SuccessFULL With ADHD

Emotional Sobriety: ADHD, Alcohol, and Dopamine with The Hangover Whisperer, Colleen Kachmann

• Brooke Schnittman MA, PCC, BCC • Season 1 • Episode 90

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If you’ve ever questioned your relationship with alcohol or struggled with that all-or-nothing mindset that so many of us with ADHD have, then today’s episode is for you. I’m joined by Colleen Kachmann—certified master life and recovery coach, mindful drinking coach, and host of It’s Not About the Alcohol. Colleen has a powerful story of overcoming alcohol use disorder while navigating ADHD, and she’s here to break down the science behind addiction, dopamine, and why traditional sobriety approaches don’t work for everyone.

Colleen introduces how self-directed neuroplasticity, nervous system regulation, and how shifting your mindset from “I have to quit” to “I want to feel better” changes everything. Colleen shares her personal journey, the myths around addiction, and the small, sustainable steps that make lasting change possible. 

 

Episode Highlights:

[2:26] – Colleen’s journey with ADHD, alcohol use disorder, and the moment she realized something had to change.

[6:31] – The difference between an addiction and an identity—why the word “addict” kept her stuck.

[10:47] – Debunking the “once an addict, always an addict” myth and the science of how the brain heals.

[15:06] – Why traditional sobriety doesn’t work for most people and what to do instead.

[21:05] – The first step to breaking the habit (and why it’s NOT quitting cold turkey).

[25:12] – Why small habit shifts are more effective than all-or-nothing thinking.

[30:40] – The importance of nervous system regulation and how to stop living in fight-or-flight mode.

[36:06] – How to bounce back from setbacks and avoid the shame spiral.

[40:00] – Colleen’s unexpected analogy for negative thoughts (this one’s hilarious and SO true!).

[41:45] – Trusting your felt experience and paying attention to your body’s cues.

[43:50] – Find the non-judgmental support and getting out of your head.

 

Connect with Colleen Kachmann:

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Colleen Hackman:

An addict is an identity. It's a label that we put on people. And what kept me from asking for help for years was because I thought once an addict, always an addict. I mean, if I walk through that door, if I cross that line, there's no going back, which prevented me and prevents millions of other people from saying, Hey, I've got an addiction here. Addiction is such a stigmatized word, but addiction is a spectrum. You know, you can be a little addicted, you can be a lot addicted, and you can be addicted to coffee your phone. So when I talk to women now about alcohol use disorder, which is how I reframe it. You can call it alcoholism, but it's not a disease, it's a habit, and it's also a state of belief that you can't control yourself.

Brooke Schnittman:

Welcome to successful with ADHD. I'm Brooke schnittman. Let's get started. Welcome back to successful with ADHD today, I have certified master life and recovery coach, mindful drinking coach and podcast host Colleen Hackman, and she uses cutting edge strategies in nervous system regulation, growth mindset, positive psychology, self directed neuroplasticity to help women reconnect with a higher sense of purpose so they can feel passionate and powerful again. And how specifically is she doing this? We're going to learn today on today's episode, but she, through her own experience with alcoholism, has founded recover with Colleen, and it's after realizing that being sober is not a good goal, and you know, with ADHD, we're all or nothing. So I'm really excited to learn about how she makes it decrease to 80% not drinking. So Colleen pursues happiness instead of sobriety, and it's the only way to reclaim your power. She says, Once you realize that you can actually trust yourself. The only rule you need to follow is your own intuition. So just need to learn how to listen. Colleen holds a lot of different certifications. She helps us reduce the stigma and the drama, and she's going to help us unlock a higher level of purpose, passion and power. So Colleen, warm. Welcome to successful with ADHD.

Colleen Hackman:

It's so good to be here. Brooke, thanks for having me. Yeah.

Brooke Schnittman:

So Colleen, tell us a little bit about your story with alcoholism. ADHD, how that all ties into what you're doing today.

