The Secret of Joyful Sobriety: Clarity, Freedom & Feeling Alive

Are you sober curious? What if sobriety wasn’t a loss—but a doorway to something richer, deeper, and more vibrant? In this episode of Beauty in the Break, Foster and Cesar explore the concept of joyful sobriety—a term that flips the narrative from shame and scarcity to celebration and self-connection. Whether you're newly sober or just beginning to explore what it means to be sober curious, they share how choosing to stop drinking (for vastly different reasons) opened up clarity, creativity, spiritual depth, and real emotional presence. 

From near-misses and cravings to sober parenting and creative breakthroughs, this conversation weaves together lived experience with gentle wisdom. This episode is an invitation into a world where sobriety isn’t about less—it’s about more. More vibrance, more presence, and more of your real self.

In this episode:

• Why joyful sobriety is a radical reframe of the narrative around addiction and alcohol
• Foster's reason for quitting drinking
• Cesar’s raw, honest account of waking up at the wheel
• The myth of being “less fun” without alcohol
• The process that helped Cesar heal from addiction
• Foster’s revelation about alcohol and creativity
• Cesar’s take on waking up clear – without having to check for his kidneys
• The question we should be asking ourselves about the role of alcohol in our lives
• Special feature: A beautiful chorus of voices from their joyfully sober friends: Chan Kinchla, Kate Anthony, Megan Stewart, Glenn Milley, Eve Sturges, Johanna Brown, and others.

Mention Beauty in the Break at Burden of Proof in Pasadena, and get 20% off your purchase!

If this episode spoke to you, you will love The Eating Habits We Didn’t Choose where Foster unpacks her diagnosis of an eating disorder. You can also watch the episodes on YouTube.

If you enjoyed this episode, take a moment to follow Beauty in the Break on your favorite podcast app and leave a review—it really helps!

Reach out to the show—send an email or voice note to beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com and be sure to follow on Instagram. 

Cesar Cardona:

• Attend his upcoming speaking engagements
• Listen to music from Cesar + The Clew on Apple Music and Spotify
• Receive his monthly newsletter Insights That Matter

Foster Wilson:

• Buy her poetry book Afternoon Abundance
• Learn about her postpartum services
• Receive her monthly newsletter Foster’s Village

Created & Hosted by: Cesar Cardona and Foster Wilson

Executive Producer: Glenn Milley

Editor: Bessie Fong

Transcript

I'm afraid I will be less without alcohol.

I will have less fun. I will have less friends. I'll be less social. I'm afraid I'll be boring.

But at some point in my sleep, I heard a horn honking.

It woke me up. I was at the wheel.

And what I want to say is you are going to be more.

You're going to be more vibrant, more colorful.

You're going to be more of the unique person that you are inside.

That's being dulled by the intoxicant.

You're going to be more and your more is beautiful.

Hello and welcome to Beauty in the Break.

I'm Foster.

And I'm Cesar.

This is the podcast where we explore the moments that break us open

and how we find beauty on the other side.

So whatever you're carrying today, you don't have to carry it alone.

We are here with you.

Thanks for being here and enjoy the show.

I've been waiting to ask you this question for weeks.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I was like, I want to ask her this question, but I don't know if I should ask her on air,

ask her in person.

And you were like, ask me on air.

I'm like, all right, I'll just hold on to this thought.

Okay.

What character from a book, movie or television show do you resonate with the most?

You hit my Achilles heel of all questions.

You told me to wait.

Oh, because I-

First thought, best thought.

My first thought was Pippi Longstocking.

Great.

Go.

Why?

She's free and weird and wild.

Cool.

And that's who I wanted to be as a kid.

And I ended up boxing myself into rigidity and I have to get straight A's and all of these

things.

And she wore wires in her hair to stick her pigtails out six feet on either side.

I used to watch the show as a kid and be so enamored by her freedom.

Cool.

It was literally the first micro thought that I had when you asked me that.

And then my brain went so wide into all of the different characters in the entire world.

Yeah.

It's a total overwhelm question.

This is the beauty of first thought, best thought.

It's one of my favorite things in the world to say is first thought, best thought.

And it's not always, of course, obviously.

It's actually for like addicts in the AA, they say the other.

Your first thought isn't your best thought.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Clearly.

But in these sort of situations where it's play, first thought, best thought.

And I can see that about you too.

Did you know that Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, found a way to have people tune into their personal

mythologies because he said, what was the thing that you enjoyed as a kid that when you did it,

you forgot all about time?

So then this 40 year old Swiss man went and got logs to play with like toys by the river

and the lake.

And he played with it until he found this beautiful, again, this back to the playfulness where you're

not so rigid in the world.

He felt so comfortable with it.

And then in time he met a partner who bought a piece of land and allowed him to build a house.

Oh my God.

I feel that when I'm listening to you say Pippi Longstocking because you've reached over all

of the things from your life and went right back to the part where things felt the most free,

the most liberating, the most you.

What about you?

