SUMMARY KEYWORDS

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SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson 

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Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a bus, how to sit with your emotions, when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

What do you picture when you think about sober life?

When you think about what your life will look like if you don’t drink?

I know for myself, before I stopped drinking, it was something I was terrified of.

I couldn’t imagine coming home and not being able to open a bottle of wine and have a drink.

I couldn’t imagine going down a date without alcohol.

I couldn’t imagine sitting around a girl’s night without drinking with my friends.

 

I absolutely had bought into the idea that alcohol was a reward at the end of my day or the end of my week, that it was something I used to bond with my friends, to connect with my husband, that it was my stress relief. And I actually, in my mind, sat there and thought like, what do people do if they don’t drink? Do they just sit around on a Tuesday night and stare at each other in silence? It was crazy.

 

Stopping drinking was literally my worst case scenario. And I’m sure you’ve heard me say it before, but, it has definitely turned out to be the best decision of my life.

 

So, I wanted to share with you

 

7 things I believe everyone should know about sober life, because it’s probably different than what you imagine the experience to be.

 

The first one is that you will look better and feel better. And this might be a surprise to you if you’ve ever white knuckled it through your first 5 days or week or 2 weeks. Or if you’re trying to moderate your drinking and just hold it to 2 drinks a night, or only drink on the weekend.

 

If you are in the beginning of stopping drinking, or if you drink every week or two weeks, you will feel tired, you will feel irritated, you will feel blah during that period of time. And it’s because you’re withdrawing from alcohol. It’s because of what alcohol has done to your nervous system.

 

You might not sleep well in the beginning, but as you get further away from alcohol, I can guarantee you that you will look better and you will feel better, and that’s because alcohol is toxic to your body and your mind. And once your body gets rid of it, you are going to notice clearer skin. You’re going to notice that your face and your body is a lot less bloated. You’re going to have better sleep, and I have to tell you, sober sleep is the best. You do not know what you’re missing.

 

You’re going to have better digestion, more energy, brighter eyes, and you’re going to be happier. Your mood will be better.

 

Alcohol is a depressant. It can amplify your negative emotions. Your mood will stabilize. You’ll get rid of that brain fog, and you will have more mental clarity. You’ll have a sharper focus, clearer thinking. You’ll feel more productive and more on top of things. You will be much less anxious and stressed, and because of that, you’ll have more confidence.

 

So, if you’re like me, if you had taken shorter breaks from drinking and said to yourself, “I’m actually a nicer mom when I drink, or I’m actually more stressed and irritated when I don’t drink”, you do not know what sober life looks like or feels like. You are just in withdrawal, and you actually need to get further away, more than 30 days away, to have all those benefits happen and to reset yourself and be like, Oh, my God, this is my new normal. I actually never knew what being a healthy adult felt like because I had been drinking for so long.

 

If you’re listening to this episode and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, The Sobriety Starter Kit. The Sobriety Starter Kit is an online self study, sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step-by-step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one-on-one coaching. And The Sobriety Starter Kit is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it, when it fits into your schedule.  You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time. This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step-by-step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life. You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better, you’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course.

 

The second thing you should know about sober life is that you will not always feel deprived. You will, even if you don’t believe me, you will stop thinking about drinking all the time. I know it’s hard in the beginning, but it will not always be so hard.

 

The way you feel in early sobriety will not last, and this is something I needed to hear. You will not live the rest of your life wanting to drink and white knuckling it, feeling deprived and isolated that stage just will not last.

 

You will look back and see that the period before you stop drinking. When you are going back and forth in your own head over and over again about drinking or not drinking, or white knuckling it, or saying fuck it, or rationalizing it, that is the hardest place to live you will not live the rest of your life desperately wanting to drink and denying yourself that desire. You will get to the point where you are just a healthy, happy, confident person living your life who used to drink and doesn’t anymore, because you feel better without it.

 

The third thing you need to know about sober life is that you don’t need to adopt a label, words matter, approaches matter. Keep trying until you find one that’s right for you.

Once you stop drinking, you don’t have to be living in recovery. You can just be living.

