Challenging Normal

In this episode we look at challenging what's "normal" when it comes to alcohol in our life and work to push back on society's norms and expectations surrounding it on our alcohol-free or cutback journey. 

This week's journal prompt - Write down your thoughts on this once you listen to the episode. What do I want my normal to look like? Take away any excuses, reservations, etc. and just ask yourself "What do I want my normal to look like?" What's optimal for you? What's ideal? Frame it however you want, but think about it. Journal on it. 

What do I want my normal to look like? 

Transcript

Untitled

​[00:00:00]

Kevin: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Reframeable podcast, a podcast that brings you people's stories and ideas about how we can work to reframe our relationship, not just with alcohol, but with stress, anxiety, relationships, enjoyment, and so much more.

Because changing our relationship with alcohol is about so much more than changing the contents of our glass. This podcast is brought to you by the Reframe app. Reframe is the number one iOS app to help you cut back or quit drinking alcohol. It uses neuroscience to reframe your relationship with alcohol and unlock the healthiest, happiest you.

My name is Kevin Bellack. I'm a certified professional recovery coach and the head of coaching at the Reframe app. 

In today's episode, I want to talk about being normal. This has been on my mind lately for various reasons, and I want to take a moment and just challenge this word and potentially others like it.

First off, Normal is bullshit. [00:01:00] Yeah, I said it. Um, and the definition of normal is very different from person to person, right? Maybe one person bases their thoughts on this more on traditional basis, where others may be more open to changing their thoughts more quickly with new information. But saying something is "normal", I'm using quotes there, doesn't mean that the thing, whatever it is, is ideal or something that we should accept in our own lives. Think about when we get blood work done and we look and to see if we fall in the, in a normal range. And even if we do fall in that range, that doesn't mean that it is ideal or healthy, and it definitely doesn't mean those results are necessarily optimal still.

It just means we fall into or not into a range of average healthy adults for the same test. Generally speaking though, normal is relative to the times. But the times change and so do people's definitions of normal. [00:02:00] Uh, a good example here is smoking. It was normal just a few decades ago to smoke in airplanes, restaurants, cars, offices, et cetera. Go search for old cigarette ads and look how many of them include doctors talking about their favorite brands. The marketing strategy here being that if doctors smoke them, they must be okay. Right? 

How about seat belts? It was normal not to wear seat belts and not have your car annoy you until you put it on. The first seatbelt laws in America were passed in New York in the eighties and at a time when only 14% of the US regularly wore them. Fast forward 30 plus years and around 90% of Americans buckle up, if not more now that the cars have that annoying beeping if you don't. 

Same thing with car seats. Those weren't a thing for a long time and now they're mandatory.

My car seat growing up was sitting in between my three older brothers and them all leaning into me from both sides, defying the laws [00:03:00] of physics around every turn just to mess with me. Or me riding in the middle of the front seat. While that might have been fun for me to steer the car on occasion, I think we can all agree that protecting ourselves and our kids is a good change.

Which brings me to alcohol and all the ways we look at this.

It might be that we start on the path to addressing our own drinking and start beating ourselves up and ask, why can't we just be normal? But we have to ask ourselves, what is normal drinking? Is that drinking the way we did five years ago? Is that drinking only on the weekends? Is that not having more than X number of drinks?

Is that drinking the way our one friend does? What normal are we searching for? If you look at TV and movies, normal is usually drinking without consequences because they have it in many scenes, but rarely show the real effects of alcohol unless it's important to the story, then it's usually a cautionary tale.

They say we are the average [00:04:00] of the five people that we spend the most time with. Because of that, this is typically what we see as normal in our day-to-day lives. And in order to change our normal, we have to branch out and find new people, or we have to be able to handle being different. We have to handle being abnormal at least for a period of time till we get comfortable or until others change. 

So we start down this road and potentially worry about the fact that we aren't quote unquote normal. And then we are in situations where we might be challenged with good meaning people with normal good meaning suggestions, like, "why can't you just have one tonight?"

Or telling us that, oh, you don't have a problem, you're fine. You drink like everyone else. It's normal to be confronted with these because as we state time and time again, alcohol is the only drug that you have to justify not consuming.

It is that normalized and it is that ubiquitous in our society today. 

Let's throw one more angle into the mix, and [00:05:00] that's the one where people who are sober, who are working on themselves, who are alcohol free, who are sober curious, who are moderating, whatever the case may be, that they'll call. Certain people Normies.

And this refers to people who others think can handle their alcohol. Maybe those who they think can have a drink and stop with no problems. And of course, the problem I have with this term is that it paints a black and white picture. It paints people who are normal and people who are abnormal, people who can drink and people who can't drink.

And as we have stated, time and time again, it's not that simple. But making it that simple, only further normalizes alcohol use in society. It only helps mask the real problem, which is that alcohol is a drug that impacts our bodies. Whether you have one a day, one drink a day, or 10, yes, less is better, but we have to ask ourselves what we want our normal to look like.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not anti [00:06:00] drinker. And with that, I mean I don't think everyone should stop drinking or or anything like that. Everyone's free to make their own decisions about what they do in their own life. People can make their own decisions about whether they drink, how much, if they smoke, if they eat too much sugar, like too many Swedish fish like I like to do and so on.

But one thing I want you to challenge, one thing I want you to reframe in your life is this perception of what's normal when it comes to alcohol. Because much like when people say, Am I an alcoholic? Is the wrong question to ask. Also, beating yourself up and wondering why we can't drink quote unquote normally is also the wrong question.