What character would you be?

Mine is such an easy one.

It's John Nash from A Beautiful Mind, the Ron Howard film.

That movie I saw when I was a kid.

I was about 11 because it came out in '01.

It is always one of my favorite movies.

I resonate with him so much, not because he's a genius.

That's got nothing to do with it.

I don't consider myself a genius.

But what I do find myself is to be just always outside of society, looking for the thing that

is just outside of society, but helps the whole society.

And he discovered game theory.

Game theory is the concept of the fact that everybody can benefit from a strategy instead

of it being so Wall Street, I win, you lose.

So on top of all of that, he also discovered a thing that brought us all together a little

more.

They use game theory now in math and biology and Wall Street and finances, you name it.

I feel like him.

Thanks for answering that, by the way.

I've been holding on to that question.

Boy.

Now you know.

It's John Nash and Pippi Longstocking hosting this show for you.

Sitting in the tree.

Oh.

Welcome to Beauty and the Break.

Thank you for being here today.

Welcome, everybody.

Thank you for being here.

We have a really great show for you today.

Really and truly, this is one of the topics that I have wanted to discuss on this show for

the last year before this show was even a thing.

Because you and I are both sober, and we both became sober before we met each other.

And I want to talk about joyful sobriety.

When I say sober, I think of the word somber.

And most people in my life don't, I don't think they know that I'm sober, actually.

I don't use that word very often because I sort of have a different definition of why it is that I don't drink alcohol.

And I got there because of this messy middle place.

I'll tell you the whole story of how I got there, but it just feels like there's something to be explored there.

I've grown up around people, even when I wasn't sober, and now that I am sober, someone saying, no, I don't drink.

First thing someone says is, oh, sorry, is there a problem?

Are you okay?

It doesn't have to be that.

Why do we have to lean right into that?

My way of getting sober was a whole different way.

I went through a bunch of horrible things.

And getting on this side, I realized there's a lot of joy in this.

And every time you meet someone else who is sober or just not a drinker or not a substance abuser, whatever,

they're vivacious, they're alive, they're grateful, they're present, they're here, they're ready, they feel happy for everything.

And they're thrilled about it, by the way.

Yeah.

If I'm on the side of, I drink, right?

I drink alcohol.

If I'm on that side and I'm looking at that word sober or sobriety, which insinuates that you're doing that for the rest of your life,

what comes up for me is this idea of abstinence.

It's nothing.

It's the absence of alcohol.

All the fun in your life, we're just going to take the alcohol piece out and leave you empty on the other side.

That is not actually what I found.

It's really not.

I have found that without alcohol, everything else filled in in full color.

There was a vibrancy that didn't exist before.

There were thoughts and ideas and clarity that didn't exist before.

There was beauty in things that didn't exist before.

That, for me, is what I want to explore because it's not just me and it's not just you.

I could not agree more.

There's so much more to it.

And also, how often do you start meeting more and more people who are becoming sober?

Gen X drinks a certain amount.

Millennials drink even less than Gen X.

And Gen Z drinks even less than millennials.

So there's a scaling that's going where people are starting to recognize, oh, first off, it's unhealthy for me.

But two, am I living in a society where it's telling us we need this to be?

And the answer is yes, of course, because they spend $6.7 billion on advertisement.

But still, that's more than they've spent before.

But we're still drinking less and less and less in society.

So I think there's something, there's a clue in here somewhere that we are wanting to drink less because we're trying to find the more fulfilling things in life.

Also, our generation and Gen Z are going to therapy more as well.

So we're dealing with things instead of coping with things.

And I love that concept.

The rebel in me wants to say anything that someone's trying to sell me hard on.

I want to step really far back from that and look at it really deeply.

Heard that.

Why did you start drinking, though?

I started drinking very casually, not for any particular reasons, social reasons, maybe.

I was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to alcohol.

I had a bad experience at 15, and I never drank again until about 19.

And that's pretty late, actually, in the U.S. for starting to drink.

I'm chuckling at that.

You said that, and I was like...

It's late.

It's a late bloomer.

It's late and technically early.

Two years before the legal age, but that's late.

And it was social.

It was going to college parties and drinking around friends.

It's what everybody did.

I think if you find...

You go to a party or an event and you say for any reason, no, I don't want anything to drink.

Everybody's going to ask you, oh, why not?

No, no.

Come on.

Come on.

If they don't know you're an alcoholic, if they don't know that you're sober, that's what

they're going to say.

Hopefully, they won't push you.

But why not?

And there's always got to be a reason why not as opposed to a reason why we drink.

Yeah.

So I only ever drank casually.

I was never a heavy drinker.

I would say light to medium because I don't like feeling out of control.

I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my body.

I could count on one hand the number of times I'd actually been drunk.

I see.

Okay.

Gotcha.

So I and the rest of Los Angeles don't have enough hands to count how many times I've

been drunk, let alone all the other things that come with it.

There's not enough octopus.

Octopi?

Octopi.

Octopi.

