The Sobriety Expert : Redefining Life Without Alcohol. “alcohol is the only drug we have to justify not taking!”

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You left the tribe.

Alcohol is the only drug we have to justify not taking. I knew I wasn't an alcoholic. I was looking forward more and more to that evening wine. Oh, how am I going to get through the day? I felt like the light inside me was starting to go out. Alcohol robs us of that. Alcohol absolutely exacerbates anxiety and depression. It's a level one carcinogen. It causes anxiety, it disrupts your sleep, it makes you feel crap. Why are you fighting for it? Everything in my life is better when I don't drink. And so why do I keep going back to could actually be the most life changing decision you ever make.

Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now international keynote speaker and high performance leadership trainer. Each week I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for helping us be a consistently number one ranked show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I hope you enjoy today's show.

I'd like to thank NZ Mortgages for sponsoring the Lead On Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages.co nz beyond booze. Yep, there's a book out there that talks about life beyond booze. Sarah Rusbach is the author and I've sat down with her and asked her why? Why would you give up alcohol? What's the point in it? Where did you start? How did you get there? What have you noticed are some of the changes? So if you've thought about your relationship with alcohol and what it might look like, or how it might be slightly different or change, then this is the episode for you. Sarah. A huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm very excited to have you here. We're going to talk about life and alcohol and how alcohol has made its way into most of our lives in some shape or form and how it's influenced our mindsets, our relationships, our health and even our Wallets. So you give up alcohol. And I've done the same thing about four years ago. But I want to talk about why you did it. What happened? What was the tipping point? Why did you give up?

I think I reached a point, James, where I knew I wasn't an alcoholic. I didn't drink every day. I hadn't lost my job, I was running a very successful career coaching business. I was raising two kids. Like on the outside, no one thought I had a problem with alcohol, but on the inside I was starting to notice more and more the effect it was having on me. So in my 20s, I started drinking at 14 in the north of England. You know, like that rite of passage of filling up soda bottles with like solid comfort and Malibu and going down the local park and drinking. And alcohol had been part of my life for a very, very long time, but it had never been problematic. I was a big social drinker, but always just saw myself as the party girl and I was always the one that was having fun. And back in London in the 90s and the early 2000s, it was, you know, there was no such thing as a hangover. You got home at 3, you got up at 7, you were at your desk by 9, bacon sandwich, diet Coke, kind of got through the day and then you were doing it again that night. And I moved to Australia in 2010. And that, I think, is when I noticed, reflecting back on this, my drinking changed. I had become a mum. I had two very young children in very quick succession. I was on the other side of the world. I'd left my career behind in London, moved to the other side of the world, raising two kids and my alcohol use had become something as a bit of a crutch. It had become something that was something that I was looking forward to and I was doing on my own for the first time. Sarah, the party girl, didn't really have any parties to go to when she didn't really know anyone on the other side of the world and had two very young kids. But I was turning to alcohol more and more to make those feelings of homesickness, the monotony and everything of raising two young kids. When you're used to having this high flying career and suddenly you're at home pureeing carrot and cleaning baby sick and going to monkey music. And I was looking forward more and more to that evening wine. Again, never problematic, wasn't drinking in front of the kids, wasn't hiding it or anything like that. But over the years that crept up because we've got to be realistic about what alcohol is, it's up there in the top five most addictive substances in the world. We build tolerance to it. So what starts as one glass will become two and will become three. And I could towards the end of my drinking, drink a bottle and still be very high functioning, still be able to get up in the morning and go to the gym still, like that was where my drinking had got to. And so when I finally made the decision to remove alcohol five years ago, so I just had my five year soberversary at the weekend as opposed to sharing. Before we went live, I had just noticed more and more that alcohol was causing low level anxiety. I've never had anxiety in my life. I am not that type of person that had overthought things or worried that much about things. But I was noticing, noticing more and more that I was becoming anxious, I was becoming nervous about certain things, I was overthinking things a lot. Alcohol was highly impacting my sleep. So even one or two glasses, I would often be waking at 2 or 3 in the morning, unable to get back to sleep, tossing and turning, finally, finally get back to sleep. Then the alarm goes off an hour later and then you have to go and start your day. No one feels like they're going to reach their full potential when they've had a crap sleep, you know, three glasses of wine and they're feeling that load level anxiety. But that had become my normal. So the impact of drinking, probably I drank three or four nights a week. The impact of my sleep, the impact on my mental health, the impact on my drive and motivation, like I'm a very driven, very motivated, quite a passionate person. And I felt like the light inside me was starting to go out. That's the only way I can describe it. And so I took a break. This was 2017. And because I thought, I don't have a problem, I'm not an alcoholic, I don't drink in the morning. You know, everyone was just like, no, no, your drinking's fine. If I so much as dared say to anyone that I was worried about my drinking. So I took a break and I thought, I'll do 21 days, I've just got a bad habit. And they say it takes 21 days to change a habit. And I ended up doing 100 and I got to the hundred days and I was like, whoa, this is what it's like to wake up every day after eight hours sleep. Like really true restorative sleep. This is what it's like to wake up with really positive self talk first thing in the morning. Because like three or four mornings a week I'd be waking up on my first thought being, oh, how am I going to get through the day? Whereas when you wake up having had eight hours sleep and you jump out of bed and you go to the gym or you go for a run and you're feeling excited about the day ahead, my goodness, that sets you up for such a different mentality towards your day. In that 100 days, I made more money in my career coaching recruitment business than I had made the entire year the year before. That shows the impact that that constant low level drinking was having on my motivation, my energy, my drive, my confidence, all of those things. But I got to the end of the hundred days and I was getting a lot of peer pressure. So I was getting a lot of are you still not drinking, Sarah? And oh, well, let's catch up when you're drinking again was a very classic line that I got. So I went back to drinking thinking, okay, I've had 100 days off, I don't have a problem with alcohol because if I did, I wouldn't have been able to take 100 days off. And I thought, now I'll be a moderate drinker. Someone that just has a glass of wine a couple of times a month with a roast dinner and that'll be it. But that's not the way it works. Because when we've built up those associations with alcohol neural pathways that are, when I'm stressed, alcohol makes that feeling go away. When I'm angry, alcohol makes that feeling go away. When I'm pissed off with my husband or my kids are driving me nuts or whatever. The thing is, if we've built a neural pathway, then that neural pathway doesn't go anywhere. So once I'd let alcohol back into my life in the smallest little bit, the neural pathways kind of fired back up. And all the time the associations started to become have a drink. And so then my tolerance started to build up again. So then it was several glasses again that carried on. And then I got to April 2019 and I just went, everything in my life is better when I don't drink. And so why do I keep going back to it and why do I keep fighting to moderate? It's like I've got it on this pedestal of having alcohol in my life as a moderate drinker is like the elixir of life. And then I sat there and went, let's not forget, Sarah, it's a level one carcinogen. It causes Anxiety, it disrupts your sleep. It makes you feel crap. Why are you fighting for it? And that was when I kind of had this epiphany and went, I'm going to go, and I'm going to create an absolutely amazing life without alcohol. And that was that.

