As I’m sure you’ve seen on social, I started drinking again after challenging myself to sober September last year, which ended up turning into 9 months without a bevie!

If you’re interested, I put together 2 podcast episodes thus far around this whole personal booze experience, which are EP 158 titled ’10 things that sober September taught me’ and EP 176 titled ‘Insights from 6 months sober.’

Throughout the majority of the 9 months I was basically taking it day by day and I had a few moments where I thought, ‘a drink would be kinda nice right now…’ but obviously not nice enough to actually have one, otherwise I would have.

For month number 8 I was living in Houston, Texas and I still really had no desire to partake and when I decided to book a flight to Vancouver in mid-June to see friends and family, I started to think about potentially having a few beers when I arrived in Van a couple weeks later.

Vancouver has an amazing craft beer scene and I thought about getting together with buds and enjoying some brewskis and so the wheels started turning a little bit…after a week or two of thinking about it I decided, ‘I’m gonna drink some beers at some point this summer!’

4 or 5 days after arriving in Van, I met a great friend of mine at a local brewery and had a nice Rueben sandwich on rye bread with a side salad and a delicious stout…if you’re not sure what a stout is, it’s a dark beer and a classic example is something like Guinness.

The stout was really tasty and it was super interesting because I had no desire at the time to actually get drunk or even a buzz, I just wanted that magical craft beer taste. I ended up stopping at 1 beer and I didn’t feel buzzed, which I was slightly surprised by because I hadn’t had a drink in ages!

A few days later it was a Friday and I decided to head out with 3 buds and I told myself, ‘I’m just gonna go with the flow’ and wow…speaking of flow, the drinks were fu*king flowing! We ended up going to 3 different restaurants, it was a boozy night yet I wouldn’t change a thing…I had so much fun, however…

It was definitely overkill, I was pretty rough around the edges the following day but again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’m fully content with the choices that I made because I went into it with awareness, it was a conscious choice.

I’ve had some bevies since then like on Canada Day (July 1st) and I had a couple at a BBQ last weekend as well and it’s been fascinating to see how my relationship with alcohol has shifted after being sober for 9 months…

I’ve noticed that there are so many beliefs and stories around booze that just turned out to be completely false, however I never would have figured these things out for myself had I not gone through this experience, a few classics are…

It’s hard to socialize without booze…no it’s not. Typically I found that my socializing happened at slightly different hours of the day as in, I did a lot more social stuff when the sun was up and I was typically sleeping a lot sooner after the sun went down…but it’s not hard to stay social without alcohol in the mix, it’s just different.

Another story that’s untrue, basically everyone drinks…or at least it feels that way sometimes and…no they in fact don’t. I had no clue how many folks chose not to partake in alcohol until I chose not to partake in alcohol, for example…

I found an incredible community of sober folks in Tulum, Mexico when I was living there for 2 months and we did tons of fun stuff…we hit the beach, we played a bunch of Spikeball, hit restaurants, just chatted and it never involved alcohol. A decent number of folks smoked weed, but lots didn’t too!

I did smoke weed twice over the 9 months and personally, weed just doesn’t do it for me like it used to, it’s not really for me anymore and so I stayed essentially stone cold sober the whole time.

I also found plenty of people that didn’t drink in Playa Del Carmen where I lived after Tulum, tons of folks didn’t drink in Playa and it’s thought to be a fairly big party city, the same goes for Tulum and just Mexico in general, but this is one of those things where…

If you’re not going out of your way to be sober, typically you’re not going to come across a bunch of sober folks because you’re going to be in a lot more situations where alcohol is at the forefront…makes sense right!?

This also makes me think of the quote ‘you are the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with…’ and just how important your environment is, meaning…

If you truly want to drink less, hang out with folks in situations that involve alcohol less often, just like if ya wanna eat healthier, surround yourself with more fit folks…environment is a massive factor in our behaviour, a much bigger factor than we give it credit for in fact!

Another story that ya hear is that ya can’t have fun without booze…I had SO much fun sober, it was an amazingly enjoyable 9 months…so it turns out that there are fun things to do that don’t involve booze, who’da thunk it!?

It’s funny, now when I have a drink or maybe two and then stop, I find that I typically just get tired and so what I now know that I used to do was drink ‘through’ that tiredness and never really feel it because I’d just have another drink and another drink and another drink, so now…

I’m like, ‘hmmm, do I want to have a bevie or two and feel that or would I prefer to just skip drinking all together tonight.’