Colleen Hackman:

Well, like many people, especially women, with ADHD, I didn't. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was, I think, 3839 years old, and so I had been through my 20s and 30s on every single psych med for anxiety and depression and, you know, impulse and anything that they have a commercial for. I tried, and it wasn't until I kind of hit like nothing was working. Of course, my drinking was a part of that, but that's not like I told my doctor that, you know what I mean, I never brought that up as a problem that would have raised any alarms. I probably tried to be honest, but stayed underneath the radar of, oh, you're a daily drinker, and you drink a bottle of wine every night. Well, maybe we should talk about that, because, like, I know now it really wasn't about the alcohol. I always had this felt sensation that if I had a reason to not drink, that I could drop it like it's hot, you know? I knew it was more emotional. I was stuck in a habit. I was stuck in a rut. There was just something that wasn't going well, and I understand all of that now, but I was diagnosed with ADHD at 38 and then I became medicated on a stimulant, and that really changed everything. It didn't immediately change my drinking, because I wasn't trying to change my drinking, but it did. It did give me the support that I needed to move forward with my life and begin to take corrective actions and start changing things, changing the things I was agreeing to that I didn't really agree with, put in the habits that I needed to stay focused. Realize that my brain is a tool, and I just had to learn how to use it. So concurrently with some growth, I was still experiencing what I now understand was an addiction to alcohol and being raised in the culture that we all are, you know, I thought you were either an alcoholic or you weren't, so I spent a lot of time taking tests online under private browsing. You know, am I an alcoholic? And I always kind of came up with, no, I wasn't an alcoholic, and so, because of the way we frame alcohol as this all or nothing thing, I didn't think that I needed to quit drinking. I just really wished that I had more control when I drank and I recognized that, you know, I'd say I was having one glass, but. Then the whole bottle would be gone every single time. And so my journey with alcohol didn't shift until early COVID, when I woke up and realized I can't keep doing this. You know, all of the guard rails that had kept me busy and focused and committed in other places, driving my kids around teaching yoga or volunteering at the schools or working with clients, all of that went away. And so happy hour started earlier and earlier, getting up and moving through it went later and later. And about six weeks in, I just said, Okay, there's nothing I can change right now, except this, and I cannot keep doing this. I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired, and my impulse actually saved me. I was very impulsive, always thinking, you know, that I had no sense of self control and instant gratification. And one day, that worked in my advantage, and I reached out and I asked for help and outed myself as somebody with a drinking problem, and then began my journey to where I'm at now, which we can talk more about, if you'd like, yeah,

Brooke Schnittman:

thank you for sharing all of that. You brought up a lot of good points about like, thinking you're an addict, and then knowing that you're not an addict, but it was impacting your life, where you started to drink earlier and earlier, you were not doing as much yoga, it just had a negative impact on the life that you wanted to live. What is the definition of an addict when it comes to alcoholism? So

Colleen Hackman:

I'm going to differentiate the word addict and addiction. Addict is an identity. It's a label that we put on people. And what kept me from asking for help for years was because I thought once an addict, always an addict. I mean, if I walk through that door, if I cross that line, there's no going back, which prevented me and prevents millions of other people from saying, Hey, I've got an addiction here, addiction is such a stigmatized word, but addiction is a spectrum. You know, you can be a little addicted, you can be a lot addicted, and you can be addicted to coffee, your phone. So when I talk to women now about alcohol use disorder, which is how I reframe, frame it. You can call it alcoholism, but it's not a disease, it's a habit, and it's also a state of belief that you can't control yourself. So while it gets harder to control yourself, because it jacks up your dopamine and then leaves you in a dopamine deficit, alcohol also is a depressant, drug, and your brain has to release cortisol and adrenaline to make sure you don't get so relaxed you forget to breathe. So daily drinker that I was, I had very high levels of cortisol. I had very low levels of dopamine, plus my thinking. I had become obsessed with alcohol. It wasn't even that I was drinking all the time that was the nice part. The hell I was living in was waking up in the middle of the night and thinking about it, and thinking about it, ruminating about it all day long, I thought about drinking far more than I actually drank. And so addiction itself is simply I would I would differentiate it in between to two things. It's a mental and emotional construct where you believe that you're not capable of controlling yourself, and that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, and every time you try and fail to change because you don't know that alcohol is addictive, not just to alcoholics or addicts. It's an addictive substance. The more you use it, the more dependent you become on it, and the more the brain changes in response to it, and the more the habit forms, like for me, alcohol, like the brain learns like an algorithm. The more you get on your social media feed, and you select the dog, the dancing dog videos, then every time you get on there, then the algorithm serves you up the content that you normally look at. And so for me, the question of, Why am I stressed? Or what do I need to relax? Or how do I have fun tonight? The more I answered that question with alcohol, the less my brain showed me the other options. I forgot that there were other options, and then I started to believe that those options were harder, because it's not doing it's not that not drinking would have been hard. It was doing something different outside of the habit that gets harder and harder, and that's supported by some brain chemistry, but the brain chemistry actually is very quick to change. You can reset within 10 to 30 days, even heavy drinkers, in terms of baseline levels of dopamine and dropping the cortisol levels and those things don't inherently preclude you from controlling yourself. It makes it harder, but if you're aware of it, like once you realize i. Crave alcohol. I crave dopamine. I don't crave alcohol. I'm having a stress response in my body. You once you realize what the real problem is, sure then you can begin to treat that and so thinking it's all about the alcohol and you can't control yourself. You know, it's just as it's a mental, emotional and physical downward spiral.

