How to Learn to Love Life Sober with Christy Osborne

Episode Transcript:

00:02:17 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Christy, welcome to the show.

00:02:18 – Christy Osborne
Hey Eric. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here today.

00:02:22 – Eric Zimmer
I’m excited to talk with you about your new book, which is called Love Love Life Sober, a 40 day alcohol fast to rediscover your joy, improve your health, and renew your mind. But before we get into that, we will start in the way that we customarily do, which is with the parable. And in that parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild. And they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:03:12 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. Thank you so much for the question. I was actually thinking about this, obviously, knowing I was coming on today, and I was coaching a lady this morning who I coach women who want to break free or take a break from alcohol. And we were talking a lot about this idea of creating more space. And I think when we’re talking about alcohol or any addiction or any negative behavior or habit we want to change, we focus so much on not feeding. Right. The bad wolf, and we don’t focus so much on feeding the good wolf, but also what to feed it. Right. And so, for example, with this lady this morning when we were talking about space, it was the space to joyfully move her body and to eat healthy and to have time for herself and to begin enjoying music and all of these things. And so when we’re talking about this, in the scheme of, I think, alcohol. Right. It’s what can you feed the good wolf with to make yourself feel better and the person that you end up wanting to be. And so, yeah, that’s what I thought of today when I was preparing for today.

00:04:19 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I really love that response, because one of the things that I got out of your book that I thought was useful was when you hear 40 day alcohol fashion, it’s easy to think of like a sober January or a dry, I don’t know how many months now have a dry version of them associated with them, right.

00:04:38 – Christy Osborne
Pretty much all of them.

00:04:39 – Eric Zimmer
And while that’s a lovely idea, mostly what people do is just not drink for that month. And your book is really saying, let’s use this time that a yes, you’re ideally not going to be drinking, but let’s explore your relationship with alcohol during that time. Why are you doing it? What are you getting from it? What might the benefits of not doing it? And your book does a great job of walking through a lot of those things. And that’s why I think it’s a really useful addition to this sort of dry January movement, which, again, is valuable. But if you just don’t drink for 30 days, nothing’s different. I mean, you’re probably healthier in many ways at the end of it. But the way you think about the world may not be that different. Whereas your program gives you an opportunity to do that.

00:05:28 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, I talk about in the book that I did all of those things, right. I did the dry Januarys, the sober Octobers, and it’s exactly what you said. I ended up drinking. Nothing really changed as far as the behavior of drinking. And there was one particular dry January where February rolled around and I drank even more because I kind of had proven to myself that I didn’t have a quote unquote problem and so that I could continue on. And there was no real look at the reasons behind why I was drinking. It was just this white knuckle figure out how to not drink for 30 days and get through it as fast as possible. And that didn’t work for me. And so I obviously wanted to try something different. What I really, really wanted to do, when it got to the point where I wanted to seriously look at my drinking, is I wanted to lose the desire to drink. I didn’t want to have that desire. I wanted to have freedom from alcohol.

00:06:21 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve thought before about what did I get out of twelve step programs that helped me get sober? Because I have drifted away from them over the years for a variety of different reasons. And one of the things that I got out of them that I thought was like, this is a critical component, is a method for changing the way that we view the world and think about alcohol. And that’s what the twelve steps ideally will do. And so, again, this is a different version of that, but there’s a very clear path here to walking through that. And so I’d like to get into some of that. But first, maybe just tell us a little bit about what brought you to the point.

00:07:04 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:07:05 – Eric Zimmer
What life was like when you wanted to change your relationship with alcohol.

00:07:10 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, I grew up not drinking a lot. Like, I went to USC for college in southern California, a big greek school. I was in a sorority. But even then it was very measured. I wanted to be very much in control. And as I kind of look back, there was definitely upticks for various reasons. I went to law school. It kind of became this way of reward at the end of a hard day of studying. And then I moved to the UK right after I graduated law school. And it was the thing that everybody was doing over here to connect, to meet new people. Then I became a mom, and then it was the thing that all the moms were doing as, again, the reward aspect of it. A long, hard day with babies, and I was alone in a foreign country with no family, and every mom that I looked at was using wine as the reward for being a mom. And so it was an incremental, slow uptick in the drinking. And I never did have this massive, rock bottom moment. I’ve heard you tell your sobriety story, and I don’t think I necessarily blew up my life. I could have gotten there. Don’t get me wrong. Like, it could have gotten there, but it was the slow, incremental uptick in the drinking and using it for various reasons and giving the wine various jobs. And then my own mother passed away in 2018. And growing up, she didn’t drink, but in the last kind of ten years of her life, she discovered alcohol, and it changed her. It kind of wrecked our relationship. And so her death was very traumatic for me because I was mourning the loss of this mother who was my best friend growing up, but then who we had this great chasm of distance between us when she passed. And so what did I do to manage all those really hard emotions? I drank. And people always ask me, were you, you know, at home on the couch drinker, or were you the going out drinker? And I was both. But at the same time, it looked very similar to my friends. I didn’t know anybody that didn’t drink. I knew that everybody, you know, or at least I thought I did. Thank you, social media. Thank you, Instagram, that everyone was having the wine at the end of the day because the homework was hard with the kids or to let loose on a Friday night. And so it didn’t feel like it looked any different. And so that was one of the things, I think, that kept me stuck, right? A little bit longer. But also, this idea of maybe my drinking’s not bad enough, right? I could never, ever have pictured myself walking into an AA meeting and saying, hi, I’m Christy. I’m an alcoholic. I just couldn’t picture it because I thought, okay, that feels like it could be a lot different than the way that I’m drinking. And so I felt really alone. I felt really, really alone and lost. And I honestly didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to. And this is in 2020, when the sober, curious movement, I think, is just then gaining traction. So, thankfully, there was then a lot to read and learn about over the course of the pandemic when I started my work. But it was very isolating and feeling very alone and feeling like, is this something I even need to address if nobody else is? And so, yeah, that’s kind of how it all started.