Octopi in the ocean.

That can let me know.

Let alone this grain of sand in the Ganges.

There's not enough cacti in the desert.

With enough prongs.

Not at all because I wasn't dry.

That's the point.

My goodness.

Were the people around you growing up drinkers at all?

Alcoholism actually runs in my family

I was always told by my father, you have alcoholism in your family.

You need to be really careful.

I am really careful about alcohol and you need to be too.

Because this is genetic.

Every person, and I try to stay away from absolutes, but every person I've known who grew up being

told that alcoholism runs in their family did not drink in their adult ages.

Wow.

There's something so cool, at least beautiful, that that acknowledgement to the child,

the verbal acknowledgement, made them say, I'm good.

My stepdad doesn't drink.

He knew it from the beginning.

I got a ton of friends now who are sober and all of their kids are like, no, I'm not interested in it.

And the parent told them, your father or your mom, I have an addiction.

So I love that you had that experience too, because it's just another example of that.

Yeah.

That awareness was so key growing up.

I was constantly aware of it.

And my dad did not partake in alcohol in any great way.

Very, very casually, very small ways.

It didn't take me long to start drinking in that case for me.

Watching my family do it at some capacity or indulging in anything for that matter.

I definitely had first sips of beer from extended family members when I was eight or nine or whatever.

But by the time I was 14, 15, I would find a friend who could buy me a whole bottle of

Hennessy.

And then I would drink that on my own.

Just completely on my own by myself.

Just finish the thing in a night or whatever.

And then when I joined a gang, then forget it.

Where everybody's drinking there.

I almost got away from it all, actually.

Because from about 17 until about 19, I just stopped drinking.

I was like, I'm not going to drink.

I'm done with it.

There's that.

And then I started working at a place and there was a bunch of older people around and they

invited me to their house for parties and they were drinking the hard stuff.

The really hard stuff.

And then that started me.

It just got darker and darker and darker and darker and darker.

But I thought I was just being more social.

Right.

Because I always felt like I'm a little askew from society.

I see the world differently.

I think the world differently.

But when I was out with people, I couldn't really connect with them because I was just,

I was thinking of other things that were more important that we could be talking about

or could experience.

And then I had a sip of drink or a beer or a whiskey or whatever it was.

And then all of a sudden it was, the social lubricant was just flying through.

I didn't go to college.

So my experiences weren't so socially compartmentalized with drinking.

Right.

Like you go through a threshold of like, oh, this is where people are drinking a lot.

And if you get towards the end of it and majority of people are drinking less, you might go with

the wave a little.

I didn't have that.

So when I started drinking at 19, it just started opening up itself more and more and more

with more hangovers and more whatevers.

And because I speak well and I was more social than at the time, I got along with people more,

which meant I met a lot of mates more, potential partners.

And then that got fun.

I mean, how rewarding does this all seem?

And to go back to the society showing us this is what we need, everything I saw on television

and in advertisements, I was now participating in.

So it validated my intention so much more, but I hadn't done any of the internal work on

me.

You were trying to belong.

Yeah.

As somebody who always felt like an outsider, you're the John Nash of your childhood going,

I don't fit in here.

I've got to belong.

And really the path of least resistance in social life is to just drink, put a drink in your hand

and start drinking.

That's such an easy one.

That's the easiest thing to do.

It's such an easy one.

And it's a little bit of Cardona's law of convenience, if I may say, because there is

something to be said of, I'll do the easy thing now.

Whatever needs to, if it brings a problem later, I'll deal with it then.

Right.

And now we're seeing that because we have so many people getting super sober, really sober.

I mean, there's, I have so many friends of all ages who are sober now because we decided

to put the word later.

So what was your breaking point?

It wasn't necessarily a full breaking point.

You know, I love this image a lot.

The Buddha uses this thing a lot, this metaphor a lot.

You have droplets of water, turns into a puddle, turns into a lake, to a pond, into a stream,

into a river, and then the waterfall.

There's always the direction of where you're going.

And then at some point it just collapses, right?

So for me, it was what the waking up in the morning, being exhausted, being really, really

tired or still being drunk the next morning.

Was it the embarrassing text messages that I had sent?

And then I got really smart of when I was drunk, would remember that I was going to look

at the messages the next morning.

So I would delete the messages after I sent them while drunk.

Was that the breaking point?

Probably not.

There was one year on St. Patrick's Day, I got unhealthily drunk.

It's something that I'm not proud of.

I want to be as vulnerable as possible for this sort of stuff.

And even though it's embarrassing, I want to say it because that's what we should be doing

in this world.

I was 21, maybe 22.

It was one in the morning.

I was driving home and I had drank since 11 a.m.

I don't even know how to explain this whole thing.

But at some point in my sleep, I heard a horn honking.

It woke me up.

I was at the wheel and my car was cutting through lanes on the way to hit this white escalade.

They were waiting for me to pass so they could drive.

They had been holding the horn because I was coming their way.

