Revisiting: Making a Drink Plan vs Planning to Drink
Welcome to the alcohol minimalist podcast. I'm your host, Molly Watts. If you want to change your drinking habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, you're in the right place. This podcast explores the strategies I use to overcome a lifetime of family alcohol abuse, more than 30 years of anxiety and worry about my own drinking, and what felt like an unbreakable daily drinking habit. Becoming an alcohol minimalist means removing excess alcohol from your life so it doesn't remove you from life.
Molly Watts:It means being able to take alcohol or leave it without feeling deprived. It means to live peacefully, being able to enjoy a glass of wine without feeling guilty and without needing to finish the bottle. With science on our side, we'll shatter your past patterns and eliminate your excuses. Changing your relationship with alcohol is possible. I'm here to help you do it.
Molly Watts:Let's start now. Well, hello, and welcome or welcome back to the Alcohol Minimalist Podcast. With me, your host, Molly Watts, coming to you from I'm gonna say it's an unpredictable Oregon today. It has been raining, windy, and now it's sunny. And, we had this torrential downpours over the weekend.
Molly Watts:Yesterday was kinda gross. It felt like October. It's June. And then today started off that way, but now it's warming up. It's sunnier out.
Molly Watts:And when I look towards the end of this week, it looks as though we have some 80 degrees coming our way, which is lovely and just perfect for June in my opinion. That's what we'll go with, unpredictable Oregon. How are you doing? Welcome, and welcome back to the show. It is June.
Molly Watts:It's summertime, and I love this time of year. I am looking forward to doing some really fun things, getting ready for a more dry July. For those of you that are not familiar with how I do July, I don't do a fully dry July, but I do more dry July. And for me, that means that I'm gonna up my number of alcohol free days to 25. So I will be doing 25 alcohol free days in July.
Molly Watts:And if you'd like to join me practicing, prioritizing alcohol free days, that would be awesome. There'll be more details as we get closer, but I'm looking forward to it. It's already it's already June 4th right now as I'm recording this. Can you imagine it is going to be July 4th before we know it? The next 3 weeks, this week, the week after, and the week after that, we are going to be revisiting 3 episodes that I did last year back in March of 2023.
Molly Watts:These are 3 episodes that are actually included in the podcast listening guide, and I really believe like they are foundational for learning all about becoming an alcohol minimalist, about changing your drinking habits, and what I really mean by changing your life and making a sustainable change that's going to last for the rest of your life. This first episode is all about making a drink plan versus planning to drink. That's what it's about. Making a drink plan versus planning to drink and why that is different and what I mean by it. And this whole thing is really coming from multiple conversations that I've been having both in my Facebook group, in my group coaching, in my 1 on 1 coaching.
Molly Watts:I get a lot of question about why I am so adamant about the doable drink plan. And this episode kind of outlines why that is and why I think it is such an important tool for creating sustainable change. I really gotta tell you, if you want to make change last, alright, you gotta meet yourself where you're at. You gotta start small. You gotta take slow steps, incremental change, right, and really have to change your identity, which is why that thought work is so important.
Molly Watts:This episode, like I said, is the first in the 3 part series, and I'm gonna drop them all. So we're gonna have this one this week and then the next 2 the the following 2 weeks. I'm gonna come in, talk about each one a little bit differently than I did back then. And, again, I hope that you get a lot out of these. I really believe even if you've been listening for a while, remembering this information, reiterating this is important.
Molly Watts:I listened to it again and I was like, yeah, really good information. Gotta remember. Now you will hear me reference in the episode step 1. And I just wanna remind you that back then, step 1, when I dropped this episode originally, step 1 was a standalone course, and now step 1 is part of making peace with alcohol, my group coaching and community program. So a little bit different, but step 1's still very much a part of that curriculum, but it's just not its own course.
Molly Watts:Would you hear me? Like I said, reference it in this show. Enjoyed this flashback to making a drink plan versus planning to drink, and I will see you next week. Here's what I'll be talking about during this series. This first show, this one, this week, I'm going to be talking about the doable drink plan and the difference between making a doable drink plan and planning to drink.