Brooke Schnittman:

Yeah, everything you said makes so much sense. And I just want to clarify for people who are listening, who are straight up alcoholics, who have a disease compared to alcohol use disorder, there's a difference correct in treating Alcoholism and Alcohol abuse.

Colleen Hackman:

Well, the science shows that the number one predictor of future binge drinking is the belief that you can't control yourself. The correct term in the DSM five is alcohol use disorder, which is when a person drinks more than they should drink. That's it. Now, addiction is a little bit separate. Addiction is when there's a compulsive behavior that you continue to use even though there's negative consequences. But technically, I had a raging case of alcoholism. I am no different than somebody who than anybody else, and so alcoholism is more of a colloquialism now, and there are different schools of thought, there is a model in the medical model that alcoholism is a disease. However, the science shows that even hardcore meth addicts, if they change the behavior in whatever modality, whether it be sobriety, all the support within six to 12 months, their brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex is stronger denser. The gray matter in the prefrontal cortex is denser within six to 12 months of overcoming an addiction. So the only people who can't overcome an addiction and drop the label of addict are people who believe that they can't or shouldn't for some reason, and I don't want to demonize that at all. It's just a different school of thought. Science shows like one of the things that kept me stuck for a long time was this idea that you can't unpickle your cucumber. So I stayed sober for a period of time and worked on the all or nothing mindset. Shifted into a less is more persona. We can talk deeper about that. But at some point, I realized the only reason that I wasn't having one glass of wine was because I was afraid that if I had one glass of wine, it would be a slippery slope back into the old habit. That's the belief that creates the self fulfilling process. It is that idea that you can't unpickle your cucumber that we get that gets tossed around. Good news, your brain isn't a cucumber. Your brain is always learning. Addiction is a learning process. The brain changes in response to the habit. But it is not alcohol that changes the brain. It is the behavior and then, of course, the thought patterns that that drive that behavior. So it is not a disease in the sense that it is not curable. And people can choose to stay sober for the rest of their life. People can choose to identify as alcoholics and recovering alcoholics, and that works. What where I stand and what I do is that only works for about five to 7% of people that choose to identify as an alcoholic for the rest of their lives. Most people end up going back to alcohol in some way, and the people who go back thinking they can't control themselves are going to be on and off the wagon the rest of their life. You should not pour alcohol on the belief that you can't control yourself.

Brooke Schnittman:

It's interesting because I you know, with alcoholism or being addicted to something we can also, if we don't change our mindset or change the chemistry of our brain, just switch that addiction to workaholism or to phone addiction, like you said, and I would you know, talking to different mental health practitioners, they say workaholism is the healthiest in quotes addiction, but it's still an addiction, right? So can you tell us what is that first step that you take a client through, or you took yourself through? Yeah. To either reduce the alcohol or completely have them stop.

