Tiny Buddha

Tag: coping skills

  • Why I Love My Sober Life: Everything I Gained When I Quit Drinking

    Why I Love My Sober Life: Everything I Gained When I Quit Drinking

    “Sobriety was the greatest gift I ever gave myself.” ~Rob Lowe

    I tried and failed to have a fabulous relationship with alcohol for many years.

    When my children were tiny, I drank far more than was good for me, thinking I was relaxing, unwinding, socializing, and having fun. I’d seen my life shrink down from a world with lots of freedom and vibrancy to a socially restricted void, and I wanted to feel normal. I wanted to join in with everyone else.

    All my birthday cards had bottles of gin or glasses of fizz on them, all the Friday afternoon memes on social media were about “wine o’clock,” and I wanted to be part of that world.

    The opening of a bottle in the evening had me thinking I was changing gear, moving from stressed to relaxed, and treating myself to some self-care. Nothing could have been further from the truth; the alcohol made me wake during the night and gave me low-level anxiety and an almost permanent brain fog.

    I’m not proud of the drinking I did when the kids were small. I now feel a deep sense of shame about that time. I’d created such a happy life for myself—lovely husband and kids, nice house in a great town, wonderful friends. What was I drinking to escape from?

    On the outside I looked like I had it all, but I didn’t—I had overwhelm.

    I was a wife and family member, a mum to two small children, an employee, and a freelancer… I had all the roles I’d longed for, and yet it was all too much.

    I didn’t know how to let go of some of my responsibilities, and I didn’t know how to cope with everything that was going on in my life. Alcohol felt like the treat I deserved. It took me a while to figure out that alcohol was the common theme in my rubbish decision-making, tiredness, and grumpiness.

    I’d spent a long time feeling trapped and stuck. I knew I wanted to stop drinking, but I was worried about what others would think of me, how I would feel at parties without a drink in my hand, and whether I’d be able to relax properly at the weekends.

    I kept going back and forth, deciding I’d stop, then changing my mind, thinking I wouldn’t or couldn’t. It was a hellish merry-go-round. When I was forty-one, I finally made the decision to quit alcohol for a year as a little life experiment. I wanted to see how I would feel without it for an extended period of time.

    I decided to take a bold action in autumn 2019. I told a group of online friends that I was not going to drink alcohol for the whole of 2020, and once I had said it out loud, I knew I would have to do it.

    This step toward accountability really helped me to move forward with my sober mission. I started to count down to 2020 (still binge drinking), wondering how this experiment was going to go!

    Toward the end of 2019, my mindset began to shift. Instead of dreading the start of 2020, I started to look forward to it. I made plans that I knew would lead to a successful sober year. I read books about quitting, listened to inspiring podcasts, and watched films or documentaries that didn’t show alcohol consumption in a glamorous light. I followed people who were a few steps ahead of me on their sober journey. I asked questions and I followed advice.

    I had my last drink on Dec 8th, 2019—nothing monumental, out with a few friends and no hangover the next day. It was a total non-event!

    I wanted to have a year without alcohol to know if life would be stressful, lonely, or boring like I’d led myself to believe, or if it was possible to relax, connect with others, and have fun without a drink. The hangovers and brain fog were getting worse. In my late thirties and early forties, I just couldn’t get away with it like I had in my twenties.

    I wanted to be a more patient parent—no more selfishly rushing the kids through bedtime because I wanted to get back downstairs to my drink.

    I wanted hangover-free weekends to enjoy my time away from work.

    I wanted to maximize my nutritional choices—no more rubbish food choices dictated by low-level hangovers, or high-level ones for that matter.

    I wanted to sleep deeply and wake up feeling rested and ready for the day ahead.

    I wanted to know I was giving myself the best chance at not getting high blood pressure, heart disease, liver disease, cancer, dementia, or a compromised immune system.

    I went through the whole of 2020 without a drink. There were some tough days to navigate, some challenging events to negotiate, and awkward conversations to have with friends, but I did it all, and I did it all sober.

    When 2021 rolled around, I knew I wasn’t going to go back to how I’d drunk before. I had changed my relationship with alcohol for the better. I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually a different person, and I didn’t want to go back to numbing my feelings.

    It’s easy to name all the benefits to our bodies and minds when we cut alcohol out—deeper sleep, clearer skin, better mood, more energy, and less anxiety, to name a few—but for me, the real shift has come a couple of years down the line. I feel more spiritually open than I’ve ever felt before, and I cannot wait to see what unfolds next for all of those of us on this sober-curious journey.

  • Eating Too Much While Working from Home? How to Solve Emotional Snacking

    Eating Too Much While Working from Home? How to Solve Emotional Snacking

    “We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.” ~Geneen Roth

    Sometimes I feel like asking me, a recovering overeater, to work from home is as unreasonable as hoping a sex addict will pen a report from the lobby of a brothel.

    Snarky email? Feel annoyed. Get Penguin bar from cupboard.

    Meeting over? Feel relief at no longer being on camera. Eat Wagon Wheel from cupboard.

    Worked hard today? Need a reward. Wait, who ate all the kids’ lunchbox treats? Never mind, people, all good: I found the cheese.

    This was me when my desk moved from an office full of doctoral researchers to the corner of my living room.

    Some people would say I was emotional eating, or “stress eating.”

    But I didn’t recognize myself in that description.

    Where was the stress? I worked for a university: plenty of holidays, flexible hours.

    And although I hated the way I ate, I didn’t feel anything dramatic about work.

    Looking back, yeah, I had the odd frustrating collaboration, a smidge of self-doubt, a bit of trying to make myself do a spreadsheet while believing “I’m not a spreadsheet person.”

    I treated these low-level doubts and insecurities as insignificant because, like we all are, I was a professional at ignoring them.

    What I couldn’t ignore, though, was a twenty pound weight gain.

    So I tried to eat better food.

    For instance, I banned chocolate from the house, put the kids on school lunches, and got the bread machine making wholemeal bread.

    Unfortunately, the problem didn’t vanish: After working my way through a whole fresh baked loaf with butter one rainy Zoomtastic Wednesday in November, I just felt gross and out of control.

    Then came the self-criticism. “I’m weak. I can’t stop.” That made me want to eat even more.

    I was stuck in a vicious circle. But my vicious circle was like a half-moon: I could only see the half that involved stuffing my face.

    Then one day, something happened in my work life that woke me up to what was really going on when I was eating.

    At my work, we had to complete an annual professional development review. It was like a form I had to fill out about my strengths, weaknesses, and progress goals that my line manager and I both signed off on.

    I put it off. For days, I ate dry granola standing up in the kitchen. I invented a weird mousse, made of creme fraiche stirred with tons of cocoa powder, honey, and lemon essence. I mixed and ate it multiple times a day.

    When I finally tried to fill the form out, I fell apart. I felt my weaknesses were so glaring, and that I was such a productivity lost cause, that I cried and cried.

    The unavoidable issue was, although I got results by throwing creativity and enthusiasm at my job, I was hopeless with time management and focus.

    I phoned my line manager and told him everything (except the food part) in one outpouring.

    He was a total star. Kind, receptive, unfazed.

    He proposed a new daily practice…

    Planning.

    Urgh!

    The idea was to plan my time every twenty-four hours, in my calendar.

