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 welcome to this naked mind podcast. Today I am here with Jolyne Park and Jolyne is a functional

nutritionist and a very good friend of mine. We both live here in Denver and thank you so much Jolyne for joining.

This is fun. Thanks for asking me Annie.

It's awesome. So recently Jolyne has become quite famous. She had a TED Talk, which is awesome and such a cool thing on such a cool topic.

So I want to talk to you about your TED Talk and maybe we can just dive in there, but I also would really love you to share your story.

So anyway, you want to enter to find it is great for me.

Sure. Well, my TED Talk was the culmination of my story over all the years and it was my title of the talk was great area drinking, nourishing your nervous system in a new and revolutionary way.

So as a functional nutritionist, I'd study brain chemistry, neurotransmitters, kind of the physiological mechanisms that happen around cravings with sugar and alcohol.

And then my own story has been while I've been working in corporate wellness over the years and working with people one on one, I loved red wine and fit in really well, how I drank red wine.

But it was becoming more and more of a problem, especially kind of around the 38, 43 year old period.

And I quit drinking when I was 43. So the TED Talk was kind of a mixture of a little bit of my story of the back and forth, Mary go round.

I would stop drinking at times. I'd say, oh, I'm doing a paleo challenge. I'm, you know, just not drinking for a while. And it's slid under the radar really well because of the work that I did and people are like, okay, you're doing wellness and nutrition. That makes sense since I didn't get hassle too much.

And then I would, you know, my own mind be like, I want to, I want to drink like why might do why might be so restrictive and I'd go back to drinking.

But it was escalating for me. It was becoming really, really easy and very much a habitual pattern to be drinking, you know, in the end, most days, the last year that I quit, I was drinking most days.

And it was also becoming very easy to say, I'm just going to have a glass of wine while I'm starting to make dinner tonight and I would end up drinking the whole bottle. And that was the pattern that I wanted, I knew that I didn't want to keep continuing.

It was really cool because in your wellness work, you obviously were probably quite a bit more aware. I know for me wellness was sort of, you know, the last thing from my mind, I was young and I was healthy and, you know, whatever.

So I didn't have that kind of the same cognitive awareness around how alcohol impacts my body.

So I think your story is unique in that not only were you super aware and taking these breaks, but you were very mindful to recognize the escalation as it was happening instead of recognizing it kind of in hindsight after something negative had happened.

And it's funny, you know, and the other part of my story is anxiety. I've always been a pretty anxious person and and through my drinking would think, oh, you know, just I'm an anxious person, but didn't kind of realize how much the alcohol was making me anxious and part of that anxiety, I can also be a bit of a hyperchondriac.

So, you know, I think that was some of the two, but there was also things I didn't realize. I remember calling my nurse practitioner, my, my women's health doctor a couple of years ago.

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