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EP #135

Not Drinking Tonight

Enjoy this conversation with therapist, author and recovered drinker, Amanda E. White all about her book, Not Drinking Tonight

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EPISODE #135

Summary

In this episode of the Alcohol Minimalist podcast, host Molly Watts shares transformative strategies for reshaping one’s relationship with alcohol. Drawing from her personal experiences, including overcoming family alcohol abuse and a long-standing daily drinking habit, Molly emphasizes the significance of mindfulness and self-reflection. The episode features a conversation with therapist Amanda White, exploring nuanced topics such as redefining language around alcohol use, addressing trauma and shame, and the importance of practicing mindfulness techniques. Listeners are encouraged to assess whether alcohol truly serves them and to approach the journey towards mindful drinking with curiosity and understanding. The episode also highlights an upcoming free masterclass, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Changing Your Drinking,” underscoring the podcast’s mission to provide actionable tools and empower individuals to make positive, mindful choices concerning their alcohol consumption.

Hey, it’s Molly from alcohol minimalist. What do you do in this October? I would love to have you join me in my more sober October challenge. What do I mean by more sober October, it simply means that we’re going to add in more alcohol free days than you currently been doing, whether that’s one or two or 31. It’s up to you, you get to set your own goal and that’s why it’s more sober October. You can check it out and learn more at get got sunnyside.co/molly It’s totally free. I’ve got prizes, I’m going to be going live every week to announce the prize winners. And it’s just going to be an awesome event. So I would love to have you join me. You can learn more at get.sunnyside.co/molly and you can get registered today. Welcome to the alcohol minimalist podcast. I’m your host Molly watts. If you want to change your drinking habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, you’re in the right place. This podcast explores the strategies I use to overcome a lifetime of family alcohol abuse, more than 30 years of anxiety and worry about my own drinking, and what felt like an unbreakable daily drinking habit. Becoming an alcohol minimalist means removing excess alcohol from your life. So it doesn’t remove you from life. It means being able to take alcohol or leave it without feeling deprived. It means to live peacefully, being able to enjoy a glass of wine without feeling guilty and without needing to finish the bottle. With Science on our side will shatter your past patterns and eliminate your excuses. Changing your relationship with alcohol is possible. I’m here to help you do it. Let’s start now. Well, hello, and welcome or welcome back to the alcohol minimalist podcast with me your host Molly Watts coming to you from Oh my friends. It’s still a very gorgeous Oregon around here. We are now officially into hockey. Just really oh my gosh, how’d that happen? August. It’s like the middle of the summer. And that means I don’t want the summer to end. I really don’t. I’m just enjoying this dry, warm weather that we’ve been having. And I have just come out of my more dry July. How about you How did more dry July go for you. I hope that you found ways to prioritize alcohol free days and to add them into your life. That’s really the goal of more dry July. If you didn’t take advantage of that opportunity or join me along the way. I’m going to have another opportunity coming up in October when I do more sober October. So you can join me then if you didn’t do it already. And for those of you that did do it again. Right before I get to this week’s show, I do have a prize winner. Remember if you would like to be entered into a drawing for some alcohol, minimalist swag, all you got to do is leave a review of this podcast or of my book breaking the bottle legacy wherever you’re listening to this podcast or wherever you pick up the book and you will be entered in I will find you you can also leave comments on YouTube you can leave reviews on Goodreads wherever you’re listening or reading, I will find you add you into the big randomizer drawing. And you could be the next winner of some alcohol minimalist swag. Today’s winner is Christina H 73 Christina H 73. You left a review on Apple podcasts. Love it and it says perfect podcast. Well thank you very much. I appreciate that. This is exactly what I was looking for. I feel that I need to break a daily habit and this is perfect for just that reason. Oh, I appreciate that so much because that’s exactly who I was. And I’m glad that what I talk about here is resonating with you Christina H 73 Please email me Molly at Molly watts.com and I will mail you out some alcohol minimalist swag. Before we head into this week’s show. I do have one more announcement and that is that I am ready to open making peace with alcohol. I am going to be doing a free masterclass and training called How to Stop Worrying and start changing your drinking. And at the end of