Alcohol Minimalist: Change Your Drinking Habits!

You're listening to breaking the bottle legacy with Molly watts, episode three. Hi, I'm Molly, after a lifetime living under the influence of family alcohol abuse, spending more than 30 years worrying about alcohol and my own drinking, believing I had an unbreakable daily drinking habit, I changed my relationship with alcohol forever. If you want to change your drinking habits than breaking the bottle legacy is for you. My goal is to help you create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, past, present, and future. Each week all focus on real science and using your own brain to change your relationship with alcohol. Nothing has gone wrong, you're not broken, you're not sick. It's not your genes. And creating peace is possible. I'm here to help you do it. Let's start now. Hello, and welcome or welcome back to breaking the bottle legacy with me your host, Molly watts. Hello, and how are we doing? How are you? How have you been surviving the holidays and the approaching end of 2020? Okay, you're listening to this in January, I get it. But gosh, I hope that you've been ending 2020 with a sense of optimism and light, I definitely have felt a lift in spirits for myself. And as the new year a new administration gets ready to serve. Vaccines are being delivered. I think we have a collective reason to hope. But no matter what's going on globally, I hope for you in your own life, you are feeling optimistic for the future. If you're struggling or feeling stressed, I hope that you're I hope you're not using alcohol to try and solve those feelings. But if you are, hey, let's look at that with curiosity and compassion. How can we take a next step to change that habit and make a better choice next time. So what is a real fast to this is episode number three, I have done a full podcast before go back and listen to episode one you'll I referenced it. What I will tell you is that I have found over time that episodes keep getting better and better and better. And I know that will be the case too with breaking the bottle legacy. So I really appreciate you jumping in on these first episodes. I'm just getting my sea legs with all of this with this content and how I want to deliver this, this message. So I appreciate you being here. I'm super excited God, I have some great interviews coming up. And I'm really excited to share those with you. I'm excited to share more and more information about how you can change your relationship with alcohol. And so I just want to say thank you again for coming along for the ride, and for bearing with me in these early episodes as I'm figuring it out. So again, this is episode number three. And at breaking the bottle legacy is all about helping people change their drinking habits, to stop buffering negative emotions with alcohol and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol past, present and future. I am especially dedicated to serving adult children of alcoholics who worry about their drinking and want to have freedom from the anxiety and pain that alcohol has caused them throughout their lives. But even if you simply wanted to quit drinking, you want to quit drinking more than you want to and you want a break from your daily drinking habit, then I am here to help you. In the last episode, I said that there was a two parter right so last week we talked about alcohol awareness and challenges. And what I mean by that is awareness and challenges to the power that you have over your relationship with alcohol. And as you will hear if you stick around this podcast long enough you'll is that I believe that most people who drink more than they want to or believe they have and quote unquote unbreakable drinking habit are not physically dependent on alcohol. Statistics actually say that is true. And I believe that the vast majority of people who are, quote unquote, over drinking fall into that category. I also believe that we the over drinkers have the power in our own brains to change our relationship with alcohol. And in last episode, I talked about the first challenges to that power that are science based and that make it difficult to change your drinking habits. I labeled these as challenges because but I want to contend that half the problem lies in awareness. Once you become aware of the challenges they lose their strength. We talked about brain chemistry and neuroscience and the neuroscience of habits as to areas of challenge that are based in science. And once you understand how alcohol impacts your brain chemistry and how our brains work to create habits, well, that helps you have the knowledge to overcome those challenges. So today, for additional challenges and awareness law, we're going to be talking about how society and industry work to challenge our power when it comes to creating a new relationship with alcohol. Let's look at society first. So socially drinking is an accepted default, whereas non drinking is actually still treated with suspicion. And alcohol has been a part of human culture for a long, long time dating back as far as the end of the Stone Age. The first historical evidence of alcoholic beverages came from an archaeological discovery of beer jugs from approximately 10,000 years ago. So lots of history around alcohol, right. Alcohol is also the most widely used legal drug available without a prescription. And