I opened my eyes at the very last moment and swerved off.

My heart was pounding, pounding.

And of course, I mean, that's such a young age.

I'm 21, 22.

Clearly, that's a wake-up call.

I got sober at 29.

So breaking points were just like the signs are there, right?

Not to mention I started participating in adult parties that were really dangerous

and just not healthy for the world, healthy for my body.

I just kept chasing this thing over and over again.

Even the accident that happened to me wasn't it.

Just wasn't it.

What did it take for you?

To get sober, what it took for me was to sit and be with myself.

I had been drinking because I could be more social so I could get out more

and get away from my own self.

But when I sat down and meditated or listened to my thoughts,

then I started to realize the reality of the narrative I was telling myself,

that I wasn't enough.

I wasn't smart enough.

I was dumb.

I was whatever.

And then when I started learning how to let go of those,

I turned over to drinking and said, maybe I should stop drinking.

And then my thought came up and said, well, how are you going to go to sleep then?

And then I really knew it's time to stop drinking.

So all of those crazy things from before somehow didn't do it.

I had to go face inward and find the scary parts and ask myself, why do I drink?

That is where the lead in came for me.

Through meditation and through your beginnings in Buddhism is how you got there.

Absolutely.

The Buddha says a multitude of things.

But one of my favorite things that the Buddha says is,

we suffer in this world because we hold on to things hoping they're going to stay the same.

But that's not life.

Life is ever changing.

So the moment you can find stillness and recognize the change and see it as beauty,

then the divisiveness of the world becomes a dynamism of the world.

And I started seeing the world much more beautiful.

And when I saw it beautiful and I started meditating,

I looked inward and said, oh, this is beautiful too.

I don't have to poison it or intoxicate it.

Right?

First off, it's in the word.

Intoxicate.

Toxic.

It's in there.

Yeah.

And then I started doing the work to shed that off.

And little by little, the darkness started going away and the joy showed up.

And this was six or seven years ago.

And I find it to be the top three best choices I've ever given myself.

What tools did you use to get there?

Did you use a 12-step program?

You are an addict, actually.

You are an alcoholic.

Do you identify that way?

I do.

I identify as an addict.

As an addict.

Because I was drinking and I was using a bunch of other stuff too.

And I had no problem popping into even harmful stuff just to see what it was like.

Because again, I wanted to escape.

Yeah.

When I started having those thoughts, it became a slow process.

Little by little of watching how often I had drank every night.

And then I thought, I need to just cut out one night.

And then it became two nights.

And then three nights.

And then it was only on the weekends.

And then it became every other weekend.

And I had talked to my mom about it.

And my mom is smart.

She knew 3,000 miles away.

Because I had a phone call with her once.

And I said, I think I got to stop drinking.

She goes, you're right, baby.

Because alcohol is not your friend.

Neither is cocaine.

Oh.

And I got quiet.

And she goes, I'm your mom.

You know I know.

I was like, oh my goodness.

I was like, is she watching me?

You know?

What's going on?

Oh my God.

So I was going through that.

And right at this time, I met a friend who the first day we met, he was wasted.

Drunk and also using.

He walks up to me.

He goes, I'm sorry.

I'm really, really wasted.

Can we just walk together?

And we walked and walked.

And he gave me his whole life story.

And he's older than I am.

So I got to kind of see where it could go while listening to him, while I was open to try to learn and change.

At the end of the walk, he was like, I want to be friends with you.

And then he says to me, if you're willing to put up with this.

And I felt that.

He said, are you willing to put up with this addiction about himself?

And I felt it.

I felt how much loss he was feeling in that moment.

And it shook me to my core.

I gave him a big hug.

I said, I'm always here for you.

Got in my car and called my mom.

And she goes, there's your message, son.

There's your message.

My ego was still running a lot of things still.

I didn't have the strength to say, I'm an addict.

I need help.

So when I would hang out with him, and by this time he got in the program, I would just ask random questions.

What do you do when you have this craving?

And what do you do?

And I just took the notes and went home.

And I gathered the pollen from him, and I made the honey in my house, right?

Yeah.

Well, a lot of things that you do, you do it your own way.

You go in the side door.

You make your own pathway through.

I feel like you did that with alcohol.

Yeah.

Most things are like that for me.

I try to, I often, almost always try the normal way.

And I realize it just doesn't appeal to me.

It doesn't fit.

I don't get it.

It doesn't work out.

So over time, I was able to keep reducing when I was using, bit by bit.

It's not the most common way, obviously.

I don't know if it's the safest way, not the most preferred way.

But at some point, it started compounding.

One day turned into two days, right?

And two days turned into four days.

Four days turned into eight days.

Eight days turned into, and then so on and so forth.

And I went 11 months or something like that.

And I was really depressed.

And I was like, you know what?

Forget it.

Forget it.

And then after that one, I went really low.

And I almost felt like I needed that.

And I popped out of it.

And I said, this is the end of that.

Fast forward to where I am now.

