Can you actually enjoy wine without going overboard? That's the question I've been obsessed with for the past years, working with amazing women on their journeys with alcohol.
This episode is all about mindful drinking and moderation. Is it a myth? Let's find out!
Join me as I share some eye-opening research on how our brains can actually CHANGE (neuroplasticity, anyone?). This means we can rewire our drinking habits for the better.
We'll also dive into:
This is an informative exploration of whether mindful drinking can be your reality. Tune in and see if it could work for you!
Are you ready to drink 95% less in 30 days without committing to the nevers, forevers, and always so you can have more time and freedom to create a life that you love? Fill out this brief application to schedule a free 30-minute call.
Love the show? Leave a 5-star review, and let me know what hit home for you.
Find me on Instagram @camille_kinzler and leave me a DM!
Can you actually enjoy wine without going overboard? That's the question I've been obsessed with for the past years, working with amazing women on their journeys with alcohol.
This episode is all about mindful drinking and moderation. Is it a myth? Let's find out!
Join me as I share some eye-opening research on how our brains can actually CHANGE (neuroplasticity, anyone?). This means we can rewire our drinking habits for the better.
We'll also dive into:
This is an informative exploration of whether mindful drinking can be your reality. Tune in and see if it could work for you!
Are you ready to drink 95% less in 30 days without committing to the nevers, forevers, and always so you can have more time and freedom to create a life that you love? Fill out this brief application to schedule a free 30-minute call.
Love the show? Leave a 5-star review, and let me know what hit home for you.
Find me on Instagram @camille_kinzler and leave me a DM!
Have you ever wondered if mindful drinking or drinking in moderation is actually something obtainable? Maybe you currently drink and just want to drink less and quote unquote moderation, or maybe you've quit drinking for a while and you've thought, Hmm, I wonder if I could go back to drinking, but at a normal level. Well, this episode is for you because we'll dive into the research about mindful drinking. And then I'll share my personal experience with working with women for the past six years, as well as my own personal experience around moderation. So see you in the episode. Even though my clients, close friends, and family knew I was 95 percent alcohol free after five years of zero alcohol, I didn't announce it on social media, nor did I promote moderation as part of my mentorship coaching program. And I'll go why that is later on in this program, but in short, the reason why I didn't share that I drink again after so many years of not drinking. Is because I was afraid my experience was specific to me and that I'd unknowingly cause harm to others if I started talking about mindful drinking or drinking again after a long period of not, then I realized something even more important. If I didn't share what I had learned through my medical experience, through intensive research, through intensive study, through experience, not only my experience, but working with hundreds of women throughout the years, then I was really doing a true disservice. Because what I know to be true is that people feel ashamed and they feel like they have the secret that they can't tell somebody else if they're drinking more than they want to, or if they quit drinking and then they start drinking again. They're like, what does that mean about me? People think that. That they're royal screw ups. If they make a mistake, if they trip up, if they slip, if they fall, and when you think they didn't believe that you're a royal screw up, then you will fall back into old cycles and behaviors. It's just the way it goes. And so I truly believe that I'm put on this earth to. Offer love and acceptance and also to guide people to be more conscious decision makers to be more aware and present within each and every moment, but then also to connect more with what is their higher good. Like who is the person they were put on this earth to be, and that takes trial and error. It is supposed to be fun, right? It's supposed to be fun. So yes, it's my mission and it's my design for all of you human design dorks out there. Um, my human design is a one three. I am the investigator discoverer. So that third line, the discoverer, the discovery piece means that I learn best through personal experiences and that I really struggle to follow advice, but I gather this information and then I bring it back to people through my personal experience. So if somebody tells me that the stove is hot, then I'll be the first to touch it because I need to know for myself. I'm sure that I was a great kid to have. But this does mean that I'm a great coach and mentor because I preach and I practice. I practice what I preach. And not only have I studied all of this in great detail, I also use it in my own life. And with my clients. So as a medical provider, I've read an extensive amount of medical research around what's called non abstinence recovery. I've studied how the brain changes on a cellular and structural level through a study called neuroplasticity and the more esoteric side of habit change. And that is through living a life more aligned with our true souls mission. And of course I do all of this working one on one with my clients. So in today's episode, I'll share with you from my personal experience and also the literature on non abstinence recovery or moderation, mindful drinking, or whatever you want to call it, what I've learned. And I'll let you decide what is best for you. And as always, there are two options to talk with me. One is this 30 minute call where basically we see if we're a good fit for long term coaching and mentorship. Or if you want a one off, then I have a one off option where we meet for an hour and a half where we really dive into the questions of, Can I moderate my drinking or should I do long term abstinence or Whatever your questions may be, we really sit down and formulate a plan and that 90 minute period. So those are those two options. Always go to my show notes and that's how you can find how to work with me. So let's