in the United States, 70% of adults have consumed alcohol in the last 12 months. So to put it simply, drinking alcohol is socially accepted. It's widely practiced, and it is a part of our collective histories. In addition, it's glamorized throughout social media and advertising. And in 2016, the alcohol industry spent $2.3 billion on advertising here in the United States alone. So these statistics really equate to an incredible force of societal pressure encouraging you to drink alcohol, television, movies, advertising, social gatherings all influence our beliefs, and your opinions about alcohol and your desire to drink sprang from the lifelong mental conditioning of your unconscious mind. As we learned earlier, in the last episode, when we investigated science, the science that influences our drinking behavior, alcohols, positive effect is very limited. And the negative effects begin at a very low level of blood alcohol content. But this science is often ignored by society. And in fact, we often hear a lot of messages that associate pride with being able to drink people under the table. Right? Moderation is recommended by health experts, but it's basically ignored in our alcoholic centric culture.What's ironic is that we are literally immersed in messages that encourage us to drink. But we are simultaneously taught that people who can't handle their alcohol are weak, diseased or broken. So as an adult child of an alcoholic, I definitely had conflicting beliefs about alcohol, based on my mother's addiction, and based on societal influence. I knew that alcohol was a drug. But I also believed that my mother was different for me. So I hated what alcohol it meant in her life, and how it impacted our relationship. But as strong as those feelings were, they didn't stop me from drinking. Because of the other side that I saw in terms of what society said alcohol was about. Early on, I drink in the same way as my friends did. I tried alcohol was when I was a teenager, and then more as a college student, and I drank excessive amounts on the weekends and at parties. But back then it was certainly part of my social life, and not a part of my daily life. I separated myself from my mother, mostly because I didn't drink daily. I didn't worry about becoming an alcoholic, because I held on to the definition of alcoholism that my mother had helped form for me. Of course, being alcohol free was nothing was never something I considered either. I never questioned whether or not drinking was bad for me. It was just normal to drink alcohol when I was socializing, drinking to excess and being hugger, hungover wasn't anything to worry about. It was simply what we did. So I also didn't realize that I was laying the groundwork for a progressive daily habit that would go on from that would go from that one nightly drink to three to four and persist for 30 years. All of my experiences, all of my social interactions, all of the advertisements and movies I was exposed to, none of it was remarkable or unusual. And that is the challenge in and of itself, the subconscious programming. The cultural norm of drinking, kept me from truly evaluating my drinking habit until he had gone on for decades, and cause years of anxiety and mental anguish, not to mention the toll that it had taken was taking on my health. So once I made the decision to change my relationship with alcohol and educate myself on the real science of alcohol, it became a lot easier to see the truth about haul the drug was very different from society's messages about it. questioning my beliefs and learning to separate the facts from marketing hype. Moved the subconscious messaging I had held on to for years into my conscious mind where I could evaluate it objectively. It was like turning on the lights. Seriously, you will never watch a movie, see a social media meme, watch a baseball game, attend a networking event, or even a friend's backyard barbecue. Without noticing all the subtle and overt messages you receive about alcohol. The society challenge to your peaceful relationship with alcohol may feel like the hardest one to overcome for some of you. I totally understand that. And I will, we'll be sharing more tips on dealing with that peer pressure and questions about drinking later on in the podcast. The other challenge that I say is the third challenge to your power over your own relationship with alcohol is the alcohol industry itself. I separate that from society because society has it's a cultural, it's a historical, it is how we perceive and the messages were sent about alcohol. The alcohol industry helps fuel some of those messaging and and it's a business right, so we need to look at the business of alcohol and how it impacts us. We touched a little bit on the dollars that the alcohol industry spends on advertising each year. But beyond marketing and advertising, the alcohol industry has a vested interest in keeping you drinking, right? Alcohol is big business. Sales of alcohol in the United States for 2018 were $253.8 billion, which was a 5% increase over 2017. Now, in 2020, we've all heard and it's true. In 2020. alcohol sales increased with everyone staying home and the stress and anxiety of the Coronavirus. In the United States the alcohol industry is responsible for sustaining more than 4 million jobs. And it generates more than $70 billion in annual tax