that I will share some information on how to join making peace if that’s what you want to do. But even if you just wanted to do a little deeper dive on what I talked about here. The webinar is going to be really valuable in and of itself. You It’s going to be live. For those of you that can come join me live on Friday, August 18, at 10am. But even if you can’t make it live, you can sign up for the replay, you need to go to webinar dot Molly watts.com to get on the list for How to Stop Worrying and start changing your drinking. And I’m really excited to share making peace with alcohol with all of you. Even if you don’t want to be part of the webinar, you can. You’ll learn more about the program on my website as well. That is what’s coming up here in August. It’s going to be a big month for the alcohol minimalists. Today on the podcast, I am have the honor and pleasure to speak with Amanda white. And Amanda is a therapist. She is a recovered drinker. And she wrote a book last year called not drinking tonight, and not drinking tonight. I may say that this is now maybe my second favorite book behind Well, I you know, if I count my own right, then everybody knows I love Dr. David nuts book, drink the new science of alcohol in your health. This book may be my next best recommendation. Not drinking tonight has so much of the same things that I talked about in terms of the science knowing your brain understanding. But because Amanda is a therapist, she brings into her work, things that I don’t really touch on as a coach, like trauma, right? For people that are really not able to process traumatic events that may have happened in their past therapy is really the best avenue for that coaching is not in not drinking tonight, there are tools for evaluating trauma for evaluating shame. For those of you that may have struggled with eating disorders, you will find information in her books as well that I think are very useful. There’s just a lot of mindfulness techniques, there’s a lot of practices. And there’s an accompanying workbook, which was really designed for clinicians, she and I talked about that on the podcast a bit. But I think it’s a valuable tool for anyone. I just so appreciated having her on the show. She has her own practice. And that practice that’s called therapy for women, though she does work with men as well. It’s available in 27 states. So you don’t have to be local to her to be involved with that therapy if you’re looking for that opportunity. Without further delay. Here is my conversation with Amanda white. Good morning, Amanda, thank you so much for being here on the alcohol, minimalist podcast. I cannot wait to talk with you and share your work with my folks. Because it’s so important. And as I just shared with you, before we jumped on here, I really think that it it resonated with me so deeply because it really reflects a lot of the same thinking and, and a lot of what you share in your books is the same kind of language and the same process that I share in mind. So not making my book sound as wonderful as yours. But at least at least we’re on the same page. Yeah. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to chat with you. Yeah, give us a little bit of the backstory. One of the things that I appreciated about your book, from the very beginning was the fact that we kind of dive into the language right away, like, Am I an alcoholic? This is a question that a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to determine, take me back kind of where that began for you. And let’s let’s dive into where you are today. Yeah, so I’m a licensed therapist, as you said, I have a book. And this is kind of My clinical specialty. I specialize in working with individuals with substance use disorders. And I’m also personally in recovery from a substance use disorder from alcohol. And I kind of grew up just with a lot of the same messaging I think we all did. And I really had an experience where I have loved drinking for a while. And for a while it really worked. It really helped call my social anxiety. It made me feel like this better, more extroverted version of myself and it worked until it didn’t. And in college, things started to kind of spiral out of control. I was definitely a binge drinker who really struggled with blackout drinking. And I lost a lot of friends and hurt a lot of people in the process. And then after college, I started working with a therapist and she was honest about how she was in recovery from an addiction and that really changed everything for me and for the first time I was be able to be honest in therapy, and actually make progress. And I was doing really well. But I, I had an eating disorder. And I always knew that was the problem. So alcohol kind of always came second. And it wasn’t until I started going to grad school actually to become a therapist myself that I really started to recognize that my alcohol was a problem. Like, I definitely struggled more in college from the outside, but I was also able to justify it a lot more in college, you know, your your college, right? Exactly, right. Yeah. Yeah, everyone was doing it. So by the time I started questioning my my alcohol use, you know, it was it was definitely still an