In April 2019, half a decade on from that. And your life is vastly different. Your relationships are. Now, I know there's going to be some people listening right now who feel a little uncomfortable because you left the tribe, and the tribe being all of the people who like to use alcohol to socialize, to unwind, to reward themselves for a big day or a big week, to celebrate a christening, a marriage, to drown their sorrows after a loss. A lot of people are going to be a bit uncomfortable because when someone leaves the tribe, it's like, oh, you're shining the spotlight back on me for a second. And I know personally, when I gave up drinking, people said the same thing, like, come on, James, you're so fun when you drink. I was like, oh, wow, is that a compliment? And, James, let's catch up in a couple of months when you've seen sense and you come back to drinking. And when I caught up with them again and I didn't drink, there was a deep discomfort for them, not for me. And I work with a lot of high performers, whether they're athletes or CEOs, and the amount of conversations I have where they say, I really wish I could give up alcohol, but you know what? I need it to socialize. I need it to entertain clients. I need it to enter excuse. Right. They have this attachment to it because it's safe, it's known. And as you said, you've got these neural pathways that are so strong that it's an automated behavior. So for the person, that's kind of justifying it, I was that person for a long time. What's your advice for them? To break that pattern of thinking long enough for them to actually shift the relationship with alcohol.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from Australia armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in Touch with my team. Carolinejlochlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