00:10:14 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting you bring up my addiction story, because there’s two parts to it. And normally, part one is what I reference. Two is I stayed sober about eight years, and I began to drink again. And I never went back to doing hard drugs, but I was drinking and I was smoking marijuana, and my bottom was not the bottom. Like, I was doing well on all external measures. I’d been just promoted. I had the best job I ever had. I had a nice home, I had a nice car. I mean, all these things were okay, and yet I sort of knew I was dying inside. And yet it was hard. It was harder for me because there was a voice that was like, oh, it’s not that bad the first time, there was no sort. If that voice had tried even that, I’d have been like everybody knew, like, okay, that’s ridiculous. This time around, though, however, from the outside, it didn’t look that bad. And yet inside was really where I was so sick. You know, I was lucky to be able to recognize I was as sick that time as I was the first time. It’s just that circumstances had been different.

00:11:25 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:11:25 – Eric Zimmer
When it comes to your own recovery, let’s talk a little bit about that idea of alcoholic, because I think this is one of the things the sober, curious movement has been of the most service to the world, I think, which is to get people away from having to think of identifying as alcoholic as the way to get better. So what was it that you identified in yourself that made you say, okay, I may not be alcoholic, but I need to do something about this.

00:11:55 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. And I want to always start this conversation. Conversation by saying that, like, no, absolutely nothing against AA and the people that find that label empowering, like, that is awesome. It’s just that it doesn’t work and it doesn’t feel good for everybody. Right. And so to your point, too, of everything kind of looking good, and you are just promoted. You know, the morning that I stopped drinking, I was looking through my Instagram feed, and I had a really popular blog for expat amErican women living in the UK. I had just been on Sky News to commentate for the royal wedding of Harry and Meghan, and everything was, like, really glossy and pretty and all of this to the point that you said it just didn’t feel real or authentic. Like, I didn’t feel like I was representing how I really, truly felt inside. And so it was really that of just looking in the mirror one morning after a night out and just saying, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to feel this way. There’s got to be something, some path to get me to feeling better. And I automatically knew that the first thing that had to at least go. And I never said forever. In the beginning, I didn’t know what it meant. I had no idea. I didn’t know if it was going to be 30 days, 16. I had no idea. I just knew that I needed a break. And so it was just kind of this, again, like a slow burn of this feels awful. I knew I wasn’t being the best mom I could be. I definitely valued, like, at the end of the day, the glass of wine over a bedtime story or hanging out with my kids, because that felt like the thing that was mine. And, like, let’s get those kids into bed as fast as possible so I can sit on the couch and have the wine. And it was just one of these slow things. And I just woke up and I’m like, this is not who I am. This is so inauthentic. That’s not the real me that I’m portraying. And I’ve got to do something.

00:13:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You talk a lot in the book about sort of this mommy wine culture that’s out there. Share a little bit about what that is. I think a lot of people will know. I mean, you go anywhere and you just see these clever little signs that actually don’t seem that clever about moms and drinking, but talk a little bit about that.

00:14:00 – Christy Osborne
And my mommy wine culture is the pervasive messaging. Right. That we as mothers, need wine in order to parent because they’re really hard work. And when I really drilled down on the fact that that was the message that not only I was sending my kids, but to the other people that were following me, for example, on social media, that was not the woman that I wanted to be. Right. And all you have to do is literally stroll through target and you see mommy wine culture everywhere on the tumblers and the baby onesies, and it’s all about, you know, the baby wines whilst. And so I wine w I n e. If you look at Etsy, I think there’s, at the time of writing the book, there were 70,000 products on Etsy promoting kind of this wine culture and mommy wine culture. Yeah. And I was also the one, by the way, that gifted these tumblers and, like, thought these were really cute and had the cocktail napkins and all. I had all of it, but it was just really drilling down to, like, is this true? Also, is alcohol helping me be a better mom? Is that true for me? And it wasn’t. And so it was challenging this idea. And during the pandemic, actually, Tropicana, the orange juice company, came out with this ad, and it was a bunch of actresses. I’ll leave their names out of it. But hiding in bathrooms or the garage in order to make a mimosa, and they showed them, like, hiding from their families and their kids. And it was like, yeah, the tagline of the campaign was take a me moment, like, as a mimosa. But for me, I remember thinking, and I was very early into my surprise at that point, and I was just thinking, this is not the message that we need to be sending to mothers during a global pandemic, that you should hide from your kids and drink in your closet to survive.

00:15:42 – Eric Zimmer
Hiding your drinking is generally a bad sign just right across the board. Like, that’s a pretty good indicator that call yourself what you want, but you may need to examine. But I do think that is really true, that I think the message that’s being sent there is two. First is that kids are so hard that you need a real way to cope with that. And there’s some truth in the fact that parenting is difficult, right?

00:16:07 – Christy Osborne
Oh, 100%.

00:16:08 – Eric Zimmer
The second message is that the way to cope with any difficulty is through alcohol. And we tolerate it in that sense. But there’s lots of other places where if we said it that explicitly, you might. People might be like, well, hang on a second. Like, if I was like, I have such bad depression, and the thing that I do is I turn to a white claw hard seltzer. Right? Most people would look at that and be like, dude, that’s a bad idea. But to say it, taking care of my kids is a little bit different.

00:16:40 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. And the other side of that, too, is, what if you switched up the drug? Right? Like, what if you said, I just need that line of cocaine or that, or that little bit of heroin in order to get me through these kids, because they’re really hard work. And then that, of course, opens up the whole thing of, well, why are they different? And why is alcohol so socially acceptable? And why is it pushed on mothers as the thing that we need in order to parent?