I'm well beyond 11 months.

I'm way, way, way beyond that.

And I still get cravings.

That goes without saying.

It's hard to say if you had a breaking point because you're not an addict.

But you made a conscious decision at some point to say,

I'm just not going to pick up a drink again.

What was that like for you?

For me, someone who wasn't a heavy drinker,

I did still drink habitually, you know, at home.

But I had gone long periods without drinking, of course,

because I've had three pregnancies.

So I knew that I didn't have a problem in that way

because that was never hard for me.

Caffeine would be harder, actually.

Been about for that.

Been about for that.

Caffeine would be harder.

I've always been prone to headaches.

And as I got older,

I think my body just stopped processing alcohol

as well as it used to with age.

So common, yeah.

I'm prone to getting headaches if I don't eat enough,

if I don't drink enough water,

if I'm stressed, if I'm tight.

But also, alcohol didn't help at all.

I would have a half a glass of wine

and have a headache the next morning.

And then there was a point where I would have a sip of wine

and I would immediately get a headache.

Whoa.

So I had no gains from alcohol

and only terrible pain on the other side.

And it became like the Russian roulette of alcohol.

I don't know what I'm going to get.

Today I'm going to drink and I'll be fine.

And the next day I'll drink

and it'll be a migraine for two days.

It was not worth it.

And I just stopped.

I don't have a day.

I don't know what day it is.

It's so boring is the thing.

The whole story is so boring

because the stopping was not a breaking point.

I wouldn't say boring.

It's your journey.

It's your side.

The point that we want to have this conversation

is to talk about that it's not all one side.

Everything breaks.

There's some people in the world who just realize,

you know what?

I could be doing better things with my time.

And you can represent that.

That's who you are as well.

You and I are always trying to limit the dichotomy

of it's this way or it's that way.

That's not how life works.

Life is an amalgamation of things.

So it's your journey.

That's what's pitched to you in society

is you're either an addict or you can drink.

And there's not really very much room in the middle

for what happens if it doesn't agree with your system

or what happens if you just don't want to.

So when I put a pause on drinking,

I kind of decided I don't want to go back to it ever again.

I really don't think there's any reason to go back to it.

And then all of these other things started happening

where I would wake up really clear.

I never once had a moment where I would wake up and feel bad.

I started being clear every single day.

And then I started noticing that the gains I was making

in my own personal growth,

they didn't get stunted by alcohol.

Because every time I would make a gain,

then I would have a couple of glasses to relax at the end of the night

and it would set me back again.

I have to make those gains again.

This path of sobriety made me just climb the mountain

and never look back again.

I was gaining so much in my own personal growth,

which for me is so vital and so important to my life.

Oh, I'm getting overwhelmed.

Isn't it so precious?

You and I's journey are so different.

But the things that we align with are the joys.

Yeah.

Like that's such a human experience.

We have such a different way of our approach to getting here.

And then the time that we symbolically shake hands are the joys.

Because I started to recognize how clear I felt every time.

And I could, again, compound the progressive things that I was learning in my life.

And then waking up in the morning, still to this day,

is one of my favorite things in the world.

There are some mornings I will wake up and it's dark still.

My eyes are still closed.

And I'll still smile.

Because I'm just here.

I'm so clear-headed.

There's no anxiousness.

I know the person that's laying next to me.

I'm not waking up on someone's couch butt naked and checking for my kidneys like I had done before.

I literally woke up and I was like,

kidneys, check your kidneys.

Okay, I'm safe.

Because I didn't know where I was, who I was with,

and I was alone in this living room.

Naked.

Come on.

But still waking up is such a beautiful thing.

Now, there are times with cravings, because I still have cravings.

You have been really beautiful with giving me a space to express

Those cravings.

I still have dreams of using, though.

Oh, wow.

I have deep dreams of using.

I'm at a bar.

And it's, you know, think of all the things that you got to be mindful of when you drink.

The Uber and like not drinking too much and being mindful of all the stuff.

In my dream, it's all free.

The bar is like, yeah, yeah, drink whatever you want.

We'll take care of you.

You can do all your drugs here in front of us.

We're not worried.

It's just the freest thing ever, right?

And then when I wake up, I'm like, oh, thank God.

Oh, my goodness.

It was just a dream.

Fantastic.

And then, of course, that bitterness of the dream makes the morning that sweet.

And then from there, I have been able to be in touch with what's going on within me,

because I'm not running away from anything anymore.

So when I am moody, I know it's something that I can work on.

It's not an external thing like a drink.

I'm moody because there's something within me that I have to deal with, and I can do it.

And it feels fantastic.

And then the things that I recognize about that is, one, most reasons why I'm moody,

because I'm scared of something.

And fear needed me to drink, right?

And then I look out into the world, and I realize the advertisements need me to drink too.

And in that moment, I made this biohack, this like life biohack,

that my fear and the advertisements are on the same side,

and they don't need me to do anything right now except drink.

Wow.

And I'm not doing it.