Yeah, I think it's really important that we start to get clear on our alcohol use today because we can have very romantic memories and feelings towards alcohol. We romanticize it. It was, you know, many of us started drinking in our teens. It was how it gave us that bit of confidence for, you know, our first, like, you know, encounters with the opposite sex and going out to bars and clubs and doing all of those things. So we've built this neural, very strong neural path pathway that is I need alcohol to have fun, and therefore the story goes, well, then I can't have fun without alcohol. But then we need to start challenging that because, you know, I always remember I sat down with a client the other day and she said, I feel like I'm letting my friends down if I stop drinking. I said, but do you. Have you ever spent time with your friends without alcohol? She thought, well, yeah, of course I have. Like, you know, I've gone and had breakfasts with them. We've gone to yoga classes together. We've gone and done a walk together. And I said, were you letting them down then? No. So we've got to, like, move away from this. The stories that we tell ourselves. And I always say to everybody that the best place to start is take that break from alcohol. But. But see it as an experiment. So simply start noticing, like, get a benchmark of, of testing a few things. How would I rate my sleep right now? What's my energy like day to day as a drinker? What's my anxiety like day to day? If you're a woman, what's the impact of alcohol on any menopause symptoms I might be having? Do I find that it increases hot flushes? Do I find that I'm putting on more weight around the tummy? Am I getting quite spotty on the face and my skin's breaking out? Start to notice what's my self talk? Like, what's my motivation and productivity like at work? Am I showing up as the person I want to be? Do I know that I am absolutely meeting my full potential? Because my argument would be, I don't know many people that could reach their full potential drinking in the way that most gray area drinkers drink, which is two or three glasses or two or three beers four or five nights a week, maybe a few more at the weekend. And many people would think of that as just being standard drinking. That's Gray area drinking. And I don't know many people that can do that and still reach their full potential. So it's really good to get a benchmark. How would I score all those Things out of 10 right now as a drinker, then take a break from booze and see it as an experiment, like be an observer of you and your life without alcohol. So what's my energy like? What's my sleep like? What's my productivity like? Has my anxiety gone? Do I notice that I'm performing better when in my exercise, when I'm running, when I'm at the gym? Do I notice I'm calmer with the kids, that I'm developing different relationship with them? Like that role model wing to my kids was another really important one in my decision to remove alcohol. And when we get to the end of a period of time off alcohol, we can sit there and go, ah, I've got data now. I've got information. Which version of me and which version of my life is better for me do I like better? Because so many of us are living with this belief that a life without alcohol is a less than life. And my purpose and passion until the day I die will be to spread the message that a life without alcohol is not boring, it's not a less than life. And actually we go on to achieve and experience a richer, more fulfilling, more adventurous, more authentic life when we're actually not drinking regularly, consistently.

I'm with you on that 100%. You know, I look back at when I was drinking diverses to now and I do socialize with people who drink. I don't mind being around people who drink. I just tend to not want to be around them late at night when things get messy and sloppy. That's not fun. But my business has probably 6 or maybe even 7x in its revenue since I stopped drinking. The amount of money I've saved. Also, I've got this little app, it's called a sobriety calculator. And you put in just roughly how much you might have drunk, roughly. And I've saved just over $40,000 in the last five years. Yeah, it's mental, right? My partner's the same. So these little things, when you start to see these little wins and these micro victories, it starts to reinforce actually this behavior serves me really well. And the one thing I think about alcohol is if you give up alcohol, do expect some pressure from friends, some criticism, some winding up. Maybe some friends will hang out with you a little less. But just know that it's the Only drug in the world that when you give it up, you get berated for it. Every other drug you give up, crack cocaine and you stay off it. People are going to high five you, hug you, celebrate you, heroin, same thing. Alcohol, they're like, you're a loser. What are you up to? Come on, come back. Come back to the tribe. Let's have some fun. But it's because it's so beautifully packaged, it also tastes so sweet because you don't taste the alcohol, you taste the sugary stuff and all the wines that taste beautiful, it's covering up what we're actually consuming. So for the person that says, I love the taste, what's your advice to them?

