When Relief Is a Terrible North Star
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. Today, I wanna start by talking about a period in my life where I kept drinking even after I actually stopped enjoying it. Now I wanna say that this was not every night, but it was enough nights that it should have been more obvious to me that something was off in my life. Here's how it played out.
Speaker 1:The regret in the morning basically had gotten stronger than whatever I got out of the night before. And I knew that, not necessarily analytically. I mean, I actually just I felt it. And yet that same night, I'd still pour a drink. And I remember sitting with that at some point and just thinking, what is actually going on here?
Speaker 1:Because it didn't really make any sense on the surface. If I'm not enjoying this all day long, if I already know tomorrow how that morning is going to go and how I'm going to feel, why am I still doing this? And the answer, when I finally got honest about it, was pretty simple. I didn't know another way to mark the end of the day. That drink was a signal.
Speaker 1:It was something that the workday was over. You can stop being on. You're allowed to rest. You're allowed to have relaxation. And here's the truth.
Speaker 1:I needed that signal so badly, not the drink itself, the permission, that basically I kept reaching for it even after I was paying more of a price than I was getting a reward from it. And it was at that point that I realized my drinking, it really wasn't about drinking. It was about relief. And I think that's true for a lot of people in this community. Not all the time.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's fun, but more often than we admit. Because if you pay attention to what's actually happening at the moment the thought shows up, not what you tell yourself, but what you're actually feeling, it's more like, I really need to change how I feel right now. I need basically to get out of this mode that I've been in all day. I need my brain to give me a rest. I need some relief.
Speaker 1:There's a psychologist named Roy Baumeister who spent years studying this. He found that one of alcohol's primary appeals isn't pleasure. It's what he called escape from self awareness. The ability to narrow your focus so you stop monitoring yourself, stop replaying the day, stop running that loop. So that's basically what he's saying.
Speaker 1:Your brain isn't craving a drink. It's craving an exit from where it is right now. And that was especially true for me as an entrepreneur, as a business owner. There's always going to be something else to do. Always more work to squeeze in, maybe a decision that I haven't made yet, a conversation that's waiting for a response in my inbox.
Speaker 1:So now I want to talk about a researcher. Her name is Sabine Sonnitag, and she spent decades studying what she calls psychological detachment, the difference between being physically done with work and actually mentally done with it, which for most of us are two very different things. And she found that people who can't switch off at the end of the day, they have worse energy. They have worse focus and worse mood the next day. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1:Even with that knowledge, many of us are still pretty terrible at it. So what we do? We outsource the switch to something external. And for a lot of people in high pressure environments, that something is a dream. Because here's the truth.
Speaker 1:It works. It changes your state really fast. It's socially acceptable, and it has a ritual around it. And your brain has learned this. When we feel like this, that's the move.
Speaker 1:So it stops feeling like a habit, and it starts feeling like a solution. But here's something that I had to work through. Your brain is wired to massively overvalue what helps you right now versus what hurts you later. Psychologists call this hyperbolic discounting. Basically, the future costs get steeply discounted.
Speaker 1:It's abstract. It's tomorrow. It's not sitting right in front of me in the kitchen right now. So the relief in front of you, as in a drink, almost always wins every single time. The deal your brain is making every single evening isn't really drink or don't drink, even though it feels that way.
Speaker 1:It's more like immediate relief versus the near future me of sleep and mood and energy or maybe self trust. And as you would probably guess by experience, the future you loses that negotiation every time unless you understand what's happening. And that's what I mean when I say relief is a terrible North Star. Relief isn't bad. We all need it.
Speaker 1:But if the main question that you're organizing your evenings around is, What will make me feel better maybe in the next twenty minutes? You will keep choosing things that make tonight easier and, unfortunately, tomorrow harder. And I know this better than anybody. I did this for over ten years. And the thing that I didn't understand was that the problem really wasn't the drink.
Speaker 1:It was that I had trained myself to solve discomfort now as fast as possible, and I only had one tool for doing it, and that was using alcohol. So even when I tried to cut back, that urge, it was still there. And having a drink was the fastest exit every single time when I was tired or stressed, or to be honest, just done for the day. The shift that actually helped was me learning to ask a different question when the cravings did show up. Not should I drink or not drink tonight, but it was actually, what do I need right now?
Speaker 1:And then actually answering it because you have to do that, not just saying it and reaching for a glass anyways. Because here's the thing about why alcohol works so well as a transition ritual. Number one, it's reliable. And number two, it's immediate. Your nervous system basically has learned that when the drink happens, the day is over.
Speaker 1:At least that's what it was for my case. It might be something different for you, but I guarantee it has a signal. And that signal is a real thing that your body needs and looks for. The problem is that most people don't have anything else that does that job with the same consistency. And here's the thing, alcohol is very effective more than probably most things, as in it's going to shift your state from where it is to another state 100% of the time.
Speaker 1:So removing the drink just leaves a gap, not a small one either, a gap that you feel every single evening when you take it away. And that sits there uncomfortably, basically, until you fill it with something else. What I eventually figured out, and this sounds almost too simple, is that I don't always have to be doing something. That idea to be accepted is bigger than it sounds because I had spent years feeling like unproductive time was wasted time. Like, I always had to be doing something.
Speaker 1:Like, if I was just idle for a little while without always in the move, then that meant I was falling behind on something. But I had to get real with myself. There was always going to be more work. The proverbial stack on my desk will always be there. My inbox will never be zero.
Speaker 1:I was holding myself to get to something that could never truly be finished. So at some point, you just have to give yourself permission to be done. Not because everything is finished, never will be, but because you're a person and not a machine that's meant to always be on. And once I understood that, the evening started looking a little bit different. Sometimes it was making dinner and actually putting some effort into it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it was getting outside before the sun goes down and going for a walk. Sometimes it was giving my mom a call. Sometimes it was just sitting somewhere without my phone. And, of course, none of this is gonna hit as fast as a drink did or feel as strong. But to be honest, none of it's gonna send me a bill at 3AM when I'm waking up with my heart pounding and feeling crappy in the morning either.
Speaker 1:But nonetheless, it feels uncomfortable at first. I'm not going to sugarcoat that. And my brain, it kept looking for that signal that it was used to and it wasn't finding it. But over time, it learned that these things, they meant the same thing. The day's over.
Speaker 1:You can stop them. So the next time that urge shows up, before you answer it, try asking two things. What am I actually looking for right now? And will this actually help me get it? Or is it just the fastest exit?
Speaker 1:Sometimes the drink isn't even the thing that you want. It's just the permission slip that you think that you need. But I'll tell you the same thing that I had to learn. You don't need a permission slip. You're already allowed to be done.
Speaker 1:Okay. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you got anything out of this episode, please rate and review. Of course, send me an email, [email protected]. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.
Creators and Guests