Colleen Hackman:

Yeah, I'll speak to that on a broad base. Science shows that when people are given an option that that has the best outcomes and the the sobriety as full and complete and lifelong and permanent, that being held up as the ideal solution keeps a lot of people from seeking help. The first action that you need to take is the one you're willing to take. And for me, I did call the AA hotline. The reason I know so much about AA is I spent a year in AA, wonderful people there. I just realized it was a box I had put myself in, and as I grew I didn't fit in that box anymore. The first step is the one you're willing to take. And I would go a little farther to be more specific, and say the first step is talking to somebody who might be able to help you, because you can't think your way out of a thinking problem, and addiction is a thinking problem. So science shows that giving people a choice and responding to the person, as opposed to the addiction, and giving people the option and the autonomy to design their own path, because it's not linear. I did get completely sober, and then I moved back around and believing that people nothing is permanent, like even the decision to never drink again. Because I'm an alcoholic, you can change your mind in five minutes, like that's a story you're telling yourself to avoid the pain of going back. What I teach women once they get into my program is that there are two sources of motivation. One is the avoidance of pain, and one is the pursuit of pleasure. When you change your behavior because you're getting negative results, and you're able to change it and you do good well, the motivation to continue not doing the thing goes away. The more confident you feel, and the more clear you feel, that actually begins to undermine what it is that you're not supposed to be doing, whereas what I teach women is this isn't about the alcohol. Saying I don't want to drink or I want to drink less, those would actually be side effects. That's the negative goal. It's the inverse of the goal. If you felt clear and relaxed and powerful and connected, you would drink like a person who feels that way. So the way I teach women with and most of my clients have ADHD, I have a raging case of ADHD, but I've learned that my brain is a tool, and my brain will get me whatever it is I think that I want, and when you think that you want to drink and you can't, that's going to keep you or that you shouldn't, or that it's a problem, but when you think I want to feel powerful, I want to feel grounded, I want to feel connected, then you can say, Okay, what would I need to be thinking and what would I need to be doing. You kind of reverse engineer the goal. The goal being an emotional goal. How do you want to feel? Instead of getting stuck in your head thinking about what you should do and what you shouldn't do and what you can't do and what you want to do, no, it's like a feeling. And so learning that your brain is a tool, and it will get you whatever it is you want, but it can't get you what you think you don't want. So if you tell your brain, I don't want to drink, that's similar to saying, What do you want for dinner? I don't want pizza. I cannot go Google a recipe for that's not not pizza and serve you not pizza. And if I did that, you'd be thinking, what the hell else are we having here besides not pizza? And that's the exact same thing that happens in the brain when you program it with a negative goal. And so whether you're dealing with ADHD, whether you're dealing with an addiction, or whether you're just dealing with some wonderful achievement that you want, being very careful to program your brain and think the words in your head, I want to feel calm and relaxed and learning that dopamine is actually tied to a felt sensation in your body. And so if you tie the dopamine to the metric I'm never going to drink again, well, you have to be dead to experience success on that. But if it is, I want to feel more connected, even when I drink, then the body learns, okay, am I more connected if I have one more, or am I less? So it's really about changing how you articulate the goals, using language to design goals, so that when you're thinking about what you want, it's something you can actually get right. As opposed to just the avoidance or the absence of what you don't want. Let

Brooke Schnittman:

me ask you a question, and I and I agree with what you're saying. So I know you mentioned that you use tools from positive psychology, so I'm hearing some of that, and what you're saying with avoidance goals and the goals that are bigger long term picture. Goals, now avoidance goals, I know, is only for the here and now, and it's not for long term goals. However, if someone comes to you, Colleen, and they have a problem and they're in complete and utter chaos, for them to think about, oh, I want to be healthier. I want to have a greater impact with my family. I want to spend more time with my kids, those big, overarching goals. What I find is that when someone comes in chaos, it's hard for them to think that way, right? Because, as you mentioned, their brain has changed. So do you ever start with those avoidance goals and then move into the bigger goals.

Colleen Hackman:

