Crash Course 212: Dry January

So many people start the new year with resolutions, usually around establishing or continuing healthy habits.  What I've noticed this year in particular is the emphasis on "Dry January," or giving up drinking for 31 days.  While the reasons for starting this resolution vary drastically from person to person, there are several trends that I've noticed in my work that I wanted to share.  And, after discussing more with Mindset Coach Andee, there are other intricate pieces of this sobriety puzzle that needed to be brought to light. So we took it upon ourselves to discuss in detail - and here are the fruits of our labor! Excited to share this intriguing podcast with all of you - and even if you're not a resolutioner, or not a dry January goer, there are so many tidbits of mindset and nutrition work in here that can benefit YOU!

Transcript

Coach Dan: Hey, welcome to Crash Course. This is your weekly podcast, brought to you by The LiveUnbreakable brand.

Coach Shaun: I'm your host, LiveUnbreakable, founder and head fitness and nutrition coach Shaun Provost. Alongside me, I have my co-host, strength and conditioning coach, Dan Murray. We're here every single week to give you a crash course and something about health and wellness, diving deep into the science behind diet and exercise. In each episode, we look to provide you with the essentials on important topics and give you the best advice and training, mindset shifts and overall healthier sustainable living, so you can make the best decisions for you and your lifestyle. No fluff. Just fit.

Coach Shaun: Happy New Year, everybody. I'm so excited today, we have Andee back on the podcast. She doesn't even need an introduction, but I'm gonna give her one anyway, as you've heard her on the podcast before, she's all over our social media, and she's just one of the most amazing people out there. So Andee, welcome back.

Andee: Shaun, thank you. I am excited to be back, and I'm telling you what, I will never get tired of an introduction like that, ever.

Coach Shaun: So today, guys, I wanted to jump in on New Year's resolutions and some thoughts. I know that, yeah, if you follow me on social media, I put a little negative out there about what I thought about resolutions and having to do them at a certain time of the year.  But I noticed some trending with my clients and my friends and the people that I surround myself with, and I thought immediately of Andee and so I'll tell you a little, and then dive right in.  Andee, I'll let you jump in with your thoughts too. So guys, I noticed as I do every year, people are using January and January 1st specifically as a time to start dry January, then I see all these people doing it year after year.  But always falling back into the same habit in February, maybe March, April, somewhere along the line, they have to do dry January again because they only do dry January, and so I was kind of cogitating on this and I hit Andee up on social media as one will do, and I was like, “Hey, I need to know your thoughts on this and how I should be thinking about this.”

Coach Shaun: So Andee, welcome in. I would love your thoughts on dry January, sober January, whatever we'll call it, and what you think about moving forward.

Andee: Well, I think that, first of all, all of the things that we talked about are really valuable, so before I jump into dry January:  I know you talked about your clients and certain patterns that you're seeing in terms of behavior and how that's not serving them. So first of all, I want to say before we jump into that... Just for everybody listening, I think dry January can be a very positive thing. If you choose for it to be a very positive thing. In fact, I think that anybody that decides to not put poison into their body for an extended period of time is doing a very self-serving act. Now, if you follow that sort of self-serving act with a rotten betrayal, then you're not so self-serving.  So before I get into my thoughts on dry January, Shaun, you've been working with clients now for quite a long time, I know that you said year after year.  And I just want to say everybody, I also am really negative about New Year's resolutions.  I think anybody that's in our line of work really is because New Year's resolutions, 80% of the time don't work.  We've already talked about this in a previous podcast. We don't need to belabor it. So I do tend to fall on the negative side of the New Year's resolution.  I always am in support of dry January, I'm always in support of doing self-serving things.  But Shaun, if you can, just kinda share some of the trends that you've seen, and then I want to address those, and I'll probably do that maybe one by one or two at a time, or however it flows.