You can just decide to remove alcohol from your life, to stop drinking, or quit drinking, or be alcohol-free, or whatever you want to call it, simply because you feel better without it, simply because you’ve done some research, and you know it’s terrible for your mental health and your physical health, and you’ve decided that you don’t want that in your life.

 

In the same way some people decide to become a vegetarian. In the same way people decide to make other nutritional changes, you don’t need to be an alcoholic. You don’t need to have a had a problem with drinking. You don’t need to identify as anything at all. You can tell people you stop drinking. You cannot tell people you stop drinking.

 

You are just a healthy, happy person who decides at a restaurant to order a nonalcoholic beverage instead of an alcoholic beverage, in the same way you might choose to order a pasta versus a steak. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

 

The fourth thing you need to know about sober life is that when you stop drinking, your world actually gets bigger, not smaller.

 

You may not believe me, but it will be more exciting and more adventurous. You will discover new interests and meet new people. And the reason for that is, is that when drinking is really important to your life, your world actually gets very small. You tend to repeat the same activities with the same people and not look at any social or connection options that don’t include alcohol.

 

When you stop drinking, your eyes will open up to all the things that have been around you all the time that you’ve never noticed or never had time to explore, or people you’ve never talked to because you were so invested in hanging out with other people who drank. Or if you were like me, having a party on your couch on a Tuesday night with a bottle of wine.

 

When I stopped drinking, I started going to running club, started joining new morning workouts, I took up the guitar again. I went to the garden store and really started working on my vegetable garden. I joined a gym and started swimming. I went to retreats that felt like summer camp for adults.

I made friends through online sober groups, both virtually and I found a lot of them. In Seattle, you have more time and more energy and more money and more creativity and more confidence to explore the world. I got back from a trip to Provence with three girlfriends I met through sobriety, and it was incredible and beautiful and wonderful. And when I went on trips with my husband when I wasn’t drinking, I did things that I never would have considered if I was unconsciously factoring in when I would be hungover or when I would be busy drinking. The world gets so much bigger.

 

 

The fifth thing you need to know about sober life is that you are going to be more confident, more capable. More empowered and better able to advocate for yourself and make changes when you stop drinking.

 

One of the first things that a lot of women need to work on is people-pleasing and getting better boundaries.

 

When I was drinking, I felt stuck in my job. I felt anxious and stressed out all the time. I felt like I had too many obligations and not enough hours in the day, and I was just getting through every day feeling like anything new that was added to my life would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Once I stopped drinking, I had to take better care of myself. I had to give myself rewards. I had to nap when I was tired. I had to walk and work out, to work off my anxiety, but I also felt so much better. I felt happier. I slept better. I had more energy. I didn’t have that brain fog. I didn’t have that quiet shame and then overcompensating so that nobody would know what was going on inside me.

 

Once you stop drinking, you realize that you’re powerful.

 

If you don’t like something, you can change it. You get to decide what you put up with and what you don’t you have power and agency. When I stopped drinking, I realized that my job was actually so much easier than when I was drinking. I was just able to do more and cope with more, and I was more emotionally stable. Things didn’t stress me out the way they did before. But on top of that, there are always things that we drink over.

 

And the question to ask yourself is,

when I am drinking, what do I not have to think about it?

 

Might be your relationship or parenting or work or unhappiness in other areas of your life, or social anxiety or something else going on when you stop drinking. You need to deal with that. But that’s actually a positive. You get to deal with that. You get to address it. If something isn’t right in your relationship, you don’t just bury your head and knock yourself unconscious. You can recognize it and decide what’s working for you and what’s not and get support if you need to.

 

Not drinking makes you more calm and more capable of addressing other things in your life that are problematic.

 

The sixth thing you need to know about sober life is that you will be happier without it.

 

I know that we think that we will be unhappy or bored or boring or stressed or lonely if we stop drinking.