I think it's really important to reflect on that because I used to say that I considered myself a wine snob and I would go to all the wine tastings and think nothing better. You know, I was in heaven on those nights. But in actual fact, I was sat next to someone on a plane recently, James, and he had a red wine right next to me and I was just like, oh, God, I can't believe that that was something I used to, you know, drink all the time. And so, yes, we might think that we like the taste, but it's again, amazing how much our taste buds will, if we give ourselves a break off alcohol and what we actually will find that we do enjoy. And then also on that, I would say that the alcohol free drinks have come such a long way in the last few years and many of my clients now will find that having an alcohol free beer or an alcohol free champagne or what have you at the end of a day just scratches that itch and gets them over the hurdle of the five o' clock wine time or whatever it might be. And I have a saying, keep the ritual, change the ingredient. And so if you often will pour a wine on a Friday night, pour an alcohol free wine and just notice, does that, you know, scratch that itch for you? My husband stopped as well and he's a, you know, we've got a boat. He's a mad key, he's a kiwi, he's a mad keen fisherman. And like all those associations of when you have a beer. But he totally finds now that an alcohol free beer at the end of a hot day on the boat, catching fish, coming back, you know, when he's filleting the fish down at the filleting station with all the other blokes and he'll just take an alcohol free beer and no one even notices. Particularly, particularly if it's in a stubby or something. And so it's finding those things that work for you. But as you say, being prepared for the fact that alcohol is the only drug we have to justify not taking. So there will be comments, there will be pressure that comes from others, and something I wish I had done that I didn't do when I first removed alcohol was I felt shame that I couldn't moderate this addictive substance. I felt shame that I always drank more than I intended, that I just couldn't keep on top of it. So I didn't. And I also felt like I was letting all my friends down because I was Sarah the party girl, and so everyone was gonna be disappointed that I wasn't drinking. So instead of saying, alcohol's rotting my soul and destroying my sleep and killing my energy, I said, oh, I just want to lose a bit of weight, so I'm just gonna stop drinking. Now, when you say that, the first thing people are gonna say is, you don't need to lose weight. Oh, Sarah, come on, just have one. Or have a vodka and soda. There's no calories in that. So I left myself open to that kind of pressure. Whereas what I could have said was, alcohol's really impacting my mental health at the moment, and I need to just take a bit of a break. And I think that if I'd done that, the peer pressure would have been a lot less, because the evidence is out there now. Alcohol absolutely exacerbates anxiety and depression, particularly anxiety. They've done studies now that show show people who just drink a couple of glasses of wine three or four nights a week versus people who don't drink at all. Those people that do drink very moderately have a higher baseline of the stress hormone cortisol circulating through their body than people who don't drink. And that's because alcohol causes our brain to release the stress hormones. So, again, we've got to remember, so many people are drinking because they're stressed and they think it helps to relax them, but in actual fact, they're just going into a very vicious cycle of making anxiety worse.

You're right. And like a lot of people, let's say that are maybe taking antidepressants, they're taking those whilst also drinking, which alcohol we know is a depressant. So it's almost like counterbalancing what you're trying to achieve with your medication. Now, what I think about the professionals out there that are maybe at a work function and there's maybe their bosses around or there May be some clients, they're trying to schmooze and they don't want to say, hey, alcohol is impacting my mental health. So I'm taking a break. What other one liners? Because that's all it takes is a one liner to shift the focus away. What other advice would you give them to try and just say, hey, no, I'm good, I'm going to focus on this, or I'm driving or what are some things that they could use?

Yeah. So we talk about this a lot in my groups and there's a few different ones depending on the scenario. But it's great to say I'm training for something, whether it's like an Ironman, a marathon, a half marathon, a 10k, like whatever, even if you're not. Like, it's the one time that I say it's kind of okay to tell a white lie just to get people off your back. I was at a dinner party and I've never met this woman before, and she went to pour me a glass of wine and I said, oh, no thanks, I don't drink. And she looked at me and she went, oh, are you an alcoholic?

It says so much about society, doesn't it, that you say to someone you don't drink and their first thought is, well, you must be an alcoholic. So I think it's great to have. Have something there that is your reason for not drinking. I'm on antibiotics. I've got a big deadline this week. Alcohol's been really messing up with my sleep and I just feel really tired. I'm just trying to get on top of it. I'm seeing a sleep expert and he's told me I'm doing a weight loss challenge and I can't drink alcohol for eight weeks. Like just something that just goes, nah, I'm done. That shuts it down. Doesn't leave you open to peer pressure, but also doesn't invite too much personal information.

That's brilliant. Honestly, it's brilliant. I found in the first, maybe six, four to six weeks that I needed those one liners. But after I got to, like say, I don't know, 12 weeks and beyond, I actually started to really embrace the fact that I love my life without alcohol. And I'm happy to say, hey, no, I don't drink. Thanks a lot. I'll have a soda, I'll have a Heineken double zero. I became proud of it almost. I turned around to go, hey, I'm really proud of this decision I've made. But in the early Stages. It was like, shame. It was like, oh my God, will people stop doing business with me? Will people stop hanging out with me? Will my business crumble? It's been the opposite. And it's been a talking topic for people who want to not necessarily quit, but they want to change their relationship with alcohol. And the only way to change it is to have some perspective and develop awareness. So taking a break, we are about to step in to July. Now, it's been called dry July for a long time for a really good reason. So this is a good time, I think, for people who are curious about shifting the relationship with alcohol to go, this is it. So if somebody's going, hey, I'm thinking July is it. What advice do you have for them as they step into this new territory?