Coach Shaun: Yeah, let's do it. So, I was super negative because what I was noticing, especially in the circles that I'm in right now, whether that's athletics, client's friends, was that they were doing this by completely restricting themselves for the month.  So you go from holidays where you're out with friends and family, and you're doing stuff maybe even before Omicron came out, and even if you are following covid precautious or whatever, but everyone was drinking more during the holidays.  Then they had this idea to restrict themselves for the entire month of January. But the biggest thing that I noticed was that they're not partaking in any of the same events or any of the same experiences. So by that, I mean in January, they said, Don't ask me to go out with you. I don't want to go out. So now all of a sudden, you have to have a different theme or event to go to Thursday, Friday, Saturday, maybe even Sunday fun day, and you're restricting yourself from socialization, so in addition to not drinking, you're also not going out and you're not being in this environment which you think might be helpful, but actually is detrimental in the end.

Coach Shaun: And then the other thing that I noticed after a year is after they do that restriction, they bounce back into February with what they used to. They're doing something very self-serving in January, and then all of a sudden they sabotage it, February or March after the restriction has been too much, and they binge.  I talk about this nutritionally all the time, but from an alcoholic standpoint, it is so dangerous to your immune system and your mental state, so those are the two big trends, so one is your super restriction and two as restricting yourself from the experiences that you were in before as well.

Andee: I forget how I actually said it. What did I call it? A brutal assault or something like that.  So first of all, I will tell you guys, I want to say flat out in the beginning that there is a big difference between sobriety and recovery.  So people that are sober are very different than people that are in recovery. I fell into sobriety, I'm just gonna tell my super story because why not.  And it's not something that I put on blast, it's not the primary work that I do, but it is a part of my identity, and I do like to talk about it, and what happened was when I decided to stop drinking.  I decided to stop drinking as stopping a habit; like when I stopped smoking.  I was like, Alright, I'm just gonna stop drinking. And I was gonna do it for the first month or two of the year, until I get everything straight, I'm gonna stop drinking. I didn't know this at the time, but I also embarked concurrently on a journey of recovery, but it wasn't related to my drinking.

Andee: My life was a mess, my job was a mess, I wasn't where I wanted to be, I wasn't doing something that fulfilled me; I was standing still, I wasn't using any of my education.  So, I started seeing this coach and we started doing work together, and I started diving into my limiting beliefs, into past traumas, to all of these things, and it was separate from my sobriety. And what I didn't know was: I was going into recovery, which was about myself, and sobriety was just something that was happening.

Coach Shaun: It was a part of another experience or a journey that you were on.

Andee: It was just something that was happening and it was happening there. So I would love to bring up dry January. So first of all, if you're going to do Dry January, I would love to ask you, and this is for the listeners, I would love to ask you, “Why are you doing dry January?”  This is seriously something that is really - I don't want to say really great  - for somebody to think about.   And if you guys want to check out any Grace's website, she does the 30-day alcohol experiment where she talks about abstaining from alcohol for 30 days, but those 30 days are loaded with different things for you to think about throughout those 30 days. So, if you're going without alcohol for 30 days, and what you're basically doing is just avoiding the entire topic with a plan to completely jump back into binge drinking, that probably for me would bring up some questions.  For example: “Why am I drinking? What is the need that I have to do that now?” If the binging is just the result of taking alcohol away and you just feel like you have to play catch up, well, congratulations, you're like everybody that tries to stop a habit.

Andee: I'm sure you see this all the time in nutrition, like, “Hey, I'm not gonna allow myself to ever eat anything with sugar in it.”  Then here we are, an entire bag of candy is gone.  That was just ridiculous. But I would ask you, Why are you doing dry January? And if the activities in your life, like going to the bar, spending time with your friends, doing these things on the weekend, if you can't do those sober, that's something for you to look at.  Because that's really indicative of, Am I really doing these activities because I enjoyed them like, Am I going to the bar? Am I going out to this event or to that event, and am I able to enjoy that without a drink? They do these paintings, (I’m looking at a painting on my wall right now).  They do these painting classes in New York, and it's a fun thing for you to do, like you go and everybody goes to the painting class and you sit there and you all paint the same picture, and then there's always one a**hole that has to do different colors just to look different.

Andee: They're gonna be, they're like Gary V. They're making it, but when I went to one when I was still drinking, we all were hammered by the end of it.

Coach Shaun: Yesteryear. With this experience in a... Ethics is a real thing.