Molly Watts:I've mentioned this in numerous coaching calls, both 1 on 1 and in group coaching that I was gonna do a podcast on this because it's one of those big moment for folks when they are first doing this work. If you're factoring in a lot of alcohol free days and then just planning to drink on some other days, then this episode is for you and will possibly illuminate some of the work that you still need to do on your thinking around alcohol. Next week, I'll be talking about the difference between drink plans and drinking goals. In the Facebook group, I shared last week my better than half 70% alcohol free goal that I started in March. You know, I probably could have figured it out back to January because I was alcohol free for all of January.
Molly Watts:But in keeping integrity with myself, I know that I wasn't focused on this goal in February. And as I say often, this is a lifestyle, right? That is really for the rest of my life. So whether or not I started tracking on January 1st or March 1st, it really doesn't matter. There's a year's goal that I'm working on, and I'm excited to make it happen.
Molly Watts:And, yes, it's a goal with a plan to help me get there. We'll be breaking down your goals and your plans next week. In the 3rd week, we're going to tie it all together with three things that you need to stop doing to achieve your goals and to change your drinking habit. And a teaser. One of the biggest takeaways you'll hear is that your life, your specific challenges and constraints, all of those things that make your life situation unique, they matter.
Molly Watts:We'll talk about making this area of personal development more personal. Alright. This week, let's talk about the doable drink plan. When people first come into my work, they are typically not making any plans with regards to alcohol. I know that I certainly never had a plan ahead of time for drinking.
Molly Watts:I did typically track my drinks or paid attention to how many I was having, but that was in real time or sometimes, especially when I was feeling the effects of overdrinking, I would try to count backwards. Right? Try to recount exactly how much I had drank in an effort to quantify and avoid doing it again in the future. Right? Feeling this bad thing again in the future.
Molly Watts:And side note, of course, that strategy of recounting what happened the night before to avoid a similar result in the future was never a successful strategy. I'm sure many of you can relate. You have a hangover and you say never again, but somehow, either next week, next month, or maybe if it even worked a little longer, you know, but eventually you overdrank, and then you would try the whole recount again process. Big part of my strategy when I finally changed my drinking habit for good was the doable drink plan. Now I didn't call it that back then, but I had been learning the difference between my logical future focused prefrontal cortex and my illogical in the moment pleasure seeking pain, avoiding limbic system, toddler brain.
Molly Watts:And the idea that my drinking habit was just something that I had trained myself to do with my lower brain and that I could rewire the habit by using my higher brain seemed like a really reasonable idea. Wasn't that alcohol was a different habit because it was an addictive substance. And that's kind of the story line that I had believed for a long time or because of my genetics. No. It was just like any other habit that didn't serve me.
Molly Watts:So to build up some positive momentum and create evidence for my brain that change was possible, the first thing I needed to do was make a plan ahead of time for my drinking. Now this idea flies completely in the face of recovery programs and sobriety communities who insist that abstaining is the only way to change your drinking. Other programs actually encourage you to start with a 30 day alcohol free period. And, of course, I've shared during dryuary that there are absolutely benefits to taking an extended break from drinking. But the idea that you can get to sustainable change faster by taking a 30 day break, I don't agree with that.
Molly Watts:I don't believe that's necessary nor for everyone do I believe it's possible. It certainly stopped me from trying for a long time because I literally did not believe that I could succeed in taking a 30 day break. So it prevented me from even starting to change my habit in the first place. I will be honest. I don't think fast change is what any of us should be aiming for.
Molly Watts:In my experience, fast change rarely equals sustainable lifelong change. It never worked for me in the past, and, in fact, I think part of the problem many of us have with regard to goals, plans, or habits is that we simply don't keep going. Now more on that next week, but back to this making a drinking plan versus planning to drink. Making a plan ahead of time for alcohol. I encourage you to make a plan 24 hours ahead of time, but you can also make it a week ahead in advance if you want to.
Molly Watts:Regardless, in the beginning, it's going to feel awkward. If you've never tracked or counted your drinks before, that may be new for you. When I work with people in step 1, the very first thing they do is a habit assessment to figure out how much they are drinking on a regular basis. And let me tell you for some folks that is very eye opening. A lot of people never measure.