issue for me. But not everyone on the outside would have said that I met criteria for an alcoholic. When I told my parents, they were like, Why don’t I think you’re being dramatic? Why don’t you just try cutting back. But I knew that it was a problem. And I really saw the path that I was on. And I had this realization that I wouldn’t be able to become a therapist if I kept drinking this way. And that was what led me to stop drinking. And I’ve worked in rehabs I have my own practice now. And, you know, my idea of kind of moderation and not having to call yourself an alcoholic really stemmed from the fact that I was working with a lot of people who didn’t meet criteria to be an alcoholic, but also drinking wasn’t working for them. Yeah, in your book, and I and I loved this, you talked about changing the terminology. And I actually in my book, I have a chapter called losing the alcoholic label, because it’s a problem in our cultural mindset, because we have this vision of what it looks like to have a drinking problem, right? Yeah. Don’t see yourself in that. In that context. For me, my mother was the vision of what I you know, was who had a drinking problem. So, you know, I could continually separate myself from her. And in my mind, it’s like, well, if I’m not that, that I’m okay. You talk about disordered drinking, which I think comes from probably your your experience with disordered eating. Right. Yeah. So it’s Yeah, I think that’s an important way for us to look at alcohol. And what I really appreciated about your book was, the fact that you ask the same thing that I do, it’s like, is alcohol working for you? Is it is what you’re doing right now working? If it’s working, don’t change anything, right? Just like to do a cost and benefit analysis and really look at things logistically. And if we start there, then do we have to say, I’m an alcoholic? Therefore, I need help. No, we don’t have to go even down that path. We need to say, Okay, if what I’m doing right now isn’t working for me, then? Is it time to, to change this behavior? Is it time to look at this and see what we could do about it? Yeah, absolutely. And I think so often, right, because we have this idea of what an alcoholic is, it does prevent us from asking that more important question, which is, is this working? For me? would my life be better without it? And as a therapist, I do costs and benefits analysis. With almost every other topic, you know, we talk about is your sleeping habits working for you? Is your life working for you? Is your relationship working for you? And for some reason, with alcohol? We can’t do that. Because people get so worried that if they say it’s not working, they will be labeled an alcoholic, and then they will be told they can never drink again. And people are rightfully, you know, scared off by that. Right, which is why I talk about it the way that I talk about it, because that’s exactly was my experience. I could never imagine myself saying, I’ll never drink again. And therefore, because I believed that about myself, I would not take any action whatsoever. I would just you know, it would be this deer in the headlights kind of thing where it well. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. And I was a daily drinker. Yeah, a daily habit drinker. Really easy to justify that. Right? Yeah, practically. We’re told that that kind of drinking is practically good for us. Yeah. Antioxidants. When I first understood like, Yeah, okay. But this constant anxiety and this constant worry that you have all the time about whether or not you’re drinking too much, whether you’re following down the same path of this genetic path of your mother, that’s actually cost that you’re paying, right? Yes, yes. And, and that was something that I never took into account until I was really like, you know, ready to do this work. One of the things I also really appreciated about your book and I cannot wait for you all to pick it up. And I know the workbook is for clinicians, I got the workbook because I plan on using it in my coaching practice. But I think it’s a valuable tool for anybody that is doing the work, especially for self changers. This is a resource for self changers, right? People that want to take action themselves, who aren’t going to invest in therapy or coaching. These are tools. So your emphasis in separating out some of the things that might necessitate, in my opinion, a therapeutic relationship, a therapy relationship, as opposed to just a coaching relationship? Can you talk to me a little bit about trauma and shame as something that you work with, especially when it comes to alcohol use? Yeah, I mean, I think that shame and trauma are both really intertwined with it, if you’re doing if you’re drinking in a way that’s like negatively impacting you or your family, it’s probably very likely that you have shame around it. And I think what’s so interesting is people really feel like, if they beat themselves up enough, they will be able to make themselves change. And that there’s this idea that shame is this positive motivator for change. And according to the research, that’s not true, especially when we look at a habit like alcohol use. What’s so insidious about shame is that