Actually, I do the exact opposite. When someone is addicted to alcohol, they are using alcohol to experience the only sense of felt connection and relaxation that they get at all. So what I want to put this into a safer container for us to talk about. I'm talking about somebody who's showing up at work, who is functional, who is not driving around drunk. Okay? We're talking about someone in the context that I am a specialist in. It is the woman who nobody really knows she has as much of a drinking problem because she's hiding it and she's getting away with it okay, versus some like in our brains, when we think of alcoholic, we think of the mouthwash in the paper bag down by a river, you know, just going for the next hit. That's a different treatment plan. I don't speak to that. However, the biggest rate of failure I get is when I have a woman come into my program who is drawn like a moth to the flame to I want to get 30 days of sobriety immediately, right now. I want to avoid this pain and that throat that you so you're taking away the medicine that she's been using to cope, and so it throws her into even more chaos. What I do with my women is we have mindful drinking. You can still drink, but now you're feeling the process like and there's no judgment. There is no good amount of alcohol or bad amount of alcohol. There is how much you drink, how you feel while you're doing it, after you're doing it. And do you want to repeat that again tomorrow? It's like more of an iterative mindset, which is a subset of growth mindset. It's like all results are neutral. They're not good or bad. How do you do you like? How you feel, and what action can you take now to cause a little bit better of the result in the future? When I quit drinking, I also just to let you know I think this probably goes in with my personality. At the time, I also went off my Adderall. I quit vaping. I quit I was a hardcore vegan, I was an intermittent faster. Now I've given up alcohol. Guess how much fun that was, not Terry and I white knuckled through that, and I got through it. However, when I now have the privilege of walking other women through the journey of breaking the addiction, I tell them, Don't change your alcohol any more than you would anyway, if you want to try to reduce a little bit, but allowing the brain chemistry to change naturally, and using techniques to minimize what would be called harm reduction. You know, can you delay your first drink by an hour? Can you alternate? Can you cut off a little bit sooner and just reducing that consumption so that over time, the experience of sobriety is one she wants to repeat. It is not the lack of drinking that that is going to make her feel better. It is her connection with the felt sense of whatever else she's doing. And so we build that out a little bit at a time. You know, who would you be in? What would you be doing in the evening if you weren't drinking? Let's start with five minutes, 30 minutes, one hour so, and not too much, because the way the dopamine works, the brain responds with dopamine when you have a felt experience of pleasure. And so if you're just like, Okay, I'm gonna go for a walk when I get home from work for 15 minutes, because I want that to be added back into the list of options in my social media feed. When I say I need to relax, I want my brain to say a 15 minute walk might be nine. Increase. And so the more you enjoy it, the easier and easier it gets. And so we are just reducing the amount of alcohol while increasing the other coping skills that actually have much better side effects.

Brooke Schnittman:

Yeah. So you're like 1% decreasing alcohol to whatever that 1% for them looks like, while increasing the 1% positive dopamine to ultimately get them to a healthier frame of mind, a growth mindset, not all or nothing. So they choose, and they sustain the habit, not only

Colleen Hackman:

that, but it catapults them so much farther. I just had a call yesterday with a gal who had tried to do the 10 days crashed and burned, almost wanted to quit the program. And I advised her, I'm like, let's just do this other, you know, kind of two ships passing in a night. Want growing other habits while decreasing this. And now she's like, she got on a call. She's like, I really want to do a sober September. Can I? Can I? And I was like, Oh, do tell me more. Why do you want to do that? And she was saying all the things about it. So now she's going to go for a month, but it's it's under a much different reason. It's a felt experience of just now I'm ready to reset my brain chemistry. This isn't going to feel hard, it's going to feel good, and the hard part I'm going to enjoy. And so she wants to go into that completely different entry point to a month of sobriety than I suck so bad, and I have to do something, and I just need to reset my brain chemistry. When women do that, they come out, yeah, they've reset their tolerance, but they haven't reset their mindset, you know, right?

Brooke Schnittman:

I'm glad you said that, because I have seen many people, quote, unquote, quit drinking or nicotine by doing cold turkey with that all or nothing ADHD piece, and at the same time, shift that all or nothing mentality to something else.

Colleen Hackman:

Yes, that's what I did as well. You know, I was gaining weight. Yeah, I just shifted my addiction, because ultimately I was chasing a feeling. And so you took the one medicine away, and now I'm just chasing it somewhere else. And so the work that has to be done is what I call emotional sobriety, and then also learning how to manage your brain, but to speak and go full circle to what you brought up with the chaos in the body, is understanding that you cannot do thought work on a dysregulated nervous system. No, it the brain, the mind is not open, and so that's why it's a lot easier to do some thought work if you have one or two glasses of wine instead of the bottle, than it is to go completely sober, because that felt, sensation of connection, is what the bridge the alcohol is providing. So I do a lot of work with the nervous system regulation. And Dr Russell Kennedy has a podcast on anxiety. It's the anxiety RX, and he describes anxiety, which is that state in our body. In ADHD, we have it very much, but by splitting it into two, it is not the thinking process that is the anxiety, but the real problem is the alarm in the nervous system. And in today's world, the threat that we have, it's not a physical threat. We're not running, we're not starving. You know, most of the time, we're not active, God, you know, working against some catastrophic physical events. We're not emotionally safe, yes, and we're living our lives in a state of stress, because it's not okay that we have this much college debt at this age, it's not okay that we can't afford a house. I mean, there's so many things, or our kids are messed up, or

Brooke Schnittman:

that we get 20,000 notifications every second, and we have to tend to our emails. And you know, everything is so quick.