    It was a complete disaster. Every day, I’d veer wildly off-plan.

    For instance, I’d aim to spend two hours producing slides for a presentation but end up reading research papers. Then I’d do my best work for the half hour before school pick up and arrive to the school gate late again.

    Luckily, writing on my daily schedule became my new favorite procrastination tool: Even if I’d done nothing, at least I could evaluate why.

    So I started noting, alongside my schedule, what I actually ended up spending my time on.

    And I didn’t just write down the activity, either; I went further. I wrote my rationale for getting sidetracked.

    Total. Game. Changer.

    For each sidetrack, I wrote down the exact words I’d been inwardly telling myself, to make whatever had overtaken the priority seem so important in that moment. (My manager never saw this part, so I could be really honest with myself).

    And there they were, in black and white! All the visits to the kitchen. All the thoughts and feelings behind the eating, made visible.

    Since this was about time management, it gave me some objectivity on the eating issue.

    This time-tracking activity was surfacing data about my eating behaviors, but unlike other attempts to track my eating, this time it wasn’t about my body, my weight, or my self-worth. Cold, hard info neutralized my outrageous, shameful eating habits just enough for me to be intrigued by what the hell was going on in my head.

    That information led me to these learnings that I’m about to share with you.

    Insights that completely revolutionized my emotional eating. I’m going to show you a perspective shift, an understanding, a tool, and a strategy.

    These four things completely took me by surprise but had been under my nose all along.

    Tools that help me to continue to unlearn my emotional eating as it relates to work.

    Simple techniques that have helped me get healthier and more productive, and waste less of my energy hating myself for having snacked randomly all day.

    So, if you’re feeling like food is calling you from the kitchen all day long, and you fear you’re just someone who needs to be in an office to function, think again.

    These discoveries are going to help you let go of your urges and make all working environments an option.

    Seriously, if working at the kitchen table can be safe and doable for me, it can be for you too.

    1. A perspective shift: People don’t make you feel things; your thoughts do.

    Some days, I blamed my boss for my eating.

    For instance, she’d pick holes in my idea… I’d feel discouraged… Damn, now I’d polished off half a loaf of banana bread.

    But she didn’t make me feel bad; my thoughts did.

    I was making her criticism mean something about me: “I’m useless at my job and I’ll never get recognition.”

    Until I wrote them down, those sentences ran all day beneath my awareness, so of course I felt inadequate and cheesed off!

    We don’t notice our thoughts until we externalize them by speaking them out loud, or writing them down.

    We swim around in them all day. It’s like being a fish that doesn’t know it’s in water.

    2. An understanding: Feelings are physical.

    When I felt tempted to go to the kitchen, it felt like a physical compulsion to walk there.

    Like my body was a puppet, and the food was a puppet master.

    I realized that feelings like urgency and self-doubt make my body especially restless. Jittery, insecure.

    With a feeling coursing through me, my body literally did not want to stay seated at my desk. It wanted me to walk, move, shake off the crawling feeling.

    That’s when the penny dropped that all emotions are bodily experiences.

    Not just the extreme emotions: butterflies in your tummy, needing the bathroom before appearing on stage, or feeling like you’ve had a double espresso when you’re in love.

    But also, low-level challenging emotions that normally reverberate in our bodies but are somewhat under our radar: boredom, confusion, slight overwhelm.

    3. A tool: Change your thoughts on paper.

    So now that I was noting my justifications for going to the fridge, I could see that my body’s restlessness was ramped up and my eating was given the go-ahead by the exact sentences I was running in my head.

    Let me show you an example.

    Thoughts about the task: “I don’t know where to start.” “This communications plan is just a formality; nobody will read it.” Feelings: Daunted. Hopeless. Draggy low energy. Justification for eating dark chocolate: “I’m tired, this’ll wake me up.”

    With this understanding, I was able to make changes before the urge to eat even arose.

    Instead of thinking downer thoughts and then believing food would pick me up, I could purposely say more encouraging sentences to myself to create motivated and confident feelings.

    Except how? How could I think a new thought? Um, just think it?

    Since writing things down was working for me, that’s what I kept doing.

    I remembered revising for exams, when writing things over and over was my go-to revision method.

    “Getting this done now will make my future life simpler.”

    “I’m phenomenal at coping with my workload.”

    Try writing it down right now!

    “My work is a valuable contribution to the world.”

    Imagine believing that was true.

    When I discovered that, I was like: Mwah ha ha ha! I have the power to control my feelings!

    4. A strategy: Surf your urges.

    Journaling helped me nip some of my triggers in the bud.

    But what about when I was already in the kitchen, or boiling the kettle, and the urge to browse the cupboard was already upon me?

    Once an urge had hit me, I felt like eating was the only way to quiet it.

    But now I had a new perspective on emotions as being physical, and I realized that urges are the same. Urges are just emotional desire. Restless desire in the body.

    I also realized that I already let urges and desires come and go every day without acting on them.

    For instance, I hadn’t acted on the urge to send a sweary, irate email to management for making me repeat an onerous online training I had done twelve months earlier. No brainer: Being rude would cost me my livelihood.

    I just composed it in my head, had a rant to my husband, and then it passed. My body was inflamed with it for a bit, but after a while the sensation subsided.

    So I wondered: What’s the equivalent for the urge to eat?

    I noticed: When I have the urge to eat, my neck feels tight. I feel unsettled. Graspy.

    It’s laughable really. When I feel compelled to satisfy an urge to go eat peanut butter on toast, I really just want to dissipate a fleeting tension in my neck?

    Try it. Two minutes.

    The even better news is, after a few days of letting urges come and go, they stopped coming so thick and fast.

    So, friend, you don’t need to go back to the office to escape your compulsions.

    And there’s nothing wrong with you for having them.

    Our brains form habits to help us get through the day. They are just learned ways of coping with the emotional terrain of working life, and if I can learn better ways of coping, guaranteed you can too.

    We put a lot of ourselves into our work lives, and work requires more of us emotionally than we give ourselves credit for.

    It takes intentionality to not use food, Netflix, checking Facebook, and anything else that’s easy and mind-numbing to take the edge off the tougher feelings, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

    It takes a willingness to feel our feelings bodily, which is a skill we can cultivate.

    So please go easy on your lovely, hard-working soul. Be patient. You’re doing a great job of being you.

    And next time you’re staring vacantly into the cupboard while the kettle boils, remember you’re not alone. I’m learning this too.

  • Emotionally Imbalanced? How Qigong Can Help You Heal Your Mind and Body

    Emotionally Imbalanced? How Qigong Can Help You Heal Your Mind and Body

    “In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.” ~Mitch Albom

    The marble tile felt cold and hard against the side of my body as I lay sobbing and shaking on the floor. Some part of my mind nudged me to get to the couch, but I couldn’t. What did it matter?

    Tears kept flowing as my moans of “Why? Why? Why?” echoed through the room. Despite the discomfort, I curled into a tighter fetal position on the floor, continuing to sob and whimper. Every once in a while, I would cough and gag, a familiar side effect of crying so hard.

    After ten minutes, I had the clarity and energy to get up. I wiped my tears, blew my nose, and took several deep breaths, each one shaky and ragged.