Andee: Now, if you're doing dry January, are you able to go to the painting class, or is this gonna be something that's really uncomfortable for you to do.  Because if it's the latter, then you have something to look at.  Because if you're having to avoid all of these activities that you're doing, and then February comes and you are going because you had to make up for lost time… There's something else, and I want to give you some time to kinda ask you how you feel about all that?  Because I want to jump into something else, but I don't want to go too hard because I want to say really quick before I step off of this particular - I don't want to say soapbox, but for a step off of this thing - is that just because you have something to look at, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.

Coach Shaun: Exactly where I was going. Thank you. Because that's true, I spent a fair amount of the last week of December into the second week of January, either trying to convince the people that I know are going to jump back into their habits in February or are just experimenting.  Trying to talk them out of doing it. I spent a lot of time doing it, but not like, “Hey, you shouldn't do it, is bad for you”, but asking them why or saying, “These are the negatives. If you're going to go back to your old habits.”  And I think the part that is really important for each of these conversations is the level.  So you think of every conversation, and, you and I have definitely talked about some podcast too, where you have levels in a conversation like, “Hey, how's the weather” and no one's really paying attention.  And it's just in passing.  You have your friends that you see every once in a while, I'm like, “Hey, how's it going? It's going well, Great.”  And the better you know the person or the more you've worked with that client, the deeper the conversation can go.

Coach Shaun: You always has to come up with goals. And when you're talking about something this serious, because it's not just being able to tell all of your friends that you're not drinking.  They don't want to hear, and they were drinking with you last week.  They’re probably going to unless they're joining you in dry January. So there's that kind of heavier piece of it where so and so is not drinking anymore, what do we do?  Do we not invite them? Do we invite them? And not like there's that social peer pressure almost, if they do go out and then everyone kind of feels awkward, because most of the time, your friends don't, they're just like, “Alright, you're finally here.”  And you're not drinking tonight, here's some water. So what are you doing instead? And it'll definitely be a conversation, but it doesn't have to be awkward if you know your why.

Andee: Absolutely. I think that that.  I was just having a conversation with somebody that I was on a call with this week about this very thing, it was actually we were talking about somebody that she was really close with in her life that really liked when she would drink or have drinks.  But it wasn't really because that person wanted her to be drinking as much as it was that they felt that she wouldn't be having a good time if she wasn't drinking. So a lot of the times what happens with friends is: when you tell somebody, “Hey, I'm not drinking”, you are gonna have those couple of people that might try to peer pressure, particularly if they know that you're just doing this for the month of January.  But if you're really serious and you communicate, Hey, I really feel like I really truly don't want to be drinking right now, most people will be supportive. They're gonna be super supportive. And anything that you might make, we are mean making machines. So we're gonna think like, Okay, well, these people think this about me. It really is more to do, your friends are thinking about things from their own perspective, so they're seeing things through their own eyes, so they may believe that you are not having a good time, and it's not because they want you to be drinking.

Andee: Can I tell a story? The first time that I went out with a group of people; so this is the covid year, so we all haven't been out in months.  We go out for my ex-boyfriend's birthday, it's me and a group of guys. It is a long day of drinking, I'm drinking soda water, and the next day, one of the guys communicated to my group of really close friends, he said, “You know, it really was too bad that Andee didn't drink, but it was really nice to have her there”. And his perspective was, he thought I would have had a better time had I been along for the ride with all of that.  But I wouldn't have had a better time, I would have had a headache and I would felt like sh*t and I would have been a blithering idiot.  That was 10 hours of drinking, my friend lost his phone that day, like the peer pressure aspect of it, just know that anything they may say or do or feel or believe has everything to do with them and nothing to do with you.

Andee: So if you are in this dry January mentality and you want to set yourself up for success and maybe you don't feel like alcohol really is a problem for you.  Maybe you just feel like you want to give yourself a 31-day detox. Amazing. And I do this with sugar regularly, particularly after the holidays when I've ingested so much sugar that I feel like a sluggish lump.  I do this all the time, but when it comes to going out, you're not doing yourself a service by avoiding people because you are gonna feel “Oh sh*t, I have to go out and I have to have a big hangover because this is kind of over.”