Colleen Hackman:

Yeah, you're late. You're behind. So the nervous system regulation component we do from day one and that, I'm sorry, it requires slowing down. It does not require hours of meditation every day, but it requires don't pick up your phone right when you wake up. Yeah, you set your agenda for the day. If you don't set the agenda, you're on somebody else's agenda, correct? And it's these little, tiny habits of connecting with yourself. You know, I define what? What does it mean to change your relationship with yourself? We get all up in our head and our personality and our past and our success and our failures? No, no. Yourself is your body and just understanding you don't have to like yourself, you don't have to like your weight, you don't have to like the way you look. But I bet you, every single person listening to this believes in basic human dignity. Your body has a right to exist without being harassed and bullied and told that you're never going to get there. You're behind, you've screwed up. You're never going. To get it right. Nothing's ever going to work out for you. Everything you've done is always wrong. You're not lovable, you're not capable. That is where slowing down. It's not changing the thoughts, it's stopping them and redirecting your focus, learning how to just pull out, like there's nothing to fix over there in crazy town, you can't fix crazy like, come down and redirect your focus and breathe, and then perhaps give your brain a babysitter. That's what I call it, put in some sort of thing that creates a felt sense of curiosity or open mindedness or distracts you. But you have to. You cannot switch gears in the mind until you come through neutral in the body.

Brooke Schnittman:

Yes, I love that. And the word curiosity too really resonates with me, because when you are in chaos, there's no curiosity. When you stop being curious, you know that your nervous system has been dysregulated and you are reactive to your circumstance and your environment. I love also what you said about that waking up and just thinking about what you want for the day, your intention, it is so small, right? And it doesn't have to be five minutes, 10 minutes. It could be 20 seconds. What am I looking forward to for the day? So you put your proactiveness into the day, and the chaos doesn't come to you. You calm the chaos, right? I think we're very aligned in how we work with people, starting with that hierarchy of needs, calming the nervous system, increasing those positive 1% while decreasing the negative 1% and then making big shifts in their mindset and actions over time that are sustainable. So habits can be anywhere between 10 to 30 days 66 days on average. What would you say? On average you see for alcohol changes, mindset shifts,

Colleen Hackman:

you can build a habit. According to some people in 21 days. Other people 66 days. Some range in there. However, the brain does not begin to cement. The process the myelination of the neural pathways cement, if you will, the pathways until between three months and one year. So in the early days, you are building a habit. You're learning to ask different questions, you're being curious. You're testing what works and what doesn't work. You're making small changes the support. But we all know something big happens in your life. Those new habits are not any match against the old not not only behavior pattern patterns, but thinking habits and also emotional knee jerk reactions. And so that is where having support is key. What I tell my women when they come into the program because they're high performing perfectionists, you're going to get amazing results, and then the better you do, the fat, the quicker, in one moment, you're going to fall. And that is what we train for. That is what we train for, is to how to respond to your own mistake. That moment you wake up and realize I did it again. That is the habit that has to change, it is seeing where you're at as a failure that closes the mind and creates the stress response in the body and puts you in to the chaos and

Brooke Schnittman:

the shame and the all or nothing. And yep, I failed, so I'm never going to be successful. And