It's really important that we. There are two attitudes that we can take towards taking a month off booze. So when I was in the midst of my drinking, I would do these dry January, dry Julys and it would, it would almost be like a punishment. So I'd almost be sat there, I'd be crossing the days, or people would be asking me out and I'd be like, God, no, I'm not going out tonight. Why would I go out? I can't drink. I'll just be at home, like on the sofa with my cup of tea and I'll see you on the 1st of August. And if we go with that attitude where, if, you know, it's like the words of Henry Ford, whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right. If you believe that you can't have fun without alcohol, then of course you can't. If you believe that your life is going to be boring without alcohol, then it will be. So if we go in with that attitude, attitude, we've got to be really careful because we're not actually going to get anything from it. Whereas if we go with the attitude of I'm going to look at what the benefits are for me, I'm going to look at the impact that it has. I'm going to look at what I can add in when I take alcohol out. And I work with a lot of business leaders and the, and I work one to one as well as in group coaching and it's all about performance coaching and it's all about understanding that you will be on fire when you take the alcohol out. Most people don't realize that they're feeling 5 out of 10 most of the time because they don't take a long enough Break from alcohol to ever know what it feels like to not have alcohol in their system in some way. It takes 72 hours for alcohol to leave your system. And as we get older, we produce less of the enzyme aldh, which is the enzyme that breaks down alcohol and helps the body to metabolize it and get it out of the body quickly. So as we're older, we're just not as effective as doing that, which is why our hangovers get worse, why our sleep becomes more impacted, and why we will feel more of the effects of alcohol for a couple of days rather than just bouncing back very quickly the next day. So taking that break and noticing, as I said before, seeing it as an experiment, being really curious and noticing what you're gaining and what you're benefiting from. And how does it feel to wake up on a Saturday morning not hungover, with the whole day stretching ahead of you, with all of this time to fill, doing exactly what you want? You can't put a price on that. At the end of the day, what do we have? What is life? To me, it's time and energy to spend doing things we love with the people we love. And alcohol rocks us of that. And so actually having the time, energy and intention to get up, you know, do your exercise, spend time with the kids, go and do social things, go and do interesting, fun things, whatever it is that lights you up. And having the time to do that has a ripple effect in every area of your life because you're feeling more fulfilled, you're living more aligned to your values, and therefore you're going to show up as a, in a, as a more authentic and most likely have a greater positive sense of well, being 100%.

And I like to only do things that I can measure, right? So if I'm going to make a change, I'm like, well, I want to actually sit back and measure if I can make a difference. So I started thinking, okay, if I have one day a week where I have three or four drinks, even two drinks, let's say two large pints of beer one day a week, I know the next day I'm not going to be at 100%. From an energetic standpoint, I just won't. I might be at 95 or 80 or whatever. So I started going, okay, if I did that once a week, that's 52 times a year. That's two months a year where I'm actually hungover. I'm under power, I am low energy, I'm a bit grumpy, I'm a bit short. I'm lacking focus. And then I asked myself, what's the most important thing? Well, the most important thing to me was being a good dad. I wanted to be a good dad. That meant a lot to me. So I said, am I being a good dad now whilst I drink? Well, I thought, I think I'm being good. Well, let's not drink and let's see if I improve. And I have to say, I'm more patient, a lot more patient. I've got more energy to wrestle. So Finn's turning about to turn eight, so I'm able to wrestle and run around and bike all around the city with him. And it's just time better spent. So I do think it has improved, and I don't know by how many percentile, but I'm a little bit better as a dad, and just being a little bit better makes me feel a lot happier. So for the people out there who have kids, I know it will make a big difference. I don't know. What have you found from your family experience and your relationship experience from giving up alcohol?

Yeah, and I think there's two parts that I'll talk to on that. One with my husband and one with my kids. So my husband, we met at the age of 24, and we were both pretty big drinkers. I think my chat line to him was, do you want to come and play my drinking game? So that kind of like, he was a Kiwi tour guide in Western Australia. I was backpacking. And so our life was just party, party, party for a very, very long time. And once we'd moved to Australia, although we had kids, we still drank a lot together. We enabled each other. It was our. It was our ritual of connection was him coming home from work. I would hear his truck pulling into the driveway. I'd be like, oh, it's wine time. And we would go and sit outside together. He'd have a beer, I'd have a wine. We would connect. We would talk about the day, maybe have a cheeky F behind the washing. And that was like our little rebellion against, you know, parenthood and adulthood and all of those things. And then we stopped drinking. And then we stopped that having that ritual of connection because we hadn't realized you don't realize what you're doing is not just about having a drink. It is a connection. And then we started to go more and more distant. I started doing a lot of work on myself. I. After I removed alcohol, I made the decision to do some therapy, to do some somatic Work I retrained to a health and wellness coach, a gray area drinking coach, a menopause coach. And so my life has changed beyond recognition. And he was less interested in doing that self reflective work. He knew he wanted to stop drinking but was very happy staying, you know, as he had been in his career. And so it suddenly felt like we're on different paths. And we ended up in couples therapy and the couples therapist was getting a picture of our life and he went, huh, well I can see what's going on here. You do not have your ritual of connection anymore that the alcohol had provided for you. And as couples, you know, we've been together 20 odd years like you, you want to feel seen, heard, validated, understood, like most, you know, all of the time, but a lot of the time and we'd stopped having that because we'd stopped having that moment of going, hey, how was your day? What happened to you today? And so when you're not feeling seen, heard, understood, validated, you might become a bit resentful, you might be quicker to snap at the other person. You're not feeling like you're on the same side so much anymore. And that was definitely where we got to. And so we then implemented the evening walk. And it was just after dinner, the kids would go settle on the sofa or whatever and we would do Sometimes it's a 10 or 15 minute walk, but that, that bit has become our ritual of connection. And once again going, how was your day? Anything you want to share today? Anything interesting to report and you don't realize how much those small little moments actually go on to make a massive impact on your relationship. So that was the relationship side of things. And then with my kids.

