When stress causes you to backslide into daily drinking ….again

You might worry that you have a problem with drinking because the stresses of daily life made you backslide into daily drinking. But the problem is how you are thinking.

Does this sound familiar? You have been doing well with drinking less and one evening you have just HAD IT. Your boss was completely unreasonable at work and your husband just doesn’t understand what you have to put up with. You just want a break from all of it and “Calgon take me away” won’t cut it. You go ahead and open a bottle of wine to take the edge off and promise yourself that you will start fresh tomorrow. Then the next thing you know, your nightly ritual is back in force.

You think that the problem is the stress caused by your boss. It is amazing how quickly our brains can very quickly turn a terse email into "I am going to get a bad review, lose my job and have to live in a van down by the river." But the real problem is how you are thinking about it. Sounds crazy, I know, I used to think so too. I promise you that this is good news because your thinking is going to be easier to change than your boss.

In the absence of knowing how to change your thinking, the knee jerk response is to turn to alcohol as a coping strategy. Let's face it, the prevailing belief in western society is that alcohol is a stress reliever. We see it everywhere. Look at the popularity of the Mommy wine culture where the key message is that alcohol is the solution that Mommy needs in order to deal her life. “Wine is to Women as Duct Tape is to men, it fixes everything.” We hear this over and over again, thank you HUGE advertising budgets, and we believe it. We accept it as "true."

My clients come to me because they have decided that they don’t love the results that they are getting with their current drinking and they want to drink less. But they also don’t want to be stressed out all the time.

And as long as they continue to believe that drinking is a stress reliever, they have to choose.

Other programs will focus on ways to manage stress throughout the day so that they don’t feel like a pressure cooker when they get home. This is helpful, and I encourage using these tactics.

I take a different approach and teach my clients how to address the root cause of their stress. This doesn’t mean telling off their boss. This means managing their mind around stress. They learn to practice recognizing that their boss says words or does things. The boss’s actions don’t create a feeling of stress without their brain making it mean something.

We all have 100% control of our thoughts and what we make things mean. We have all seen the inspirational quotes that say this, and understand it intellectually, but were never taught how to do it. I teach my clients how.

The most important work that I do with my clients is help them create a life that they love so much, they don’t want to numb out of it.

If you want to never have to worry about backsliding into daily drinking again, you should consider my 12 week 1:1 coaching program.

We will meet weekly for a private 45 min zoom session. During these sessions I will help you identify the underlying thoughts that are causing you stress and we will build out an individualized plan on how to unbelieve them.

This program is ideal for you if you already have some failed attempts to moderate, secretly questioned if you are an alcoholic but know that you aren’t. And most importantly, you have now decided that you really do want to change your drinking for good (not just when you are hungover or because your kids have made comments.) You need to want it for you. I only work with clients who are committed to put in the work.

If this is you, I will show you exactly how step by step. Start by scheduling a mini session by clicking on the button below or just hit reply and we will connect today.

At the end of these 12 weeks, you will feel happier, and you will be 100% in control of your relationship with alcohol.

I would love to work with you too.

Take care,

Caroline

PS Answer this - if alcohol actually helped with stress, won’t we need less of it rather than more of it?