imagine here, guys, let's imagine that we have three doors, one door. Behind door number one is where you have all of the negative side effects of drinking. You drink more than you want, you're thinking about drinking all the time, you wake up in the middle of the night worried about life, you have anxiety in the morning, you generally feel like crap due to alcohol. And through door number two, you don't drink at all and you never will ever be able to drink again. Then, you have door number three. And this is where you have all the benefits from drinking and none of the consequences. That's where most people who overdrink think of, like, the quote unquote normal drinker. You can take it or leave it, you can have one drink, maybe you have four, but you don't really ever feel like crap and, you don't have any of the negative consequences. Everyone wants door number three. Where you can have your cake and eat it too, where you can make your martini and drink it too. This is the land of moderation. So, what is moderation anyway? Have you ever created limits to your drinking? These self imposed rules and boundaries. Have you ever said things like, I'm going to drink water between glasses of white, or I'm only going to drink on Friday and Saturday night, or I'm never going to drink during the school day or the work week, I'm never going to have more than one glass, only to find you break your self imposed rules? Well, then chances are you've tried to moderate your drinking. And chances are, if you're here listening to this, it hasn't worked. Well, it hasn't worked yet. Simply put, the reason why it's so hard to change your habits by instilling these stricter rules to the game, by putting these parameters on your drinking, is because your brain hates change. Your brain loves automation and repetition. Your brain has this highway system that's put in place. You are hardwired to move through life the same way Day after day, your brain sets off these alarms in your mind and your body by thoughts and physical sensations so that you feel uncomfortable enough to repeat the habit. Anytime that your brain senses that you're deviating off the beaten path, it's going to start sending these thoughts and these uncomfortable sensations in your body saying, do the dang thing that you always do. The thoughts that you might have that you may be familiar with is, I deserve a drink. I can always start again tomorrow. I can just have one. I don't really have a problem. People are way worse than I am. And physical sensations can be like the stomach feels like it's in knots or maybe some tension in the body or emotionally you could feel irritable or annoyed or kind of an excited feeling, but this is why it's so hard to change a habit or routine. Your brain is so used to a certain pathway that forging a new one takes effort, but you change the brain through what's called neuroplasticity. And that is what got you into this mess, and that is the same thing that will get you out of this mess. And we'll talk a little bit more about neuroplasticity later on in this episode. And even when you don't drink daily, but maybe it's just weekly, maybe it's on a Friday night, your brain has a very accurate alarm clock. And it will set off this alarm. Every Friday, or every time that you go to a certain restaurant, or every time that you meet up with a certain friend, your body will send off this alarm to do the habit. This works in so many other areas of our life. That's why I feel like this podcast is meant for anyone who is trying to break a habit, or start a new one. Because, does anyone have those sugar cravings at the same time , every evening? That is your alarm system going off, and you have to intentionally change the neural networks in your brain in order to change, in order to even moderate. And we'll talk about methods about how to do this later on in the episode as well, but let's get into neuroplasticity or actually let's go into a few vocabulary words that I don't typically use. I want to define those so you guys are familiar with them because like I said, I don't typically use these words. But when we're looking at. Recovery. And we're looking at recovery as it relates to alcohol. The term means reduction from high risk drinking. It doesn't mean abstinence. It just means reduction from high risk drinking. I'll define high risk drinking later too. Alcohol use disorder is a medical condition characterized by impaired ability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social occupational or health consequences. So that's alcohol use disorder. Non abstinence drinking and recovery is the reduction of alcohol from heavy alcohol use to low alcohol use. So let's go ahead and define what heavy alcohol use is for women. Heavy alcohol use for women is considered seven or more drinks per week, seven or more drinks per week. Okay. And no more than two drinks in one sitting. So if you're having three drinks in one sitting, that's considered heavy alcohol use. Or heavy drinking. So ladies, remember a glass of wine is five ounces. So if you're having two, seven ounce glasses of wine a night, every night of the week, then that is considered a heavy drinker. Okay? So let's define neuroplasticity. So neuroplasticity is your brain's ability to change its function and physical structure based on life experiences. Y'all, it's based on life experiences. Our brain changes based on the repeated behaviors, thoughts and emotions that we have. I talk about this all the time. Habit goes way beyond behavior. It is our thoughts and our emotions. When our thoughts and our emotions are habituated, which they are, they change our brain and they change the neural pathways in our brain. This is Dr. Joe Dispenza's work. He was so ahead of his time. The research has now caught up and the research shows that you can create healthy patterns and boundaries with alcohol, that new paths can be forged. This is neuroplasticity. It is what allows people to change their behavior and establish healthy patterns. And the moment that you decide to change your lifestyle and the moment you decide to change your thoughts and your emotions and you're working through them is the moment that you are developing a new healthier habit and the brain changes. It creates these new neural pathways. And when you create a new neural pathway, it