Colleen Hackman:

that's actually biological. There's a part of the brain called the habenula. Dr Kira bobinet speaks about this. The habenula is the failure counter, the bean counter. Your brain wants to protect you from failure, and so by the time you're in midlife, you've either done everything so perfectly that now you're afraid to screw it up, because you can't keep going on all high levels for the rest of your life, because at some point you're we're going to die. So your brain protects you, and it it is the break in the nervous system of that open hearted curiosity, open minded willingness to try and feeling energetic and motivated, the brain shuts that down if you perceive something to be a failure. So what I train my women is that no a hangover, that's the day you're doing the hangover meditation and revisiting your learning how to process your shame again. It's like the Serenity Prayer, right? It's the Serenity Prayer, but it is learning how to speak to your body, because in the moment you wake up in shame, your body's under attack. You screwed up again. I knew it, and if you put in that, okay, my body deserves basic human dignity. We can talk about this later, about, you know, what needs to change or or the consequences of this. However, I love you. You are. Safe. I got you. We can figure this out. We can ask for help. I'm so proud of all the good you've done. This is a setback, but we're going to learn from it. Let's get some water, take a walk and take a nap, and then we'll be at the drawing board figuring out where we went wrong, responding to a mistake as though you have something to learn from. It is critical. So to answer your question, my program is a year because you can behave your way into success for a long time, but at some point, life is going to happen, or you're going to be doing so well that you're just going to forget to remember to be mindful, or remember to bring the non alcoholic beverage, or remember to leave when you said you were going to leave like you can't be mindful all the time, sure. So at some point you will fall back into old habits. That's what we look forward to, because that's when the new habit grows, and the new habit that counts is responding to your shame and processing those emotions, making it safe in your body to make a mistake and get back up.

Brooke Schnittman:

Yeah, I love that. It's like, I look at it at like the stock market, where you are making that progress with those new tools, and then once you start crashing a little bit, the program is there to lift you to a new point, right? That's what really gets you to that conscious thinking and action over time when you when you start to fall a little bit, yeah, that's great. And you You did something too in what you were saying. It was you were talking to yourself as a part of you, not your whole, right? So you do some parts work where you say you're safe, you're healthy, you're okay, and and you separate the two. I like that too.

Colleen Hackman:

That's a tool and a tip that I can give you. One of the best ways to cultivate a relationship with yourself is to use second and third person language. You know she is tired, or she doesn't feel well, or she deserves like when you think about doing hard stuff for somebody else and surprising them with a gift like last summer, I turned 50 last year, and I surprised Colleen. Thank you. I surprised Colleen with a triathlon, and every single day when I didn't want to run, I was like, I'm doing this because she is going to be so excited on her birthday to do a triathlon. And so you can use that cognitive distance with language to think about yourself in second and third person, where you're planning for yourself. You're taking care of yourself. One of the the best ideas I ever came across was demon Copperhead with Barbara kings lover and the main character of the story said, recovery is when you stop identifying as the person who is sick and become the person who is taking care of the person who is sick, yeah,

Brooke Schnittman:

yeah, I love that. That's inner child work, and ifs or whatever you want to call it, but that's great. And one other thing that I like to do on top of that, this is not third person, but talking about parts is what do I need? Like going internal and just holding my chest? What do I need right now, when my nervous system is dysregulated, and the answer always comes to us, and I'm sure in doing your work, there's a lot more healthy actions that someone gets used to and understands. This is what I need currently. So they have a whole toolbox to draw from in the moment.

Colleen Hackman:

Yeah, there's not one tool. There's 1000 tools, yeah, and not one. One tool might work in minute number one. And you take yourself from a, you know, on a scale of one to 10. You're at a 10 anxiety. You go from a 10 to a nine, and then you do something else, you know, and you just take these little, tiny baby steps. I think that's where, you know, as an all or nothing person, we get so overwhelmed because we think we have to change everything all at once. That's not possible. You cannot change your existing habits as they are. You can white knuckle through your behavior, maybe, but you can't change the automatic response. You can change your trajectory, and you can change your perception of what the actual problem is, but you cannot change where you're at or what you're struggling with. I think

Brooke Schnittman:

that's an important distinction for people who are listening. I think some people think that that is going to change, and if they do this work, they're going to be cured, and they're not going to have negative thoughts, and they're not going to have negative trajectories or automatic negative thoughts, but those will always exist, and I think it's so important that you you share that with our audience, because it's there. It's human nature, like you said. I mean, 80% of our thoughts are negative and 95% are repetitive. So you're giving them the tools to reframe them, not stop them. You don't. Change

