Celebrating 100 Days Alcohol Free! + A special offer for you

Foreign this is Crappy to Happy and I am your host, Cass Dunn.

I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappy to Happy books.

In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy.

Foreign hello and welcome to another solo episode of Crappy to Happy.

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Enough about that today.

A couple of things you guys.

The first thing I want to share with you is a little update on my giving up drinking, which I told you about back in June.

So today marks 100 days alcohol free for me and I feel amazing.

Apart from the fact that I have a cold and I wanted to share that and celebrate that little milestone.

But if you're thinking you told us you were giving up drinking in June and that feels like longer than a hundred days ago, you would be absolutely correct.

So I wanted to share with you that I did give up drinking.

As I said, I Was going to, back in June, give up drinking again, I should say, because you all know if you listened to that episode, if you didn't, I'll link it in the show notes.

But I gave the backstory back in June that I have gone for a long period of time without drinking in the past.

I went almost two years.

I can't really say two years.

It was 20, 22 months or something like that.

And then I started drinking again around the time we moved to London.

Didn't really want to have that restriction of not drinking.

I was already feeling like I was sort of wanting a glass of wine occasionally, and I'd had a really long break, so I started drinking again.

And then I got to the point after two years in London that I was like, no, that's it.

Like, I actually know that I feel better without alcohol.

And so I'm stopping again.

I know some of you were stopping with me.

Some of you were either further ahead, you'd already given up drinking.

Some of you were like, yes, I'm the.

I'm stopping now.

I did not drink for nine weeks when I stopped in June, and then we went away for a weekend and I was at a lovely restaurant and I was offered a glass of wine.

And I thought, yeah, like, why not now?

I want to talk to you about that because that's a very common scenario, right?

And what happened in that moment was that the giving up for that nine weeks had actually felt really easy to me.

I slipped back into not drinking really smoothly, and I put that down to the previous long stretch that I had already had of not drinking.

It felt like my body just remembered what it's like to not have alcohol.

And I must have just been in the right headspace.

I honestly think sometimes it really is just the headspace that you're in, and you can't always predict how easy or difficult it's going to be to break a habit like that.

I know there's been times in the past when I've said, I'm going to not drink, even just for a month, and I've found it so incredibly difficult.

And then other times it's just felt like, oh, well, yeah, you know, easy.

Cannot explain it.

If you're an expert on this subject and you can tell me why that sometimes happens, then by all means, call me up.

We'll get you on the podcast and explain this, why this happens.

Because there is no explanation in my mind why sometimes it is really hard and sometimes it is so easy.

For me, in June, it was really easy And I think that's a problem because it felt so easy that it felt like, oh, well, I can just, obviously I can just stop drinking anytime.

Obviously my body remembers what it's like to not drink.

And so why do I need to make this new rule that I'm just not going to drink again when I can just stop anytime?

Does this sound familiar?

And so I had that glass of wine that weekend.

And then I also knew that we had some social events coming up in the next couple of weeks after we came back to London.

So I thought, oh, I'll just stop again like next month.

Surprise, surprise.

When I went to stop again.

Wasn't that easy, was it?

So lesson learned.

If it's easy, stick with it.

Ride that wave.

Don't, don't take it for granted.

If you have those times when it does feel easy, when you've got a bit of a run up, you know, like when you've got a several weeks under your belt of not drinking, then be really careful before you consider giving that away and having to start again.

You know, it's just a reminder.

I know you know this.

If you're a person who has quit drinking or if you're thinking of quitting drinking or give any, any habit, you know, this applies to any sort of habit or compulsive behavior that you do and that you would prefer not to.

Yeah, it's too easy to give away that success that you've had, but very common as well.

Now, I do want to say also on this that the reason I didn't come back and tell you about the, the drinking again is not because I felt like embarrassed or ashamed or anything like that.

Even though I had come on here and said it gives me a bit of accountability to share with you that that's what I'm doing.