00:17:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. The whole, I’m going to celebrate. I want to be careful not to be judgmental here. To each their own. Right? But I have found this whole I’m celebrating my near dependence on alcohol to be a strange thing. Maybe it’s that when I started, I was underage, and the last thing I wanted the world to know was that I drank all the time. Now, this was a long time ago, maybe the culture was very different. I don’t know. But to me, it was never something that I was going to, like outwardly proclaim to the world, yeah, yeah.

00:17:39 – Christy Osborne
Oh, my gosh.

00:17:40 – Eric Zimmer
That this is my thing. But that is very much the culture. You see it certainly in the wine mom culture. I see it a lot in the retired woman culture also. I see a lot of it there. It’s probably lots of other places. You talk a little bit about how pervasive alcohol is in our culture, and it really is everywhere.

00:18:00 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, it is. And to your point of this becoming, this almost point of being loud and proud about, I recently saw there was an Instagram post, and it was a gal using a tumbler to go to her son’s soccer game, filling it with vodka, but then putting a teabag like label hanging outside the yeti or whatever. So that. And the line was, yeah, where my soccer mom’s at? And it literally has, of course, millions of likes. And all these people being like, yeah, that’s what I do. And I was just like, when did that happen? Because I don’t remember going to my brother’s soccer games and mom’s having yeti tumblers of white claw or whatever it is on the sidelines.

00:18:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it is very interesting. And the flip side of it is shame perpetrates this. Right? So it’s a strange thing that’s sort of happening, which is, on one hand, we’re celebrating being this way, and yet on the other hand, the people who are really struggling with it, they may be superficially buying that message, but inside they feel shame about how much they’re drinking. So it’s this weird contradiction.

00:19:07 – Christy Osborne
It is this weird contradiction. And it also means that, you know, women have to kind of want any of anyone, really. But I say women, because I coach women, have to almost live up to this thing of keeping alcohol cute and making it look fun, but if you get hooked on it, oh, my gosh, no. Then you are other, and there is something wrong with you, and then you have, you know, all the things that come with that, the stigma and all of that. And so that’s where, obviously, the shame kicks in. And the shame part is so important to talk about, because when we’re stuck in shame, we are in our survival part of our brain, and we are not in our prefrontal cortex. We can’t make good decisions. And so we want to get out of that place as fast as possible. And from personal experience, I know that the easy way out is wine when you’re stuck in it because.

00:19:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:19:54 – Christy Osborne
It shifts the emotion real fast.

00:19:55 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It is such a pernicious situation once you’re in its grips. Right. Because you have alcohol, which is actively damaging your prefrontal cortex and your executive function, your ability to make good decisions. So you’ve got that happening, and then, like you said, you’ve got the shame happening, which is further shifting away from your prefrontal cortex and the ability to make decisions. And you have a great emotional strain. And the way you cope with that emotional strain is you drink, and it’s easy to see how this, just once you’re in it, it tends to be no direction but down.

00:20:32 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:20:32 – Eric Zimmer
And again, that’s not for everybody. Right. Plenty of people moderate just fine. And so this is not, at least from my perspective, not an alcohol is a bad thing. It’s just that I think there’s a lot more people struggling with it than we might know.

00:20:48 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And we’re in a day and age now, right, where we also do know so much more about it. And there is so much research on Gen Z and the upcoming generations not drinking as much as we did, because they know the health ramifications of it, and they’ve probably seen parents struggle with it. There’s the whole idea that they also have smartphones. Right. So the reason that we’re using alcohol, maybe to connect or to have fun, they just have to open up TikTok. And so we’re seeing, I think, this shift from the younger generations using it as much. But I think a lot of that has to do with. With everything that we’re learning about how it does. It is hard. It is hard. And moderation. Plenty of people can do it, but it can be tricky. Once you’ve given alcohol jobs, once you’ve leaned in, it’s hard.

00:21:54 – Eric Zimmer
I want to come back to that giving alcohol jobs thing in 1 second, but I want to ask a question, because you’re closer to the research on all this than I am. Are we seeing in Gen Z, a drop in using substances overall, or are we seeing a drop in alcohol with marijuana maybe making up more of that gap? I’m just. I’m just curious.

00:22:13 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, definitely less alcohol. And there is research to suggest, because marijuana is legal in a lot of states now and more prevalent, that that’s had an uptick. I don’t know the exact data on that, but I know that a lot of kids are drinking a lot less. They’re drinking a lot less in college, which is a good thing.

00:22:32 – Eric Zimmer
100%. 100%. Okay, let’s come back to this line you just used, giving alcohol jobs. What does that mean when we are giving alcohol jobs?

00:22:41 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. So when I looked back at the reasons why I was drinking, it was for connection, it was for coping, for example, for the loss of my mom. I also really believed that wine was helping me sleep because, listen, if I had two glasses of cabernet, I fell asleep, I passed out. I didn’t actually fall asleep. So I was giving alcohol all these jobs. And when I looked at my wine and when I started talking through this with clients, that was one of the questions that really resonated with them. I would say, well, why are you drinking? But when I said to them, what is the job that you are giving to that glass of wine? It was all of a sudden just a lot more clear of the reason, kind of behind the why and all of that. And another way to ask that is, what is the unmet need? What do you actually need when you’re pouring that glass of wine? Is it rest? Is it connection? Is it fun? Is it coping? Is it because there’s a really hard emotion that you don’t want to feel because you weren’t taught to feel it? And so I just think it’s a really good way of getting behind the reasons. And then you get to ask the amazing follow up question, right, of is that true? Is alcohol doing that job? And I know that this is a really blanket statement and can feel really untrue to anybody that’s stuck in the drinking cycle, but alcohol actually does all the opposite things of what we’re drinking for. Right. Disconnects us, makes us more tired, zaps our energy, spikes our cortisol, all the things.