reinforces the new habit. And when this new habit is repeated over and over, the pathway gets stronger. And the pathway of the old harmful habit will weaken since it's not being reinforced. And one systematic review, a growing number of studies indicate that at least some alcohol use disorder induced brain changes. And the changes in thinking, feeling, and behavior that accompanied them can improve and possibly reverse with months of abstinence. And we'll talk about the reason why that's important later. The study also demonstrates that the majority of people with alcohol use disorder can reduce their drinking and alcohol related problems over time. With studies showing a reliable pattern of improvement that counters views that alcohol use disorder as an inevitable worsening disorder is false. Even patients in recovery who have some period of heavy drinking following alcohol treatment may reduce their consumption and I'll call related problems by more than half. A substantial improvement that can be maintained for many years after treatment. The main takeaway here, guys, is treatment and treatment can mean many different things to many different people, but. To me, what that means is that you need to break. It's a treatment to break your addiction to your habits, thoughts, and emotions. If you start thinking and feeling differently, you start living differently. So, any time that you're thinking about what would be best for you to change your drinking patterns, I really want you to focus on what would be best to help me change the way that I think and believe, the emotions that I have and the attachments that I have to those thoughts and beliefs. And if you guys want to dive more into The research on this, then you can look up terms like non abstinence, drinking or recovery, and then use the word scholar after that. And a bunch of studies will come up. And also in the research, it showed a couple of examples of what makes it harder to moderate your drinking. And It suggested that people with negative emotional states who always live on the negative side of their emotion will have a harder time moderating their drinking because they will drink and over drink to cope with those negative emotional states if you are stress sensitive. So that means that you can't handle what's considered normal amounts of stress if you're very sensitive to that, or if you live in a very high stressed state all the time due to your work life, your environment, your home life. Another thing that can make it harder to moderate is untreated anxiety, or if you self medicate with alcohol to cope with mood symptoms like anxiety or depression, this can be a lot easier to slip back into your old patterns. It also increases your risk of developing alcohol use disorder. So a couple of other things is people with severe dependence or with lifetime dependence on alcohol. It's harder to moderate their drinking and neither of those two things were defined, but I think we can all extrapolate what that means. So this is the good part, right? So what strategies can we use to help prevent us from returning to heavy drinking? So to be more mindful drinking. And the biggest one here, guys, is management of stress. And I have a training inside my program that looks at the cascade of high cortisol and how it affects systems in the body. It affects our sex hormones. So anyone out there with perimenopause and is saying that my hormones are all out of whack. We have to look at what cortisol is doing first before we can start really looking at the way to work with our hormones. But anyway, that's all part of the program. If you want to dive deeper, come and talk to me about that. But stress and negative mood. Okay. This is just, I mean, I can't highlight this enough. I've been stressing it a lot and the importance of really changing what our emotional status and being extremely self aware of that. Because if we can learn to be emotionally intelligent and change our negative state, when we see it happening, this will decrease our cravings and over drinking. Okay. Well, we can control our stress and negative mood. Now, some stress is normal. I think that stress is getting a bad rap. It makes it seem like any stress is bad stress, but some stress gets us out of bed in the morning, right? Some stress gets us to finish our jobs. Some stress gets us, to take care of our kids or take our dog for a walk, right? But it's when the stress is not managed, when we have high stress states, when we don't need to, or want to have it. And when I work with women one on one, the beginning of every session is stress management strategies. It's the most important thing that I feel that across the board helps us in all areas of our life. Another strategy is recognizing your cycle of drinking. So connecting the dots, does that negative mood cause you to drink more? Or drink more frequently? And also, does your negative mood, then you drinking because of the negative mood cause you to have more of a negative mood like this is so important for mindfulness. If you want to be mindfulness in your drinking, you have to be mindfulness in your life. It will not work. Otherwise, if you only try to be mindfulness around your drinking, you're missing the whole point because you'll never recognize mindfulness in other areas, mindfulness around your mood, mindfulness around how other people affect you, mindfulness about how having a bad day at work leads to you to want to drink or some negative relationship that you're having is causing you to want to drink. You have to be mindful in all areas for this to actually work. We have to learn how to handle urges to drink. I had podcast episode about how to catch yourself before you go into the craving or before you give into the craving. It's really important for us to learn how to handle our urges to ride the wave. I have like three or four different options about how to ride the wave or handle cravings within my program. But actually, I think I'm going to have a podcast episode just specifically about that in the next couple of weeks. And again, this is not just about alcohol, right? It's how do we handle cravings to want to react to our spouse? Or how do we handle a craving for wanting to eat sugar? Or, um, but how do we handle Other urges in our life that may not be beneficial to us in the moment. So