we feel shame. And then we drink to relieve the shame, and feel better. And then we end up putting ourselves in a position or doing something that we regret, which causes more shame. And then we cope with it again, by drinking. So it becomes this, like, you know, finger trap where the harder you try to get out of it, the more you want to drink to cope. So we have to instead, break away from the shame and start treating ourselves with compassion. And I really am a believer of, I don’t care whether you believe you deserve compassion, I don’t care whether you think that, you know, other people believe that, you know, other people may be mad at you. And whether you think that that’s correct of them, like shame can be so insidious, because we think we deserve. You know what happens to us. But it is just straight up not effective for change. And if you want to break out of that you have to start treating yourself compassionately to start a new cycle. Yeah, I use the terms compassion and curiosity, because they go hand in hand, we need passion for ourselves. And we need to be curious. I think the biggest problem with shame is that it turns us off from being curious about what’s really going on underneath the reason that we made the choice that we did, we have to get down into understanding where where the choice when arrived, where the behavior, you know, what, what, what happened to lead us because we don’t make choices in a vacuum. We don’t decide to drink, usually in a vacuum, and we don’t decide to whatever negative consequences we probably are. There’s a choice there as well. You taught me a term, and somebody probably taught me more than one term. But one term that stuck out to me Yeah, and this book, because I think a lot of us hear about cognitive dissonance, meaning that this idea where we want to do something, but we’re are getting we, we want to do something, but we’re not doing it. And so yes, this dissonant behavior, you talked about getting stuck in our thoughts, and that being cognitive fusion, so I didn’t know about cognitive fusion. But here’s what it says in the book, when we are not aware of our thoughts or internal dialogue, we may believe we are our thoughts. We have our thoughts, but we are not our thoughts, which I love. Because I say that I say the similar stuff all the time, these are sentences in your brain, they’re not just you know, they’re not you. And when we don’t understand this crucial difference we get can get stuck in our thoughts. And this is also known as cognitive fusion. So that isn’t, I love that because again, it’s so important for people to understand how powerful their thinking is. Yes, yes. And I think that that’s where that, you know, shame really comes into is that I think people feel shame sometimes over what they think and they don’t recognize that. You know, just because you have an automatic thought that pops into your brain doesn’t mean that that is you or that’s what you want. I mean, one thing that I personally struggled with, and I see, though, you know, clients that I work with struggle with is that if they have the thought that they want to drink, they immediately start to judge themselves and beat themselves up for that. And then again, we get into that if you’re beating yourself up, you’re going to feel bad, and then you’re going to make the desire to drink even stronger, rather than recognizing just because you had a thought that you want to drink like, okay, it’s a habit of course. You’re gonna think that and treating yourself with compassion. Yeah, I love that. I think in the book, you said it nice. I use the same terminology, you got to normalize your thinking, right? Like, it’s just telling yourself like, it’s completely normal that you would think I want to drink even though you have this, you know, that’s the cognitive dissonance, right? You’ve decided that you want to work on your drinking, you want to change this habit. So you’re all in on getting better and making choices, better choices. And then all of a sudden, you have this, this thought or this urge or this craving to drink. And you’re like, wait, what’s going on here? I want I’m trying to get better. How come this keeps coming up? Yeah, I, I’m an alcohol minimalist. We are the alcohol minimalists around here. And really, what I think is so important is the same work that people do to become sober, or being alcohol free, I think is the exact same work that I did to, to break a decade’s long daily drinking habit. I now have, you know, a minimum. I mean, I’ve multiple alcohol free days a week I never have, I would never over I don’t over drink. I don’t you know, I never look to drinking. I don’t want alcohol, to try to change how I’m feeling. Right? I’m not looking for it as an opportunity to. And I understand so much more about the science behind alcohol. And that was another thing I loved about your book, because people ask me all the time. I say I’m a I’m a science person. So science is a big part of what helped me change my thinking about alcohol, right? I used to believe that I needed alcohol to unwind and relax. And what I learned was the amount that I was drinking was actually causing a rebound. impact in my in my brain that was actually causing me to be anxious all the time. Yeah. And so right, which then made you seek it out, right, again, like this cycle? Yeah. And so I loved that you shared so much science in your book as well, because I think that it really helps, then you have ammunition for your brain. When these things come up, you can go okay, yeah, understanding the neuroscience, understanding how your brain works a little bit better. And understanding some of the science behind it actually just helps everything become less dramatic and more data driven. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s especially important with this topic, because there is so much research out there still that you know, people like to pull from that alcohol is healthy. And until you actually look into the research and the data and who’s funding this research, which, spoiler alert, a lot of times those antioxidant. Yeah, it’s like buying alcohol brand that’s like sponsored it or their parent company. So I think that that’s also really important, too, because I’m very much I don’t like to add morality to things. I don’t think it’s helpful to classify drinking as good or bad. I really am a believer in it either works or it doesn’t. And let’s focus on that and someone’s life. I agree. 100%. A just a quick break to talk with you for a minute about Sunnyside. You hear me talk about it on the show often. And it really is my number one recommendation for a mindful drinking app. People use this tool in my groups in my classes, and they tell me all the time, how much they really appreciate the fact that Sunnyside is a very positive reinforcement. And what I mean by that is that when you track your drinks, and let’s just say you planned for one drink, and you ended up having to, if you’re honest and you track that second drink, you’re not going to get a message that shames you in any way or reprimands you, you’re actually going to get positive reinforcement for tracking a drink that you didn’t plan on. And some ideas of some suggestions for going and grabbing a snack or getting some water. Sunnyside is like having a coach in your pocket. And I love that you can try it for a 15 day free trial go to www.sunnyside.co/molly that gets started today. I tell people all the time for some people the most peaceful relationship they’re going to have that’s the way the terminology I like to Yeah, creating a peaceful relationship with alcohol. For many people, for some people, being completely alcohol free is going to be the most peaceful choice. And that is a great choice. Yeah, it’s the safest choice. Bart, there’s no there’s no. You know, scientifically speaking, it’s the safest choice. There’s no two ways about it. I don’t there’s no argument for me on it. And if someone is able to include alcohol in their lives, they should do it in a minimal way which is yeah What I what I would suggest, also in the book, lots of different tools for practicing things that help people address some of the underlying reasons that people turn to alcohol in the first place. Right? So alcohol, we have to, to recognize, for some people has become their coping mechanism, right. Yeah. And I appreciated that in the book as well. You didn’t just like you kind of said, if you, you know, if you’re somebody that’s really turned to alcohol, and this is your coping, you’ve got, then you may want to consider just a cutting back schedule, and not just going, you know, cold turkey, No more drinking, because you have to. I mean, that is for some people, it is a coping strategy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that we can’t like the culture can be very black and white about things. And there can be a lot of like demonizing of alcohol. And I’m always looking at things from a clinical perspective, I’m thinking about the person that’s struggling to get by, and alcohol is the thing that’s keeping them afloat. Like I want to first give them tools and other life rafts before we take away their main right. Yeah, you talk about really about mindfulness as being something that is a tool in terms of breaking away from any unhealthy coping mechanism. I say all the time, what I talk about is a meta skill, whether it’s alcohol or something else, if you’re going to change the behavior. There are some some practical tools. And mindfulness is one. And you gave an example, which I thought was I just love this, this tool. This is a therapy tool, I assume, right? And the 54321 Yeah, 54321 is list five things you can see lists for thing, you can touch list three things you can hear, list, two things you can smell. And one thing you can taste. Talk to me about why mindfulness is a powerful tool for anyone. Yeah, I think mindfulness really sets the foundation for we were talking about curiosity and like self introspection, if you’re not mindful of what’s going on, in your, you know, current surroundings, in your, in your emotional surroundings, like in your head, it’s really, really hard to change, because you’re not aware. Even with like cognitive fusion, if you aren’t able to be mindful of what thoughts you have, if you’re not able to step back and separate yourself from your thoughts, you the idea of cognitive fusion won’t make sense to you, because