00:24:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I always talk about addiction and substances because there’s this strange nuance to them. Right. The first is that when we first started using it, it may have done those jobs semi well. Right. That’s thing one. Right. And this gets to the learning model of why we become dependent on substances, is that we learn over time. But the other thing is that if it didn’t work at all, this would be so much easier. Like if you took a drink and you didn’t feel temporarily a little bit better, it would be easy to see through this. But the fact is, it continues to do something that, at least initially, and my experience is that initially gets smaller and smaller and the benefit gets smaller and smaller as the costs go up and up and up. But it’s the fact that it does do something that makes it hard, because, again, it would be easy to see through if it did nothing. But I think you’re right. If we look honestly at anybody who’s got some degree of dependence on alcohol, or any substance for that matter, because I think they’re all essentially the same in this regard, the thing that we wanted it to do, the perfectly good reason that we may have started it, it doesn’t fix that anymore. And like you said, it makes most everything worse over time.

00:25:22 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, and that is so true. And this is the reason that people get stuck on it. Right? And when I did the research around dopamine and dynorphin and all of the ways that our body actually chemically reacts to alcohol, this is when this massive light bulb went off for me and I was like, oh my gosh, everybody needs to know this. And that is that, that feel good feeling. The dopamine that you get, the reaction from the glass of whatever you’re having is actually between 20 and 30 minutes, and then your body is desperate to get back to homeostasis basis. So it pumps you with this downer called dynorphin. And you cannot replicate that feel good feeling with the second glass. Sometimes really feels like you can, but scientifically, looking at the way our brain works, you can’t. And so that was, I was like, okay, so yes, it did the thing for 20 minutes, but then it wrecked three days after that.

00:26:12 – Eric Zimmer
Precisely. And you keep chasing it. That’s the thing, right? Because again, if you had one drink and afterwards you were like, oh, okay, well, that was a good feeling. It’s gone, I’m not going to get it from the second drink. And you just said, okay, enough. Right? Well, you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast because you’d be a normal human being, probably. But those of us that relate to this go, oh, yeah, but one more will do it, one more will do it. I’ll get there, I’ll get there, I’ll get there. Right? You just keep going. And the cost keeps escalating.

00:26:42 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And so when I kind of learned that, I was like, well, it became a no brainer. And when you factor in cortisol and adrenaline and the fact that that can stay raised for seven to ten days, then after you’ve even had a small amount to drink, then it’s like, is the 20 minutes really worth it if you’re making yourself more stressed a week later?

00:27:01 – Eric Zimmer
No, I mean, that’s the question I have to ask myself. Not that often, because it doesn’t come up very often, but every once in a while I have to do that calculus in my head.

00:27:09 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:27:09 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, yeah. One drink is the best antidepressant I’ve ever had. Like you said, it’s 20 minutes and then wreckage.

00:27:17 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah.

00:27:18 – Eric Zimmer
Okay, so we’ve established the problem clearly enough here. I think let’s turn ourselves to some of the things that we can do that help us to change our relationship with drinking. So we’ve sort of talked about the core one, which is to understand what jobs we were giving it. Where do we go from there?

00:27:39 – Christy Osborne
This is the thing with all of the asking of the question is there’s so much that you can read and learn, but what I think really ends up making the change is when you do it and you feel it, when you have that experiential knowledge of, okay, I know that alcohol is going to hijack my rem sleep. You know, I can read all about how that works in the brain, but when I actually sleep, not drinking, I can compare the two. And I think if you’re a regular drinker and you haven’t ever taken a significant break before, we have a lot of data, right, of what it’s like to be a drinker, but we’re making a lot of assumptions about what it’s like being a non drinker without having tried it. So first ask the questions and then do an experiment. Try these things. What are you assuming if you’ve labeled the jobs, are those jobs really true? And the thing about finding freedom from alcohol is it obviously takes work and it doesn’t feel really good the very first time. And I’ve heard you talk about this on another podcast where, you know, 30 days might not do it.

00:28:42 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Right. Where sometimes it gets worse before it gets better can be the experience for some people. Some people start feeling better right away, but some people feel worse, you know?

00:28:51 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah. And then it becomes okay. So I’m using that glass of wine for connection. So that’s my need. How do I really get that? And there’s a lot of women that I’ve coached that don’t know how to get that thing that they need to. Fun, for example, is a really big one. It’s like, the only way I know how to have fun is by drinking. I don’t remember what I even like to do. I coach a lot of women with that. You know, I had a gal recently who went back to a pottery class or a dance class because that’s what they enjoyed in high school, pre drinking. And so it’s really about getting to know the things that then can fill those unmet needs that you’re using for wine. And if you keep doing that in a way where you’re giving yourself a ton of grace and a ton of self compassion. And by that, I also mean if you’re on a break from alcohol and you’re looking at your relationship and you have a drink, you don’t necessarily have to go back to day one. If counting days doesn’t work for you, let’s figure out what you learned from that growth point. And so that also is super, super important because, like, we touched on shame briefly, that’s not going to help us at all. But if we can come to a place of grace, compassion, curiosity of just would my life be better without this? Would I feel better? How do I want to feel? How is alcohol playing into that? Asking the questions and doing the experiment and getting to the truth of all of it is just. That’s what helped me so much.

