Alcohol Minimalist: Change Your Drinking Habits!

Hey, it's Molly from alcohol minimalist. What do you do in this October? I would love to have you join me in my more sober October challenge. What do I mean by more sober October, it simply means that we're going to add in more alcohol free days than you currently been doing, whether that's one or two or 31. It's up to you, you get to set your own goal. And that's why it's more sober October. You can check it out and learn more at get.sunnyside.co/molly. It's totally free. I've got prizes, I'm going to be going live every week to announce the prize winners. And it's just going to be an awesome event. So I would love to have you join me. You can learn more at get.sunnyside.co/molly and you can get registered today. 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. 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 will shatter your past patterns and eliminate your excuses. Changing your relationship with alcohol is possible. I'm here to help you do it. 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 well, my friends. It's a sunny morning here in Oregon. That is a very exciting thing. Because let me tell you, it's the second week of June. And last weekend. The first weekend in June, it rained cats and dogs all weekend long. It was really just miserable. And it was cold to boot. So hello, it's June. Let's have a little sunshine around here. And we finally looked like we're going to get some that makes me happy. So before we get into this week's podcast I do you have a prize winner. And I think I was supposed to have a prize winner last week. Sorry about that. But at Loretta and this is somebody I know, I will just say the sand dollar girl. If you are listening, you are this week's winner of some alcohol, minimalist swag. All you got to do is email me Molly at Molly watts.com, let me know that you heard that you were the winner. And I will send you that alcohol, minimalist swag out. If you would like to be a winner, then all you need to do is leave a review of the podcast or the book on any of the podcast players that you might listen to. And really any format that you find the book and it's available across all the E retailers. And certainly you can always find it on Amazon. So either way, especially the podcast if you would leave a review. That is really how people find us, the more reviews that I have, the more people can find this content. So you're really helping pay it forward. You're helping somebody else change their relationship with alcohol by leaving a review. So thank you in advance. This week on the show, it's going to be a little bit different. This is actually a combo podcast. I recently listened to an episode of the change Academy podcast hosted by my coaching friends Brock Armstrong and Monica Ryan Nagel. Both Brock and Monica have been on the alcohol minimalist show before in my alcohol and series. Brock was alcohol and athletic performance, which I'll link in the show notes. Monica was alcohol and nutrition, which again, I'll link in the show notes. And the podcast that they do together is called the change Academy. Alright, so it's really highly focused on behavior change. And that could mean changing your relationship with alcohol, with food, with exercise with money with your, you know, relationships, whatever. Whatever you're trying to change in your life. The change Academy podcast is a really great tool. And this episode was really awesome. And it paralleled something that I was planning on revisiting on the podcast, because it comes up so often. And because it's still something that I see In my own life, now, not with alcohol anymore, but certainly other areas. And it's a major obstacle to change. So I'm calling this episode The biggest obstacle to changing your relationship with alcohol. Yep. And so I'm gonna get there in just a second. But I want to remind you, too, that last week's episode, I shared six keys to changing your relationship with alcohol. And those keys were these changes simple, but it's not easy, changes, incremental changes, slow. Change comes with discomfort, commitment is the key, and never give up. Okay. And while these keys are incredibly important, especially as you're beginning to embrace this idea of changing your life, there may come a time when you've been working on you're drinking for a bit, and you aren't seeing results. What if you've been working on your drinking and you're feeling kind of stuck? Right? I want to make sure that you are not a victim of the learning trap. Now, I've talked about before on the podcast, and I've admitted to you that I am a lifelong learner, I loved being and was accused of being the teacher's pet, often in school, and I find comfort in learning. But I don't want you to mistake me here, continuing to challenge your brain and create new neural pathways, it's absolutely essential to have it change. And it's a proven strategy for living a happier longer life. But here's the kicker. Learning happens by doing. Tim Elmore refers to this learning trap as quote unquote, artificial maturity. And he explains that artificial maturity is the byproduct of two colliding realities, over exposure to information and under exposure to experience. So that right there basically sums up one of the massive barriers to creating change, if not the biggest obstacle to creating change in your life, too much information, and not enough consistent practice. You're not here listening to this podcast to learn, you are here to change. Information is not transformation. And what you need to do is take action. Now, I've got a few more thoughts on this, that I'm going to share with you. But first, I want you to hear a little bit more tough love from Brock and Monica. So here is consuming content versus creating change from the change Academy podcast with Brock Armstrong and Monica right. All right. All right. Take your seats, everyone. This time, we're talking about the difference between consuming content and creating change. Taking the time, this welcome to the change Academy, an educational podcast dedicated to helping you create positive, sustainable change in your mindset, in your habits, and ultimately, in your life. I'm Brock Armstrong. And I'm Monica renagel. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while now, and now that you think about it, not a whole lot has changed. I want to suggest that you may be suffering from consumption disease and I don't mean that old fashioned disease. But all the heroines of 19th century opera die have basically always are coughing and do a little a hanky that's got a tiny bit of blood on it or something. That's right, that's right, but still singing beautifully right to their dying breath. No, no, we are talking about a very modern affliction that's made possible in part by a couple of industries that we know and love very well, namely podcasting, and self improvement or personal development. Because no matter what your aspirations may be, there are dozens of podcasts and YouTube channels to inspire and educate you. But what we want to know is are you actually applying what you're hearing and learning? Or are you just indulging in inspiration porn? Because it's a really, no, it's really easy to confuse consuming content, whether that's in the form of books or podcasts or other media with taking action. It kind of feels like you're doing something you're researching, you're learning, you're thinking and you're planning and all those things do have their place. But you've got to actually take some action if you want to see change happen. I think people have probably seen this major paradox in social media in particular. When you're spending time on social media, you can actually feel Like all that scrolling and all that inspiration, the outrage, the consumption is actually being productive. And I'm pretty sure I've seen some studies where they put people in fMRI eyes and saw that the part of the brain that lights up when they're scrolling through is the same part of the brain that lights up when you're actually doing work. So our brains think it's work if it thinks it's work and thinks we're being productive. But in reality, when we're doing all that scrolling, nothing is really changing. Anything that's happening is actually happening just between your eyeballs in the screen. But the time that we spend doing this does feel like work, or at least it feels like research, when in reality, it's just scrolling. It's interesting that researchers have actually called this part of this interaction, the online brain, and the online brain uses what is called transactive memory. And that's the type of memory where we actually outsource a lot of our actual memory, instead of truly committing it to our internal memories or keeping it in the cloud rather than our own brain. Since we know that we can easily go and find that again. Right? This is why nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore. Sure, yeah. Yeah, there's so many things in my phone, right? Yeah. And there was a paper that was published by World psychiatry, where the author's actually say, using transactive memory systems reduces an individual's ability to recall the specifics of the externally stored information. And so, you know, I believe that this is part and parcel with what we're talking about in this episode. Yeah, well, I mean, it, I'm sure there's trade offs, you know, we can retain or at least access a lot more information than we might be able to commit to memory. But not having those details actually available to us does change our relationship to them? Yeah, exactly. So again, I think it follows that without taking any action on what you hear in this podcast, or what you read on Monica, and my blogs, or what we share on social media, the ideas you're consuming may be staying with you. But the details, which really are what leads to the lasting change, while the details are not staying with you. It's the illusion, again, of learning, right. And those details, of course, only emerge in the application of the ideas, right, that's where the rubber meets the road. So let's talk a little bit about how we see this in our work. So our expertise is in nutrition and fitness and behavior change. So the people who follow us, I'm guessing most of the people listening to this podcast right now. They're generally looking to improve their health through healthier habits and lifestyles. And we share a lot of advice and information in our podcasts, our newsletters, our workshops, and other offerings that we do. But in addition to that, we also work with people in paid coaching programs. And the interesting thing is that we take pretty much the same approach both inside and outside of our programs, we even share some of the same tools. But I've noticed that the people who make the commitment to work with us in our programs tend to get different results than those who simply attend our free workshops or subscribe to the podcast. Yeah, yeah, that's a big reason why I actually stopped offering any free coaching sessions or working with any friends or family members for cheaper free, because, you know, once the enthusiasm of this new program wears off, so does the commitment quite often. And you know, when we were preparing for this episode, we started thinking a lot about why that is. And maybe part of it is, of course, is that we have a higher level of support and a higher level of feedback to our paid clients than we can to the wider audience. So people listening to this podcast, for example, or part of it is that we actually designed a very specific curricula that people move through in a very structured way that is proven to get the results. And we even have a few proprietary tools and processes that we only share inside of our programs. But I think it's more than that. I think part of it is the commitment that people make. So when they sign up for one of our programs, they're committing to do the work in a specific way in a specific timeframe. And that is a lot different than browsing a variety of approaches and picking up a little thing from one place, and then trying something else for a little while. And there's also the accountability of tracking and measuring outcomes. But I don't mean external