I'll have a podcast episode on that. I think that'd be really fun. So, keep an eye out for that. Maybe I'll even have it next time. And how to recover from a drinking episode. So, yeah, let's say you do drink and you weren't planning on drinking or weren't planning on drinking that much. Like, why do you say to yourself, I have a really good friend who is also in this coaching space and she says that alcohol use disorder isn't a drinking problem. It's a thinking problem. And I love how she states that because it really is. It's like, what do you say to yourself after you drink? How do you treat yourself? Do you think, do you say things to yourself? Like, I'm just such a horrible person. I'll never be able to change. This is just who I am. My life sucks only because I drink. I feel this bad only because I drink. I'm not working out only because I drink. Those are all reasons to keep you stuck in the bottle, stuck in your cycle. But if you can learn to think differently, then you can learn to drink differently. I don't know if she's coined that, that phrase, but I think it is so good. Currently drinking, I would suggest you start mapping out your alarm signals, right? So what time of day do you think about drinking? What are the thoughts and sensations that you have around it? What's going on in your environment? What's going on in your mood? You can create a spreadsheet so you can get really. Interested in what is going on in your body. Like how do the interactions that you have affect your urges to want to drink? Being self aware is the first step of healing. Self awareness is the first step of healing. Now, what do I believe about moderation and mindful drinking? Do I think it's obtainable? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Do I think it takes a lot of energy in the beginning? Yes, I do. Do I think that energy is worth it? No, I don't. I think for most people. We're trying to choose the third door where we can drink without any of the negative side effects. But here's the deal, if we are drinking the same way that we have always drank, and then we're just trying to moderate, then we're going to have these moments where we're drinking too much or where we just can't maintain moderation. It's going to be this ebb and flow. We haven't created this new positive neural network that's strong enough, I believe, to really hold us when we're going into this moderation world, we haven't really created this new habituation of our thoughts, of new habituation of behavior, what we are going to do in practice instead of drinking, how we're going to talk to ourselves in these positive ways, how we're going to really look at our mood, because alcohol can affect our mood. It's a toxin that can affect our mood. So if we drink the next day, we can have this negative mood, but it's not us. It's the alcohol. And so if we can clear that up and we can really determine what is me and what is alcohol, who is truly driving the bus, then we have more clarity. I also believe this is the quicker way to get to the point where you can decide whether you want to moderate or not drink ever again. There is nothing wrong with choosing not to drink ever again. I think that's a beautiful option for a lot of us. Alcohol does not need to be in anyone's life. If you do choose to moderate, then having a period of abstinence can really help you get to the other side of that with assistance. I really believe that to take out all of this guesswork, to have somebody who can support you on the journey to help you think differently, then it will also expedite you getting to whatever outcome that you're looking for. So in my program, I don't do a moderation based program at the beginning after a hundred days together as an extension. If it looks like that you want to go into a moderation period or mindful drinking period, then we extend it for another three months. So we can really walk through what that looks like because it's different. That's a different type of focus. And, for me, I think that at a year when I was not drinking for a year, I got to that year mark and I thought, About drinking again. And I knew for myself that I wasn't ready for that. That I felt like I had a lot more changing and growth to do in order to ever consider drinking again. And when I did drink five years, you know, I guess four years after that point, I didn't want to drink. It wasn't like I was craving it or I needed it in my life in a certain way. I was just tired of it being a thing or not, not a thing. It was just, it was a non thing that I really wanted to kind of remove the boogeyman and, but that was my personal choice. And that was through intensive amounts of personal growth and development and spiritual development and really learning myself. It's a period of self discovery, not recovery for me, right? Life is about self discovery. So, um, can you moderate? Only you will truly know if you can moderate. And at the same time, there is research to support that people can go to non abstinence based recovery where they're not heavy drinking anymore. Uh, and if that's something that does interest you and you want to have a consultation, reach out to me and we can go through a series of questions and I can guide you and what a really awakening, what you believe the correct answer is for you as always, I hope this episode was helpful for you. And as always, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please go over to Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts and give me a five star review. This will get the podcast in front of more people, and we can spread the word about how conscious living and self awareness is so important for growth and development and who we want to be in this world. All right. Have a good day. Have you ever had a craving for alcohol or sugar, or maybe even the connection or intimacy of a loved one? And It's just that desire and longing just feels so uncomfortable in our mind and our body. And it just feels so urgent, like we need it right now. And if we don't have it right now, we're going to die. Well, in next week's episode, I'm going to give you an acronym or two to surf the urge to ride a craving to where you can learn to do this easily and skillfully to where craving isn't something to be afraid of. It's something just to surf, ride, and enjoy. See you then.