00:30:14 – Eric Zimmer
The phrase you just use there, growth point, is one that I really like. What you mean by growth point is, let’s say I’m trying to do a 40 day alcohol fast, and on day seven, I end up having a few drinks. Right. Instead of looking at it as a failure, we look at that as a growth point. It’s a chance to learn something, right? And I think that is really important because I think most people, if they’re trying to change their relationship with a substance, are going to have lots of, quote unquote, what look like failures, right? Like, even everything you do up to the last time, when you get, like, I think about it, like there was a day, you know, 15 years ago was the last time I had any substance. But there were lots of things that I tried before that that didn’t, quote unquote work, that actually were part of getting me to whatever magic puzzle pieces clicked together. 15 years ago, it was those times that I tried and it didn’t work, that were part of the solution. They were part of the answer. And I think that that’s so important. And I think you do a great job of really highlighting that. Because if we take failure to either mean we’re bad people, so we feel bad about ourselves, and the way we cope with that is to drink, or we take failure to mean weakness. Can’t do it. I’ve known so many people who just go, I can’t. You might have been able to, but I won’t be able to. I can’t. And the lens to get through that is, at least that, I think, is you just haven’t figured it out yet. We haven’t figured it out yet. What’s your combination? What’s your puzzle pieces that come together that are going to lead to you having more freedom? I just love the way you talk about that. And I love that idea of growth point.

00:31:59 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. I mean, I always use the example, a couple examples. One is if you fell at like the 20 miles marker of a marathon, I’m not a runner, but would you go back to the starting line? No. You would get up and you would finish the race, right? Or for the moms out there, your little toddlers learning how to walk, they keep falling down. Do you say, you’re horrible at this, stop trying? No. You say, get up and try again. And for some reason, with the drinking thing, we feel like we have to make it perfect. And if it’s not, then, as you said, we’re somehow failures, that we’re not going to be able to do it. And then for a lot of people, this idea of you are then this alcoholic, you’re never going to be able to have any fun. You’re going to have to go to meetings for the rest of your life. That kind of narrative can be really scary. So exactly what you said. It’s about figuring out what works for you. And that’s what I love so much about your story. And also, so this podcast is, you get to pick and choose, right? Because push comes to shove, it’s about choice. And it’s also, this is, like, beautiful work that we get to do. We don’t have to do this. We get to do it. And sobriety is a gift and a blessing. It’s not something that I had to do. It’s something I got to do. And, like, I’m so grateful that I got to do it.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a really lovely reframing. And you do that a lot in the book, sort of the reframing from deprivation to what am I giving myself? Right? I’m giving myself good health. I’m giving myself better sleep. I’m giving myself more clarity instead of I’m taking this thing away from me. I always share this story because I think it’s such a great one around these growth points, and it’s from a client of mine. She figured this out. I did not figure it out, but she was having trouble getting to complete abstinence. And so she started this thing where every day she was sober, she put a marble in a jar. And it was amazing because what. What we got to see was this jar just filling up and filling up and filling up, right. And so instead of looking at the one day, let’s say it was one or two days a month, that it didn’t work. What we saw was this accumulation of sober days. We were focusing on the good there, not the bad. And I think that can be a really important thing to be able to do, is to recognize, like, okay, I’m not perfect, but, wow, I have 22 sober days last month. That’s better than the month before where I had zero. And that’s the way some people get there. A progress like that, other people are able to sort of just stop. But lots of people. It’s more a process than that.

00:34:29 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. And progress can look so many different ways. Like, I was chatting with a client recently, and we were talking about she had had a few days drinking that week, but what she did was she stopped before those drinks, and she actually took out her journal, right? And she wrote down why. And she. And she journaled through cravings that she then would overcome and all of this. And so I said to her, she came to the call, and she’s like, I wasn’t perfect. And I drank four days this week, or whatever it was. And I was like, wait, can we talk about that journal situation that you just read to me? Because that progress of getting behind of the why and figuring out why you’re doing this and delaying the craving and all of that, that is such incredible progress. And to your point, with the marble in the jar, I love that so much. Sometimes what I do with clients is I have them print out a calendar, and then we highlight the days, and then we take the percentage at the end. I’ve created a fun little celebration tracker to go along with the book. Kind of similar, where let’s figure out, let’s celebrate the wins as opposed to focusing on being perfect. So. I love that so much.

00:35:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s so important. Let’s talk about thoughts. You talk about taking every thought captive. What do you mean by that?

00:35:38 – Christy Osborne
So even if when we’re talking about the whys, right, that’s a thought. Like, I am drinking to relax, or I am drinking because I want to connect. And so the battlefield of all of this is going on in our minds, and we are not used to listening to our thoughts. We’re very used to thoughts kind of calling the shots and going along with what they say. And it’s so funny because we’re having this conversation relatively close to when the cute Pixar movie, now it’s just fallen out of my head. Inside out, too, has just come out. And I went with the kids. And it was just a really fun way of kind of showing what’s going on in your brain. But looking at your thoughts, and your thoughts don’t necessarily have to be true. We have been conditioned for a number and number of years to believe various things about alcohol, but also various things about lots of things in our life. And so it’s taking those thoughts captive and asking whether they’re true or not. I work a lot with women who come with a list of, like, shoulds, right? I should be doing this. I have to do this. I should be doing this. I need to host this party. I have to run all these committees. And it’s like, well, let’s take that thought out and let’s put some light on it and ask ourselves, is this really true or are you putting that on yourself? And if you’re putting this expectation on yourself, how is that serving you? And so it’s just getting really, really clear about what we’re thinking and which is something that we’re not trained to do and something that takes practice and asking ourselves if that thought is true and if it’s serving us or not. And if it’s not serving us, why are we thinking it? Why are we holding onto it? Why are we letting ourselves mind spiral on something?

00:37:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that. What you just said about that. Is it serving me? One of my favorites is with thoughts to look and say, is this useful? Is this actually useful in getting me to where I want to go? Because truth, it could go either way. You could be like, well, maybe, I don’t know, like, is it useful? And I think so often we’re making up the stories about things, we’re giving things their meaning and interpretation. And if we can, like you said, take our thoughts out and really examine them and say, okay, you know, is this true? And also, is it useful, right? Or is it serving me? To use your phrase, we’re not trained to do it and it’s really hard to do. And the mind is really slippery. You have a lot of journaling in this book, and I assume that’s why. Because things in our head are slippery.