Coach Shaun: Yeah, and the other thing is, your friends do want you there.  They don't want dry January to take you away from them.   Like you were saying with your friends, “Well, I wish he was drinking, but I'm so glad she was there.”  Yes, they want to make memories with you, it's their decision to drink or not, just like it's your decision to drink or not.  But your decision to spend time with them shouldn't change just because of what you're eating or drinking.  So and so is eating pork, so once I wanted to check in, I wanted to be pleased that day it can be just like that, it's just the peer pressure for drinking gets so much heavier and it's just so starkly different than what you were doing that it can be really jarring for your group of friends, but it doesn't have to be, especially if you communicate that way, and it really is in the communication.

Andee: Absolutely, we are in such a lubricated culture. So I read this book, “Alcohol Lied to Me” by Craig Beck. It's great, it was one of the books that I read when I first stopped drinking.  I just want to tell you guys, if you're listening, I love alcohol, like I don't drink it anymore, but I had a great time. I had a great time, and I'm never gonna be the person that said I didn't have a great time, but did I really have a great time? Or was it programming? Do we know? I don't know, but Craig Beck writes about how we as children are told alcohol is bad, and we intended DARE classes, I'm born in 1985, we had DARE when I was a kid.  And that was a thing, and we learned about how drugs and alcohol are bad, and we learned that drugs are bad and everything in society says drugs are bad, but alcohol is a little bit different, everything that you see says, alcohol is good. Your parents are drinking it. People on TV are drinking it, the images of sexy, people are having a good time.

Andee: Everything in the world says everything is bad.  But alcohol is shown to be good.  So when you decide to eliminate it, it is not normalized for you to take a step away from it.   This is the biggest thing that I see with people that talk to me about their ideas about stopping drinking, and I'm talking about people that drink recreationally, I'm talking about people that would not define themselves as someone that has an alcohol use disorder that just wants to not drink every once in a while.  And their biggest concern is, what does that mean about me?  These are the kinds of people that don't drink.  And that's what's all lumped into this whole hit, so I think that's another reason that people might want to take a step back and not be around anyone is because they're like, Oh sh*t. Well, if I go out and I'm the person not drinking, I'm gonna have to answer all these questions, like all of these questions, I'm gonna have to be talking about sh*t from when I was eight, and it's like, no buddy you don’t.  And there's so much about in our culture that says that alcohol is necessary for having a good time.  And I would love for anybody to tell me about one time where they were drunk out of their minds, where sex was fantastic.

Coach Shaun: That's gonna be my example too.  One time when you were super, super intoxicated, that sex was better because of that.  Wait a minute.  Absolutely, it's not a thing.

Andee: We're always trying to make excuses, and we're always having to try to defend the idea that we have to continue to do this.  We have got to defend it.  You and I do a lot of work where a lot of times what people think is the issue isn't really the issue.  So I think that when we're talking about this, where we have to talk about it from a standpoint where we're looking at everything on the outside like, Yes, we have the behavior of “I restrict and then I vanish”, which is a whole other issue. We could talk about binging, you and I can talk about that all day. And then we have why are you hiding? Like why are you hiding in your apartment, what is making you want to do that because you don't have to.

Coach Shaun: Obeying... No, no, literally no, no, if someone sends you a drink at the bar, yeah, thank you so much. That was such a great gesture, but I'm also a thank you, or when your friends are pressuring you, are they really your friends. If they continue to pressure you, if you put your foot down and you say that's something that you don't want to do anymore, are they really your friends.  Do they really have your best interest? Maybe they do, and they just don't understand where you're coming from. That's fine, then put your foot down or just explain it however simply you need to that.  Nope, you're not interested in that. And then remove yourself from the situation, but understanding your why gives you that armor to go into battle and say like, Oh, this is why I'm doing it, and this matters to me, so I would appreciate if you would respect that decision.

Andee: Absolutely, talk about that. Why is it great? What are some big whys that you've been hearing from people about why they want to do it?  Because I think a lot of people will be like, I want to not drink for a month, but they don't have those really strong why’s.  And that's another thing. So I don't know if your clients have been saying different things, and what things you've been saying a great idea is and what things aren’t.