Molly Watts:They never they never really know how much wine they're pouring in their glass. They don't know how many ounces are in their shots. And that's part of the process. We cannot change what we cannot see. And while it seems obvious, you might be surprised by how many of us don't really know how much we are drinking.
Molly Watts:Once you know what the habit really looks like, what you're drinking, how much you're drinking, when you're drinking, we can make a plan based on what you're currently doing. We are literally going to simply work on planning ahead for what you've typically been drinking and create a doable drink plan that you feel 80 to 90 percent sure you can meet. Now, I typically get pushback on this because when people decide to work with me, they already feel motivated to change, and they want to reduce their drinking right away. So they wanna cut it down immediately. And lots of people will say to me, I think I just need to take a break or be completely alcohol free for a while, and I get it.
Molly Watts:I understand the desire to feel like you're doing something different right away. But I will tell you that this type of thinking and feeling is really just an extension of wanting to recount and adjust for the future. It's focused on the action of drinking and does not address your thoughts and how the habit is working in your brain. When we just wanna jump in and drastically reduce or take an extended break, what we're usually doing is testing our willpower and trying to figure out if we actually have a drinking problem, right? If I can take a break, I don't really have a problem.
Molly Watts:I'm not addicted. Maybe things aren't that bad. I'm not that bad. I don't need a drink, and all the other old stories and ideas that you've had regarding your relationship with alcohol. That's why I push back equally firmly with people and strongly encourage that we make a doable drink plan.
Molly Watts:The process of planning ahead and meeting yourself where you are at does not mean that we're going to be staying where you are for a long time. Another facet of the doable drink plan is doing 1% better. Now that isn't a real mathematical percentage. It's really the idea of kaizen. We're looking for small improvements we can make each week as we are working towards reducing our overall intake.
Molly Watts:For me, that meant literally just reducing one drink on one day each week for quite a while. Then eventually, I incorporated one alcohol free day, which was big for me. I didn't typically have alcohol free days before I started doing this work unless I was sick. And PS, I didn't consistently plan alcohol free days each week until I'd been working on this habit for almost a year, probably. I had occasional alcohol free days.
Molly Watts:I had definitely reduced my drinking considerably, but consistently having an alcohol free day and then increasing those alcohol free days did not happen until I had been working on my habit for a while. I will tell you that is one of the reasons that I wrote my book, created my course, did this podcast is because that I think I could have made progress faster. And in retrospect, there were things I could have done to make it easier for self that I now teach people so they can see results sooner. Sooner is still relative. Right?
Molly Watts:If you've been, like, having a daily drinking habit for decades like I did, it's not gonna be weeks. Alright? I'm not ever gonna tell you that you'll do this work for 30 days or 6 weeks, and you'll be fixed. No. In fact, we aren't working towards some timeline achievement.
Molly Watts:We are creating a lifestyle, so there really is no finish line. Just a quick break to talk with you about Sunny. You hear me talk about it on the podcast and truthfully, I have so many students and group members that share with me how Sunnyside is their preferred tool. It helps them build their healthier drinking habits and really create that peaceful relationship with alcohol. It's a tool that I feel very confident in recommending.
Molly Watts:And the Sunnyside team has recently, in September, launched a new iOS app, and that iOS app is gonna just enhance the existing text message experience. It makes it easier to build healthier drinking habits for anyone looking to cut back or simply drink more mindfully. The new Sunnyside community is also available only in the new iOS app, and it gives you access to an engaged community of like minded people who are also on a journey to cut back on drinking and build healthier drinking habits. It's a safe, private space, and you'll get access to inspiration and advice from Sunnyside members, as well as coaches. I encourage you to go check out Sunnyside.
Molly Watts:Go to www.sunnyside.co /molly to get started on a free 15 day trial. That's www.sunnyside.co /molly. One of the things I have seen people do when they do this work is that instead of making a plan ahead of time for what they will drink, they decide to add in multiple alcohol free days into their week, and then have a few days a week that will be drinking days. Here's what I wanna would say the problem is with that strategy. Now granted, multiple alcohol free days is great, and I never want to discourage you from adding in alcohol free days into your life, But I don't believe that you can really have a peaceful relationship with alcohol if you're leaving your drinking days as just open drinking days.
