Ever feel like cutting back on alcohol is an uphill battle? You're not alone, and Debi Talbert gets it. In this episode of 'Aging Flipped', Debi, a certified Mindset & Alcohol Freedom Coach, dives into why it's so tough to change our drinking habits and offers some solid advice on how to make it through. She talks about the mental roadblocks we hit and why it’s normal to struggle.

Debi's approach is all about understanding your thoughts and feelings without beating yourself up. She believes that accepting the hard parts of this journey is key to success. And guess what? She’s got practical tools to help you stay present and focused, like using your breath to calm those overwhelming emotions. If you're trying to drink less or quit altogether, this episode is packed with insights to help you stay on track.

Tune in for some real talk and useful tips from someone who’s been there and knows how to get through it.

Join Debi Talbert in 'Aging Flipped' as she tackles the struggles of changing drinking habits and offers practical tips to overcome them.

Overcoming the Struggles of Changing Drinking Habits with Debi Talbert

Hey my friend, how are you? So glad to have you here, so glad to be recording this for you today.Listen, if you want to get started exiting the drinking life and I’m pretty sure you do or you would not be listening to this podcast, I want to make sure that you get my Jumpstart Guide. This is a beautiful starting off point for you.It’s a really quick easy read with some powerful tools you can start using right away to help you change what you drink.<a href="https://www.jumpseatcoaching.com/">Simply go to JumpseatCoaching.com</a>IN TODAY’S EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:<ul><li>How to get the EXIT Quick Start Guide </li><li>What happens in our minds that gets us off course, even when we’re doing everything right.</li><li>How to get past the discouragement.</li><li>Why you should expect and embrace the “hard.”</li><li>The benefits of getting through hard things.</li><li>Why you should return to your breath </li></ul>Today, I want to talk about when it’s really hard to choose something to drink other than alcohol. I believe all of us have been there at one time or another because if it was always easy, then we wouldn’t still be talking about it, we wouldn’t have all the sober curious books, the mindful drinks movement, the variety of podcasts about getting, staying, remaining sober or drinking less alcohol.When it feels really hard to make a different choice, our primitive brains, that part of our brain that’s just wanting to keep us alive, just really starts to go into overdrive.We can start to let it take over and run the show, and then it’s all drama, it’s all horror, it’s all, “This is terrible. It’s too hard, I can’t do it,” and then before we know it, we’re back in our old patterns of avoiding our emotions and numbing out of our life with alcohol.I want to talk to you about what to do when the journey of change really feeling challenging.When you’re doing all of the things: examining your thoughts and beliefs, processing your urges and your negative emotions, you’re doing the thought work, you’re deciding to drink from a conscious decision instead of an unconscious automatic one, you’re taking care of yourself personally by moving your body more, getting as much rest as you can and choosing healthier foods and it is still just hard.We often think like, “I thought by this point, it should be easier.” We start thinking, “Something’s going wrong. It shouldn’t be this hard. It’s easier for other people. I wish it were that easy for me. Look at that girl, she’s drinking wine all the time and look how good she has it. It’s not fair. Why do I have to suck at making this easy? Everyone else seems to be thinking this is easy and it’s still not for me. I’ve been at this a long time. It shouldn’t require so much mental effort anymore. I shouldn’t have to work so hard at this. It’s really discouraging that this seems so challenging still. I don’t know if I can keep this up forever.”These are the stories that our brain offers us. Oftentimes my clients will say, “I don’t want to have to live like this forever. I want to be able to just not want it. I want to be able to have a drink every once in a while and not go off the deep end.And those are our thoughts about our experience of doing what it takes to exit the drinking life and make alcohol a small and irrelevant part of our lives.We think we’re just telling it like it is, “Like it is hard. I’m just being real. I’m just telling the truth. I’m just sharing what it’s like for me,” but in actuality what we’re doing is we’re stacking the pain, we’re stacking the discomfort and the difficulty and the challenge. We’re stacking the resistance and making the experience of changing what you drink even more uncomfortable with the way that we’re thinking about it.So many of us believe life with less or no alcohol in it is too hard or not something that we can sustain.And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while or if you’ve known you needed to exit the life of drinking, over-drinking, shame, and regret for a while and you just haven’t been doing it, I’m talking to you.We just have this idea of like, “It’s going to be too hard,” or “There’s going to be a right time to do it,” or “I just need to get through this difficult period, then I’m going to be able to focus on it.”But what’s actually too hard to sustain is doing all of the things that help us change what we drink while thinking terrible feeling thoughts about ourselves our lives, our bodies, and the process of exiting the drinking.Focusing on what we’re missing out on and how other people are