Dr. Sarah Wakeman
speaker
484 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sarah Wakeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
If instead you think, okay, I, you know, started to realize that when I drink every single night, I don't get the work done that I want to get done because I'm too tired and I fall asleep. I don't feel refreshed in the morning because I'm not sleeping very well. I'm not getting up early to exercise and that's something that really matters to me.
I'm not like as present with my family as I wanted to be. Then it's all these little micro goals that make it much easier to make a change. So you may decide, you know, I'm not going to drink. I'm only going to drink two days out of the week. And when I do drink, I'm going to keep it to this amount. But the reason why is not some vague recommendation from some doctor.
It's because you're working really hard at work, and it feels good to be productive after dinner. And you're training for a race, and you want to get up in the morning and run. And so you actually notice those little steps, like, wow, it feels great. I woke up this morning, and I feel so refreshed. You're reinforcing your goal right there.
You're not working towards some abstract thing that doesn't really matter to you. So you want to make these really focused, personalized goals. and really anchoring it on what is your why. And your why may be very different than my why or someone else's why. So it may be, you know, sleep really matters to you. Or, you know, you may have a different relationship with alcohol.
So the other kind of example I'd give is people are different, right? We respond differently to things. So some people can open a bag of, like, potato chips and eat two and walk away. Some people, like, they open the bag, they're going to eat all of the chips. And so it's just easier not to open the bag. And alcohol is like that too.
Some people might find if they open a bottle of wine or they have alcohol in the house, they're going to drink all of it. And the idea of like trying to keep to these small amounts of alcohol is actually really hard and it's simpler and easier to just avoid it completely or to only drink at a restaurant or something.
So you do have to understand like how your goals, your why, your purpose interacts with your response to whatever it is that you're working on and that's going to be different for everyone.
Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch. I think first, any behavior change, whether it's alcohol or other, if you're feeling like depleted and tired and not your best self, it's going to be harder to make a change. So if you think about like any big decision you made to change your job, to start an exercise routine, to leave your partner.
You probably didn't choose like the day that you were exhausted and feeling anxious and stressed and not your best self to make that change. Like change is hard. So you want to try to boost up other things in your life, eat well, you know, get enough rest, try to exercise, things that are going to help you feel healthy in your best self when you're trying to make a change.
Yeah, because, I mean, so our natural reward system, the thing that triggers it is exercise, food, sex, connection. So, you know, trying to have healthy other ways of positive dopamine release. And so I think for many people, alcohol or substances can feel like a way of doing something nice for ourselves. Like I'm going to – this is going to help me reduce my stress after a bad day at work.
So the goal then is not that you just like white knuckle it all night and feel really stressed after work. It's that you figure out like what are some other things that help me reduce stress after work. Maybe it's going to a yoga class with a friend. Maybe it is, you know, spending time with my family. Maybe it's getting a massage or meditating or watching a show I like.
So you want to – it's not just you're removing the thing that you're trying to change. You want to fill up the empty space with other things.
But we see that all the time. So that's like replacing things. And, you know, I was reading an article. People have probably heard of dry January, this idea of like not drinking for the month of January to rethink your relationship with alcohol. I was reading an article that dry January has become high January because people are just smoking a ton of weed instead of drinking.
And so it's very – I think you want to be cautious that you're not just replacing things. The thing that you're trying to change is something that's also going to cause health problems.
Now, having dessert once in a while for this, you know, you're not getting calories from alcohol and having a nice ice cream cone once a week is a way of sort of treating yourself that's healthier and maybe more aligned with your goals. That's fine.
I think thinking about these things, actually thinking about alcohol the way we think about dessert, sunbathing, eating processed meats, all of these things have risk and benefit in our lives. I think where we've gone so wrong with alcohol is this idea that it's like a health-promoting behavior. That you shouldn't be drinking for your health. It's not going to make you healthier.
And also, much like many things we do that are not health promoting activities, there are ways of reducing the health harms of that activity so that it's okay in small amounts in your life.
So it turns out the brain is amazingly plastic, meaning it can change. We see that over time. So the first thing is even adverse childhood experiences are not a done deal. So we talk a lot about ACEs. We don't talk a lot about pieces or PCE, positive childhood experiences. But actually, you can reduce the risk that someone
develops addiction by increasing the number of positive childhood experiences. So take someone who's experienced some terrible adversity. Their parent has died, or they have a parent who's in prison, or they have addiction in their family. If that kid has one single adult figure that they believe cares about them, that reduces their risk of addiction.
So there are a lot of positive ways that we can actually change the trajectory, even in the midst of terrible trauma. When you think about someone who's had a substance use disorder, we actually have good data on this that after five years of recovery, and often that is fits and starts.
Showing 281–300 of 484 · page 15 of 25
← Previous
Next →