Why You Still Reach for the Wine: Lapses, Nervous System Triggers, and the Real Reason You Can’t Just Stop Drinking

Why do we keep drinking when we know we feel better without it? In this honest episode, I look at the connection between relapse/lapse, alcohol cravings, and the nervous system. If you've ever said “I feel better sober… and still, I drank,” this conversation is for you.

You'll learn:

• Why your nervous system defaults to alcohol as a coping mechanism
• How stress, overwhelm, and trauma wire your body for old patterns
• Why willpower and shame aren’t the answer (and what actually helps)
• The role of somatic and breath work in regulating cravings and emotional triggers
• Why relapse isn’t failure—it’s biology
• How to gently rewire your nervous system for true, lasting freedom

Whether you're sober-curious, in recovery, or simply noticing how often you use alcohol to cope, this episode is a compassionate, science-backed perspective—and real tools to support your healing journey.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome back to the Deliberate Exchange. My name is Chelsea. We talk about everything about navigating stress, sobriety, self-leadership, and everything in between. So today I want to talk about something that was brought up in one of our weekly calls with She Walks Canada relating to Chrissy Teigen. Now she's the one that's married to John Legend, who's that crooner of a voice. And she had a recent post about letting alcohol back in her life. Now she's been sober or she had been sober for a number of years and she had recently let alcohol creep back into her life. In the post, she was talking about like how she likes herself better sober Like she feels better. She gets more done. And like, yet she still drank. And I feel that. And I hear that a lot on our calls. It's the moment where your logic says like, I know better, but then your body does something completely different. And this is so familiar to for me and so many others. And so what I wanna say right off the bat is that moment that you're like, okay, like, fuck it, like, I'm gonna do this even though I know better, it isn't a moral weakness and it's not a lack of willpower. Typically, it's the nervous system. Now, we are biologically wired to reach for whatever feels familiar when we are overwhelmed, stressed, dysregulated, Even when that thing hurts us in the long run. So I want to break that down, what that looks like, uh, how it showed up in my own life and what I, and how I see that playing out in the lives of so many women also. So when you've used alcohol and I talk about this particular, uh, concept, like we, in a lot of cases have used alcohol, uh, either occasionally or often for like a long time, a long period of time. So we have a lot of like unlearning of this behavior to unlearn and then to learn a new way going forward. But when you've used alcohol as a way to soothe, to cope, to connect with others or to avoid, now your nervous system starts associated drinking with safety, even if it leads to consequences later. like blacking out or like questionable decisions, like taking somebody home from the bar. In that moment, your body is believing, okay, this is how I come down. This is how I show up. This is how I belong. Our society has really created alcohol as this wonderful social glue. It's what our families pass around like a warm blanket, right? And it's how we've learned to laugh and to let loose, to celebrate, to mourn, to numb out, to avoid conflict. So as you can understand, it has a history in our bodies. When we try to change that relationship, whether it's through cutting back or going fully sober, we're not just removing alcohol. Like we really do need to consider that we have to untangle the deeper psychological pattern of safety as it relates to alcohol. And that is nervous system work. This matters because if we only focus on the behavior, like if we only say like, just stop, then we miss the, sometimes the entire reason why stopping feels so fucking hard in the first place, right? You can know with 100% certainty that you feel better sober. Like you know that if you put your hand over fire, you're going to get burned. And you can probably see it in your skin, in your sleep, in your relationships, in your productivity. But then life gets hard or you experience heartache or grief or when everybody is raising a glass around you at some social event, the craving can show up like this really familiar feeling old friend. So like that is the old wiring that I'm talking about. Now, the good news is that wiring can change. We can teach our nervous system new pathways. We can show our bodies that we're safe without a glass of wine. We can build actual like real genuine connection without a shot to loosen up. And we can face hard feelings and It's true without numbing them. And we can do it gently and we can do it with like a lot of compassion and without like the shame and self admonishment that typically accompany the cycle of, okay, I'm going to stop drinking. And then you start again and you're going to start and stop. And that cycle that just, I see so many women looping in and out of, and then that shame of that cycle adds to the stress and the stress reactivates the pattern and And so when one of our community members told me about Chrissy's post, I had to go and like check it out. And like just thousands of likes and shares and comments in support of her. And I'm really grateful that she shared it. It's a very real messy middle that so many people and especially women live in. Now, what I think was missing from that conversation is one step further and talk about like that it isn't just about choices like I choose to drink or not, that there is the deeper work and the integration of the nervous system and that it isn't hopeless. It's not, in my opinion, it's not something that you will wrestle with for the rest of your life. Like this is something that you can absolutely get free from. Yeah. And that is the work that I do, is to teach you where you've been using alcohol as this coping mechanism, like to either shrink your energy or to expand your energy. Like you're shrinking your energy so that you can stay quiet and not feel not deal. Or you're expanding your energy to feel like more social and to get out of there and get out of your shell. And so we learn... what those tripwires are and how to make a new pattern, how to break that cycle so that you can start feeling better. If you are curious, sober curious, in recovery, however you want to label it, because labels aren't necessary here either, or you're still navigating your relationship with alcohol and don't know what that looks like, I want you to know that you're not alone. And there are a lot of tools that can help you regulate your nervous system so that you don't have to white knuckle your way through life and think like, you know, when is the moment that I'm going to cave to the glass of wine that's passing by my nose? And my work is breath and movement and somatic tools and deep presence all as a way of shifting away from those old coping patterns into true support. And I want that for everybody. So... If this has resonated, if you would like to learn more, please let me know. In the meantime, breathe it in, be deliberate, and please look into yourself.