responding to us making this change all of that.It’s the way that we are choosing to interpret the journey that causing the true pain and suffering.One way of approaching this is encouraging yourself to say yes to the process, to all of it.It kind of reminds me of being pregnant. Saying yes to the entire experience.The morning sickness, the tiredness, the extra weight, the mood swings, the moving growing human inside of us.How about that? Say yes to the entire process saying yes to the process, especially the hard parts.For those of you who’ve never been pregnant. Think of a time in your life when you signed on for something. Something you know would involve saying yes to the sucky parts as well as the wonderful parts.This is how I like to think about doing hard things.But….let’s just talk about it in the framework of exiting the drinking life. Ending that over-drinking cycle. I truly do get it. I’ve been on it, in it. I tried changing what I drank for 7 years. Trust me, I get it.”But this is the way I believe committing to and saying yes to the entire process is a really great way to thinking about it. A way that can really serve you when it feels hard.Imagine you’ve signed on to get your Masters. You’re there for the degrees. You know you’re going to have to take some classes that you really aren’t going to like it because it’s part of the program. It’s just how it is. You take a certain number of classes every semester or maybe you’re just taking it, one class, at a time…..And your current class might be allowing urges. Last semester maybe you took Examining Your Beliefs  and maybe you took Fully Dialing in on your emotions.So if you were taking these classes to get your Master’s Degree would you expect it to be easy?Most people wouldn’t go into this journey of getting their Master’s Degrees and believe or think things like “What do you mean this is challenging?I thought this was just going to be something I was going to completely coast through.Like I’m completely shocked. Why is this so hard? Why isn’t it getting easier? I mean, Gosh, now I’m doing this thing and this seems hard too. Now I’m in this class, this class seems even harder than the classes I took last semester.”They get harder as you go along sometimes. Of course, we would expect it to be hard. We would, of course, expect ourselves to work hard.Most people go into this thinking and believing “Okay, this is the real deal. Like I’m going to have to buckle down. I’m going to really have to make sure I focus and study.”What if that was the way you approached your exit journey. As though nothing was going wrong when it was hard? When allowing urges is hard, you’re like, “Yes,” yes to this, because you know why? Because I want the results of being in control of alcohol instead of it being in control of me.Yes, I really want to master trusting myself to figure this out. I want to untangle the beliefs and thoughts keeping me stuck. I want to achieve my goal of exiting the drinking life, ending the love-hate relationship I have with myself.This journey is not one you can “cheat the system” with. You can’t sneak your way through the course or copy your neighbor to get the end results you want. In order to exit the drinking life for good, to make alcohol small and irrelevant, you have to say yes to the hard work. Yes to all of it.You have to say yes to the days when your urges are pretty easy to process and they’re pretty mild and they’re really not that strong and yes to the days where they feel super intense.You have to say yes to the days where you are so restless and all you want to do is drink wine to calm your body down and yes to the days where it was really a great day and it was really pretty easy and things were simple for you.You have to say yes to having your thoughts totally dialed in and yes, to create a creatively constructed plan to attend an event in order to stay with your plan of not consuming alcohol. Probably extremely uncomfortable the first time, maybe even the 2nd, or 3rd time but you commit to making it work because of the end result you want.You have to say yes to getting enough sleep when you can and yes to sleepless nights and exhaustion the next day. By saying yes to all of it, we’re dropping the resistance, we’re dropping the belief that something is going wrong and then it should be different than it is.It shouldn’t be any different than it is.The belief that it should be different, it should be easier, it shouldn’t be so challenging is what’s making it so much more challenging.It’s the opposite of what we think.We think we’re just telling the truth, but if it was supposed to be different, it would be different.It’s not different, it is exactly how it should be.In fact, the harder it is, the more of an amazing accomplishment it is on the other side when you’ve achieved it.The more chances you have to evolve as a human being into your highest and best self.This is how you really grow.Think about how great it will feel when you’ve come through this class.Like you’ve gone through this process, this program. You’re going to come out on the other end feeling so accomplished, but this opportunity is only there for you if you say yes to the experience.What many of you do is you take a couple of classes or maybe you start your first class and then you’re just like, “This seems hard. I’m just going to back out of it. This isn’t a good time. I can’t focus on this.” And then you have to start again. Your credits don’t transfer. You have to start all over again.Some of you make it to the second semester, senior year, and then you go, “You know what? Forget it,” and then you have to start at the beginning again, and that’s completely fine, but just recognize what