    This moment mirrored dozens of other similar moments over the past two years. The severity had lessened, perhaps due to therapy or simply the passing of time. However, I never knew the deep sorrow would hit again and bring me down, literally.

    Most people experience this type of loss at some point. Mine resulted from a dearly loved and close family member telling me they never wanted to talk to me again and wanted me out of their life, in words much harsher and more hurtful.

    Deeply rooted feelings of insecurity from a childhood filled with physical and emotional abuse rose to the surface (that’s a story for another time), compounding my feelings of wretchedness, unworthiness, and loss.

    As I mentioned above, time and an incredible estrangement therapist had begun to heal some of the pain. I gravitated to therapy because I have my master’s and part of my PhD in Psychology. My clients found relief and recovery with me through cognitive behavioral, narrative, and art therapy methods. I did feel better talking with my skilled and experienced therapist.

    However, I continually felt unstable. Imagine having to walk on a balance beam all the time. You get used to it and feel more competent, but you never have the same stability as walking on solid ground. I knew I had to get my emotions on firm footing.

    I had used Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as my primary healthcare model for eight years. I know the acupuncture and herbs eased some of the extreme sadness. However, after this bout of waterworks and wailing, I realized I needed to learn more about what TCM says about the emotions. So I began to research, and my life changed forever.

    According to TCM, imbalanced emotions cause disease and mental health problems. Each organ relates to a pair of emotions, and when they are healthy you let go of the imbalanced emotions and retain a balanced state.

    • Lungs: Imbalanced = loss, grief, and sorrow; Balanced = dignity, integrity, and courage
    • Kidneys: Imbalanced = fear, loneliness; Balanced = self-confidence and inner strength
    • Liver: Imbalanced = anger, frustration, impatience; Balanced = kindness and compassion
    • Heart: Imbalanced = nervousness, excessive joy, and anxiety; Balanced = joy, contentment, and tranquility
    • Spleen: Imbalanced = overthinking, obsessiveness, and worry; Balanced = trust and openness

    I felt a significant shift in how I viewed emotions. Clarity arose about how my state of mind harmed or healed my body and vice versa.

    The good news from my research was that people can skillfully balance their feelings.

    One of the most powerful tools to do so is qigong.

    Two Chinese characters comprise qigong: qi 气and gong 功. You can roughly translate qi to mean energy or life force. It’s more complicated than that, but that imagery works for this discussion. Gong means work or skill. Therefore, qigong means developing skill in working with energy.

    Qigong originated from primitive people’s efforts to nurture their health. In fact, in 1957, when archaeologists excavated graves from over 5,000 years ago, they found a colored ceramic basin painted with a figure doing various qigong movements.

    Qigong in ancient China was also called tuna (adjustment of breathing), daoyin (moving the body and breathing), zuochan (sitting in meditation), or neigong (internal exercise). These translations emphasize the importance of breathing and using the mind when doing qigong exercises.

    A nice description of qigong for today is the skill of physical and mental training that weaves together the functions of the body, breathing, and the mind. When you integrate these three elements, you adjust the yin and yang balance in your body to prevent and reverse physical and mental disease.

    The key to remember is that, just as with any other skill, you need to practice.

    Living in Shanghai, China at the time of my exploration, I joined qigong classes at the parks near my home. At the time I wasn’t immersed in the theory, just the movements. This level of practice brought a sense of relief. I didn’t feel on the verge of falling off the balance beam at any given moment.

    Nevertheless, the shaky foundation persisted. So, I dove deeper into medical qigong theory and completed my qigong teacher certification to broaden my insights. During these studies, the healing power of sounds, colors, finger mudras, and walking patterns emerged as tools for balancing the emotions.

    For example, as you read above, my sorrow and sadness related to my lungs. The lungs tie to the metal element, the season of fall, the color white, and the emotional healing sound “ssss.” The annual respiratory illnesses each autumn, the anniversary of the estrangement, finally made sense.

    Another medical qigong concept I found affirmed that the initial willingness to cry served a purpose.

    To illustrate, my study of qigong taught me that feeling and expressing emotions helps clear stagnant energy so the body can rebalance. For instance, there is an expression of long-term physical ailments being caused by “unshed tears.” Puffiness under the eyes is one symptom of this sub-health condition. Crying as needed serves as an important role in healing, and I had definitely done plenty of crying.

    Having said that, lingering in this state slows recovery. Qigong exercises help focus the mind and release the imbalanced aspects of emotions from the body. Through qigong, the stagnant energy returns to the earth for recycling, and you live in a balanced state.

    Perhaps the most efficacious tool for qigong practice is nature.

    Qigong practitioners learn how to gather qi from plants, water, soil, sand, canyons, mountains, oceans, rivers, etc., as well as how to use this qi for regeneration and repair. You might have seen the plethora of new “forest bathing” books in bookstores. This healing modality stems from the same ancient roots as qigong and demonstrates the effectiveness of nature to heal.

    You focus on the present moment, fully immersed in the sensations surrounding you and your breath.

    As I’ve practiced and applied the curative tools of qigong, my literal and figurate feet are planted on the ground. Instead of balancing precariously on a thin beam of wood, I experience the ebbs and flows of life like a tree. My roots run deep into the earth creating a solid foundation, and my trunk serves as a stable core. From this position of solidity, my branches and leaves blow with the wind, experiencing the world. The tree remains stable and strong yet lives and enjoys life.

    Whether extreme happiness (the birth of my grandson) or broken heartedness (my continued estrangement) come my way, I use the tools and mindset of qigong to rebalance. I learn the lessons each emotion teaches me and come back to center, rooted in nature and the present moment.

    I no longer crumple to the floor. Now, when the subtle energy shifts that occur when thinking of my estrangement surface, they nudge me instead of assailing me.

    The greatest gift from this experience is the opportunity to teach others about qigong for emotional healing.

    Your body wants to partner with you to heal and balance your emotions. Whether with me or other skilled qigong practitioners, you now have another tool to add to your toolbox of emotional well-being.

  • Disordered Eating: What We Need to Understand and How to Heal

    Disordered Eating: What We Need to Understand and How to Heal

    “Food can distract you from your pain but food cannot take away your pain.” ~Karen Salmansohn

    Long before I was watching The Biggest Loser (a popular weight loss reality TV series) and trying to look like a swimsuit model, I was hiding in my closet eating candy, fiercely addicted to sugar.

    I remember feeling completely out of control over my cravings for all things sweet, and I didn’t know how to stop myself from eating until I felt sick. Food played a bigger role in my life than simply to support the processes in my body that lead to optimal health. To my “child self,” who wasn’t sure the world was a safe and welcoming place, food was a lifeboat.

    No little kid imagines, “Oh, it would be fun to starve myself and see what happens!” Or enjoys waking up in the middle of the night to work out for hours for the reward of being “loved” by those around them. But when faced with adversity in childhood, our number one goal is to survive, and in order to do so, we look for ways to reassure ourselves that we have some element of control.

    I grasped for anything I could to create a sense of agency and stability in my life, but at the cost of disconnecting from my inner wisdom and abandoning the core of who I was created to be. I was trying to survive by becoming less. Less of myself, less visible to the world around me, while at the same time crying out to be seen.

    As you consider your own childhood experiences with food, notice any emotions that come forward. How old were you? What was the backdrop in which these early experiences with food occurred?

