Journey to the Sunnyside | Mindful Drinking & Alcohol Health

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. I want to start off by asking you to think about the last time that you drank. And then when did you actually decide that you were going to have that drink? Now I know this is kind of a strange question because I'm not sure you can always answer it.

For most adults, lot of drinking happens in pretty ordinary moments. You're at home, the day's winding down. Maybe there's something in the fridge and at some point you decide to have a drink. Now looking back, you can always point to that moment. You open the bottle and poured it into the glass or whatever it is, maybe cracked a beer.

Obviously that is a decision. But there's usually some runway leading up to that. Maybe earlier in the day you had that thought, I'm probably going to have a drink tonight. Or you picked up some wine on the way from home because you don't have any in the house. None of this is very surprising.

If there's wine sitting in the kitchen cabinet, it's easier to drink the wine. But that's not really the interesting part. The interesting part is what happens to the decisions once you start drinking. Let's say you want to drink tonight. You have one and you enjoy it.

Then the glass is empty and you decide, am I going to have another one? And that seems like you're answering the same exact question as the first time. Except there's a pretty important difference, which you know. You've already been drinking. The person deciding about drink number two is making the decision under slightly different conditions than the person who decided to have drink number one.

This doesn't blow anybody away. We all kind of know this. But by the time that you're deciding about drink number three, those conditions have changed yet again. And big surprise, science is behind this. It's called response inhibition.

We know that alcohol lowers our inhibition and basically our ability when there's an impulse or an available action in front of us becomes much more difficult. So if there's more wine sitting in the bottle and your glass is empty, pouring more is an available action. And to tack onto this, there's something called alcohol myopia. And I actually think this explains a lot. This is basically the idea that as we drink, our attention tends to narrow towards what's more immediate and noticeable.

Things happening right now are going to get all our attention while information that's less immediate, I. E. Tomorrow, has a harder time competing with it. Think about what that means if you start the night saying, Hey, I just want to have two drinks tonight because I have to get up early tomorrow. But a couple drinks later, what's right in front of you?

An empty glass, maybe the rest of the bottle. And the fact that another drink would feel really good right now. Tomorrow morning, that's kind of started to disappear. And it's now competing from a much further out place. And I can see this in my own drinking.

I've had plenty of nights where that first drink, it was completely intentional. I wanted it. I enjoyed it. And if I could go back, I would probably make the same decision again. But that doesn't mean that I would choose everything that then followed.

I think that we tend to lump these things together. Let's say if I had four drinks and I woke up wishing that I only had two, it's really easy to look back and think, you know what, I just really shouldn't have been drinking last night at all. But maybe that's not actually what I wish I would have done differently. Maybe I wanted that first drink. Maybe I wanted the second one too.

The decision I actually wished I had changed was having that third and that fourth. And this is really useful because now I'm solving for a different problem. I'm not trying to convince myself not to drink on a night when I genuinely wanted to. I'm trying to figure out how to make a better decision about the point where I tend to keep going past what I actually wanted. The problem, of course, is waiting until that exact moment to figure it out means that you're making the decision after you've already been drinking.

This is where planning ahead starts to make more sense. There's an area of behavioral science around something called implementation intentions. And it's a complicated name for a pretty simple idea. You decide ahead of time what you want to do when a particular situation comes up. And researchers have tested this with alcohol specifically.

And across these studies, it appears to produce a reduction in weekly drinking. Now it's not some magic trick and the research doesn't show that making a plan suddenly eliminates heavier drinking. But we already know here at Sunnyside that it does. And I think there's something useful about the timing. If I decide earlier in the day that I want to have two drinks tonight, I'm making that decision before I've had either of those.

Then when I finish that second one, I'm not figuring this out for the first time what I wanted my night to look like. I already did that. And of course I can change my mind. Maybe dinner does turn into a celebration. Maybe I'm having this incredible bottle of wine with my friends and I genuinely want another glass.

We're all adults. That's fine. The point isn't that the decision that you made at noon has to control you at 09:00. It's that you're giving the version of yourself who hasn't been drinking a voice in that decision that might not otherwise happen entirely if you already started. For some people, that first drink, that really is the decision that they want to change.

Maybe you plan not to drink tonight and found yourself pouring one anyways. Now that's a different problem than we're talking about right now. And we've talked a lot about that on the podcast here around patterns and states and situations that can really drive those moments. But I think there's also another group of people who are actually pretty happy with the decisions to have a drink. It's what happens after that they're really all not that happy with and where things get away.

And if that's you, then focusing all your attention on whether or not you have that first drink or not can miss part of what you're actually trying to change. So I want you to think about that last time that you had more than you planned. Was that first drink actually the problem? Because sometimes it actually wasn't. You wanted one.

Maybe you even wanted two. The decision that you changed happened later. So maybe the question isn't only, am I deciding to drink tonight? There's another question worth asking. When did I decide to keep drinking?

Because those aren't always the same decision. And if you can figure out which one you're actually trying to change, then you're going to be in a much better place to start. Okay, thanks for hanging out with me this week. If you got anything out of this, please rate and review. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.