And my life has just gotten nothing but more clear and better.

The presence, the energy, the clarity, the saying things like, I'm wrong.

I don't know this answer.

This, the apologizing.

Well, I wasn't in the program, but I recognized how beautiful making amends was.

So I went, and I've done this on Facebook, and I've done this to people one-on-one.

I've posted online.

If I've upset you, offended you, done something to wrong you,

at any point in our time together, please tell me privately.

I would love to make it right.

So good.

It's one, because you should make it right.

And two, I feel lighter than ever because I've dealt with those things now.

And then you get a little addicted to that of wanting to be like a right maker.

Right.

I feel so bright and light in the world now because I can say,

I messed up.

My bad.

So sorry.

And I don't got to carry that stuff.

Yeah.

You know, for me, when I stopped drinking, it was purely physical.

I just need to do this so that I don't get headaches.

That was my only agenda, just so that I don't get headaches.

Instead, I got mental clarity.

I got emotional clarity.

I got time and space at the end of the day.

I used to not know how to give myself mental rest.

I have an ADHD brain.

My brain is going a mile a minute.

A glass of wine was the only way to guarantee mental rest.

I had to figure out new ways to give myself mental rest.

Authentic ways too.

Right.

Real ways too.

Something that felt good in my body.

And this was a surprise.

When I would have any kind of alcohol and fall asleep, it was like,

I'm just going to plop into bed and pass out.

You know, I wasn't drunk, but I would pass out or I would nod off.

Now, as I'm falling asleep, I drop into the hypnagogic state

and I get some of my best ideas and clearest thoughts.

And sometimes I feel like they're just downloads from the universe.

When all of the chatter is gone and I'm just slipping off,

something clear will come into my head.

I'll remember that for the morning and take action on that tomorrow.

But it's not a to-do list kind of annoying, intrusive thought.

It's a very clear, calm thought.

And I never got those before when I was drinking.

I get the image of you saying that it's not a to-do or task.

It's like walking up to the front of a forest and one rose is out there.

You smell it.

You go, oh, this is the forest I want to go into.

It's an enticing thing.

It's the Fred Flintstone smelling the food and floating to the kitchen kind of thing.

That's what I hear when you say that.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

And in the hypnagogic state, that little space between dreaming and awake where you're aware

and all this creative stuff is going on.

When can we do a conversation about dreams in an episode?

Yeah, well, that will be a full episode.

There's so much, right?

I get my clearest ideas at night and I do my best creative work in the morning.

That's when I get all my writing done.

That's when I sit in a quiet space before my kids get up and I write.

All of my writing pretty much has come in that state.

When would I have clarity of mind in the morning having had any kind of alcohol in my system the

night before?

So it's given me my creativity back.

You're 100% right.

I don't know you from back then, but I see you in ritual doing that.

And you have a beautiful mind.

Your brain is so brilliant.

So to know that you've gotten this ritualized thing as a reward for doing the work just screams

of the joy of sobriety.

You know, I find that there's a level of self-love that comes with not drinking.

There's a level of love that comes with being sober.

There's a level of love that comes with taking care of your inner body.

When I was a kid, there was a song by Timbaland.

Remember that producer, Timbaland?

He did this song.

The song is called All Y'all.

I had to look it up because I don't remember the name of it, right?

But I looked it up because I kept remembering him saying in the song, I don't drink or smoke.

That's why I love my body.

And for years, I would think about that.

And then when I got sober, finally, I was like, me?

Yep.

Yep.

Me too.

Uh-huh.

Totally understand it.

Totally get it.

And this was in the early aughts.

And that was the only time that someone said I love my body in a song.

Everything was like going out drinking, going to the club, so on and so forth.

And then this guy says that, and it somehow stuck with me.

And now when I get in this sober space, I'm realizing, oh, I'm loving my body.

And I mean in the physical sense, but also in the chemical sense of my body, the chemical sense of my mind.

When you drink, it gives you dopamine.

So your brain stops producing the dopamine.

And then when you stop drinking, it takes a minute for your brain to say, oh, we got to make dopamine.

So in the meantime, what's going on there?

You're depressed.

You're moody.

You're groggy.

You're hungover.

You're dehydrated.

All of these things that are bad for you.

It softens the front of your prefrontal cortex.

It literally makes the front of your brain softer, which means that you're not able to be more rational and think logically as well.

It's all these implications and ramifications on how bad they are for you.

And it's on every billboard if you turn left or right.

Speaking of billboards, if you're going to make a billboard talk about you, what is your reason for being sober?

I think that is the wrong question that we're asking.

Okay.

That's what we ask people.

What's your reason for being sober?

Why are we not asking the question, why do you drink?

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

It's just the wrong question.

Why is drinking the default when we have to have a whole big reason?

I got a DUI.

I almost killed somebody.

I almost ran into a white escalade.

That's the reason for being sober?

Why do we drink?

Yeah.

Well, sure.

I'm trying to find, I'm trying to be social and connect with people that I don't understand.

