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. I hope you guys are doing awesome. How's everybody doing today? Awesome. So cool.

Alright, so today I want to talk about the power of a firm decision. And there's a few ways to approach this.

First of all, there is a very real phenomenon called decision making fatigue. And this has been measured and studied.

And basically what it is, is it means that your brain, because decision making takes brain power and brain power,

takes energy like actual real true energy. In fact, the structures in your brain are one of the most energy,

energy taxing or energy expensive structures in the whole body. So your brain takes almost significantly more energy to function in certain ways than,

and then other parts of your body and muscles. So like more calories. Like the brain consumes an incredible amount of calories as an example.

And I don't know the specifics, so I won't quote them. But I know that this is true, that it is very kind of expensive to use brain power.

And decisions by their nature are utilizing brain power. They are forcing your brain to weigh amongst two different choices.

And think through kind of what is the future outcome going to be of each of the different choices and try to evaluate different criteria and it's doing thousands of things to make kind of a single decision.

Now the interesting thing about how the brain makes decisions from the research that I've done is that brains make decisions, the easy decisions, so like what clothes are you going to wear for the day or what root are you going to take when you drive to school,

take as much brain power as the more difficult decisions. And so that's really interesting. And I think to varying degrees that there might be some wiggle room in that, but by and large, a decision takes a certain amount of brain power, no matter if it's like a pretty tough decision.

Or a pretty easy decision. And so when you are in the cycle of wondering, I remember this cycle so well of just wondering how much was I going to allow myself to drink tonight and what was it going to be and how was I going to space it out to make sure I didn't get too drunk or too tipsy and what was I going to do in compensation for that?

And I'm going to go for extra run or trying to maintain my health while drinking so much because there was a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. And being a runner, having run some half marathon, having being a climber, being a skier, being pretty outdoorsy, and a very health conscious person eating mostly organic food, and drinking so much alcohol.

And I was always trying to like, you know, stave off the effects in one way or another, whether it was by drinking extra water or doing extra exercise to burn it out of my system or something like that.

But I remember being, even before I started questioning my drinking way before, I remember being in a cycle of decision making. And once I started questioning my drinking, that decision making just grew and grew and grew. And all of a sudden it was like, am I going to drink today or not?

Am I going to drink? One of my drinking, how much is too much? And then eventually, of course, alcohol impairs the brain to where you're not really making decisions, you're being driven around by the cravings inside your brain. And so what I had decided was two glasses of wine would end up to be four or five or sometimes even more.

And I sometimes was even aware that I was making those decisions anymore, but suffice it to say that there was a large amount of mental activity and noise that was constantly directed toward decisions around drinking.

And the power of a decision is that once you decide something, even if it's for a small amount of time, but say I was going to without a doubt, no holds barred, no matter what, I wasn't going to drink for a week. And I made that decision with all of me. It wasn't I was going to try.

This is not the decision I'm talking about, like Yoda, do not try. It was that I was going to decide, like I was not going to drink no matter what, like I had made this commitment to myself. And sometimes at some stages in my drinking, I will be really honest with you that this ability to make that kind of firm decision, it I didn't have it anymore around alcohol.

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