14 Unexpected Ways Life Gets Easier When You Drink Less (Part 1)
episode
Journey to the Sunnyside | Mindful Drinking & Alcohol Health
13 min
1 speaker
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the overall premise of the episode and why focus on drinking less?
Welcome to Journey to the Sunny Side, the podcast that helps you build a better relationship with alcohol and uncover the secrets to mindful living. Each episode brings you real stories, expert insights, and practical tools to support your goals. Whether you're cutting back, taking a break, or thinking about quitting for good. I'm your host, Mike Hardenbrook, best-selling author, neuroscience enthusiast, and habit change expert. This show is brought to you by Sunnyside, a personalized science-backed program that helps you to drink less through habit change, coaching, and community. And for added support, we now have Sunnyside Met. A clinical option offering access to compounded naltrexone. a prescription medication that reduces cravings and helps prevent binge drinking.
Ready to start your journey? Get your free 15-day trial at Sunnyside.co Hey everybody, welcome back to another one of these 10-minute Mondays. Today I want to talk about the benefits of drinking less. This is all about motivation, but I wanted to do it in the not normal way. Because most people already know the obvious ones. We already know our sleep gets better. We already know that we're gonna have less hangovers, maybe we might lose some weight. Maybe you'll feel a little bit more in control. And while that's all true, and it is motivating, I don't think it's the only thing that's motivating. The more interesting part is what happens underneath those benefits, the stuff kind of nobody really talks about because it's not the obvious thing until you're looking at it.
So today is not the obvious benefits of drinking less, it's more of the hidden ones that you. Haven't heard of, or maybe you didn't think about just the little things where you can go, oh, I didn't realize alcohol was actually connected to that. So I've got 14 of these and we're gonna break this up into a two-part series. We're gonna do seven today, seven in the next one. So let's get into it. Number one, you stop outsourcing your off switch. This one is obviously one of my favorites because it's tied to my history, but it's also pure sunny side. A lot of us use alcohol as that off switch. It's the thing that ends the workday. It's how we stop thinking. It's how we go from on to off, especially at night.
And it works. And that's also the problem because if alcohol is what usually you use to get your off switch. Then you never really practice doing it on your own. So that ability to wind down, it gets rusty. You can still do it, you just haven't been doing it in a while. So when people drink less or take a break. It's not really removing the alcohol, it's actually What they do at the end of the day to really come down from it because they feel maybe stuck in this on position. Now here's the good news. It comes back. Now you practice the end of the day in a different way. And within a couple of weeks, your body learns how to downshift on its own. Now you've got that off switch that you can go anywhere with.
It can work on a Tuesday. It can work on your vacation. It can work on nights when you're stressed out. And the benefit is that when you change your drinking, you're not gritting through all of this. You have relearned to use this skill and you've got that ability back that the drink had been handling for you for quite a while. Number two is the drink is the first domino. So I'm gonna skip the whole boring calorie angle. We already know that alcohol has calories and if you drink less, you have less calories. But the more interesting thing is how alcohol becomes the first decision in a chain of decisions. It's rarely the drink itself. It's the drink than the chips. It's the drink then, hey, pick up the phone, let's order something.
But it's more than that. Then there's the drink and then tomorrow you're tired. So your workout gets skipped. Or there's having drinks and then you want comfort food the next day because you feel like crap and your sleep was off and your mood is low. So the drink is just one domino, but it quietly knocks over maybe five more. And there's even research suggesting that alcohol can nudge people towards more savory, ultra-processed foods, which we know are not good.
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