revenue. So to put that number in perspective, one year's taxes collected from the alcohol industry would fund federal student loan programs for four years, or fund the federal government assistance to low income families for a year. It would also cover the annual basic pay for all 2.3 million armed service members. Big dollars, right. The industry itself is robust and for many Americans provides the source of their livelihood. And because of its economic power, the alcohol industry influences both government policy and scientific research regarding alcohol. Dr. David Jernigan directs the center of alcohol marketing and youth at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. And he says that laws dealing with alcohol production, Sales and Use have eased thanks to efforts by alcohol manufacturers. He adds that public health messages about Alcohol Alcohol often cannot compete with the information from the alcohol industry. So what does this mean for someone who wants to change their relationship with alcohol? Well, it quite simply means that you're going to need to accept the fact that alcohol is going to be readily available to you for the rest of your life. This is a circumstance that is not likely to change. Whether you choose to drink alcohol or not, you will be surrounded by it everywhere you shop go out to eat at most entertainment and sports venues. And you will need to create your own peaceful relationship with alcohol through conscious awareness that the alcohol industry prefers to sell you more alcohol and works to counteract the science that shows alcohol to be harmful. If the lessons from the tobacco industry have taught us anything it should be that should be clear that big alcohol isn't going anywhere, and it does not have your health and happiness as its priority. So the challenges that I've outlined here, both last week and this week, science, society and industry, there are challenges that everyone who wants to gain control over their relationship with alcohol is going to have to face they are strong, but you are stronger. So for adult children of alcoholics like myself, these challenges are combined with a long standing personal history with alcohol. And I definitely want to help adult children of alcohol I understand that even though we have our own challenges that stem from a long hit our long histories, it is not because of your genes that you right now may have the kind of relationship with alcohol that you have. You have the ability to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, and I'm going to help you do it. So let's recap real quickly between challenges to your power over alcohol are three science, society and industry. The habit of drinking is propelled by the chemical reaction of alcohol in the brain. The chemical reaction of alcohol in the brain is unique each time you drink alcohol, and it's impacted by factors like your age, your gender, your food intake, stress level and setting. These are things we talked about last week talking about the science first, alcohols biphasic effect means it makes you feel better and worse at the same time. And while your body's immediate chemical reaction to alcohol is unique, triggering the brain's reward center is universal. And it's the linchpin of habit formation for everyone. We talked about the triune brain, and it gave us a simple way to understand how the brain has evolved. The brain's reward center is located in the second area of the brain, the limbic system. The limbic system, also known as the toddler brain is focused on seeking pleasure avoiding pain and conserving energy. And the prefrontal cortex is located in the newest area of the brain. It's also known as the adult brain, and it's responsible for higher thinking executive function, and it's capable of projecting into the future. Creating a different relationship with alcohol is as simple as using your adult brain to override your toddler brain. Society challenges our brain power because drinking alcohol is culturally accepted and encouraged. Alcohol has been a part of society for at least 10,000 years, and the longevity strengthens a challenge to your brain's power. advertising and marketing messages glamorize alcohol and are entrenched in our subconscious brains from childhood. The alcohol industry big alcohol is a robust and powerful industry that influences policy and research on alcohol. The alcohol industry has a vested interest in making alcohol attractive, affordable and available to you. So links to pertinent articles and studies will be again available in the show notes. And if you would like to pick up your free copy of alcohol truths, how much is safe, then please head over to www dot Molly watts.com. That's Molly with a why w a t t s.com. And you can get that free report, as well as get advance notice of when breaking the bottle legacy will be available on Amazon. If you have questions if you'd like them answered here, please send them to me at podcast at Molly watts.com. Tune in next week and learn more about changing your drinking habits once and for all and creating a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Until then, choose peace my friends. See you next week. Thank you for listening to breaking the bottle legacy. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Take something that 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