Coach Shaun: Yeah, and for the most part, there's an iteration AI component to it, obviously for my athletes, not drinking provides them a certain level of recovery that they don't get if they're consistently drinking or binge drinking.  Athletes will always see a better performance if they are not hung over when they're training because they can go harder, they can push themselves more, they can reach muscle atrophy at a certain point.  But for my non-athletes, people who are either getting into sports or they're just getting moving Couch to 5K or something like that. Or just people who are coming to me for nutrition advice, most of what I hear as a resolution for dry January is cutting back on calories that aren't as good for them, cutting back on bad calories.  But calories don't have realities, or were you getting them from doesn't necessarily matter: non-carbs or carbs, but they do function differently in the system.  And that's a whole scientific talk we can save for the end, but a lot of it is weight loss, it is better function athletically, and then the last one is clearing the brain fog.  They'll say something like, I don't want to be hung over anymore, or I hate the feeling on my weekends where I'm sluggish or tired or fatigued, but it really is that brain fog and that body fog where your joints hurt, you're dehydrated and your brain doesn't function as well because it's literally catching up from the damage that you did when you were drinking.  Those are pretty much the three that people fall into.

Andee: I would love to tell your listeners that the brain fog doesn't even start to go away until weeks later.  You guys might think that the feeling that you have when you're hung over is brain fog.  If you are regularly binge drinking, you don't even know what brain fog is, like you feel like the hang over feeling is the brain fog. You give it six to eight weeks and you'll start seeing what brain fog really was, a lot of people that binge regularly don't realize how much of a haze they're actually living in all the time.   I remember when it happened for me, and your brain takes a while to heal, but your body is a miraculous healing system, it can heal itself in ways like you don't even know.  I remember the one day, I just said to my friend, “Josh, God, I feel like I'm awake for the first time in maybe 15 years, I don't even understand.”  I had no idea that I was living under this umbrella of fog.  I had no idea, and I think you were talking about scientific experiments, and I'm sure we'll get around to it.

Andee: I'm sure science will be interwoven into this podcast, but I do want to say the weight thing: people will always focus on the calories, but people always forget that alcohol is a poison and your body must get rid of it before it gets rid of anything else before it does anything else. It has to go. So if you are drunk and you've ingested many bottles of wine, (which I have been guilty of doing), and then you go and you eat a gigantic meal, I guess that's going to storage because that alcohol has to go.  Unless that's wrong, I don't know if that's wrong, that's what I've always been led to believe. I don't know if you can correct me.

Coach Shaun: That is the simple way of saying, how your body processes it.  Yes, which is why when you get sick, when you are super drunk or hungover, you're throwing up literally everything, because your body can't digest food because you're poisoning it, so there's no nutritional value, that's why you can get the healthy salad the next day, but if you're gonna throw up, your body is not ingesting any of those nutrients because it just has to get rid of the poison.  That's correct, yes. It's a lot.

Andee: Again, this is your specialty, this is not mine, in terms of a nutritional aspect of it.  So I always love to learn and I love to see.  But I think the people really just focused on it.  I know a guy, he's not a client. He is one of those distant friends, we used to be closer, but you know, he's the kind of person that'll have a couple of beers for dinner and be like, “Well, I have a couple of beers and that's the same calorie content is having this”.  And I'm like the two don't even equate not like it doesn't even.  What do you think your body's doing with that.

Coach Shaun: I think the other scientific piece of this that I think is so important is that when you restrict anything, your body stops creating the organisms that break it down in your system, so if you don't eat anything for a month at a time, your body doesn't create what it needs to break that food down, so if you don't eat vegetables, if you don't eat sugar, if you don't drink alcohol, if you don't have it in your system, your body gets rid of the things that break it down because it thinks it doesn't need it anymore.  You’re having other things instead, so it's creating more of those micro-organisms to break it down and do what it needs to do and grab the new chances from it. So when you restrict for a period of time, when you don't have those micro organisms in your gut anymore, and then you re-introduce it, your body is like what?  Then you don't have what you need to do anything with this. So another reason that your tolerance goes down in addition to so many other scientific processes when you have a dry month or a period of time, is that you literally can't digest it because your body has nothing.

Coach Shaun: Similar things, maybe like similar sugars, try to break it down. But it just goes through your system. You're like, Nope, I don't know what to do with that. You haven't seen that in a long time. Don't even know what that is. And so you can't break it down, you can't process it the way that you used to.  So yeah, when you go out, yeah, the first night, you're probably gonna get wasted super fast for a lot of reasons.