I can clear as day remember my daughter. I said to my daughter so stressed this was when I was sober, I said, oh, I've had a really busy day, I've got one more zoom call to do and then I'm going to go and have a bath. And I finished my Zoom call and she was sitting on the floor outside my office and she went, mama, mama, come with me. And she took me into the bathroom and she'd turned the bathroom into like a spa sanctuary. She'd lit candles, she'd run me this beautiful bath, she'd put my favorite music because she knows that that is my reflection, that's how I self soothe. Whereas I would have thought like a year before she'd probably have gone and got me a bottle of wine.

There you go, right?

Because monkey see, monkey do. And she would have Just seen me reaching for wine and you know, as we're talking and recording, it will soon be Mother's Day in Australia. And it saddens me, the number of adverts, the number of cards, the number of gifts that I'm seeing that are all focused around mum needs wine. Because the statistics show that mothers who are gray area drinkers or have alcohol use disorder will have daughters who are seven times more likely to develop it themselves because they've never seen mum managing stress in a healthy way. They've seen mum reaching for alcohol the moment she faces any adversity. And when I realized that, that played a huge part for me. And I am so, so proud of the fact that my kids now see me go out dancing, they see me socializing with my mates, they see me go to barbe and parties and they know I can do it without alcohol. So that's telling them I don't have to have alcohol to socialize and go out with my mates. Whereas for me growing up, I don't know what it was like for you. I grew up in Scotland. Every time my parents socialized, I can clear as day remember it involved alcohol. And so it's important that we reflect as well on the role modeling of how alcohol is modeled to our kids and how it was modeled to us growing up as well.

It's really powerful because we are constantly modeling to the people around us, whether it's our kids or colleagues or friends. And what's interesting is when I was drinking, I actually didn't see alcohol show up in marketing or advertising or on movies or on birthday cards. I didn't see it at all. As soon as I stopped, let's say three or four months in, I was like, are you kidding me? They're placing alcohol there, like even on kids TV shows and the parents are drinking. And I'm like, like this is totally not right. This is like very unsavory and not cool. The amount of marketing that goes into alcohol, in movies, in.

Cosmetic ads, anything you look at, there's always alcohol there. Why? Because there's such massive marketing budgets, the margin's huge and once they get us hooked on it, it's hard to get us off it.

Right, exactly. And we've normalized it. I feel like there's a whole movement around mummy wine culture and how women are drinking the most that they've ever drank before. And actually middle aged women are the only demographic where alcohol use is going up and not down. We are seeing it go down in the younger generation and we're also seeing it go down in middle aged males, but middle aged women is the only demographic where it's going up. And that they are putting down to the correlation with the specific direct marketing that Big Alcohol started to do about 25 years ago, which was they realized they weren't making enough money from women and so started to segment their marketing to specifically target women. And that's where we saw the rise in the pink drinks, we saw the rise in the Alco Pops and all of those types of drinks. And it's really interesting because just last week the Lancet, which is the biggest medical journal in the world, had a breast cancer commission and they reported their findings and they have actually come out and said that in order to really impact the very frightening numbers that they're predicting that breast cancer will become over the coming years, in order to ensure that doesn't happen, they've asked for policymakers to ban the commercial marketing of products linked to causing breast cancer, such as alcohol.

Wow. Damn it.

And it'd be very interesting to see what the impact is because I can't see it happening. A lot of people, I get asked on podcasts all the time, do you think alcohol will go the way that tobacco has? And you'd like to think so, because what we now understand about the health risks of alcohol, but there's so much money in it. And so, yeah, it's a very interesting topic. And so I, I don't, I don't preach, I don't lecture. My, my role is not to say you must never drink alcohol, but I just love, love, love talking about what are the benefits of an alcohol free life so that we start quashing that message that a life without alcohol is boring, 100%.