The coolest part of this process has been that the way that I relate to alcohol and my relationship with it is forever changed, I can just feel it, it’s different, for example…

Booze has so much less of a ‘pull’ over me now and so it’s truly a choice that I’m making vs. before feeling like the alcohol was choosing me. I’m fully aware that I was putting the bottle to my lips and no one else however, it didn’t feel like as much of a choice as it truly was until after having this experience…simply put, I was addicted to a degree, addiction is obviously a spectrum, but it’s just so easy to justify via saying things like…

‘Well there are tons of people that drink way more than I do’ or…

‘I don’t drink nearly as much as some of my friends…’

But…what I always circle back to with stuff like this is, personally I don’t want to compare myself to most people because that’s an incredible way to be incredibly average and there’s nothing wrong the middle of the bell curve per say, but for me, that’s just not what I want…I want to live an exceptional life…as far as how I define it at least.

The same dealio applies to fitness and health, I don’t want to have an average fitness level or body composition, especially because the average is getting worse and worse as we get heavier and more and more unhealthy. Average used to be far fitter than it is now because we’re trending in the wrong direction…obesity rates are skyrocketing, diabetes, autoimmunity, Alzheimer’s, you name it and it’s getting more and more prevalent!

But back to alcohol…

Creating that distance between myself and booze allowed me to see much clearer on so many levels and this is called ‘the dirty windshield effect.’

You know when you’re on a road trip and you get onto the highway and bugs begin to splatter on your windshield? You really notice it right…well at some point, your windshield gets so dirty and filled with bugs that you don’t notice any new bugs at all.

Then, you pull off the road and hit a gas station, clean your windshield, hop back on the highway and all of a sudden you start noticing the bugs splattering again!

It’s SO important to ‘clean your windshield’ once in a while just so that you can see what you’re in because if your windshield is dirty 24/7 that becomes the new norm, you’re a fish in water!

I created distance from alcohol in order to truly see the role that it was playing in my life and this happens with nutrition and lifestyle as well. If you’re eating poorly, carrying around excess weight, your digestion is off and your energy is low…that becomes normal, that is a bug filled windshield and the only way to truly experience and understand what having a clean windshield is like is to eat better, shed that excess weight, square away your digestion and improve your energy!

Humans are amazing at adapting, a little too good sometimes and so I have clients tell me all the time shortly after we start working together…

‘Wow, I didn’t know just how shitty I felt before and I really didn’t know just how great I could feel!’

‘I’ve gone my whole life without even knowing what good digestion was!’

‘I had no clue that I could sort out my skin issues, joint pain, PMS symptoms, brain fog, afternoon energy dips etc. via nutritional changes!’

I hear this stuff on a daily basis.

Cleaning your windshield is so valuable and I’m a BIG fan of fun little challenges for stuff like this, for example…

I recently did a 30 day no processed foods challenge, this is an amazing way to clean your windshield!

Skipping booze for 30 days, doing a movement challenge for a month, essentially anything that excites you, challenges you and potentially can improve you…and if 30 days seems like too much, do it for a week, shit…do it for 24 hours and go from there if that seems more doable from a psychological standpoint!

Now as far as moving forward goes around alcohol for me personally…

Like I mentioned, my relationship with it is forever changed so I’m super stoked that I gifted myself that 9 months, it was an incredible experience…having said that, I felt ready to incorporate booze back into my life and maybe I’ll cut it out again, maybe not, I dunno.

The idea of going for a period of time without it definitely doesn’t scare me like it did before, I know I can do it, it’s super doable…so we’ll shall see.

What I do know for sure is that I’m not going to be drinking as much as I did before simply because I know that that amount of alcohol just doesn’t jive with what I want anymore…it worked then, it just doesn’t now.

If you’re curious and/or questioning your relationship with alcohol, first of all…that’s super cool!

Perhaps you’re ready to incorporate some change now or maybe you’re not quite there yet…I had been thinking about giving booze a break for years before I actually took the plunge because I wasn’t ready until I was ready.

The payoffs of continuing to drink as much as I was were outweighing the costs, simple as that…this is why we do anything and everything, whether it’s what we eat, how we spend our time, our work setup, our relationships, everything is a payoffs and costs formula or essentially and pros and cons list.

We engage in behaviours that we perceive to have larger payoffs than they do costs and as soon as that relationship flips, we change. As soon as the costs outweigh the payoffs, we shift, we alter our behaviour.

One thing that I will say is that if you’re waiting for the perfect time to cut out booze or the perfect time to get in shape, you’re never going to make it happen because the quote unquote ‘perfect time’ doesn’t exist.

There’s always going to be something…and the truth is when you’re ready to make a change, you’ll stop looking for why you can’t, and you’ll start looking for HOW YOU CAN…you’ll make it happen, you’re far more resourceful than you think!