you don’t have that pause, to be able to notice things. I also think if we’re talking about something like alcohol, which is such an automatic, ingrained habit, we need to wait for curiosity to happen for us to be able to really notice whether how we feel before we drink, how we feel after what our thoughts are around it, what our emotions are around it, we have to have this foundation of being able to be curious and recognize all of that. And without it, you know, I think I give the example in the book, a lot of times, people are just like, I drink it, I have no idea why. And there was nothing that happened, I just drank reading, we really have to pause and with a fine tooth comb be like, Okay, let’s really break down all the things that happened before. And if you don’t know how to be mindful in your life, you’re not even going to be able to tell, you’re not even gonna be able to tell your therapist or someone else or excavate it for yourself, because life is just gonna happen at you. Like I was working. And then all of a sudden I drank and I don’t know what happened. Right? Yeah, there’s a lot of unconscious thinking, right? Or yeah, brains are pretty, pretty active. Very busy. And so it’s very easy to act in default. In fact, most people do run around just kind of in that default thinking mode, unconscious thinking mode, not really seeing what’s going on. That doesn’t mean that there’s not thoughts there. That doesn’t mean that it’s not happening and becoming more mindful, is a skill set. It’s a practice. And once you do so, once you you know, learn some things and you actually start training your brain to pay attention. And doing that in a curious way. Not in a compassionate way. Not a judgmental way. Yeah, that’s when you can really make some progress. That’s when people really understand Oh, okay. I didn’t just drink automatically, like didn’t, you know, bottle didn’t just pour itself. I didn’t open it right. There was actually a choice and a determining factor and I was a part of the process. Yes, and especially if you’re going to go the route of not I’m being totally sober, that mindfulness is going to be even more important for you, when you’re sober, you can kind of fall into a little bit more of a habit of I just don’t drink. That’s not what I do. I don’t keep alcohol in my house, there’s never a choice. But if you want to have power around having a mindful relationship with alcohol, it requires mindfulness. Yes. And I’m so glad that you said that, because you talked about in the very end of your book, that true freedom is when you create your own life based on your values and needs, rather than living based on other people’s lives or expectations. And you are willing to do the work, right? Yeah, you are willing to do that. And people ask me that all the time. I don’t want to have to count. I don’t want to have to pay attention. Well, okay. You know, Freedom isn’t about being like, like not accountable. Freedom is being accountable to yourself and out. And about the freedom that I’ve created for myself is that I don’t have any desire to go out and try to escape my life. Yeah. Yeah, I think is where most people who develop a problematic relationship with alcohol or food or gambling, or you know, social media or shot Yeah, you know, you name it, we’re trying to escape our lives in some way. Absolutely. And I think that’s what’s hard about it is, you know, when I talk about some of the brain science around habits and things like that, it is hard to just casually. And this is what a lot of people want, right? It’s hard to casually escape your life sometimes. You know, it’s hard to just schedule that a little bit and not have it be too much. Because I think all of us at the end of the day, being human is hard. Life is hard, of course, we’re going to have that desire to escape. But if we’re not mindful about it, if we don’t develop all of those other coping skills, it is really easy to just fall into that pattern. Yeah, and we get sold this whole idea that we’re, we’re searching for happiness, like even in the Constitution, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the pursuit of happiness. And instead, I think we should be in pursuit of the human experience, because that really is like, we, you know, Life is 5050. Yeah, we have to have the bad to understand the good. And until we really just like, go, Okay, this is a crappy day. And that’s okay. Right. Yeah, like, and I think you talked about in the book, you’ll use the word allowing things allowing emotion, yes. And being able to articulate and describe the physical sensations that accompany emotion, because we often give a lot of credence to, like, I just didn’t feel like it, or our, you know, the emotions of our lives, really are how we navigate the world. But if we really want to get technical about it, most of the times like, feeling is just a physical embrace, you know, it’s just a physical vibration in the body. Yeah, when we really start to get compassionate and curious with ourselves, distance ourselves a little bit from it, we can, we can allow it to be there without needing something to change it right to drink over it or to eat over it or to, you know, spend over it, whatever it may be. Yeah, and it’s like, that is where the mindfulness piece comes in to have it’s much easier to be with your emotions, when you don’t feel as though you are just overtaken by them when you can have some of that distance and recognize, right, I am feeling anxious versus like, anger, like you are just anxious. Like, I’m a really big fan of recognizing and using the tool of like, I’m having the thought that this is happening, or I’m having the physical sensation of my heart racing, I think we can get so I mean, our brain loves shortcuts, which is what it’s designed to do. