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.

Today we are diving into people's stories which I think is one of the most powerful things is just hearing from other individuals.

You know, we can hear from experts all day long, but actually just hearing from people who have been there done that is just so so amazing.

There's something really special about it and today I have a special woman with me. Her name is Maureen. Hi Maureen, welcome.

Hi Annie, thank you.

Yeah, I'm so glad to have you here. This is really exciting. These are my, by far and away favorites. I mean, it's great to get to talk to other authors and whatnot, but getting to talk to just have, have good conversations with real people is my favorite thing to do.

So anyway, we're going to start kind of back way back when if you don't mind. So why don't you just kind of introduce yourself and talk about who Maureen was sort of before you even started questioning your drinking.

Where were you at in your life and what was even your first first few drinks like?

Well, my first few drinks were horrible. I was 18 and my friends and I got hold of a bottle of rye whiskey from one of our parents liquor cabinets and it was not a pleasant experience.

And I really didn't drink again until I started working in the restaurant industry where it was just so much a part of the culture that at about age 24, 25.

I started drinking on a really regular basis and went off and on. I had three kids. I stopped drinking when I was pregnant and breastfeeding.

But then it would start to creep up again until it became something that was I was just doing every day and tried to cut back and sometimes successfully for a while, but it always crept back in.

So when I made the decision to actually quit for good after reading your book and it was easy. It was easy to do.

The hard part was the decision, but once that was made, it was really quite effortless and I'm just so happy that I made this decision and life looks so different now.

That's so awesome. So let's talk about some of the initial, you know, I talk a lot about the cognitive distance. The thing that happens where there's this one point in time where you're just kind of like going on drinking and you're not giving much thought to it because it's just kind of part of life.

And the interesting thing is how little kind of mental space drinking takes up for for me, it was kind of a significant amount of time. I mean, it was a drinking was not a big deal in my life for many years.

And then and then something changed where it became a bigger deal. And I think that often that's triggered by when we start to drink to relieve stress.

You know, if you're just drinking purely socially alcohol actually has a slightly different effect on you than if you're drinking to relieve stress because alcohol is an anesthetic.

And so it makes you not feel the stress. So it feels it feels a lot better when you're drinking to relieve stress alcohol can really numb that. And then all of this at end drinking becomes something that is is taking up a lot more of your your mental thoughts.

And then something happens where you start to say, oh, wait a second, I'm not happy with this. And so what was that what was that like for you like where where were you when you kind of things changed.

I think it was when my dad died, which was 11 years ago and it hit me really hard. And I was in very intense grief for the week following.

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