But what I see in you now is you are your fullest, freest, most beautiful self.

And it's weird and it's brilliant.

And it's all of these things that couldn't express itself before.

But now you are free to do that.

You are damn right.

Absolutely right.

You are so right.

It is so much of knowing that the cave you fear to enter, in this case, sobriety, holds

the treasure you seek, which is your best version of yourself.

Yeah.

I started drinking at 18, 19.

And when I got sober, about a year or two later, I started having these inklings and thoughts

and ways of perceiving that I hadn't felt in a while.

And then I remembered, oh, the last time I felt it was before I started drinking.

That let me know that all the things that I was trying to avoid didn't go away.

It just waited.

Yeah.

And then it showed back up.

Yeah.

And instead of running from that cave this time, I went inward.

I went in and found the monster that was scaring, which to get a little nerdy here about it,

monster, the etymology of it is three different words.

And the three different words are monster, money, and money.

Each of them together mean to remind you to think about the divine omen within and without.

So that monster was waiting for me.

Yeah.

And I met it.

And now the person you see, and thank you for saying that because I feel so great,

is the person that I had to do the work and amalgamate with instead of trying to drown it

with Guinness, Sam Adams, wine, whiskey.

I hear people say, I'm afraid I will be less without alcohol.

I'm afraid I will have less fun.

I'm afraid I will have less friends.

I'm afraid I'll be less social.

I'm afraid I'll be boring.

And what I want to say to those people is you are going to be more.

You're going to be more vibrant.

You're going to be more colorful.

You're going to be more of the unique person that you are inside that's being numbed or dulled

by the intoxicant.

You're going to be more, and your more is beautiful.

I've only discovered more on the other side.

That's right.

You're right.

Have we met any person in our lives?

Have you personally or have I met anybody who's like, I'm sober?

I really regret it.

Yeah.

I've seen people who are doing Sober October or Dry January, and it's bugging them.

But they have an end date they're looking for.

So they're not present.

They're already thinking about the end date.

But I haven't met a person who has said, I'm sober and I hate it.

They talk about how challenging it is.

I get cravings constantly.

I lately haven't had many, but there was a while I was getting three, four times a day

in a weird place too.

There's a bar in the valley here that opens at 8 a.m.

And I drove by at like 8.30.

And this woman was walking in, this older, like 70-year-old woman was walking in.

And I thought, I'm so jealous of her.

I'm so jealous.

And my next thought was, why?

Today's great for you.

You got a great day going on.

And that's okay.

You have that feeling.

It's beautiful that you have that feeling because you're being aware of it.

Yeah.

But why?

For what?

For what reason?

Oh, my God, you say that all the time.

Yeah.

It would be a great day to get drunk.

Oh, that looks so good.

I don't personally have those, but you have them all the time.

It's really interesting to watch you say out loud, oh, it's a great day to get drunk.

Because I think of you as such a sober person that you're so content and connected with your

sobriety.

But there is still that part.

So what do you do when you feel that and when you see that?

Thank you for asking that question.

I'm a big believer of individuation, which is a Jungian practice of finding the dark parts

of you and listening to them for what they're actually trying to say to you.

I think every demon that lives within us is just an unheard angel ready to be spoken for.

So my job is to turn to that and say, what are you actually trying to tell me?

At 8 a.m., you want to go drink?

Are you worried about failing for the day?

Do you want to avoid the task you have at hand?

Are you scared of something?

Are you fearful of these things?

And over time, I've done that work.

And usually, I can pinpoint what it is.

It's either, and this is most people, I had a bad day.

I want to go drink.

Had a great day.

Want to go drink, right?

It's a way of pushing away of both sides in order to escape yourself from it.

And this wanting to escape is a fear thing.

It can also be anger, but anger is a secondary emotion.

Anger usually comes from trying to mask fear.

So I usually go with fear.

So when I know that, I get those cravings.

Two things.

I say them out to you, which I'm grateful for.

Before I was with you, I would say it out loud to my own self.

Because I wanted to, again, turn to that demon and say, what are you trying to tell me?

9.9 out of 10 times, it says something.

And then it just starts to dissipate much quicker than if it was in the back of my mind and my amygdala being this scary ghost behind me.

I verbalize it and I phrase it.

I give it a word, a title, an image.

And it goes to the, again, the prefrontal cortex where I can put a name on it.

And then I can get my hands around it.

And I can listen to it.

When I can listen to the demons that live within me, they turn into angels and they become a part of my mission.

I think what's so cool about living today with the world of sober living is that there has been so much changeover in what's available to us in the non-alcoholic department.

I have a friend who's a bartender who will constantly tell me, hey, we just got this new non-alcoholic spritz in or whatever it is.

Come down to the bar.

I'm making new things, new concoctions.

I want you to try one of my recipes.

We live in a great time for this conversation, which I love.

A couple of years ago, I remember when Miley Cyrus posted that she was sober.

