This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, my name is Scott Pinyard and I'm the head coach of this naked mind and I'm here for this month's coaching podcast.

So we've been talking a lot about expectations this month and I just wanted to tell a story up top of how expectations played into my journey.

It's a certain expectation really caused me a lot of pain and suffering and angst that I didn't need to have.

So back when I was drinking, I became convinced that I had liver disease and I had just expected it.

So I went online and I looked up how long do you have to drink to have liver disease and what does this mean and how old am I and what's going on.

I do all of this research and then all of a sudden I'm like, yep, that's it. I have it.

Now mind you, what was missing from that entire span was me actually going to a doctor and getting blood work done and having a doctor help me interpret those results.

And so when I did this, when I set this expectation in my mind, I set a series of events in process that I had to deal with for a long time.

So I started worrying about liver disease and then every little pain in my right side, I was like, there it is.

And I reinforced this expectation. But what really got me was when I started going online and looking at what the signs and symptoms were.

I was too scared to go to a doctor and why would I need to anyway because I know I have it.

I'm just going to go look online for symptoms of it and I'm going to confirm what I already know.

This is something called confirmation bias. All humans are susceptible to it.

It happens in all different realms of human life.

You know, a great place that a great example is politics, right? You think about, all right, I view the world this way.

This is where I'm going to get my news from. This website is telling me what I already know, right?

It's confirming the biases that I have. So anyway, I would Google this stuff and I would look and I would see, all right, so these are the different symptoms.

And guess what was happening as I was reading the symptoms? I was saying, ah, not that one. Oh, I have that one.

And maybe if I didn't have one, I'd notice a few days later that I'd start to have one.

I set myself up to expect that I had this problem. I set myself up to expect these things that I was reading on the on the websites.

...