Hey there!

Every month Annie has a call with our Path 365 members and answers their questions.

She tackles a wide range of topics from what to do with big emotions, what kinds of tips and

advice she has for addressing difficult situations, how to deal with cravings, and

so much more. Listen in as she does some real life coaching for our path

members. Hey Annie, I'm curious what you think.

Alcohol has been my pain reliever for so long, mentally and physically.

How do I overcome that belief?

So it's so interesting because I think that I obviously am not a doctor and I can't really speak to pain.

I don't know what that's like, but I do know that the mental relief

when we believe we're gonna drink later

when it's become, like you said, your whole body clinches up and then if you're like oh I have this in sight this this relief you're so much of the physical relief can come from a bit of that mental. So for me on a very minute scale, but I remember feeling better when I would reach for the wine before I would even drink it, right?

And so I think that there's, I wonder if it would be worth trying, and I'm not saying that this would solve it or anything because I honestly, yeah, I do feel like like the physical pain feels and the actual medication. I don't know enough about how this all works, but I wonder if it would be worth trying,

very similar to the idea of like,

okay, I'm gonna actually use willpower

to try one time without drinking and just see what that does, what that does both in terms of how you feel during the day, you know, like you could even keep it on a scale of one to ten does my dread increase drastically? Does it decrease drastically? How is the pain on a scale of one to ten where you know if I know without a doubt I'm not going to turn into alcohol to solve this. I can survive one night. What happens and how does that kind of break the cycle?

Because it's hard to tell at this point how much of the drinking part is

a cycle of anticipation and craving

that's gotten disguised with this physical aspect,

right?

Like how much of it is, our brains are so smart when they want to get like the fix right when they want to get the thing and so it would be so interesting to just try to see okay if I if I just 100% wasn't going to drink, but I knew I was going to have a day where I was up doing traffic control, I was telling the caretakers what to do. I was definitely going to do a little more physical activity than normal, but for sure I'm not going to drink.

What would the outcome be if your brain knew without a shadow of a doubt that there was no chance of you drinking?

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