Andee:  That is fantastic. I love a good scientific explanation, it makes me so excited because I love it, everybody would be doing themselves a service to learn about the science of food. I think another thing that you and I had talked about in addition to all of these specifics, because I think that science gets lost on a lot of people, because what happens is they want to know it, but then it's really easy to ignore. It's really easy. One of the things that I think is less easy to ignore, which we were talking about, is the whole issue of control.  I know that when we're talking about that, and I know you wanted to talk about that with relation to alcohol use, so you want to get into it because I think it would be great.

Coach Shaun: That's the other piece of this puzzle that I get it and I don't get it.  I’ve been there, and when I'm not in that mode, it's hard. So let's just dive right in. So one of the pieces of the puzzle when people do dry anything or they do their detox, whatever it is, is that control aspect, they're controlling one part of their life that they feel like maybe they lost control of.  Or if they lost control in another part of their life, they think they can control this one piece, and it's totally under their control.  It’s something that they can take themselves out of the situation, and they know that they won't break whatever happened, right. Or maybe they will completely break the habit, but it's that control, it is the societal pressure where people are just like, Oh, this is an easy thing, it's a big part of my life. I know that I can control this because I just won't go out and I just won't do x, y and z, and it'll be fine, but when you're put in that position where you have to test that control, it doesn't always go your way, and that's what we're talking about going out with your friends or whatever.

Coach Shaun: But the control, when you talk about nutrition, it kind of like flip a switch in your brain where if you're restricting for so long and you're in control of that piece of the pie, you almost force yourself to go overboard in other ways.  Because you're either replacing something you're binging on with something else, or you're not in control where you thought you were, and you almost convince yourself that you are in control when realistically, you're in the least control that you've ever had.

Andee:  And that's why I wanted to go back to kind of where we started, I love big circles, but just thinking about the idea of sobriety versus recovery.  If you are a person, and the thing about recovery is that there's a lot of different types of recovery, but they all come back to the same stuff. So any person that is in recovery from anything, whether it be alcohol use disorder, drug addiction, eating disorders, different traumas that we're working through, any sort of recovery is.  It all goes back to some event, some time, and usually really far back, we're usually really far back in our lives.  So if you have an idea about if you're eliminating alcohol and you can control it tightly as in you can control the behavior, yes, you can control the behavior.  The triggers for that behavior are still real, what you're doing is you're eliminating them.  Like I always used to tell people, if you're gonna quit smoking and drinking and keep going to the bar, because what's gonna happen is, the minute that you go to the bar; that environment triggers that behavior, so if you have these triggers to drink and your control is over the behavior.  If you're completely eliminating the triggers, and of course, the behavior is gonna go away, but that's not sustainable for your life.

Andee: If there are things that are causing you to binge drink and that's a behavior that you're engaging in, that's an opportunity to look at, Am I, am I sober? Or do I need to take a closer look at some of the things that are going on with me? Not that there's anything wrong with you. So the personal development, we’re not psychiatrists, we don't believe that there's anything wrong with anyone, we believe that people are just comprehensive pieces, and there are things that we don't particularly like to feel.  And every person that I've ever worked with had an issue with control, myself included, I'm a hyper-rational controller, those are my two big saviors, that and positive intelligence. When I was taking positive intelligence, I'm a controller, I don't like to not have an answer. I don't like to not know how a puzzle was gonna play out, I don't like to take a chance.  I think what you finally get to, and this is gonna be hard for a lot of people to hear, but what you finally get to is that you really don't control anything in life, you just think that you do.

Andee: We don't know where we're gonna end each day, we can take a good guess that we're gonna get back to our beds at the end of the day, but we don't actually know that that's what's going to happen, you could be end up in the hospital.  You could be in a car accident, you could fall and break your leg, like something could happen with, God forbid, one of your relatives, you win two tickets to Aruba and be on the plane, I'm not saying that something is catastrophic, but…

Coach Shaun: We really don't understand.  The idea that we have control is really just this idea of repetition.  We really don't have much control over anything, and a lot of times what people do is they put so much emphasis on controlling such small things (and I'm sure you see this all the time) that what happens is they actually sabotage themselves in that way.  So what you were saying about this particular thing with alcohol, these people are doing this particular thing, and then what ends up happening.   The control starts showing up with their exercise, and I know that you are seeing this happen with your clients, what do you see over-training and things like that? At this particular moment, I know you just did something on over training the other day, so I didn't know if that was something you were seeing a lot of, especially as people go into the New Year and they go from not exercising either at all, or maybe one or two times a week, and now they're doing it six or seven times a week.  Because they think that's better for them and going back to primal states or they felt better when they were 20 and they worked out seven days a week.  And now they’re 50, and they're doing it.