you’re doing when it’s the second semester, senior year and you’re just going, “Yeah, screw it.” You’re not saying yes to the experience. The key is to make this journey feel “less hard” is to say yes to the easy and the hard, the wins and the losses, the failures upon failures, the mistakes upon mistakes. It’s all part of the process.Besides saying yes, what else can we do to keep ourselves going forward in the face of incredible challenges?Sometimes it’s really, really hard.Things are happening in your life or you’re trucking along and now there are some significant challenges. Maybe you’ve had the loss of a close family member or friend, maybe it’s something really big that is happening. Maybe you’re having a big relationship change. Maybe there’s some big-time stuff happening at work and it’s so easy then to be like, “I can’t take on one more thing. I barely was holding it together with this drinking less thing anyway. I’m just going to have to take a break,” and you know what taking a break means, it means just getting in the way back.Another tool you can use when you catch yourself wanting to break away and quit moving towards your desired outcome is to bring the focus back to just this one present moment. The easiest way to do that is to focus on your breath.Truly focus on it. Bring your mind to your breath and let yourself notice right where you are right then. When we are in the “I can’t take it any long” mindset, we’ve taking our focus too far out into the future. We’re projecting the worst case in our heads, even if we aren’t saying it out loud.By bringing yourself to your own breath, this brings you into the current, present moment.Because when it’s hard we can tend to catastrophes about the challenge.We think, “Well today was really hard, so there’s no way I’m going to be able to keep this up long term,” or “This whole week has been hard,” or “This whole month has been hard. There’s no way I’m going to be able to keep this up on going.” “I can’t see myself being able to do this month after month, week after week.” “I don’t know how I’m going to hold it together while I’m on vacation,” or through the holidays or over the summer or whatever is a challenge.What I want to offer to you is that you don’t have to entertain any of those concerns in your head. They seem really important and necessary to think about, but I promise you, you really don’t. All you need to think about is what you’re going to do today.And when your brain tells you it’s too hard and you’ll never be able to keep it up, you can just agree with this.That’s again saying, yes, you’re not it, you’re not going, “Oh, I shouldn’t be thinking that I’m not going to be able to keep it up,” instead going, “Yeah, maybe I won’t be able to keep it up forever, but I will keep it up today.”That is saying yes to the hardship and the difficulty. It’s acknowledging your experience and not asking yourself to think any differently about the future. You’re not saying that the way that you’re thinking about it as wrong or that it ought to be different. Instead, you’re just reminding yourself that you don’t have to make any of those decisions today.Some people will say, “We'll wait, if I decide that I’m not going to really drink anymore, seriously, I’m not going to like have a champagne toast at my daughter’s wedding?” Well, considering that she’s three right now, we probably don’t need to worry about it. It’s probably not something that you have to decide on right now, but your brain is going to go to that. Like, “What about this? What about that? You’re never going to have this. What if you go to Italy, you’re not going to have any wine?” I don’t need to know. I don’t need to decide that today. When that opportunity and that experience arises, I will make the best decision for myself for that day.Many of us talk about living in the present and all you have is the present moment. And there’s a lot of truth to that, and we can apply that to our experience of changing what we are drinking too.because so much of what feels the most uncomfortable is when we’re looking into the future and creating a story of how awful it’s going to be and/or when we look to the past and we tell ourselves a story of how awful and horrible and difficult it was and uncomfortable. And then we project that into the future and go, “Well, that’s exactly how it’s going to be. I wasn’t able to keep it up then so I won’t be able to keep it up in the future as well.”This way you don’t have to resist your experience so much. You say yes to today. Today is an unplanned day. The end. That is what you’re doing. Combine saying yes to all of it, the whole experience, to dropping the resistance and then to just committing to doing what you said you were going to do today and knowing that you don’t need to worry about the rest of that. When your brain offers up, “What about this? What about that? What am I going to do here? What am I going to have then?” Just remember, “I don’t need to decide that right now. I will decide when it’s necessary for me to decide that.”This is huge, huge stuff. Really, really helpful.Remember to get that Jumpstart your Exit Guide by heading to <a href="https://www.jumpseatcoaching.com/Jumpstart">JumpseatCoaching.com/jumpstart.</a>Right now EXIT & Beyond Life Coaching Membership is not accepting new members but we will be opening up again the first week of January. The best way to make sure you are notified when we are accepting members again is to get on my email list. By getting your own Jumpstart Guide you will be added to my email list. PLUS the Jumpstart Guide will get you going on your own unique exit journey.Have a wonderful week and I will talk to you very soon. Take care of bye-bye.