 

The truth is that number one, you have artificially suppressed your dopamine levels and your serotonin levels in your body when you are drinking, so you are actually less happy and less emotionally stable than you would be if you weren’t drinking. You will feel better just by removing alcohol from your body. Alcohol is a depressant. It also makes you anxious, and so you will be, by definition, happier without it. But not only that, you will be able to figure out what makes you happy, what makes you fulfilled, what makes you feel relaxed and honored and appreciated. You will be able to pay close attention to your life in terms of who lights you up and who drags you down. You get to edit the people you spend the most time with, to include more of the people who see the best in you and inspire you to live a better life.

 

A lot of people say, Oh, my God, that event, that trip, that obligation, whatever it is, won’t be fun if I’m not drinking. And the truth is that, if it’s not fun, if you’re not drinking, maybe it’s not fun, period. Maybe it’s not fun for you, even if it’s fun for somebody else. You get to figure that out, and you’re empowered to make changes, to spend time on things that light you up, and to reduce the time and energy that you spend on things that don’t and that doesn’t mean you abandon your life and your family and your job, but you will do this daily calibration where you keep yourself in this emotional green zone, you will take better care of yourself and those micro adjustments, they will become second nature forever. So, you will be happier without it, and as you go along, just know it’s just the beginning. It gets better and better.

 

The seventh thing I’d like you to know about sober life is that just not drinking is not the end goal.

 

The goal is not to simply go through your life, navigating work and family and motherhood and workouts and whatever it is just alcohol-free. That’s not the goal.

 

Not drinking is the foundation for all the other things you want to do and feel and be and achieve in your life, and it is okay if you don’t know what that is. The beauty is that you will be able to figure that out. You are no longer settling for just getting through the day and drinking at night or on the weekend or whenever, as your reward for all the things you need to do in your life, you deserve more and once you stop drinking, once you are more clear and less anxious and have more energy and have more money and get to see your relationships and your work and who drags you down more clearly, then you get to build on that. You aren’t foggy anymore. You aren’t checking out for 3 hours every night. You aren’t hungover in the morning, you’re sleeping well.

 

So, you finally have the time and the energy and the clarity to do all the other things you want to do with your life, to do it in a positive and uplifting and empowering way. And that doesn’t mean anything in your life needs to change if you’re happy with it, you might just have more peace of mind. You might just feel healthier. You might just be able to handle work and life and family and add in something just for yourself. And if you’re not completely happy with your life, you get to build on that too. You will no longer feel stuck. You will no longer feel trapped. You will realize how much power and control you have and how strong you are.

 

So, that’s the good news. Not drinking is not the end goal. It is the foundation for all the other things you want to do and feel and be and achieve in your life.

So, the 7 things everyone should know about sober life are

Number one, you will look better, and you will feel better.

Number two, you will stop thinking about drinking. You will not always feel deprived, and it will not always be hard.

Number three, you don’t need to adopt a label once you stop drinking. You don’t have to be living in recovery. You don’t have to have had a problem with alcohol. You can just be living.

Number four, when you stop drinking, your world will get bigger, not smaller. It will be more exciting and adventurous. You will discover new interests and meet new people.

Number five, you will be more confident, capable and empowered than you ever were when you were drinking.

The sixth thing you should know about sober life is that you will actually be happier without alcohol.

And the seventh thing you should know is that not drinking isn’t the end goal. It’s just the foundation for all the other things you want to feel and do and be and achieve in your life.

 

And if you’re listening to this and you are tired of headaches and hangovers and thinking about drinking or feeling sluggish or whatever it is, just try it out. Just jump in and get started.

 

Do 30 days, 60, 90. I recommend 100 days alcohol-free as your goal, and if you’ve been trying and giving up, get support.

 

You deserve to be able to do this, and it doesn’t have to be as hard as it’s been for you.

 

You can join my Sobriety Starter Kit program. You can join our community. That’s part of it.

 

You can download my completely FREE 30-day guide to stopping drinking that gives you tools and suggestions.

 

You can keep listening to this podcast and other podcasts, but I encourage you don’t overthink this and approach it as an experiment with curiosity and OPT.  As a gift to yourself.

 

Don’t fear sober life. Wonder if you will feel better not drinking than you do right now, because I believe you will, and I believe you’re worth it.