Coach Shaun: And it's like all of these crazy ideas that makes sense to them because of where they've been and their story, that saying it out loud and working through it, they're in control.  It’s like this little tiny piece of paper that you're just crumbling up and pushing harder on and it's just crumbling and then you just let it fall and it's just another piece of trash like, Okay, walk away, you can let it go and it'll be fine, and it feels so much better.  Then continuously crumbling up this little piece of paper that you're so tense and you have to put so much effort into it. And if you just let it go, it's okay, it's fine, just let the universe do as it well, because you don't actually control anything like you think you do.  Absolutely, it was so hard to learn that, but now that I'm on this side of that bridge, it feels so good to be able to say that and to help other people see that too.

Andee: And letting go is hard for people, I think people... They don't even know necessarily what that means.

Coach Shaun: They don't recognize it.

Andee: It's weird and it shows up in all different kinds of places.  I think of the example, I shouldn't give this example, he's gonna be mad, but I'm gonna give an example. I was hesitant.

Coach Shaun: Be good, I know it. It's too bad.

0:35:23.2 Andee: But I'm gonna give this example because I don't always like to give examples from my very personal life, but I was seeing somebody who really liked me and I really liked this person.  But they were really afraid, I think that I was gonna go away. That I was not gonna stick around, and so they just kept giving me more and giving me more and giving me more because they don't want me to go anywhere. And what happened was, I was like, Oh God, this is too much. I need space forever. I mean.

Coach Shaun: From one other section to the other.

Andee: And honestly, a great person, I am very excited that they're in my life, it's wonderful, but that's what happened now that I'm gonna skip more details than that.  Had letting go been, an option of, “Okay, I think I'm gonna lose this, so what I have got to do is I've have got to do everything in my power to make sure that I don’t,”  well, the letting go would have been useful there.  There was just a ton, and I've never been in this position before, but I think that it's appropriate for this podcast, I think it's appropriate to talk about it because this happens all the time with different sites, very relatable. Yeah, it is, it really is.  And honestly, even though I am not certified in the things that you are.  It was nutrition a lot, just from my own experience, because that is one area where people just don't like to let go. And I think we talked about this on a previous podcast with the excessive calorie counter.

Coach Shaun: Just breathe deep breath is okay. It's alright, if you don't track that one thing, it's okay, you're all right, nothing bad is gonna happen and yeah, letting go because when you focus so hard on that.  When you can no longer do that, or you have that rubber band effect where you're so tight and worried about something and then you just fine because you restricted so much and you're gonna find something else to control that.  I lost you, and now he's definitely doing something in control that and he probably might not even realize it.  Right, and that's his problem, that it did not just happen with you, that is a room for improvement on his side, it's something that you recognized and hopefully he did after that, and that's something he can work on, but that's so relatable because he may not have even realized he was doing it.  He just wanted you to not leave, so he did everything he could to make you not leave except let go, and that was not even an option for him because he's so bad, they didn't want you to go.

Andee: It sense when you're in personal development, the outside of this, you like, it's too bad that I see everything.

Coach Shaun: All... It's so frustrating.

Andee: Frustrating and yeah, I don't see everything always... You know, the one thing that we don't see, and Shaun, I know that you'll know this is the one thing that we don't see is ourselves, we see everybody else's behavior and it's very easy to see it.  And then we don't see or we don't always see our own.  And that's why coaches are here, I know that I could not see myself without the help of the people in my life that do that work and that have helped me and have held the mirror. And it's wonderful. I think a lot of times when people are doing things, I'm talking about just straight up, straight up, just giving up a habit, a straight up sobriety.  People holding up a mirror for you is helpful because it'll help you see, because what we like to do, and this is another thing that we'd like to do when we stop drinking, and this could be people that just want to stop drinking for a little while.  Or this could be people that want to go into recovery and not drink anymore because it's really damaging to their life, it could be either person, what we'd like to do, especially with alcohol, because of all of the cultural sh*t that is tied up in it, we'd like to always look at somebody else's behavior and the line always is, “Well, I'm not that.”

