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, this is Annie Grace and I am answering readers questions today and the question I have is how will I be creative without alcohol?

And I get this question a lot. I get it from writers, I get it from artists, I get it from people who just look back over our long history of different authors and writers and novelists who

alcohol has been such a huge part of kind of where they are and you know how successful they are and they actually give alcohol a lot of credit for their creativity.

And it's an interesting question because I certainly always wanted to be a writer. It was an unfiction, like I didn't imagine writing nonfiction books.

I thought I would be writing novels and I thought I would be you know typing somewhere very exotic with my glass of wine in my hand.

And that was kind of the vision that I had for myself. And so when I actually am a writer, but I actually write about alcohol, which is the irony of life, right.

It's completely crazy and insane. And so it's not novels and it's certainly not with the glass of wine in my hand. But I think that one of the things that I had to navigate myself was this question of well, how am I going to be creative.

I remember at one of my very first job out of college, I worked in advertising agency in Northern Colorado. And I remember our the head of the agency, the founder, he would get on the intercom at the time there are intercoms and he would be like, okay, everybody this is a brainstorming emergency.

I want to see everybody in the conference room on the double we have this client and we need a pitch or we need a logo or we need to slow in or we need some sort of you know,

ideas and sort of gem that we need to come through together. And so we'd have all of us rush into the conference room and share enough there would be lots of drinks for everybody was very madmen style and everybody would be having drinks and pouring drinks and brainstorming and you know looking back on it, I formed this very specific belief that okay marketing advertising creativity go hand in hand with alcohol.

And I know lots of different marketing agencies that are trying to be new and hip and will have beer in the fridge for any time of day we certainly did it already agency or wine for any time of day and it was just like, oh, this is just part of it.

And the boozy lunches and the whole thing it was just part of it. And so I remember in my marketing career thinking well, how how am I going to be creative without alcohol.

And I remember the first few times sitting down and being like okay, where's the ideas, where's the juice, what's happening, where's the conversation and feeling stuck and feeling like, huh, this is weird and then I got really curious about like, okay, what's what's happening here because I then knew I knew some stuff that I didn't know before about how alcohol works in the brain.

And I knew one thing is that alcohol actually slows down your neural synapses. So how fast your neurons transmit one, you know, electrical signal to another that that gets slowed.

And so I was like, okay, so you're thinking slower yet I'm supposed to be more creative like that doesn't really sink if alcohol makes me think slower wouldn't it be kind of the antithesis to creativity wouldn't that not make sense.

And so I started to get curious, okay, what are the other elements right the other elements of these brainstorming emergencies or these boozy lunches were people coming and not feeling like their ideas were stupid because if it was stupid, they could blame it on the alcohol.

They could blame it on the booze so they felt empowered to say what was on their mind. And I think even if you're sitting by yourself in front of your computer and you have that glass of wine, even if you haven't drink it yet or even if you've only had a few sips.

That something about that because we've formed this mental connection. Okay, I can take off the judgment that's on my shoulder, I can take off the little person in the back of my mind saying is this going to be good is it's not going to be good rewriting it, etc.

What's it's going to say how's it going to be. And I can just put that aside and I can just go for it because guess what if it sucks I can blame it on the alcohol or guess what if it sucks.

You know, I can come back to it later and and we just kind of take down that inhibition whether it's a bit of placebo effect or because alcohol does inhibit the, you know,

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