How a 66 day Sober Challenge changed my life... with Tribe member Claire B

If I had to describe a typical Tribe member then I would pick a lady in her 40’s or 50’s – successful career woman with a family. Noody would dream that this lady had a problem with alcohol but in fact she’s been worried about her drinking for years. My podcast guest this week pretty much fits that profile...Tribe member Claire B In this Episode: Claire's parents didn’t drink much so her first experience of drinking was as a teenager – 18th birthday parties – vodkas and a sweet concentrated orange juice was her drink As she says she went straight for the hard stuff but of course had to add sweetened orange juice to make it palatable just as I did with my whisky and coke As a trainee nurse Claire would drink when she went out but would never drink alone and it was not problematic in those days In her early 20’s Claire moved from the UK to SA and was struck by the drinking culture – wine at lunchtime and in fact she celebrated her first birthday in SA with a champagne breakfasts! She embraced this culture and thought it was great! The first time she began to worry about her drinking was in her late 20’s when she came home from a very boozy lunch and found herself wanting to have another glass of wine That became a habit for Claire – going out for drinks and then carrying on the party alone when she got home She realised that like so many of us she didn’t have an “off” button –that’s definitely a red flag… as is drinking alone Other warning signs are – regularly drinking more than the low risk limits which are just one and a half bottles of wine a week, trying (and failing) to cut down, again and again - …..also when all your social activities revolve around alcohol etc I asked Claire if she tried to cut down or set rules for her drinking – she explained that she wanted someone else to set rules for her – she was actually looking for a reason to stop drinking She thought she’d found one when she relocated to China as she wasn’t expecting alcohol to be so readily available and she remembered welcoming that situation However she found that alcohol was available and in fact she drank a lot during her 3 years there She found herself engineering situations where she could drink and as she said the subject took up “a lot of her bandwidth” People often ask me if they are drinking too much – I explain that if they are thinking about it, even if it’s a niggling thought at the back of their mind…. Then that’s probably a sign that they should take action, even if they are not drinking huge amounts Quite simply if it’s on your mind.. you’ll be happier without it! Those of us who’ve spent years trying and failing to moderate know only too well that it takes up far too much mental space – and when we get sober we can find peace Claire tried the odd alcohol free challenge but found the thought of quitting drinking for ever extremely scary She began to feel that there were 2 Claires – the sensible one and the other one who was egging her on to drink more Many of us experience this inner struggle between our rational conscious mind and our subconscious which is holding limiting beliefs about alcohol Limiting beliefs like “we can’t have fun, relax or socialize” without it Beliefs which are the result of decades of exposure to marketing and peer pressure convincing us that alcohol is essential to a happy life! Claire and I both drank for decades and agreed that our neural pathways for drinking were more like Superhighways than pathways! When we start to build our alcohol free life we are looking to replace that Superhighway with an alcohol free pathway which will in turn become a Superhighway if we stick at our sobriety and continue to do that work Claire came up with a lovely analogy that her sobriety was like a garden…and just like a garden is never finished and it takes work – just like her sobriety If someone asks her advice about a family member who might be drinking too much she’s not afraid to point out red flags I so agree wit