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, it's Annie Grace. I hope everybody's doing good. I hope you can hear me type of comment if you can hear me and you're on.

So today, I want to talk about one of the questions that I get all the time. And that's basically like,

Annie, okay, I'm curious. I'm not changing my relationship to alcohol. Does that mean I have to quit forever? And how can I tell if I need to quit forever?

I don't need to quit forever. So if you can hear me type of comment, I was having some headphone issues before. So just say, yes, Annie, I can hear you. That would be great.

Yes. Okay. Looks like you guys can hear me. So again, today we're going to cover this main question of, do I need to quit drinking forever?

If I feel like, if you're drinking too much, I'm not really happy about how I'm drinking, but does that mean that I need to drink forever and quit altogether?

And that's a main question we're going to talk about. And we're going to talk about it from a scientific perspective.

What the scientist says, we're going to talk about it from a personal perspective and we're going to approach it from like the angle of, you know,

I'm going to share with you a few different stories of people in your life who have gone on both. Okay, awesome. Good to see you guys.

Alright, so before I forget, if you have not yet joined for the free alcohol experiment, that is the best way to answer this question for yourself is just, you know, take 30 days, take a break, see how it feels.

Go through the mindset shift, go through every day's videos, every day's emails, we send them all to you. It's totally free. It's alcohol experiment.com. If you have not done that yet, you're waiting for, you need to do that.

So it's such a key first step, you know, and it doesn't mean that you have to like even take the 30 day break, even if you sign up, just get the videos, just do it. It's free. There's no pressure.

So good. Okay, so but today we're going to talk about joining you to stop forever. This is such a concern. And the first thing I want to offer, because I think the premise of this question is fear.

And I know for me when I was feeling like alcohol, I mean, literally, this is my coffee, this is not alcohol, but I would look at my, my pretend this is a class of wine and I look at my glass of wine and I would feel like it was the duct tape that was holding everything together.

It was the thing that was making me able to balance the big career and the two kids and the marriage and all of this stuff. And I felt so attached to it that I got these questions confused like I thought because it's our society looks at this problem that if I even questioned my drinking it meant I had a quit forever, meant I had to quit altogether forever for good.

And actually that question created so much fear inside of me that I stopped asking it. And how like I'm so happy I finally got back on, you know, the horse and started asking that question again, but for a long time I stopped asking it. And I just want to offer you this thought because I feel like that question does keep us stuck sometimes.

And we're totally going to go into the details of the answer, but I want to offer you the thought that what else in our society do we look at like that, like what else do we look at where 100% meaning total sobriety is success.

And then actually 99% percent meaning like our relapse is relapse, which is a word I really don't like you followed my work at all, but is failure.

Like where else does that exist. It doesn't write even if in the alcohol experiment, which again is free, join us alcohol experiment.com, but in the alcohol experiment, we actually measure percentage success because it's such a better metric.

If you stop drinking for three days out of 30, I'm probably going to butcher the math right now, but I think that somewhere like a 10% success rate, like you're you reduced your drinking by 10%.

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