accountability to a coach or a group or a buddy, although that sometimes does play a small role. But what I'm really talking about here is the internal accountability that happens if and when we have a clear and meaningful goal, and then we make a commitment to that goal, and not just to a certain approach or tactic. And what that means is that if the first thing we tried doesn't work, we don't give up. We try something else we iterate, we learn, right? I just want to hammer At home, Monica just said, having a clear, meaningful goal. So you're making a commitment to the goal, not to the approach. I think so many people get that backwards. Yeah, we choose intermittent fasting instead of achieving a healthy body weight. See, one is a goal. And one is the tactic. Anyway, might, as one, highlight that. And you know, all too often people stopped just short of making that final commitment. So instead, they graze or they even binge on self help content. But they're not taking consistent concerted effort, where they continue to dream about this outcome that they want to create. But month after month, or year after year, sometimes, they're not really getting much closer. They allow their most well rehearsed excuses to justify that perceived failure or that lack of forward progress, things like well, I'm just someone who doesn't follow through. But the real problem is that they didn't take the necessary steps to actually allow themselves to succeed. Or they might I see this a lot, they might occasionally take a few steps, but then get discouraged and lapse back into that passive consumption mode. I've seen that so many times as well. So I guess this brings us to the tough love portion of this episode, right? So because Monica and I are not just here to give you pep talks, and we're not just here to give you something interesting to think about either. We are offering you tools that can help you create the results that you want. But those tools have to be picked up. And they have to be used, right. So if you're thinking but not doing, if you're learning, but not taking action, if you're inspired, but not actually progressing than you are sitting on the sidelines of your own life. Instead of taking that current good enough version of yourself and allowing it to move towards a different future. The only way to truly reach your goal is to get on the field, or perhaps the ice, if you're watching the NHL playoffs like I am, get out there on the ice, you might miss a pass and you might lose some ground, which, incidentally is how you learn to succeed. But you can't win or lose for that matter by sitting on the sidelines. We've talked about this quote before from Wayne Gretzky, but just like Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take, and the shots that you only take in your mind up. They don't count. Yeah, I make all the shots I take in my mind. Yeah. And they still don't change the score, but they don't count. Now. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. And we'll be back soon with another episode. All right. All right. Thanks, everybody. This has been the change Academy podcast with Monica Ryan Nagel and rock Armstrong. You can find us at change Academy podcast.com. Okay, oh my gosh, did you just love that. So good. If you're thinking but not doing if you're learning but not taking action, if you're inspired, but not progressing? You are sitting on the sidelines of your life, and you need to get on the field. Gosh, I love those thoughts. I love that stuff. And I have a little bit of just a final thoughts on that that I want to share with you. This is actually from chasing cupcakes from Elizabeth Benton. And I know all of you that know how much that have listened to this show know how much I love this book and how much I love listening to Elizabeth. But here are some of her thoughts on this topic. Knowing what to do doesn't help at all, when you have a habit of justifying why today isn't the day to do the work. convincing yourself that tomorrow holds some promise today doesn't. Knowing what to do doesn't help at all, when you convince yourself that this one thing won't make a difference anyway. It's not about how much you know, it's about what you consistently do. It's not about taking notes. It's about taking action. While I love the fact that we live in this age of easy information. I also think it's a big part, maybe the biggest obstacle as to why we're on the hard road to change. We want to know more as much as we can. And we mistakenly believe that if we just keep listening to the information, to the motivation to the encouragement, one day it will all click. That's just not how it works. You have to take action. You have to stop spinning your wheels. Set your ego aside and refuse to argue for your time, effort, intention and an Tension. Keep it simple, folks, is what you're doing working. If it's not, then you need to take new action. All right. That is all I have for you this week, my friends. Before I jump off, I want to encourage you to go listen to the change Academy podcast, Brock and Monica are actually getting ready to kick off their big program called weigh less. It's a year long program for those of you that are working on changing your eating habits, your exercise habits, just your overall wellness and health. If this is you and you've struggled to take consistent action, I would highly encourage you to go check it out. You can find it at www dot weigh less dot life. It's way less like you know w e IG h less dot life. Please go check it out. Go listen to the change Academy podcast. Regardless of what behavior you're trying to change. You'll get a lot out of it. And until next time, hopefully it's sunny where you are. Hopefully it stays sunny where I am. And I will see you next week. Choose peace my friends. Thank you for listening to the alcohol minimalist podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Use something you learned in today's episode and apply it to your life this week. Transformation is possible you have the power to change your relationship with alcohol now, for more information, please visit me at www dot Molly watts.com