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But taking the time when we can to slow that down, can give us some space between how we’re feeling or what we’re thinking. And us. I do a lot of a lot of talking about things that are basically like cognitive behavioral therapy based, right. Yeah. One of the things that I never really understood until I started do this work, because I don’t think we are taught really, in school until you become a therapist, evidently, right. That there’s a lot of, I never understood how much agency I had, creating and creating feelings that I actually wanted to feel as opposed to being at the effect of feelings that I didn’t want to feel. I looked around externally in my life and blamed the circumstances of my life not realizing that there was As opportunity in between the circumstance and how I was feeling to redirect my brain and choose something that would give me same exact circumstance, I could feel differently about it by changing how I thought about it. Yeah. And I like that, to me was like mind blowing, like this idea that I could actually that I actually had agency. I tell people all the time, he used to be the most dramatic person I knew. Like, everything was just, you know, was was overwhelming. Everything was drama. Everything was chaos. I like I have four boys. So I was like, Yeah, of course. I’m stressed out. Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Like, you know, that’s just me. And I didn’t realize like, yeah, no, actually, that’s a choice that there’s another another perspective here, that might actually make you feel not stressed out and overwhelmed, but joyful and grateful. Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of power in like the duality of it, like recognizing, right, you can feel really overwhelmed and have all these body sensations going on. And, you know, maybe all this life is happening around you. And you can still come back to like a mindfulness practice, or you can come back to gratitude. And it’s not putting one over the other and suppressing those feelings. It’s backing up and recognizing that you can hold both of those things at the same time. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Amanda, here’s the problem. I could talk to you for like three. And I feel like I’m probably like, using it as like my own little personal therapy session. And people are like, Oh, wow. But hopefully, they are getting a lot out of our conversation. And what I think most folks is that you are really going to want to pick up not drinking tonight. And also I highly encourage not drinking tonight workbook as well. Amanda, can you please share with my listeners where they can learn more about you? In general? Yeah, absolutely. And as an aside about my workbook, too, yeah, it was a publishing decision that was made of why I had to make it for a clinician and she met Sure. But I absolutely believe that anyone can get a lot out of it. As you know, there’s tons of worksheets that are geared towards the individual. So yeah, you can follow me on instagram therapy for women. My content is not just for women. That is the name of my practice. Yeah. If you’re interested in that, you can visit therapy for women’s center.com. We have therapists in 27 states across the country, or we have office locations in Philadelphia. And my website is Amanda e white.com. And I have a podcast that’s called recovered ish. Oh, recovered ish. i Yeah, fine. Yeah. Oh, I love that. It’s pretty new. It’s been out for I don’t know when this will come out. But it’s been out for about a month. It’s been okay. That’s right. Because I’d Yeah, I think literally, I don’t think it was there when I first started when probably not. So very cool. Well, again, Amanda white, thank you so much for being here. Everyone. I gotta tell you, I have read a lot of books. A lot of the books that you list in your resources are the same, I know are similar books or books that I’ve read, books shared. What I really appreciated, was both the science you talk about neuroscience, which we love around here on alcohol, minimalist podcast, we talked about the psychology pieces, and some of the alcohol science as well. Really great tools inside of it, folks, you’re gonna love it. And Amanda, I just appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening to the alcohol minimalist podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Use something you learned in today’s episode and apply it to your life this week. Transformation is possible. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol. Now, for more information, please visit me at www dot Molly watts.com