And it did cross my mind, oh gosh, I'm gonna have to tell them.

But to be honest, because I had got messages from people saying that they wanted to do the same thing or that they had struggled with giving up drinking as well.

I didn't want to come back and say that I had found it really easy and therefore I just gone and had a glass of wine because.

Well, why not?

Because I know I can drink.

I can give up drinking anytime.

I didn't want to almost like be the person to give you permission to have the drink if you were craving the drink.

I didn't want to be that person to go, ah, look, yeah, what the hell, like nine weeks, that's fine.

I, you know, I know how easy arms can be twisted if you're having a bit of a wobble.

And the last thing you need is for somebody to actually encourage you to give up on your goal.

And I didn't want to unintentionally be the person to twist your arm and to give permission for you to just go back to drinking if that's not necessarily what you wanted or what was in your best interest.

Maybe that was the wrong thing.

Maybe I should have just come back and been really honest and said, look, this is my experience and it wasn't about.

I genuinely didn't feel bad at all for my decision, but I didn't want to be the person to influence anybody else to make that decision based on me and my experience.

So, as I said, it became more difficult when I tried.

When I decided, okay, I'll just stop again, it was really hard to stop again.

What eventually led to me stopping again and staying stopped, and I will this time.

I'm quite determined about this this time.

So as you also.

So I was feeling more and more convinced that I had probably had ADHD undiagnosed.

I was feeling quite determined to get a diagnosis and to consider the possibility of medication for that.

So whatever your thoughts about that, that was my path, that was my choice, and I wanted to at least try the medication.

And I knew that medication and alcohol don't necessarily go together.

And so even before I had the diagnosis, I think I just made the decision that I was just going to stop drinking because I wanted to take medication and I wanted that to be done.

I just wanted that habit already to be broken and that not to be an issue when it came to.

If it came to me being diagnosed and having the option of taking the medication.

So I stopped in December, the very beginning of December.

I think it was the 3rd of June the last time I stopped, and it was the 3rd of December when I stopped again this time.

So today's 100 days.

And the other reason for stopping at the beginning of December is that I know for me personally that this doing dry January, like, stopping on the 1st of January, which did cross my mind, just doesn't work for me, like giving up drinking in the middle of the holidays, when that just doesn't work for me.

To me, that's like saying you're going to start a diet on a Saturday.

Like, who does that?

It's.

You wait until the Monday, right?

Like.

And even people say, oh, well, New year January the first.

January first is in the middle of the holidays.

It's still nobody's at work, you're spending time with friends.

Not the time for me personally, that is not the time to try and introduce any new habit.

So I wanted to get ahead of that curve.

And so I stopped at the beginning of December so that I already had that track record.

Like I had a few weeks of the sobriety before I hit the Christmas season.

And that was really good.

I also knew that we weren't doing lots of socializing over Christmas, so that wasn't going to be lots of temptation.

And I did.

I found it really easy to then stay through that period.

And I would recommend that.

Like, if it's something that you're thinking about and you're thinking, I'll wait until after that event, maybe think about a month before that event.

Get the runs on the board before the event.

Because the more opportunity you give yourself to experience the party, the event, the social occasion without alcohol, the better.

The sooner you have the opportunity to do the thing without the alcohol and realize actually it's not that bad.

Nobody's judging you.

Nobody even realizes that you're not drinking.

You go home, you get up the next morning, there's no hangover, you feel great, all of your friends are dying and you are just feeling like so wholesome and so grateful for your health and your clear head.

The better you need those experiences.

So consider, I mean, that's a personal choice, but consider if there is an event, then maybe stopping before, not waiting until after.

The other thing I want to pick up on here with the not drinking is the adhd.

So I was starting to realize that I probably had undiagnosed adhd.

And in hindsight, no wonder I often.

And if I think all the way back to my 20s and 30s when I was working in jobs, and how overwhelmed I used to feel and how stressed I used to feel at the end of the work day, I always felt like no matter what I did, I wasn't getting on top of my workload.