Molly Watts:Because at its core, what this says to me is that you still believe that alcohol is what you need to help you unwind, have fun, and escape the stress in your life. If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you might have heard me mention that I plan 1 alcohol free weekend per month, because I always want to remind myself and remain mindful that adding alcohol into my life is not reserved for the weekends that reinforces the idea when you reserve drinking for the weekends, Right? It reinforces the idea that drinking is to relax. You gotta drink to have fun. That alcohol somehow makes going out better, or it's just what I do when I go to a bar or a restaurant.
Molly Watts:And those are simply not the thoughts I wanna have about alcohol. I trained my brain for years to believe that alcohol was synonymous with going out, with eating at restaurants, with parties, vacations, you name it. It created a focus on alcohol in my life as the key to having fun, relaxing, and escaping stress. When we simply decide that I'm going to drink, but without a planned number of drinks, we are basically saying that we still believe alcohol is what we need to change, how we are feeling now. Maybe you were okay with having 5 alcohol free days, each week and 2 days where you aren't counting.
Molly Watts:For me, that wouldn't be peaceful. When we allow ourselves to over drink, which as a reminder, I would say that anything more than 3 standard drinks for women or 4 standard drinks for men in any one occasion, That's what is really the number there. That 3 and 4 is what comes from wanting to avoid a binge drinking episode as defined by the CDC, which would be 4 or 5 respectively for women and men. Now I want to clarify too that on what any occasion, right? Someone asked me recently about how long an occasion is.
Molly Watts:And according to the NIAAA, which is separate from the CDC, right, binge episode happens within 2 hours, and it elevates your blood alcohol content to over 0.08%. That's how they define that. They they use basically the same numbers, 45, but they say that's what typically would raise the blood alcohol content to over 0.08%. And if you do that within 2 hours, that's what the NA that the NIAAA constitutes as a binge. So this number of drinks within the 2 hour range and raising the blood alcohol can the blood alcohol content, I think it's raising the blood alcohol content that's particularly important.
Molly Watts:You've heard me say that every time we drink, it's like our own personal petri dish. When you start to feel altered, that's a really good sign that you should stop drinking. Because that typically means that your blood alcohol content is rising above the 0 0.055% that we talked about as being therapeutic. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. When you become an alcohol minimalist, it does involve having a drink plan.
Molly Watts:It also involves changing your thoughts around alcohol so that you don't want to keep drinking because you believe that that next drink will help you have more fun, relax more, or escape stress. You know it doesn't work that way. It's the thought work that really is the foundation of a peaceful relationship with alcohol. If you're doing lots of alcohol free days each week, but on the days that you're drinking, you find yourself being resistant to making a drink plan, ask yourself why. What do you believe that making a plan or not making a plan is doing for you?
Molly Watts:What are you making it mean to have a plan for your drinking day? If you want to have a peaceful relationship with alcohol and peaceful relationship with yourself, you might still have work to do on your thoughts around alcohol, and that's totally okay, by the way. That's the work we get to do when we choose to be alcohol minimalists. Next week, we're going to dive into your goals for drinking. Had no, those are not the same drinking goals like you had when you were in college, or at least I had when I was in college, you know, great.
Molly Watts:The the goal of being able to, shoot a beer with, like a pen in a beer can and opening the top. Right. What remember anyone remember that? Or how about doing an upside down Margarita? Do you ever do that back in college?
Molly Watts:Another drinking goal was being able to successfully navigate those, fraternity parties and the the rooms, the drink rooms. Good times. We'll be talking about very different goals next week. I I promise. Until next time, choose peace, my friends.
Molly Watts:Hey. Thanks for listening to The Alcohol Minimalist Podcast. Take something you learned from this week's episode and put it into action. Changing your drinking habits and creating a peaceful relationship with alcohol is 100% possible. You can stop worrying, stop feeling guilty about over drinking, and become someone who desires alcohol less.
Molly Watts:I work with people in 3 ways. You can learn about them over at www.volleywatts.com/workwithme, Or better yet, reach out to me directly. It's molly@mollywatts.com. We'll jump on a call and discuss what's best for you. This podcast is really just the beginning of our conversation.
Molly Watts:Let's keep it going.