And I'm the same. I never want anyone to feel like, hey, I'm preaching to say you shouldn't do it. You've got to figure it out yourself and work out what works for you. But I definitely would encourage and urge everyone to give it a try. And for me, I'd done many 30 day sprints and that was good. But there was something that shifted for me at like the four month mark. Something really shifted in my mind. Even my clarity of thought, my energy, I don't know what it was, but something shifted. So to get started, if someone wants to start this next month, what should they expect in the first 30 days? Challenges, hurdles, wins, celebrations? What would you suggest?

It's a really interesting one because everyone responds differently and I run 30 day programs all the time and just on Your point about the kind of four month mark, a lot of people say to me, how long do you feel like you should take off alcohol to really see the benefits? For some people, 30 days, they will be seeing really good benefits. For other people, they'll still be feeling pretty crap after 30 days, depending on how long they've been drinking, for how well their body metabolizes alcohol, all of those things. But it's generally around the three to four months, month mark that everything changes. And if people say to me, oh, I can't do three months without alcohol, well, there's a sign that maybe we need to do three months without alcohol, right? Because if like, what is three months in the next 40 years of your life?

It's a blink.

It's a blink, but it could actually be the most life changing decision you ever make because it has been for me, and I'm sure you would argue the same. And so in 30 days, what I generally see is people's sleep starts to improve. And what some people find is that they actually can feel utterly knackered and exhausted for several weeks. And they'll be like, this isn't what I've signed up for. I thought I'd be jumping out of bed every day. And I'm like, well, how long have you been drinking for? Consistently? And for most of the people I work with, they're aged between sort of, of 40 and 65. So for most it's between 20 and 40 years that they've been drinking. And I'm like, can you honestly expect your body to have healed and repaired that much in just 14 days after 40 years of drinking? Like, we've got to be patient with, with that, that physical withdrawal process. And for some people it can take longer. And if your body is telling you you need to rest, then my goodness, rest. You know, like this might be the first time that your body is actually being able to get restorative deep sleep. Because what we've got to recognize about alcohol is falling asleep under the effects of alcohol. That's sedation, that is not restorative sleep. We also know that whenever we drink alcohol, even if it's one or two glasses, we don't get all the necessary cycles of REM sleep that are required in order for us to fully, you know, protect our brain health, protect our body from cardiovascular disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, but also our production and how well, well we're going to feel the next day. So most people will find that they're like after a few nights maybe of struggling to fall Asleep because maybe they've been using alcohol for a really long time to help sedate them to fall asleep. Some will struggle to fall asleep at start. Then they'll go into a phase where they're just like, oh my goodness, I just want to sleep forever. And then they will come out of that stage and that's when they're like, oh wow. Like, this is amazing. I can't believe my energy, my mental clarity and things like that. So when we come into that stage as well, we start to, what happens is we start to notice what I call dopamine tickles instead of dopamine punches. So alcohol gives your brain a massive big dopamine punch. So imagine the dopamine receptors. Alcohol's like a big hard hitting punch. When we're getting these dopamine punches all the time, the brain stops recognizing the softer, more gentle, what I call the dopamine tickles. So we've almost stopped getting joy and pleasure from the smaller dopamine tickles in our life because all we're fixating on is when am I getting that next dopamine? That's addiction. When we remove alcohol and the brain starts to readjust, we start to get joy and pleasure from those dopamine tickles again. So we start to really go, wow, what an incredible experience to get up and see the sunrise on that walk this morning. Oh, what I'm really appreciating this beautiful moment. Jumping on the trampoline with my kids and all of us laughing together. I just had a really beautiful night, connecting with my friends, laughing around a dinner table. I feel all soft and gooey inside. That was just wonderful. Like we start to notice those dopamine tickles that are the body where we're meant to get those dopamine tickles in life. But we've been missing them because we've just been focusing on, on alcohol all the time. And then like for those of us that are vain and like, I'm a 48 year old woman, like I, I'm very much wanting to age backwards now. My skin is the best it's ever been and I feel like I can look at photos of me now compared to, you know, five and a half years ago when I was drinking, my face was very bloated. I often had like spots along my jawline, which is a sign of your liver struggling to function. And now my skin is hydrated, it's glowing, all the bloatedness is gone. And so definitely feel like that's one of the best anti aging secrets out There and it's something that's quite a cool quick win. I had a client the other day and she said to me, I was like, in the mirror, Sarah, and there was this mark on my cheek and I kept rubbing it and rubbing it and I couldn't work out why it wasn't going. And my husband came in and I said to him, why won't this mark go? And he went, oh, that's your cheekbone. It's like, I haven't seen my cheekbone for 30 years.