    As I reflect on my own food story, I see how my emotional pain and a complicated relationship with food became intertwined. It was one of the only levers I could pull to manage the chaos both in my home and within myself.

    What appeared on the surface as a “fear of food” was in truth a fear of feeling. Feeling meant facing the ache of growing up in a home where strong emotions were suppressed, intuition ignored, and many conversations critical for the healthy maturation process of an adolescent, avoided.

    For example, any discussion around the topic of sexuality and what it meant to embody and express mine, was considered “taboo,” and shameful in the highly religious culture of my upbringing. Therefore, it is no coincidence my disordered eating patterns surfaced in tandem with my body’s transition into puberty.

    The changes in my body, at that time, felt terrifying, and the disordered eating served as an attempt to shut down the process of sexual maturation—a means to avoid the shame of being “sexual.”

    In my rehabilitation process from anorexia, bulimia, and orthorexia I found again and again that behind a binge, purge, or restrictive behavior was often a deep emotional pain I felt ill-equipped to meet and care for in a healing manner.

    Disordered eating was “pain-management.” Albeit not the most effective strategy for coping with distress, but it was the one I knew inside and out.

    The first time I recall recognizing disordered eating as a way to handle emotional turmoil, I was sitting in therapy feeling guarded and hesitant to believe that the healing answers lived anywhere in that room. I didn’t fully understand why I was there, aside from being told it was the “right” thing to do to get professional help.

    The therapist looked at me with concern in her eyes and asked, as if the answer should be simple, “Why are you so afraid of food? Why the eating disorder?”

    Now, I’d been asked that question by many well-meaning, worried adults before, but on this day, I felt an unexpected flood of emotion rise within, and fighting back tears, I replied,

    “I’m not afraid of food. I’m afraid my parents will divorce.”

    The moment the words left my mouth, I realized the question my heart had been desiring for someone to ask all along was: “Why the pain?”

    Think back to your childhood home and the role food played, beyond physical sustenance.

    Was food a reward for good behavior?

    Did food cause fights between your parents (i.e., one parent burns dinner, and the other explodes in anger)?

    Was food used as a way to “regulate” you—help you “calm down,” feel comforted when you were sad, or numb pain?

    When you faced challenges, was food more available than the ears of the adults in your life?

    Did you feel safe in your childhood home to express internal pain?

    Furthermore, if you grew up in an intense emotional climate, and your primary caregivers lacked the level of consciousness, and resources, to support you in learning healthy emotional regulation, food might have been the only “state-changer” (the only thing to take the edge off painful experiences) available. Food was your therapy.

    Emotions ended up being “fed” instead of felt. Eating became a way to cope with the feelings that seemed out of control in your life. Instead of fueling your body with the building blocks required for healing, you ate to numb your pain.

    Hear me when I say, there is no shame if you find yourself here—if you’re still stuck in the cycle of using food to survive your own emotional experience. You’re worthy of self-compassion—to be able to look back at your younger self and appreciate the ways you managed the pain you faced, with the resources you had. Whole-body rehabilitation starts by offering gentleness toward oneself.

    Another critical component of healing is giving yourself permission to have the conversations with yourself that, as a child, you didn’t or couldn’t have with others, but longed to. Doing so aids in establishing a “safe” environment within yourself for healing to flow. Set yourself free to explore any and every question that feels important to you.

    As I mentioned earlier, for me one such conversation was around what it meant to be a sexual being. For you this might mean exploring the confusion you felt when your parents split and the challenges you faced adjusting to new blended family dynamics, the loneliness you experienced as a child because it was hard for you to make friends, or a sense of shame about your family’s socioeconomic status.

    And if it was normal in your family of origin to bury and suppress half of the emotional spectrum, as it was in mine, especially the feelings that are uncomfortable, that require deeper self-inquiry, think about whether this culture aligns with your core values, now.

    What culture do you desire to cultivate for your future self around navigating emotional pain? This is your opportunity to excavate a new tunnel from which to travel from emotional pain to healing, for you and generations after you!

    Right now, you have an opportunity to build trust with yourself by committing to allowing every emotion to be experienced. What is one emotion that you believed as a child was “off limits?” What would change today if you allowed yourself to experience that emotion—to permit its flow through you?

    Listen to the little voice within you, with your heart wide open. Witness yourself. Be the listening ear you longed for when things first got “complicated” with food. Only then can you ask your younger self if they’re ready to entertain some alternative strategies, besides food, to help scary emotions move through the body.

    And when you are ready, here are some of the beautiful practices I have found on my own healing journey, that aid in building a space where the body feels free to release big feelings:

    1. Jin Shin Jyutsu- Finger Holding Practice

    This Japanese healing technique works to calm your energetic body. The practice involves holding each finger for one to three minutes on one hand, then repeating on the other hand. Each finger represents a different emotion:

    Thumb- Worry

    Pointer Finger- Fear

    Middle Finger- Anger

    Ring Finger- Insecurity and grief

    Pinkie- Self-confidence

    2. The 4-7-8 Breath or “Relaxing Breath”

    One benefit of this breath practice is its ability to strengthen “vagal tone.” The Vagus Nerve is the longest group of nerves in the body, running from your brain to your gut, and it is a key component in the activation of your parasympathetic nervous system—the branch of the autonomic nervous system that promotes the resting, digesting, and repairing in the body. Improving vagal tone can play a role in reducing stress and anxiety as well as:

    • Improve digestive health
    • Increase HRV (Heart Rate Variability)
    • And lower levels of inflammation in the body

    3. Walking outside barefoot

    Reconnecting to our roots, putting feet to earth, and absorbing the healing nutrients it has to offer can do a world of healing. When you put your bare feet on the earth, the electrical current coming from the ground contains an abundance of negative ions that are then absorbed by your skin and dispersed throughout the body. These negatively charged ions have been shown in clinical research to promote greater physical and psychological well-being.

    Try one or all of the techniques listed above to reconnect to your emotional body, ground yourself, and release stuck feelings. Notice any shifts you experience as a result.

    The goal is to start to create an environment of safety for your inner child to explore the previously forbidden emotions, without fear of abandonment or shame.

    No different from any other coping strategy, disordered eating can be a means to try to create the safety within that we lacked in our outside world early on in life. But there are other interventions, such as the ones mentioned above, that can offer a sense of safety without harm.

    Recovering from disordered eating comes back to finding healing ways to be there for your emotions, rather than numb them with food restriction, binging, or purging. Because it’s really not about the food at all. It’s about becoming the friend your body longed for in your most painful moments.

    Give your body a safe place to express, let go, and experience, without judgment, the total expanse of feelings that come with being human, and watch your relationship with food transform as a side effect.

  • A Natural Approach to Mental Health: How to Reduce Anxiety Through Gardening

    A Natural Approach to Mental Health: How to Reduce Anxiety Through Gardening

    “When the world feels like an emotional roller coaster, steady yourself with simple rituals. Do the dishes. Fold the laundry. Water the plants. Simplicity attracts wisdom.” ~Unknown

    I’ve suffered from anxiety since my childhood, but it was only seven years ago that I was formally diagnosed.

    My symptoms began to get worse after my long-term relationship ended and I felt like my world had collapsed around me.

    I was suffering from extreme fatigue, having trouble concentrating, not sleeping well, and I was constantly worrying.