And then it was like Rolling Stone or some other company that had nothing directly to do with her posted it and celebrating her on Instagram.

And the comments were full of celebration for her.

That wouldn't have happened in the aughts.

That wouldn't have happened in the 90s and so on and so forth.

It's really cool.

And there's a new bottle shop that opened up in Pasadena called Burden of Proof.

And it's all non-alcoholic bottles.

And I have been there.

And they are so lovely.

It's like this hipster Brooklyn couple who's come to Pasadena.

And they opened up this little bottle shop.

And we were, you know, we can be skeptical when it comes to good wine that's non-alcoholic.

And we've had some really bad non-alcoholic wine.

But they had a taste test.

And we tried red and white and Prosecco.

And it was delicious.

It was really good.

Surprisingly really good.

We love their stuff over there.

And this is not a paid advertisement by any means.

But we did call our friends over there and said we were going to mention them in this episode.

And they agreed to give our listeners, if you're in the LA area, 20% off your next order.

From now until July 17th.

That's really nice of them.

Yeah.

So cool.

They're lovely.

I want to speak to the sober curious person listening or someone who might be curious now

that they've listened to this episode.

You've just heard our takes on it.

But what comes up for me all the time when I talk about sobriety, if I choose to talk about it,

is that the commitment to a life without alcohol is a huge act of surrender.

And I think we should be doing more of that in our life.

It's uncomfortable to sit with the idea of never having a drink again.

And there's a difference between this all or nothing way of thinking about anything in

this world, but especially alcohol.

Let's remove the idea that it has to be all or nothing.

And let's just look at our relationship to alcohol.

Why do we choose to drink?

What is the gray area here for you?

For me, when I looked at it really deeply and said, why am I drinking in this situation?

Why am I drinking in this situation?

I realized alcohol did nothing for me.

So I ended up on the nothing side.

But I could have easily ended up on the side of, I'll drink once on my birthday and once

at New Year's.

Or somewhere in the middle.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

Well, we have a treat for you today.

We have put something together for you.

We have so many beautiful, sober friends that have lovely words of wisdom.

Yeah.

So we've kind of put them together and they want to share some of their wisdom with you

as well to anybody out there who's curious.

And as LeVar Burton says, you don't have to take our word for it.

What's something beautiful about getting sober?

Everything.

I am Chan Kinchla.

Hi.

My name is Eve.

Hi, everybody.

My name is Johanna.

Hi.

I'm Kate.

Hi.

My name is Glenn.

Hey, my name is Megan.

My name is Mitch.

I cannot overstate how life-changing it's been.

Probably the most beautiful thing about being sober is a greater contact with my spiritual side.

I'm just more present.

The mornings are easier.

I can get more done.

My life undeniably got better in all ways.

I think what's beautiful about my sober life is like having money now, not being broke all the time.

I can make memories and remember them.

I was able to support my parents during the last 15 years of their lives.

I don't wake up with a hangover.

And it's the best decision I've ever made.

And today my life is exponentially better.

And I was such a crotchety hoebag when I was drinking all the time.

I couldn't take my son to the airport to go back to college because I was drinking in

the morning.

And then two days later, I couldn't pick up my mom who had just arrived at the airport.

Well, one breaking point was breaking my fall with my cheek.

I was watching my daughter enjoy her birthday and twirl in her tutu.

And the thing that I was the most happy about was that I wasn't driving home and I could drink an entire bottle of wine if I wanted.

I needed the drug of my choice to get through every day.

I drank just because I could, because I was home from work, because it was a day that ended in Y.

Meanwhile, my anxiety and depression only got worse.

It wasn't my fault.

Somebody pushed me.

Denial.

So I just decided that I would see if my life got better if I didn't drink for 100 days.

I was sort of disappointed to discover that my life got so much better.

I read This Naked Mind by Annie Grace.

And that book changed everything.

And suddenly it all made sense.

Why I couldn't sleep.

Why I was anxious and depressed.

Why alcohol is addictive and carcinogenic.

Whether or not you fit the definition of a, quote, classic alcoholic.

I stopped drinking immediately and I never looked back.

And I love still being able to bring the party.

I'm still funny and fun.

I have more fun now.

And there's so much to do socially without alcohol.

So I'm far more social now than I ever was.

It's a beautiful thing.

Beautiful.

Beautiful thing.

I'm so grateful for all of it.

And I'm so grateful.

I'm so grateful.

Grateful.

I'm grateful every day.

So if anything I've said resonates, maybe give sobriety a try.

Truly.

10 out of 10.

Highly recommend.

Oh, how could I forget?

Sex is way better sober.

Duh.

If this episode spoke to you, take a moment and send it to someone else who might need it.

That's the best way to spread these conversations to the people who need them the most.

And if you want to keep exploring with us, make sure to follow Beauty in the Break wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll see you next time.

Beauty in the Break is created and hosted by Foster Wilson and Cesar Cardona.

Our executive producer is Glenn Milley.

Original music by Cesar + the Clew.