Colleen Hackman:

your thoughts. You change how you respond to your thoughts. And I think of negative thoughts, kind of like poop. Everybody's got it. You want to deal with it in private. If there's a smell, you know, light a candle, fan it. But to think that you're going to I'm never going to drink again, and I'm going to be sober, and that's going to solve all the problems. Well, even if you achieve that and that works for you, you're still going to have like there was a reason you were using alcohol, and that was because there was some emotional things and some thought processes that weren't working for you and you weren't coping with and so to think that I'm going to tell myself a story in this moment that I'm never going to drink again and I'm sober and I'm going to feel so good. It's a story, it's an emotion, and you're still going to have to be human. You're going to poop every single day. You're going to have random, crazy shit pop into your head, and you have to learn how to respond to it. You have a human brain, and once you learn that you don't have that you are not your thoughts. You can observe those thoughts. It's an amazing superpower, like it's what most people are searching for, and that's why, once you learn the skills, I say, with my women, once you get the emotional sobriety skills, you don't have to worry about drinking because you want to go into the thought and the feeling to figure out what's underneath that and resolve it. You know, otherwise, you're full of shit. Like, that's what I say, the emotional disconnect. You're emotionally constipated with all these unprocessed thoughts and emotions that you're so afraid to think and feel. Because what does that mean? And it's like, well, yeah, you're constipated. Yeah,

Brooke Schnittman:

that's good. I like that. One last question. So you when you stopped drinking. You were on stimulants and you were drinking. Do you notice you said that the majority of the women who you work with do have ADHD? Do you notice when they are taking stimulants, because it is increasing your dopamine levels for longer, that that is a natural tool to help them decrease their alcohol intake,

Colleen Hackman:

I don't know, because I'm going to be very, very honest with you, I now take a fraction of the dose that I did. What I have found living in a regulated nervous system, knowing how to manage my mind, not over drinking, not overdoing anything, because I like a state of balance is I need much less medication. I still use it, but my dosage is much lower, and so I don't think there's a right or a wrong answer. I think when you bring your brain into balance, you don't need as much of the medication, but there are days when I will take two. So I don't know that it helps decrease alcohol. But I also think you can't know, you can't think and know about anything. You have to move from a felt experience. My experience might be complete opposite of someone else's, and so trusting the experience of your body. Does this feel good? I know that when I feel like I need a little bit more medication, like if I take 210, milligrams instead of just one, I tend to crash more in the afternoon. I get through the day, but then there's a little bit of a crash. Now I no longer am in the habit of drinking. It's not a problem. But, you know, I like one, I'll take two, but there's a little bit of a consequence for that, but that's my experience, and so I don't think you can know. I think each person's chemistry and the same man never stands in the same river twice. What works for me this year may not work for me next year. Like you have to be willing, the truth is always the experience, the felt experience, in your body, and the truth is always changing. Yesterday's truth is tomorrow's bullshit. I'm sorry you have to start paying attention.

Brooke Schnittman:

What are some lasting thoughts you want to leave the audience with Colleen,

Colleen Hackman:

that everything you want is on the other side of the actions you're afraid to take, and that there's help, and it is not nearly as scary if you find somebody just listening to a podcast, or finding a person that's not non judgmental to help you hold yourself accountable. Because I think we get caught in our heads, and we make all the promises of all the things we're going to do, we think really big, we think way too big, and then we fail, and then we go back into the cycle. So I think getting out of your head and talking to somebody and setting some goals and getting support at whatever place that you feel is best. What's the next right step? Like the next right step is the one you're willing to take.

Brooke Schnittman:

I love that. And where can people find you if they're looking to get some free tools on social media or inquire about your services,

Colleen Hackman:

I have a podcast called it's not about the alcohol, so you can find me there, and then I'm on Instagram and Tiktok at the hangover whisperer.

Brooke Schnittman:

Awesome. Well, thank you again. Again for coming on to successful with ADHD. I know that this is going to serve a lot of women and non women out there who are thinking about their next step with drinking or other habits that they're looking to change. So appreciate your time today.

Colleen Hackman:

Thank you, bro. Thanks

Brooke Schnittman:

for listening to this episode of successful with ADHD. I hope it helps you on your journey, and if you need any additional support for you or a loved one with ADHD, feel free to reach out to us@coachingwithbrooke.com and all social media platforms at coaching with Brooke. And remember, it's Brooke with an E. Thanks again for listening. See you next time you.

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Brooke Schnittman MA, PCC, BCC

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