    Over the next couple of years my mental health continued to deteriorate, and I had trouble finding the energy or motivation to get through the day.

    Eventually, I quit my high-stress government job and moved back to my hometown to live with my elderly mother.

    I was unemployed for the first time in my life, and I struggled to find a reason to get out of bed in the mornings.

    I was prescribed medication for my anxiety, but I suffered from weight gain and other side effects from the treatment.

    After seeing no improvement from the medication, I decided to try healing myself naturally.

    I sought advice from a variety of different practitioners including a naturopath, herbalist, and kinesiologist, which helped a bit, but I was still worrying excessively, having negative thoughts and occasional panic attacks.

    I’d read about the benefits of gardening for mental health, so one day I decided to tackle the overgrown mess in the corner of my mom’s backyard.

    At first the task seemed overwhelming, but I spent about fifteen to twenty minutes each day digging up weeds, and after a week it was looking like a proper garden again.

    I wasn’t an experienced gardener, so I did some research to find out which vegetables were the easiest to grow.

    I settled on lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchinis and I bought the seedlings from my local nursery.

    As well as the plants, I also installed a small bird bath so I could watch the birds while I was out in the garden.

    I really enjoyed watching the birds splashing around, so my next project was to make a bird feeder so I could attract more birds to the yard.

    Healing was a gradual process, and it took a few months before I noticed that my symptoms were improving.

    I was feeling calmer and more centered, and I wasn’t worrying about every little thing.

    The garden is now my sanctuary and the place where I feel the most peaceful.

    Gardening has many physical and mental health benefits including:

    Mindfulness

    When I’m out in the garden my mind is fully focused on the task at hand, so I’m not stressing about things from the past or what’s going on in my life at the time.

    I make an effort to appreciate and admire the beauty of the plants, and it’s really satisfying to watch them grow from tiny seedlings into mature plants.

    As well as vegetables, I’m now also growing herbs and a variety of different flowers, which are great for attracting bees and butterflies to the garden.

    Strength

    When my anxiety was at its worst, I had no energy or motivation to exercise. Even just doing the bare minimum tasks like showering and cooking left me drained.

    As I started spending more and more time in the garden, I noticed that my energy was improving and my body was getting stronger from all the bending, weeding, and digging I was doing.

    Sunshine

    Being out in the beautiful sunshine lifts my mood and it’s a great source of vitamin D, which can help to reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression, while also boosting the immune system.

    Nutrition

    Being able to harvest beautiful fresh herbs and vegetables from my garden inspired me to try new, healthier recipes so I was eating better than I had in years.

    The crisp lettuce and juicy tomatoes straight from the garden were so much more flavorful than anything I’d tasted from the grocery store, and I’m sure they were much more nutritious as well.

    If you have the space in your backyard to create a little garden, I’d definitely recommend giving it a try.

    What if you don’t have a garden?

    Try container gardening.

    There are many different vegetables that can be grown in containers including radishes, peppers, lettuce, spinach, and other salad greens.

    Get some indoor plants.

    Indoor plants are great for bringing a touch of nature indoors, and there are lots of compact plants that are ideal for apartments like succulents, air plants, or African violets.

    If you have more space, you could try a peace lily, rubber plant, or prayer plant.

    Create a windowsill garden.

    If you have a nice, sunny windowsill you could start a small herb garden with parsley, chives, and thyme.

    Herbs are fast growing, easy to care for and great for adding flavor to your meals.

    Join a community garden.

    Community gardens are popping up all over the place in cities around the country, and they’re great for meeting likeminded people who can share their gardening experience with you.

    Spend time in nature.

    If you’re not a green thumb you can still get the benefits of plants by getting out in nature.

    Try going for a hike if you have trails nearby, take a walk around your local park, visit a botanical garden or read a book underneath a tree.

    Next time you feel stressed or anxious, try surrounding yourself with plants and see if it helps you to feel calmer.

    Whether it’s caring for a small house plant, creating a garden of your own, or simply spending more time in nature, your mental health will benefit from having plants around you.

    I hope this has inspired you to give gardening a try!

  • How I Broke My Stress Eating Habit When Nothing Else Worked

    How I Broke My Stress Eating Habit When Nothing Else Worked

    “The pain seems so much more difficult than the cookies. But it’s not. The pain covered in cookies becomes pain covered in fat covered in more pain.” ~Brooke Castillo

    Do you ever eat when you’re stressed, sad, tired, alone?

    Bag of chips after a hard day?

    Ordering the take-out when your partner’s away?

    I did.

    Seven years ago, my newborn baby cried every evening.

    I’d feed her, change her, and blow raspberries on her neck. Still, she screamed—like a smoke alarm you couldn’t stop.

    I tried singing to her, burping her, begging her…

    I felt useless, desperate.

    In my journalism job, before maternity leave, I’d often doubted my capability. But my new job as a parent? Totally out of my depth.

    I envied my husband, swanning off to the office. The second he got back, I’d thrust the howling baby at him.

    “Tell me what to do!” he’d yell over the din.

    At my wits’ end, I’d put on the sling, wrestle her in, and head into the Berlin streets.

    If I bounce-walked, muttering “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to sleep we go” four billion times, she’d sleep. Then I’d feel like I deserved a medal. Or, failing that… an ice cream? (My district was renowned for boutique ice cream shops.) Black cherry and mascarpone! Perfect.

    “Dinner’s ready,” my husband would say when we got back. I’d wipe my chin. Afterward, I’d be mega full.

    First few times it happened, I promised myself I’d nix the habit before anyone noticed. But every day from then on, when the witching hour arrived again, you know where I’d go. Before long, I knew every kiosk, every flavor, and often ran to double scoops.

    Honestly? I was overeating at home too.

    When my baby girl dozed off breastfeeding, I didn’t dare move a muscle. I’d sit there, peeling slices of Emmental out the packet.

    It was fifteen years since I’d recovered from binge eating and bulimia, so this new eating problem was scary. Plus, my post-baby waist already bulged over my leggings.

    Over the next couple of months, I Googled emotional eating tips for what to do instead.

    I tried substituting healthier snacks, but ate whole bags of carrots and prunes.

    I tried to “feel my feelings” more, but as I wallowed in self-pity, I wondered if I was doing it right.

    I talked to my friends. Over coffee and cake, of course.

    I read a book about mindful eating. On my phone, over lunch.

    The fact is, I was just trying superficial fixes, without understanding how my mind worked.

    When I finally understood how emotions fuel our behaviors, it changed not just my eating, but my handling of life too. I even lost my baby weight, eventually.

    But more importantly, my emotional eating has shown me how to manage my mind.

    So, if you’re eating when you’re not hungry, whether through stress from parenthood or something else, this is for you.

    Let me show you where I got confused so you can solve your eating more easily. Because solving emotional eating isn’t complicated. It only seems hard because we get it mixed up with self-judgment, and because we think we need to take the stress away to stop the eating.

    Confusion 1: I spent time dealing with feelings that were just drama, not the real scary emotions.

    I probably should have cried more after my baby screamed so much. But I didn’t want to scare her.

    I would have liked to kneel on the floor and wail with exhaustion, and anger at the rejection I felt. Those were my heartfelt feelings. Real, raw, ugly, unflattering and immature, but true.