00:37:58 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And pulling it out, putting it on paper so that you can actually see it and examine it is a really important, I think, exercise, for sure.

00:38:05 – Eric Zimmer
Talk to me about one thing at a time. What do you mean by that?

00:38:09 – Christy Osborne
So I think the idea of one day at a time could potentially have this twelve step stigma attached to it. Right. Where you’re white knuckling, you’re going to have to be in this forever, this is going to feel hard and heavy, and you’re going to be in this deprived place for the rest of your life. Life. It can be really, really overwhelming to people. However, in the beginning of a alcohol free journey, an alcohol freedom journey, it can be really, really helpful, because these hard things that we’re talking about, examining our thoughts, managing cravings, all of that are actually temporary. And a good night’s sleep fixes a lot of things. And so in the very beginning, one day at a time, while you’re also doing this work of discovering, like, the reasons behind your dream drinking and grace and compassion, I think, can be really, really helpful. But then what happens is, or at least happened for me, is the one day at a time, then just became. I don’t think about alcohol anymore. I’ve lost the desire to drink. I don’t struggle with this. And so I think one day at a time can be really helpful in the beginning, but it can also feel heavy depending on how you’re looking at it.

00:39:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. And I think that’s the big promise, which is that there is a way in which it seems impossible, right. But there will come a day where you don’t want a drink. And again, that seemed impossible to me in the beginning.

00:39:28 – Christy Osborne
Me too.

00:39:29 – Eric Zimmer
Literally. I mean, I would hear that and I would think that there’s no way, like, all I want is a drink, right? And I want it so bad. And yet the problem, like, for most of us, if we’re able to stay sober for a period of time, it goes away. It just disappears, which is bizarre. It’s bizarre to me, the level of non reaction to alcohol that I have right before this interview. I’m in a studio here, and they entertain here. And so I went. I had a sandwich, and I went to the refrigerator and I opened it up and I put the sandwich in. And since they do have events here, it is just stocked with beer and hard seltzer and all kinds of stuff. It might as well have been a fridge full of, like, cow piss. I mean, it just didn’t have any. Like, it didn’t gross me out. I guess if it was a fridge full of cow piss, I would have a stronger reaction than I did. I didn’t think about it. I wasn’t like, oh, that’s alcohol. That’s. Careful. I better not have it. I just, like, didn’t even really think about it.

00:40:31 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, I love that so much. When you were saying that, I was thinking last summer even, I took my daughter to Taylor Swift in LA and I was, like, very aware of, like, the mom’s drinking and thinking to my myself, oh, my gosh, they’re not going to even get to, like, the third era because they’re going to be feeling awful. And then I just took her this last weekend because she came to London then a year later and it was everywhere. And I got in the car and I was like, oh, I didn’t even really notice it this time.

00:40:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:40:56 – Christy Osborne
You know?

00:40:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I always find it a little bit, for me, of a warning sign if I start noticing it, right? Like, if I suddenly am, like, noticing, like, people’s like, oh, there’s a glass of wine over there and there’s someone else has got tequila. And, like, if starts pulling my attention, even subtly, I usually just ask myself, like, okay, what’s going on inside? Because that is almost non existent for me most of the time, which I think we’re both sharing this in a message of hope for people. Because if I had to live the way I felt early on with this feeling, like I was torn in two, like, half of me being like, you can’t do it, and the other half of me being like, you have to do it, like, if I had to live the rest of my life that way, it would be awful. It’s an awful feeling.

00:42:03 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. Yeah.

00:42:04 – Eric Zimmer
But it goes away, which is the good news. Or none of us would actually probably manage to stay sober if you felt that way all the time.

00:42:12 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. That’s cognitive dissonance at its finest. Right. I was just gonna say it’s just that I really want it, but I don’t want it and all of that. And that’s why if you get under the subconscious conditioning, under all these reasons, under these assumptions, under the jobs, whatever you want to call it, and kind of call that stuff out, but then also, also feel it and feel the difference, that’s when you get to start, I think, feeling this hope, and I love that so much because that’s all I want, is this to be a conversation of hope and freedom and all of that and for people not to feel alone. If you feel like you’re drinking, looks like everybody else around you, but you know in your soul that it’s not feeling good.

00:42:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And that’s the ultimate measure, right. It’s not about how often you drink or what time of day you drink or whether you’ve had a DUI or. Those are not the thing, right. The thing is, how do you feel about it? And most people know how they feel about it, right. If you ask yourself that, you know, there’s something in you that goes, ugh. Ugh, right. Doesn’t feel right. That doesn’t mean you get sober. I mean, I didn’t feel right for a long time. I ignored it as best I could. But, you know, it wasn’t that far into my substance use career where I noticed, like, something feels wrong.

00:43:32 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. I talk about in the book about values and how drinking just moved me really far away from those values that I held really dear, like, you know, dependability and honesty and learning and all of these things that had been something that was really important to me. And just the little ways that alcohol kind of chipped away at that, not being so dependable because maybe I would cancel because I had a hangover or. Or just totally, like, not learning. Not reading books because who has time to read when you’re just downing wine every night? And so that moving slowly and slowly away from the person that you feel like you want to be or what you hold as values was something that when I kind of looked back, I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, it wasn’t a massive DUI. It wasn’t all these things. It was this. And that is enough to look at it in a graceful, filled.

00:44:25 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that people often do is they get a little bit of time sober and they start to feel better, and then they survey their life, and they see all sorts of other stuff that feels like it suddenly needs to be fixed. What do you caution people to do in that situation?