When It Feels Really, Really Hard to Drink Less or Stop

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“Aging Flipped” is where we flip the script on all the things we believe are true about aging, alcohol’s role in our lives, ADHD, and what’s possible after you turn 50. Your host Debi Talbert, certified Mindset & Alcohol Freedom Coach, is a Baby Boomer on a mission to break the stigma she grew up with around, ADHD, Rethinking Alcohol, and Aging. 
Song credit:
Songwriters: A.Rochelle Harper and Gary Boz Boswell (c)2008 ASCAP
Link to the song - https://www.reverbnation.com/rochelleharpermusic/song/32838351-anything-is-possible-when-you-believe

Aging Flipped - Breaking The Stigma around ADHD, Aging & Rethinking Alcohol

Ever feel like cutting back on alcohol is an uphill battle? You're not alone, and Debi Talbert gets it. In this episode of 'Aging Flipped', Debi, a certified Mindset & Alcohol Freedom Coach, dives into why it's so tough to change our drinking habits and offers some solid advice on how to make it through. She talks about the mental roadblocks we hit and why it’s normal to struggle.Debi's approach is all about understanding your thoughts and feelings without beating yourself up. She believes that accepting the hard parts of this journey is key to success. And guess what? She’s got practical tools to help you stay present and focused, like using your breath to calm those overwhelming emotions. If you're trying to drink less or quit altogether, this episode is packed with insights to help you stay on track.Tune in for some real talk and useful tips from someone who’s been there and knows how to get through it.

Debi Talbert - Mindset & Alcohol Freedom Coach

Debi@JumpseatCoaching.com (Debi Talbert - certified This Naked Mind Life Coach)

When It Feels Really, Really Hard to Drink Less or Stop

When It Feels Really, Really Hard to Drink Less or Stop

When It Feels Really, Really Hard to Drink Less or Stop

Thursday 3rd December 2020

About this podcast

Aging Flipped - Breaking The Stigma around ADHD, Aging & Rethinking Alcohol

Overcoming the Struggles of Changing Drinking Habits with Debi Talbert