it is okay, as I've always said to you guys, you can fib a little bit if all of a sudden you got a headache and you needed to go home. You know what I mean? Or if you really need to go to some type of social outing, use the 60-minute rule of just hanging out for an hour and then leaving, you gotta go. So, like you don't try to pile on so much during this time period because you have to start living life without alcohol. And if you press play on this podcast today, you are in that state, or you've already been on your continuous sobriety journey and you like listening to this podcast. Okay. So cancel unnecessary plans. Maybe even you cancel two weeks' worth of plans. Maybe you don't make any plans for two weeks and sit it out because you keep putting yourself back into a situation where you are going to drink. You're you have to remove the negotiation with yourself, right? Going back to of removing that and negotiation with yourself of the back and forth, back and forth of drinking and why this works is you you've made a decision and you stop feeling like blindsided, right? You stop or you stop believing that cravings are random. You become proactive instead of reactive when you're building this plan for yourself. So, again, once you start building this plan for yourself, it builds self-trust and it builds that confidence. You start building your self-esteem, and then consistency starts happening. And consistency with sobriety, so when you start being consistent, sobriety gets a little bit easier, right? And you start really, and I know this is gonna be hard for some people who are more like type B because you can't, like you don't ever know how you're gonna be a type A person, but you do have to plan for this. You do have to plan and start relying on that preparation because then at least you can go into it with the plan. Same thing. Do you need to get all the alcohol out of your house? Like, if if and that's what you need to figure out too. If it at home you're constantly doing this, then it's like, okay, no more. I worked with a lady one time and she did volunteer work. I think it was on a Friday, in retirement, but she did volunteer work. And what helped her the most was making sure that her fridge, when she got home from this, from her day, right, on Friday, was that she could immediately go to the fridge and grab something to drink. Non-alcoholic, of course. And I'm not just I'm not talking about mocktails. Like that could have been like a Gatorade or a Coke, like anything, whatever your little heart desires that is not booze. She's she stacked up her fridge with it. So then it was like there was no excuse then to drink. And it was like that was more going to like the the now the new association. And she was like, as long as I had that, I noticed myself that it was good. So it's like, yes, that's what I'm trying to share with you today. It's like you have to start doing stuff to prepare yourself for when this other starts as stuff happens and build that plan for yourself, right? It works. I swear. This is why I was Modge Podging picture frames and doing arts and crafts those first three months on Friday nights to keep my mind busy because that was the hardest night of the week for me. But it helps. So prepare yourself, answer those questions, prepare yourself for now these situations going forward and mapping out this plan for yourself. Okay. The plan will work when the cravings hit. Now, let me say this though. It's not gonna say that it's gonna you having this plan, it will help you go through it, right? You still might experience some cravings while you're in it. I'm not saying that this plan is magically going to like make these cravings disappear. The only time that these cravings are going to start disappearing is when you give yourself time and you go through the motions of it and like in you just time, time, time, time, and consistent alcohol-free days will also make those cravings go away because you're not continuing to put a highly addictive substance into your body. Okay, you're detoxing it. All right. All right, I hope this episode helps you. As always, feel free to DM me on Instagram and you can also email me, silvervise at gmail.com. If you haven't yet, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show. If you leave a rating on Apple Podcasts, screenshot it, email it to me, and I will send you my workshop for free. Okay. And if you are needing help again in your sobriety journey, check out the options of how you can work with me. As always, good people of the world, keep on trucking.