00:44:43 – Christy Osborne
Well, I think, first of all, if you feel like alcohol is something that you want to look at, start with that and don’t do all these other things. I have a lot of women that come to me, and they’re like, okay, I want to ditch alcohol, and I want to train for a marathon, and I want to cut gluten. And it’s like, well, let’s focus on one thing at a time, right? Because there’s so much science about habit change that says if you put too many new things in that they all end up failing. But I actually love that when alcohol then finally is out of the picture, that you do get to look at these other things, and they’re things that I don’t think, at least for me, I didn’t see it coming. Right. Things like learning to sit with heart emotions, things like learning how to express and keep boundaries because I supporting the unmet need of being alone or rest or whatever it is. And so, again, it’s kind of this work that we get to do, and I think it slowly presents itself when alcohol is out of the picture because alcohol tends to muddy all of this other stuff. I guess my advice is not to do it all at once. If you feel like alcohol is the thing that’s keeping you stuck, to focus on that and then see what comes up from it. And one of my favorite things about coaching is push comes to shove. It actually never is about alcohol. It’s about so much more about what’s underneath it.

00:45:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right?

00:45:58 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:45:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I think it’s this subtle balance because I agree with you, like, trying to take on too much. I talk about this all the time. Small steps or little by little, a little becomes a lot. These ideas. And there are also things, though, that we can do that we could add to our life that make perhaps staying off the alcohol easier. You talk about joyful movement as an example.

00:46:22 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, joyful movement 100% because of also what it does to our brain chemistry. And I think maybe some of your women listeners can relate to this. I had to actually, like, ditch the word exercise and lean into more, calling it joyful exercise because it was about the feeling good and not necessarily about how I wanted to be smaller or skinnier or change my body. That was something that came up in my journey after I did shock eating protein, because protein balances blood sugar, and if you have a more stable blood sugar, cravings aren’t going to be as intense, especially, you know, as you go throughout the day. And so there’s lots of these little things that I talk about in the book, bookending your day, starting with something in the morning, whether it’s a book or a podcast or meditation or journaling, but then also ending your day with something. So you have something at either end of the day. And this is all experimentation to see what kind of works for you. One of the things that really helped me, that also really helps clients, is, for example, if a walk is really serving you and it’s making you feel really good, and you know that at 09:00 after you drop the kids at school or whatever, that is something that’s going to set you up for success during the day is to actually get out your calendar, whether it’s a paper one or your iPhone or whatever, and put that in as a non negotiable and really have that time scheduled. And I also did that, and I have to actually come back to it sometimes right when I’m, like, busy with clients or kids and everything, it’s like, oh, I feel like I’m running on empty at the end of the day, and I look back and I didn’t get my walk, and I didn’t do my journaling, and I didn’t do my things. And so to put that in as non negotiable, especially in the beginning, was super, super helpful.

00:47:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It is interesting the way as we get busy, we tend to jettison the things that allow us to perform well enough to remain busy, I guess, would be the way to say it, you know? Or as life gets more stressful, we often, the first things that we throw out are the things that help us cope with stress.

00:48:14 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, overuse the phrase, but you really cannot pour from an empty cup. You just can’t. You cannot give to others in the same way if you’re not taking care of yourself.

00:48:23 – Eric Zimmer
We’ve sort of covered this a little bit, but I want to hit on it a little bit more directly, which is redefining self care. You say one of the most pervasive messages we face in our society, especially as women, is that drinking is a form of self care.

00:48:38 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, yeah. And again, it gets back to that. What is true, right, is if it’s supposed to make you feel better, if it’s supposed to serve you, it’s supposed to give you something like rest or coping or connection. Does alcohol really, really do that? And we’re also up against a society of social media where it’s wine as self care, but also going to get an expensive massage as self care, or anything related to the spa is self care, or shopping as self care. And it’s really looking at the truth of all that, right? Because self care might just actually be going to bed an hour early or making your budget or these things that actually set you up for success, that make you feel better and allow you to stick to your goals. But we’re up against the conditioning, just like with alcohol, where self care is like, let’s do more things, buy more things. And it doesn’t have to be that. And so, yeah, I talk about that in the book of redefine it. Like, what actually do you need? Need for me, honestly, sometimes it’s going to bed an hour before the kids and just saying, you know, they’re old enough to do this now put yourself to bed. And it’s not this, like, really flashy, exciting thing that makes a glamorous Instagram post, but it is true self care for me. Or saying no, right? Saying no to the parties, saying no to the committee, saying no to the extra responsibility at work, like that is also self care. It’s just kind of like flipping that on its head. One of the things I talk about in the book is, for example, one day waking up the run might be good self care, but also sleeping in might be self care. And a good way to measure that is what do you feel like when you get home from the run? Are you so glad you did it, or are you more exhausted? What do you feel like when you get home from that dinner party that you feel might feel, like, obligatory? Did you feel good that you went, or did it feel like a drain? And so figuring it out kind of that way. And again, it’s just going against all the pervasive social media and messaging of society and getting under the hood of, like, what’s wrong? What’s just not.

00:50:35 – Eric Zimmer
Did you, and do you encourage clients to change their relationship with social media if the messages that they are getting are consistently pointing at the wrong thing for them?

00:50:48 – Christy Osborne
It’s obviously very, very individual. One thing I do say is that if someone is enjoying it and doesn’t feel like they need to address it, is at least go in and unfollow the accounts that are promoting, for example, mommy wine culture. And the second you do that right now, the algorithm’s so smarteendez that’ll stop feeding that stuff to you. But if it feels like that ends up taking place, for example, of alcohol, like, if you feel like that’s the thing that you’re using, then to numb out, then look at how it actually is making you feel. If you’re scrolling Instagram for an hour, does it make you feel better? Does it make you feel more connected? Does it bring you joy? Or does it do the opposite of that thing you can apply? Kind of all the same questions.