    By eating instead of feeling, I brushed those emotions under the carpet. And then covered the area with more mental mess: food-related self-doubt, regret, blame, failure, victimhood, despair, more eating.

    I’m not saying decluttering your brain of food drama is a waste of time—actually, in the process we learn to cut ourselves some slack, and that’s golden.

    But the shame from all the self-judgment is only the surface layer of mess, and ultimately, you have to aim to clean deeper.

    Feel deeper. Feel beyond guilt.

    Confusion 2: Believing it’s wrong to use food to numb your feelings.

    I hold my hands up: eating ice creams was pure escape. Afterward, I’d feel like I’d abandoned myself and my baby. That didn’t feel right, but it doesn’t make it wrong.

    If you’re eating to avoid your emotions, you’re not naughty, or bad, or wicked, or greedy, or weak.

    Sure, in an ideal world, we’d eat when we were genuinely hungry, not just craving relief. But eating when you’re physically hungry is a skill, not a rule. You have to learn skills. Not just beat yourself up.

    “I didn’t need to eat. Why do I always do this? I’m getting fat.” 

    It makes no sense to bully yourself into changing when you’re still figuring out how. It’d be like me yelling at my baby for not being able to communicate with words.

    My husband laughed once when I called myself an emotional eater. He was like: “What is that?”

    So I could ask that too, and tell myself: “I’m not sure what’s going on yet, but bit by bit, I’m going to understand this.”

    Big difference!

    Confusion 3: Labeling yourself as a problem person if you eat in a disordered way.

    I kept having this thought:

    I can’t help it, it’s my personality. I had eating disorders.

    To be fair, I did act like an addict.

    I mean, one minute I’d be breastfeeding. And the next minute I’d come to my senses with an empty muesli box on my side table and wheat flakes crusted onto my pajamas.

    And I’d go: What is wrong with me??

    So I Googled. Took personality tests on the internet. Felt helpless and doomed.

    Then, I read something cool: “Your personality is just a collection of habits.” Bingo! I didn’t have to label myself an “overeater” or a “binge eater” or “an addict,” which made me feel bad about myself and made it harder to stop.

    For now, I could just be “someone who overeats sometimes.”

    The grace I gave myself when I said that washed through my body like a relief.

    From thereon in, I started figuring it out, one tiny change at a time.

    Confusion 4: Playing wac-a-mole with triggers.

    A habit, as I’m sure you know, is a chain reaction. Something sparks a thought that food would be good. That trigger can be a feeling, a time of day, that buttery croissanty smell…

    So, you might think you’re at the mercy of whatever presses your buttons and start trying to avoid your triggers. But tiptoeing around triggers isn’t the answer.

    First: not practical. Avoiding your mum because she mentions your weight. Walking past Delice de France with a clothes peg on your nose.

    Second: pointless. Why? Because the reason your emotional eating began isn’t the reason you keep doing it.

    Let’s go back to Berlin—I want to show you how my emotional eating habit evolved.

    The first day I went out with my crying baby, I wasn’t intending to eat ice cream. I saw the Eis kiosk, and I thought, “I want something for myself.” That day and that day only, there was a fully conscious decision.

    My brain took notes. After that, any time I felt less-than, it said, “Let’s eat again! That was easy!” Pretty soon, I was eating whenever I felt rubbish.

    Eating biscuits, overwhelmed by my messy flat.

    Eating biscuits, resentful of others’ great sleep.

    Eating weird instant soup, because I’d run out of biscuits.

    You can’t eradicate triggers. You’d have to solve life. But breathe. You don’t have to.

    The solution to emotional eating is to not rush to solve anything.

    When I was stress eating in Berlin, I was so busy trying to solve my stress—or eating—I wasn’t really paying attention to the thoughts or feelings in each moment.

    It was all flying under my radar in a hailstorm of pretzel crumbs and salt crystals.

    I started noting the actual sentences that I’d told myself in the moments before I had overeaten. Sometimes I just wrote a word in a circle. A feeling. An urge!

    Bit by bit, I realized, I’d avoided my feelings because I thought it was bad of me to have them.

    For instance, I resented the enormous responsibility and daily duty of caring for a baby, and feared my creative, rock ‘n roll life was over—but I dismissed that feeling as selfish.

    I envied my husband for going to work and I missed my ambition—but I judged that sadness and jealousy as “ungrateful.”

    I desperately missed getting praise, or pay, or achieving things on a to-do list—but I cringed at my neediness for someone else to tell me I was doing a good job.

    Turns out, I did want something for myself. Not just an ice cream! An identity beyond motherhood.

    But with self-judgment so harsh, I can see why I couldn’t admit those feelings.

    I didn’t need to express my true feelings—to paint huge canvases, or sing my lungs out in my car.

    Or shove them down.

    Or spend any time on a psychiatrist’s couch exploring the gaps in my own upbringing.

    Or instantly solve them.

    I just had to live with the dilemma for a while. Acknowledge the emotional conflict. I needed to witness it.

    Same as I had to be there for my daughter.

    I couldn’t stop her crying! She got born, she wasn’t cool with that, and I don’t blame her—it’s a pretty exposing, vulnerable business being alive.

    My job was just to hang in there with her, going, “I know you’re crying, I’m here, I can’t make it better, but I’m not going to abandon you.”

  • 19 Techniques to Calm a Highly Sensitive Nervous System

    19 Techniques to Calm a Highly Sensitive Nervous System

    “You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.” ~Timber Hawkeye

    The sun is setting, and the cold wind is gently blowing in my face. I’m sitting on a rock that’s about ten feet tall, overlooking the Peruvian city of Cuzco. I can hear dogs barking, groups of teenagers laughing, the low hum of traffic, and the music blaring from cars in the distance. As it goes dark, the lights of thousands of houses begin to flicker on like fireflies.

    I should be enjoying this picturesque scene, but I’m not. My mind is racing too fast for me to make sense of anything that I’m thinking.

    The only thing I’m able to fixate on is the intense ball of worry that sits in the top of my chest. Every thought introduces a new problem and a restless attempt to solve it. But the thoughts themselves aren’t that important. They’re really just a manifestation of a physical tension that I’ve been holding onto for far too long.

    This was my life with relentless anxiety.

    For years I didn’t understand why I would get anxious, nor did I have the capacity to relax my body when the physical symptoms came to visit. Was I just born with a sensitive nervous system? Had life experiences conditioned me to be that way? Was it both? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Anxiety was there, and it was making itself heard, loud and clear.

    Fortunately, I learned, slowly but surely, in both my work with others and my own personal experience, that anxiety could be tamed and reversed. But it was only after I was able to bring greater awareness to my body and progressively convince my nervous system that I was safe and it was okay to be calm that I was able to make any lasting change.

    Calming your body and mind doesn’t happen overnight. It takes practice, but it’s a real possibility.

    Here are nineteen ways to calm a highly sensitive nervous system.

    1. Focus on the calmest part of your body.

    Instead of sitting directly with uncomfortable feelings, sensations, and tensions, we can place our attention on wherever in our body we find a sense of calm. By doing that, we can familiarize ourselves with relaxation and sit with it until it deepens. For example, your legs may be twitching, but perhaps you feel stillness at the back of your neck. Draw your attention there.