Because alcohol really bloats us. And so a lot of my clients notice, particularly the male clients, will start to lose a lot of weight quite quickly when they remove alcohol. Our energy starts to increase. We get way better performance when we're exercising because alcohol really impacts our heart rate. So there are many benefits that you'll start to notice. And then this increased sense of confidence and self belief. They've done studies that show people who drink consistently and regularly are less open to change. So we become very habitual, very stuck in our ways and we're kind of living that groundhog day. And when people remove alcohol, they start being open to taking chances, to being brave, to dreaming big, to, oh, maybe I could take my business in that direction, maybe I could go for that project. Everything starts to open up. Like I always say, alcohol keeps us small because it keeps our beliefs about ourselves small. No one's going to go and put their hand up for this really big opportunity when they're feeling anxious, tired, grumpy and lethargic all the time. And so it's incredible what starts to happen in that bigger picture in other areas of our life when we remove alcohol.

No 100% hear you and feel it. 100% in my life, I've experienced it. And for the person that's listening right now going, how long will it take me? I want to share that the University College London London did a study on habit installation. And for the average habit, a new habit, it takes on average 66 days to install it to the point of automaticity. So that's like a couple of months. So it's going to take a minimum of that to start to actually embed an absolute new habit. So they're not going to see a new habit form in seven days, in 21 days and 28, they will see changes, they will experience different things. But a brand new habit takes time. So be patient with it and have fun with it. And Sarah, if they want a little bit of guidance, is there anything that you can do or offer clients that maybe aren't sitting with you in Perth, Western Australia that you could help them on their first 30 days.

Yeah. So I work with clients all over the world, America, Canada, uk, Australia. I've got lots of clients in New Zealand and I offer 30 day programs. So there is a 30 day program on my website that people can start at any point. And the reason it's worth doing that is because I will start to share resources and information that you will not have been exposed to before. And we've got to remember we live in a world where even though we might not be consciously aware of it, we are getting subliminal messaging constantly that is telling us alcohol is a reward, alcohol is a relaxant, alcohol is adding to our lives, whether that be product placement in movies and films, whether it be adverts, whatever it is. So it's really important that we start absorbing and taking in way more information that is opposite to that. And I also share a lot of information in this 30 day program. You get a daily video every day into your inbox about 10 minutes and there'll also be a resource whether it's a blog or a podcast or a TED talk that is super empowering and super informative. So that is all available on my website, Sarah rustbatch.com I also run 30 day female only challenges because I am a menopause coach as well and a lot of the women I work with are midlife and so I really guide them through the what they can add in to really improve their their life experience at this age when they remove alcohol. And I do have one starting on the 1st of July. But the other option would be do pick up my book. So my book is available all over the world and it's called Beyond Booze how to create a life you love. Alcohol free. There's loads of books out there about how to get sober, but there's not any books out there about what do I need to add into my life so I don't miss alcohol, so I'm not craving alcohol so I don't feel like I'm having a less than life. And my book will really take you through the steps that I've gone through to create a richer, fuller, more interesting, more more diverse experience of life. Alcohol free. And that's available in bookstores, on Amazon, everywhere that you would normally get books from.

Incredible. We'll make sure to put all of those links in the show notes and also for your social media and also if anybody's thinking that they would like you to come and Do a keynote then. I know that you're a sought after keynote speaker and you work with a lot of corporates, so please do go and see Sarah at her website if you'd be interested. Interested in that. Now, Sarah, before we do wrap up, I've got one last question for you. So if we were to fast forward many, many years into the future and you were highly aware that today was your very last day on earth and someone very young came into the room that you loved dearly and they said, sarah, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

You know what I'm going to say here, don't you? I would say, remove alcohol and start connecting to your deeper, authentic self.

I love it. I love it. Great advice.

Yeah. Oh, and I forgot to mention as well, for any of your listeners, if they do want to look at my 30 day program, if you use the code FRIENDS AF, you will get $100 off the price. And so that's an offer for your listeners because I'm very, very passionate about supporting people to not see a break from booze as being a prison sentence and something to endure and then go and get absolutely, you know, shit faced on the last, on the day that it ends, I really want people to feel supported and held. So it's Friends AF and that's for my 30 day program, which you'll find on my website.

Well, that's so kind of you. And I'll make sure that the team puts that in Friends AF in capitals below in the show notes. And so I just want to say well done on making big changes and well done on actually spreading the message. Not preaching, but actually empowering people to look at alcohol through a different lens. And I look forward to our path crossing again soon.

I'd love that. Thank you.

I'd like to thank NZ Mortgages for sponsoring the Lead On Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages Co nz.

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