00:51:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Yeah, I think that’s such a useful way to frame the up this idea is, did it end up making me feel better? Right, because self indulgence is not the same thing as self care. They could be the same activity sometimes, but sometimes not. And I think what you’re saying is, go a little bit deeper and ask yourself, like, did that actually move the needle on me? Feeling better with me? I guess I don’t do really any social media anymore, but when I did, I was able to notice this thing that about the first 15 minutes of it felt enjoyable. I was stimulated and I was like, oh, look, I see this thing. And that’s interesting. And that’s interesting. Like, it felt good. But then somewhere around the 15 to 20 minutes mark, if I paid close attention to myself, something shifted. Something shifted where it just suddenly it just didn’t feel good anymore.

00:52:21 – Christy Osborne
Yeah. So, similar to alcohol, it’s real easy.

00:52:23 – Eric Zimmer
To go right by that because you’re distracted. That’s part of why they work. The way they do, is they distract you. But there is usually a subtle feeling there.

00:52:32 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. I was just gonna say, it’s so similar to alcohol. Right, because it’s the same dopamine response.

00:52:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:52:39 – Christy Osborne
Yeah.

00:52:40 – Eric Zimmer
Interestingly, I had not heard of dynorphin before. Let’s close with a little bit more about dynorphin, because I’ve been doing this for a decade and reading thousands of so many of these books that I can’t believe I haven’t heard of dynorphin before for. Tell me more.

00:52:54 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, so, I mean, we know about dopamine, right? It’s the feel good chemical. It’s also the learning molecule in the brain. So we learn it feels good, we cement these neural pathways in our head. But when we drink or do any substances, we get this artificial level of dopamine. And since our brains are desperate to bring us back to homeostasis, it releases a counter chemical called xynorphine, which basically brings you down. Right. It’s a set of. It’s a downer. And what ends up happening when you’re a regular drinker is your body gets so used to the incoming massive spikes of artificial dopamine that it releases more and more dynorphin. And so you cannot get or feel joy or happiness without the massive amounts of dopamine, aka alcohol, because you’re flooded with this opposing chemical. And how that looks in real life for me, was realizing that I would be sitting at my daughter’s ballet recital or my son’s baseball game, and I was like, this is not fun because there’s no alcohol, and that is because of this other thing. And it also ties into. Right, how we were talking about 20 minutes, the dopamine hits you for 20 minutes, and then this other chemical, the evil brother, whatever, comes in and does the opposite. And so it’s just a really interesting way to understand all of the neuroscience of what actually is happening and get to the truth of, is it actually doing the job that we’re drinking it for?

00:54:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. That’s one of the other things that makes addiction. I’m going to use the word. We don’t know. We could use alcohol use disorder, but I’m just going to broadly say addiction. So pernicious is that thing that you’re describing there, which is our neurochemicals are all messed up. And so we may not be producing enough of the chemicals that make us feel good, or we may be over producing the chemicals that tamp down that response. And you take the alcohol away or the substance, and you have the inability to enjoy pleasure. So then somebody says, well, go to a pottery class instead of drinking wine. And you go to the pottery class and you’re like, who cares? Like, that was stupid, right? Like, okay, that did not make me feeling better. I was uncomfortable. I didn’t know anybody. And it’s, again, why I think that having support early on in any sort of sobriety journey is so, so important. Because just to hear somebody else say, that’s a normal.

00:55:12 – Christy Osborne
Just hang in there.

00:55:13 – Eric Zimmer
Like, of course you can’t feel good, but I felt the same way. And you know what? It gets better. Like, whether it’s a coach like you, whether it’s an online group, whether it’s a twelve step program, people often ask me, like, what’s the one thing that someone has to do to get sober? I’m like, well, I would never boil it down to one thing because I think it’s complicated. But if you at gunpoint forced me, I would probably say help from other people who’ve been through it. That would probably be. If I had to make one recommendation, I’d say that one is sort of the non negotiable on the table, I think.

00:55:46 – Christy Osborne
Yes, 100%. Community. Community all the way. It’s because you don’t feel alone. Then the shame also evaporates. Because when you speak something that feels shameful in a group, that helps with the shame piece of it. And when you can hear other people saying yes. When I went to that party and turned down the glass of wine, it was so weird. And I felt like a fish out of water for 15 minutes. But then 20 minutes and I was fine and I was able to be okay, then, you know, it’s possible for you, too. And so, yes, a hundred percent, I totally agree with you. And that can come in different forms, right. Whether it is a twelve step meeting or even just connecting with the sober podcast host that you like listening to or whatever.

00:56:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s the thing. There are a lot of ways to get it. Like, when I got sober in 1994, there was one place to hear any of this, and it was in a twelve step room. That was it. It just didn’t exist in any meaningful way outside of that. I mean, the Internet didn’t exist. It’s so different today. I mean, we have so many resources and different ways of plugging in. And that’s the other one I always say. We used to say in AA, like, keep coming back, right? Which meant, you know, keep trying. And I think that’s the other message that I think is so important is you don’t have to keep coming back to AA. That’s not it. But keep trying, keep experimenting. Because there is a way out.

00:57:08 – Christy Osborne
Yeah, 100%. And with all the grace and compassion in yourself, knowing that alcohol is a highly addictive drug. And this is hard, but there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s a lot wrong with alcohol. And you’ll get there. You’ll get there. What you said, right? The puzzle pieces that work. And it will happen.

00:57:24 – Eric Zimmer
Well, that is a beautiful place for us to end the conversation. On that note of hope, you and I are going to talk a little bit longer, longer in the post show conversation, because I want to just talk a little bit about some of the different theories about addiction or dependency out there. There’s a disease model, there’s a learning model. There’s a self medication model. I just kind of want to talk through some of the different facets of those. We’re going to do that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you’d like to get access to that as well as ad free episodes and help support us, because we can use your help for sure, go to oneyoufeed.com dot Christy, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

00:58:06 – Christy Osborne
Thank you so much.