    2. Set boundaries and manage your energy wisely.

    If you’re dealing with anxiety, then you’re burning more energy than you usually would. And when your energy is low, it’s more difficult to regulate your feelings. That’s why it’s important to manage your energy wisely and not be afraid to set boundaries and say no to things that you don’t feel are in your best interest.

    3. Self-soothe through affirmations.

    Affirmations are only useful if they’re having a helpful impact on your state of being. Repeating positive phrases that you don’t truly believe in can actually have the opposite effect. So instead, choose an affirmation that feels true to you, such as “I am strong enough to survive this panic.” And try experimenting with how you talk to yourself—the tone of voice, pace, care behind the words—instead of just focusing on the words you are saying. A slow, calm, and reassuring internal voice can be a great tool to calm the body.

    4. Journal from the perspective of your stress.

    Sometimes your anxious thoughts just need to be respected and expressed coherently by getting them out of your head and down on a piece of paper. Writing from the perspective of stress, exploring what’s fueling it and what it wants us to know, also helps us take a step back from our worries.

    5. Journal from the perspective of your calm.

    When you’ve written down your stressful thoughts, you can dialogue (and reason) with it from the perspective of a calmer and wiser voice.

    6. Try Taoist Inner Smile Meditation.

    This meditation is one where you feel a smiling energy in your body. Most people find this easiest to do by visualizing a smile or bringing a slight smile to their face. The effect of the inner smile meditation is cumulative, and it can be an effective way to signal to your brain that you’re not under any threat.

    7. Finish the sentence “My nervous system wants to…”

    This is another journal exercise that helps connect your thoughts to your feelings so you can take a step back from your thoughts. You may discover that your nervous system wants you to take a break, rest, or get some fresh air.

    8. Create compassionate imagery.

    Like the inner smile meditation, compassionate imagery is a way to tell your brain that you’re safe and it’s okay to relax. You might want to visualize a person or a place, either real or fictitious, where you’d feel the most calm, safe, and connected.

    9. Increase bodily awareness.

    Anxiety can feel like it comes out of nowhere, but that’s rarely the case. By increasing bodily awareness, either through meditation, yoga, or just regularly checking in with how you’re feeling, you can catch the early signs of tension in your body before they get too difficult to manage.

    10. Slow down to six breaths a minute.

    Studies have shown that six breaths a minute seems to be the number at which we get the most benefits in terms of relaxation. As most of us breathe a lot quicker than this, any attempt to reduce the rate at which we breathe—with a focus on extending the exhalation—is a useful practice.

    11. Play around with your body language.

    How we position our bodies and physically move through the world has a big impact on our emotional state. Bringing more awareness to how you’re holding your body from moment to moment—how you sit, stand, communicate, etc.—can help you to address habits of tension.

    12. Establish a mindful movement practice.

    It can be hard to remember to be aware of our bodies, which is why a daily or weekly embodiment practice is useful. You might want to try yoga, qigong, or tai chi, the Feldenkrais method or the Alexander Technique, or any other practice. Just try to find something you enjoy and that works for you.

    13. Dance.

    Dancing is a great way to reduce stress and increase your bodily awareness. If you don’t like the idea of a formal practice, then this might be for you. And the good thing is you don’t need to get any special training or even leave your house—you can just blast your favorite song and get moving.

    14. Visualize a future calm self.

    Our minds are largely predictive machines, so when we expect to be anxious, that’s what will happen. We can begin to disrupt this cycle by visualizing a future state of calm, which sets a more useful expectation.

    15. Imagine your mind in slow motion.

    This is just another trick to break out of unhelpful patterns. An anxious mind will move rapidly, whereas a mind that is intentionally moving slowly will start to move us out of a state of anxiety.

    16. Laugh (even if it’s forced).

    Laughter is another great way to take our body out of a state of stress. In fact, the reason we laugh might be an evolutionary signal that everything is okay and that a perceived threat has been averted. It doesn’t matter if it feels forced; your brain will still get the message, and you might even find that you end up really laughing anyway.

    17. Try chanting or singing meditation.

    Both chanting and singing slow your breathing down and stimulate the vagus nerve, which is another quick way to transition from a state or fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest.

    18. Hum.

    Some people don’t like to chant or sing, but luckily humming does pretty much the same thing.

    19. Visualize healthy and rewarding social situations.

    A lot of bodily tension comes from an unconscious perceived threat in the world—particularly the social world. By visualizing healthy relationships and positive social situations, either real or imagined, we are convincing the social part of our brain that we’re connected and safe.

    —

    If my experience with anxiety and my work as a therapist have taught me anything, it’s that there is no best way to manage our nervous systems. There is only the way that works for you. By permitting yourself to experiment and play around with different techniques, you’ll be better positioned to uncover the most effective way to calm your highly sensitized nervous system.

    Let us know in the comments which techniques have worked for you and if there are any that we might have missed!

  • 10 Reasons Why I Ditched the Drink & What Happened When I Quit Alcohol

    10 Reasons Why I Ditched the Drink & What Happened When I Quit Alcohol

    “When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That’s when the sparkle started for me.” ~Mary Karr

    Growing up I thought alcohol meant adulthood. As a child I eagerly watched the cacophony of advertisements, commercials, TV shows, and movies swirling, mixing, swigging, sipping, and smelling those delicious drinks that the beautiful and the sexy preferred.

    Alcohol was literally the forbidden fruit—a mystery and an abomination that not my parents, nor anyone in my family—really had anything to do with. I assumed this was due to my family’s lack of class or sophistication. Wine, beer, and spirits meant pairing with palates and inclusion in the upper reaches of society. It was beyond us, and it seemed foreign and fun. I couldn’t wait to try it.

    I remember my first full beer at around twelve or thirteen. I snuck away with my best friend Mimi to guzzle a couple of Coronas in the woods behind my house. It made my head spin and we giggled, but it left me feeling confused and dirty.

    Even as a teenager, alcohol failed to prove its glory. The glamour that I’d read about in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker’s Jazz Age novels never manifested in the desperate high school parties or back seat sessions I had available to me, so I gave it up, opting for other types of drugs like marijuana and LSD.

    Fill the Void

    I stayed busy striving academically during my years at university, so alcohol never played a starring role. I drank a few glasses of red wine on a Friday night when I cleaned my apartment and learned how to chug an Irish Car Bomb with my friends at our local pub, but it never disrupted my flow.

    It wasn’t until I graduated and started working in the “real” world that alcohol became my dearest friend. And looking back, I realize that I only get chummy with alcohol when I’m not feeling fulfilled or satisfied with life.

    I finished my degree in 2002, a year after September 11, 2001. The US economy was in a downward spiral, and I had serious doubts about my place in the world. It was hard enough being twenty-two, but twenty-two trying to find a decent-paying job with a BA in Historic Preservation was almost impossible. I landed a paying internship and then a part-time gig as an assistant archivist and filled in my extra hours working as a paralegal at my friend’s dad’s law firm.

    After a lifetime of school and four years of university, I couldn’t believe the adult life and the freedom I was promised consisted of desk work for eight hours a day that didn’t pay enough for me to move out of my parents’ house. The prestige and the career I assumed was waiting for me failed to be a possibility. My life was nothing but a rebooted version of monotony from my school age years, so I started drinking to escape it.