I felt this kind of chronic sense of overwhelm.

Then was it any wonder that I felt like wound up like a 2Bub watch at the end of every day and I was reaching for a glass of wine.

It was undiagnosed adhd.

I think plenty of women particularly have probably a similar experience.

The feeling of overwhelm and then the perfectionism that kicks in and the overachieving and the overcompensating for that feeling of not doing enough and not keeping up and all of that stuff that goes with adhd.

And not just adhd, but you know, since we're talking about this, we know that ADHD has been severely under diagnosed in girls and women.

And we also know that women, and particularly mature women are the ones who are drinking more than ever.

More and more and more.

Mummy's little helper.

It's wine o'clock all day.

Like all of this marketing that's pitched to women around alcohol and women are desperate for the relief of it because life is overwhelming and stressful.

It's overwhelming and stressful enough if you're a woman who is managing a family and kids and all of the things, keeping all of the balls in the air and not really having any other outlet or opportunity, especially if you've got young kids, it's really hard to just be able to get an escape.

And so that reaching for the glass of wine is the easiest thing.

Right.

It's right there.

It's available to you while you're doing the dinner and wrangling the kids and all of the rest of it.

You can't get out for a walk, you can't get out to a yoga class.

That was certainly my experience when I had a young baby.

And I think if you add on to that something like maybe you've got anxiety, maybe you've got an undiagnosed attention deficit issue or autism issue, maybe there is something like that that has made things extra challenging for you and you didn't know that that was an issue.

What you all you know is that it all feels very, a lot.

It all feels overwhelming, it all feels really hard, it all feels really crappy.

Like you, no matter what you do, you're never doing enough.

And wine becomes a very, very convenient source of relief for that.

And I suspect that there is probably a correlation there.

Yeah.

So for me, obviously, knowing that I wanted to get the diagnosis and the medication, I wanted to be off the alcohol, but I also was able to look back and go, well, maybe this is part of the reason why the alcohol has been appealing to me for the longest time, through my adult life, my working life.

And then of course, ADHD also is a low dopamine issue.

Like we go for dopamine, you have low dopamine, so you look for things that give you a hit of dopamine.

Hence impulsive behaviors, hence spending, shopping, drinking, drugs, impulsive, reckless behaviors.

Whatever, whatever, whatever.

That's, that's another reason why alcohol can be quite appealing to somebody who has adhd.

And it's addictive.

So once you're on that path, it becomes very compulsive.

So I'm whatever that is.

Three or four months of no alcohol.

I am a little over two months on ADHD medication.

I feel amazing.

I don't feel overwhelmed, I don't feel anxious.

I feel organized and productive.

I'm getting the things done that I need to get done.

I'm sleeping better typically.

I mean, I'm also in that menopause phase, so sleep is an issue because of that.

But that's pretty much under control.

I feel clear headed.

I feel good.

I'm reading novels, I'm like, I'm going to bed and reading a book, doing things that I never have been able to do, had the, felt like I had the capacity to do.

And it's good.

Life is good.

So I just wanted to share that.

Breaking the alcohol habit is hard if you are a regular drinker.

If you're coming home and having some wine every night, it is really hard, challenging.

If you would like me to share with you what I have found helpful, then I am more than happy to talk more about that.

I've talked before about the benefits, about why I enjoy not drinking.

I enjoy my mood being regular.

I enjoy knowing whatever emotion I feel is my own.

It's not exaggerated because I've had two glasses of wine.

I enjoy.

Well, back in Australia, I used to just enjoy being able to just jump in the car and drive anywhere at any time and not having to think, oh, I've had two glasses of wine, can I drive?

Like, can I, can I do that?

Or you know, like, who's gonna drive if we go socializing?

Like just never an issue.

When you don't drink, you don't have to think about any of that.