We should be challenging the normal things in our life and asking whether or not it's the optimal thing. If it's the way we want it to show up. Because chances are, if you're listening to this at some point, alcohol has shown up in your life in a way that you haven't [00:07:00] liked, to put it simply. And, and if we look around, it's easy to find people that drink the same as we do, but that doesn't mean that that works for them. Or that it works for us. And I say that doesn't mean it works for them because we don't know what's going on in their heads. Just because someone drinks a certain way doesn't mean that they don't question their own drinking. Even if all outward signs point to them, having it all together, everything under control and all that, that doesn't mean they too aren't questioning how this or anything else is showing up in their life.

So we shouldn't just assume we know what other people are thinking. 

In her book Mindset, Dr. Carol Dweck talks about the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, and about how people with a fixed mindset think their qualities are carved in stone. It creates this urgency to prove ourselves over and over again because if we think we only [00:08:00] have a certain amount of intelligence, for instance, then we better prove that we have a healthy dose of it.

Time and time again. Whereas the growth mindset is based on the belief that our basic qualities are things that we can cultivate through efforts, strategies, and help from others. We can accept setbacks and look around at ways to improve. In the book, she talks about students and, and different reactions to a bad grade, depending on whether they have a fixed or a growth mindset.

When they had a poor grade on the test, that they all took those with a fixed mindset, said they wouldn't bother studying harder for the next test because why bother? And they looked at people who did worse than them in order to repair their self-esteem.

Well, at least I'm not that bad. Whereas those with a growth mindset looked at the tests of those who were scoring higher than they did and asked what did they do that I didn't do? How can I learn from them and get better for the next test?

And what she found in her studies is that in general, [00:09:00] no one just has it. People have to work to expand their knowledge, and everyone can have a growth mindset. When you tell yourself that you don't know how to do something or that you can't do something, it's important to not forget the yet. Meaning you may not know how to do something yet, but that doesn't mean that you're fixed in that place forever. As we learn more and more each day through neuroplasticity, our brains can change. 

So why do I bring this up? What does the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset matter in this discussion?

I bring it up because it's normal to have a fixed mindset when we are struggling with a decision and, and we appear to be going against the grain of what normal is, but just because we might be in the normal range of those around us doesn't mean it's optimal. It doesn't mean that that's where we want to stay, and it's okay to challenge what is normal.

It's okay to grow and challenge what seems to be a fact these days that a hangover is just a normal thing that we deal with. And I'm [00:10:00] not just singling out hangovers, but let's talk about that. We should challenge all the products that come out that say they can cure hangovers and things like that. There are no miracle cures or pills you can take, and things like the hair of the dog and sweating outta a hangover through exercise are just not real solutions. By having a drink, all you're doing is increasing your blood alcohol level and pushing off the hangover till another time, and to exercise and dehydrate your body further and add additional stress to it on top of the alcohol is not a healthy way to treat withdrawal from this drug ethanol.

And I bring these up as yet another example of what can be normal or normalized when it comes to alcohol. 

So all this is to say screw normal, uh, and ask yourself how do you feel when you drink more than you wanted to, regardless of whether you drank the same amount as everyone else because nobody else wakes up with your hangover.

Nobody else feels your anxiety, or any other reasons why you are looking to [00:11:00] address alcohol's role in your life. And while I came home from work and would pour myself a drink like many other people, I knew for me personally that it had become a full on crutch to help me through stressful times, it became the only tool in my toolkit.

I knew this was normal to do, but the more and more I did it, the more of a nagging feeling I got that this was nowhere near optimal, that this isn't how I wanted to live my life.

And forget optimal. I wasn't. I wasn't even, I was optimal, was so far away. This just wasn't how I wanted to show up in my life. This wasn't what I wanted my normal to be. 

And they say, The younger generations like millennials and Gen Z are drinking less than previous ones like my Gen X and older. Uh, and more and more studies come out routinely about the negative effects of even a little bit of alcohol as well.

According to the American Cancer Society guideline for diet and physical activity for cancer prevention that came out [00:12:00] in 2020, it is best not to drink alcohol, period. They said People who choose to drink alcohol should limit their intake to no more than two drinks per day for men and one drink a day for women.

Fast forward to the more recent Canadian guidelines that just came out, which said there is a continuum of risk associated with weekly alcohol use where the risk of harm is as follows, and that's zero drinks per week. They say not drinking has benefits such as better health and better sleep. Two standard drinks or less per week, you are likely to avoid alcohol related consequences for yourself or others at this level.

And that's two standard drinks per week or less. Three to six standard drinks per week and your risk of developing several types of cancer, including breast and colon cancer, increases at this level. Seven standard drinks or more per week. And your risk of heart disease or stroke increases significantly.

And they state [00:13:00] that each additional standard drink radically increases the risk of alcohol related consequences. 

So normal is changing. Again, as we see, it may not be changing as fast as some of us would like. It may not be changing in our everyday interactions, but we can look around and see that it is changing or we can bury our head in the sand and look at others and say, well, at least it's not, I'm not as bad as they are.

But in the end, it's about getting comfortable with the choices we make for ourselves. Leaning on our own reasons to change and asking what do I want my normal to look like? 

So I leave you with that question. That's your journal prompt for today. What do I want my normal to look like? And, and take away all of the excuses, all of the things that we, I can't do this because of these people. I can't do that because of this. Take away all the excuses. What do you want your normal to look like? What's, what's optimal for you? What's ideal? You know, frame it [00:14:00] however you want, but think about it. Journal on it. What do I want my normal to look like? 

Thank you everyone for listening to this week's episode of the Reframeable podcast, brought to you by the Reframe app.

Reframe is the number one iOS app to help you cut back or quit drinking alcohol. It uses neuroscience to reframe your relationship with alcohol and unlock the healthiest, happiest you. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with those that you feel may benefit from it. My name is Kevin Bellack and I want to thank you again for listening and be sure to come back next week for another episode.

Have a great day.