    I remember needing to go out during my early twenties—like needing it so bad. Staying home alone on a Friday night was akin to suicide. I had my weekend planned and sorted by Wednesday, my friends assembled, outfits purchased, and possible bars and clubs all picked out.

    I needed the release. I needed to ring out the chaos and the comfort and the elation those sixty hours away from work could bring me. I needed to dress up, go out, get as drunk and insane and wild as I possibly could to get all that balled up energy and anger out of me so I could stuff down my disappointment at life from Monday to Friday. Even when I worked a Saturday shift at a clothing boutique, I was either still drunk or hungover.

    I remember how being drunk made me feel. It made me feel alive, energetic, magnetic, magical, powerful, fun, charismatic, fearless, hilarious, untouchable, and sexy. Alcohol gave me what I could not seem to muster at all during the weekdays sober, but what I so desperately craved.

    Looking back, I see now that what alcohol gave me was an undiluted, raw version of myself. What was happening after two or three drinks was what should have been happening sober—I felt like myself.

    But years of child abuse and learning to people-please and put others first had forced my authentic self into the backroom. Alcohol was the only way I could feel like myself. But I didn’t know that then and I never stopped at three drinks. I stopped at stumbling, mumbling, passing out at 4am drunk.

    Alcohol was an escape from a life and a person I didn’t like, but nonetheless, both I had created.

    Finding Freedom

    At twenty-six, I did something radical. I cancelled my wedding to a lovely man and decided to leave the US and travel to Australia. After four years of steady alcoholism, I finally realized that the life I was living was a prison not a life.

    As soon as I made the decision to leave, I stopped drinking. I started working more and saving money. I had somewhere to go and someone to be. I wanted a future.

    By the time I was twenty-eight, I was married, in love, and pregnant with my first child. Happy and healthy, alcohol had no room in my life. It didn’t come to stay again until after my second child was born, and I realized my husband wasn’t happy. Then, alcohol settled in while I drank myself into ignorance as a mother, wife, homeowner, and business-owner who didn’t want to admit that she had again constructed a prison instead of a life.

    Alcohol kept me alive during my subsequent divorce. The pain was so severe that, looking back, I’m grateful I had something to numb it. But two years after my divorce I realized that I was thirty-eight and totally free.

    It was time to finally live the life I knew I wanted. I was old enough to know myself and know what I needed to feel creative, alive, and happy. So, on 1 April 2019, I made a list of all the things that were not actively contributing to my life. Alcohol was number one on that list.

    Now, two years after giving alcohol (and all other drugs and addictions) up, I can easily say that I am so much happier and healthier without alcohol in my life. I don’t miss it at all. In fact, I wish more people would jump on the sober bandwagon.

    If you think you might be keen to join me, consider these ten ways giving up alcohol changed my life for the better. I hope these reasons are enough to convince you to ditch the drink.

    1. I learned how to feel my emotions.

    Instead of numbing myself, I had to learn how to feel all the feels. This led to learning how to feel and clear emotions as well as deal with my childhood trauma head on. Healing my trauma was the best thing I ever did.

    When hiding my true self, I had invited alcohol into my life in an attempt to numb the pain I was carrying around in my body, but it also allowed me to be my authentic self without fear. Healing trauma allows you to present your true self to the world.

    2. I learned how to play.

    Not drinking alcohol leaves more space for you to be a kid again. Instead of sitting at the bar complaining about your problems, you are free to ride a bike, swim at the beach, splash in the pool, run, jump, explore, and learn because life becomes a wonderland again. Living alcohol-free just invites in more of those rare, beautiful, and innocent moments.

    3. I lost weight.

    Alcohol is pure sugar, people. There ain’t nothing good about it. Bad for your liver, bad for your insulin levels, and bad for your brain. Not one good thing. At forty, I am thinner than I was during my twenties when I was binging all weekend long.

    4. I balanced my hormones.

    As a female, I can attest to having very disrupted hormone levels. After quitting alcohol, my PMS symptoms drastically improved. Alcohol is sugar, which disrupts your insulin. Because it disrupts sleep, it also throws off your cortisol. Studies have also proven that increased alcohol intake increases your estrogen levels. If you want balanced hormones, say goodbye to alcohol.

    5. I slept better.

    Alcohol massively disrupts REM sleep. Take a few nights off from your evening wine and see how well you hit the sack. While we mistakenly believe alcohol relaxes us and eases stress, it actually has the opposite effect. Not getting proper deep sleep leaves you feeling worse and worse.

    6. I saved money.

    Alcohol is expensive, and when you’re drunk you want more and will stupidly spend it. Saving money creates the actual freedom you seek. Not going out to bars and sipping on fancy cocktails is one of the easiest ways to save money.

    7. I developed hobbies.

    Instead of using alcohol as a hobby, I started to play tennis, learned sailing, and started up a side hustle. As a result of not drinking, I’m much more interesting.

    Quitting alcohol sadly means losing a few friends. You’ll instantly notice which friends do have alcohol hobbies. But that’s okay. Having actual friends and real hobbies is much more rewarding.

    8. I’m happier.

    I’m not as stressed, tired, worried, or angry. Alcohol seems to take away the pain of life momentarily, but it comes back to bite you tenfold the next day. Alcohol is like a health and wellness credit card. You don’t have to pay now, but you will have to pay later, plus interest.

    Not needing alcohol to numb or feel comfortable in scary situations is such a relief. My mind is clear and calm, and that brings me immense pleasure and joy.

    9. I don’t need alcohol to talk to people.

    Instead of running straight for the wine at networking events, I just sip on water and make casual conversation. I am who I am. I also try to make sure that I ask interesting questions.

    No more “So what do you do?” I want to know who you are, what you’re about, and I dig around and see what interesting facts about you I can unearth. People become much more fascinating sober.

    10. I’m leading by example.

    My kids are witnessing firsthand that their mother does not need alcohol, so neither do they. I’m sure they remember when I drank, but I also want them to see me sober.

    While I don’t villainize alcohol and I know that they will most likely experiment with it, I want to be sure that they know that they can live a happy and fulfilling life without it.

    Bottom Line and Disclaimer

    I’m not advocating for the abolition of alcohol by any means. What I am advocating for is more responsible representations of alcohol in advertising, movies, and film. Being exposed to such blatant subconscious programming at a young age gave me the belief that alcohol would add something to my life that I felt it was missing.

    And while I know that I used alcohol as medication to treat my unhealed childhood trauma, I know that teaching kids why people use drugs and alcohol would be more effective. If someone told me during my teenage years that people abuse drugs and alcohol to cover up the pain they are in, that could have changed everything for me.

    I never sought out treatment from AA because I believed my consumption of alcohol was not irregular or excessive by society’s standards. Looking back, this greatly disturbs me. I needed help. What I really needed was to heal my trauma much sooner. It took many, many years to find the right help to heal.

    If you are consuming more than two glasses of alcohol on more than two subsequent nights per week, then you most likely have a problem.

    If you need alcohol or any drugs just to get by, then you have a problem.

    Drugs and alcohol are ways for us to cope with pain. The best advice I can offer you is to seek help for the underlying issue and heal the reason why you need to drink. I wish you all the best and know that you are more interesting, powerful, and fun sober.