So I've talked about all the things that I love about not having alcohol in my life, but I haven't, I don't think necessarily talked about what has helped me through all of my stopping, starting and you know, doing 100 days and then starting again, doing two years and then starting again.

Like, you know, maybe I'm not the best role model or the best example, but I can tell you through all that stopping and starting what I have personally found really helpful.

But that would not be like me being the expert and saying how to quit drinking.

That would be how I quit drinking.

My personal experience as opposed to talking as some sort of expert on the subject.

More than happy to share that if that is of interest.

And I hope that in sharing that, I obviously only share that so that if any of it resonates with you or you find interesting or helpful in when you're making your decisions about your life, your habits, whether it's to do with drinking, whether it's to do with ADHD medication, anything like that.

Like, I just want to share my experience so it might be of interest or benefit to you.

The other thing that I want to share with you or ask of you is how we can make this podcast the best podcast in the whole world.

Okay, maybe not the whole world, if you haven't guessed.

I am really on a mission to grow this show this year for no other reason than I love it.

I love this podcast like you would not believe.

It's a labor of love.

I don't have ads on it these days.

It's at my own expense.

It is purely an act of service.

I'm hoping it's helpful, but it's also really fun for me and it's not good enough that it just be fun for me.

It has to be of service.

Like it has to be of value to you.

Whether it is entertaining, informative, inspiring, whatever you get from this, I want to know and I want to know what you want from this show.

What you want more of, what you want less of.

What interviews do you like?

What kind of guests do you like?

Do they need episodes need to be shorter?

Do they need to be longer?

I personally think shorter because I talk too much.

Obviously I'm doing the private podcast, the paid podcast.

And so there's going to be lots of options there to mix things up and add new things and maybe add an extra weekly segment that is like I've thought about something like Psychology Hour or Therapy Hour or something where we just like workshop people's issues or things you want to bring to the table.

Might be just weekly wrap ups of what I'm listening to, reading what I'm learning that is of interest to you.

Like there's so much scope to mix things up and keep it really interesting and fun and relevant to you.

So what I'm going to ask you to do is complete a survey.

Boring.

I know that sounds boring.

So I'm going to incentivize you.

I'm going to come up with something that's really exciting that you're going to want and you're going to love it.

And then I'm going to bribe you.

That is what's going to happen.

I'm going to bribe you to complete my survey, but the bonus will be not that I just give you something special and amazing for completing the survey, but I'll also make the podcast better.

So win, win, win.

Right Yeah, I want to make it really interesting.

I want this to be the podcast that you never want to miss an episode.

So whatever it has to be, knowing that I'm Cass and what I am, and I'm a psychologist and all the rest of it, like, I can only be me.

But I am happy to be really creative about how we can keep the really good bits of this show, add in new bits, strip away the bits that aren't that great, and make it so that it's the best show that it can possibly be.

But you are the listener.

You are the one who can best tell me, because I can't guess.

So I'm going to put a link to a survey in the show notes, and I don't yet know what I'm going to bribe you with, but I am going to bribe you.

So it's going to be good.

Just trust me that whatever it is, it's going to be good.

And it'll be so worth it for you to take the time to fill out the survey.

If you are a paid subscriber, then I love you the most, of course.

And I will also be asking you the same question.

Tell me what you want.

You're the VIPs, like, you are the VIPs, and you get to tell me exactly what you want.

And you'll be the first to get all the best bits.

So that is it for me, you guys.

I hope that is enough.

I hope I've bribed you enough.

And next week, I've got a great interview for you.

Also got an interview that I've decided I might not run.

And I'll be happy to spill the tea about that one because it is also a decision that I'm making probably in along the lines of, like, in keeping with this, wanting the show to be the best that it can be.

So maybe I'll tell you about that.

Maybe I'll tell my private people about that, my paid peeps.

Anyway, I have got some great guests coming up and I cannot wait to catch you next week on Crappy to Happy.