Friday Reflections - How I finally quit my most toxic habit.
Picture this: it’s a Saturday afternoon, the sky is cloudless, and it’s a perfect 77 degrees. ☀️ You’re at your favorite restaurant, sitting outside on their patio with a group of friends, laughing and soaking up the sunshine.
What would make this an even more enjoyable scenario?
A refreshing and artisanally crafted adult beverage, of course.
At least, that’s what my brain had been wired to believe after decades of being sold the line that alcohol makes everything more fun.
I’ve been questioning this narrative for multiple years now, based on the many data points from my own experience indicating that alcohol actually makes things less fun (at least for me).
Like any good elder millennial, I genuinely enjoy the taste of an old fashioned or a good glass of wine. However, over the last couple of years in particular, I've been increasingly prone to developing a headache and feeling exhausted after just a few sips of any alcoholic beverage.
It reached a point where it felt like the cost far outweighed the very brief enjoyment.
So I would ask myself, why on earth are you continuing to make a choice that isn't serving you and putting something into your body that makes you feel terrible? After all, I’ve cut out multiple other consumables due to their negative impact (e.g., caffeine, gluten, dairy 😳), so why was I holding onto alcohol, even as my consumption decreased to a very occasional half glass of wine?
The decision to cut out alcohol completely only came once I finally realized what was really driving my consumption to begin with, beyond the aforementioned association with fun.
I’ve always known that like many people, I’ve used alcohol as a means of calming my social anxiety and “loosening up”.
However, a friend unwittingly helped me come to a much deeper realization earlier this year. We were in a small group together through our church and were reading a book that prompted us to share photos of ourselves as kids. As we shared our photo, we were also meant to share how we felt about the version of ourselves in that photo.
I shared a photo from when I was around 4 years old, and commented that I seemed down in the photo, as if I had already internalized the message that I was too much and was, even at that young of an age, projecting a curated version of myself to the camera.
4ish year old Jess.
My friend offered a different perspective. She shared that she experiences me as a calm person, and that what she saw in that photo was a little girl who was simply exuding a calm energy.
That perspective unlocked a new insight I had never considered before.
I realized that somewhere along the way, I picked up a subconscious belief that being calm was unpreferable. As if calm equalled boring, which equalled not compelling, impressive, or inspiring, or worthy of engaging with. Calm equaled nice but forgettable.
I realized that I had been using alcohol as a means of artificially hyping myself up to compensate for my naturally calm energy.
It seemed almost comical when I realized this, because part of why I drank alcohol was to calm my anxiety, which perhaps could have been accomplished by tapping into my inherent sense of calm that already existed.
And isn’t that what we so often do as humans? Behave in ways that unintentionally create the opposite experience of what we desire?
Equipped with that new insight, along with a resolution to align my behavior with my desired experience (e.g., feel energized when I wake up in the morning versus hungover from a single ounce of wine), and a growing community of friends who had made their own decisions to stop drinking for myriad reasons, I committed to myself that I would no longer consume any amount of alcohol moving forward.
Not because alcohol is bad or wrong, but simply because it now costs me more than it serves me.
Once we figure out the real thing that’s been keeping us stuck, we unlock access to new perspectives we didn’t see before, which enables us to make new choices and experience life in a way that didn’t seem possible before.
My invitation to curiosity to you today is:
What behaviors have you been unable to shift, despite persistent effort?
To what extent are you aware of the root level beliefs that are keeping those behaviors in place?
How are those behaviors serving you?
What are those behaviors costing you?
What might become possible if you finally shifted those beliefs and subsequently shifted those behaviors?
Drop me a line and let me know what comes to mind.
Need help figuring out what’s really keeping you stuck so you can finally start moving towards what you desire? Let's chat.
Stay curious,
Jessica
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