Andee: And it's interesting how it just keeps being one step further.  “At least I'm not the person that's drinking in the morning”.  And then all of a sudden you're drinking in the morning on the weekends, and then maybe you're drinking in the morning on all of your days off, and then it’s  “Oh, at least I'm not the person that had to go to detox.”  Then you have to go to detox once, and then “At least I'm not the person that keeps losing their job.”  But when does it end? And now most of us will not get there, I didn't get there, I didn't lose my job or have to go to detox. Any of that, any of that sh*t.  Because I was always looking out there and I was like, Well, at least I'm not that person, Well, at least I'm not that person, and I never could see myself.

Coach Shaun: But the minute that you did and that mirror was turned back on you, that’s when the work starts, that's when they're recognizing each little piece.  What changes can you make? Every single little detail that you change in your life comes when it stops being “At least I'm not that too, Well, what am I? Where am I, what am I doing?” And it turned from external to internal.

Andee: And I think that that would be a great service for all of the people doing dry January that are listening to this podcast.  There's nothing wrong with you. Then you find nothing wrong. For me, I'll tell another story, if you don't mind, that is?

Coach Shaun: Absolutely, please do.

Andee: But the story is that, and I talked about this in one of my latest podcasts about sobriety, because I did one right at the beginning of the year, because this is when people like to give it a go.  I talked about how there is science to breaking a habit and I'm sure a lot of the people that you work with know that, especially athletes, because they're the most disciplined people.  Know I'm an athlete myself, so I know. They're very disciplined people. So we know how to make something happen. Push comes to shove. And when I wanted to stop drinking, I knew how to make it happen. Push comes to shove, of course, I told you about my concurrent things that were going on with the work that I was doing, but for the most part, I was so insistent on breaking the habit, and I didn't have a trigger to drink until I stopped.  December 26, I didn't have a trigger to drink until February. February was the day, it was mid-February, and I was going into my sh*t hole job that I couldn't stand, and I worked for this jerk of a human micro-managerial a**hole.

Andee: I mean, this was a restaurant job, so if you've ever worked at a restaurant, you know that it is hard.  So if you can be just terrible and you're working with, you're not working with the most inspirational motivational people as your superiors, you're working for somebody that is looking for upward mobility for the sake of it. I'm sorry, that's a whole other issue, but this person was not a kind person.  I've worked for some empowering people in restaurants, so I'm not gonna say that this is a blanket statement about everybody, but this was not a kind person, this person was a b*tch, and I had to go into work and I had to go and work for this person, and I thought to myself as I was standing outside of the building, I was like, I just want to get through the day and go and get hammered. I just want to go get f'ed up, like I just want to get f'ed up, and that was the first trigger that I had a drink and I called somebody and talk to them about it. 

Andee: And what I realized through that trigger was that I knew that there was a series of steps of things that had to happen for me to get out of that job.  The first being, I had to change my limiting beliefs about myself, and that was the big one, and I didn't know that at the time, but all I knew was that I didn't feel qualified to get out of that job.   Now, looking back, that was asinine, but when we groove ourselves into patterns, we don't realize that, so I had no realization of that.  Because there were so many steps, so many micro-steps, as you said, 1% shifts that I had to make.  They seemed so overwhelming to me that the only thing my brain wanted to do was give me booze so I could forget this, so I don't have to feel this, so I don't have to take action, and that's how it comes up.  So for all of you guys doing dry January, especially athletes like us:  No, we believe you can do it, because you do it all the time, you shop all the time, so no one is in doubt that you can do it.

Andee: But if you're having a trigger to drink alcohol after the whole shebang is done, that's an opportunity for you to look, because if it's showing up that way, the habit science, Great, congratulations, you know how to give things up, you know how to eat a certain way when you're training a certain way, and you know how to feel appropriately, you know your body better than anything, that's something.  But the trigger to drink, the trigger to finish drink, particularly when February rolls around and you get that trigger to binge drink, that's somewhere where you can look... You can take... That's the mirror.

Coach Shaun: That's unadulterated, I made it. Yes, absolutely, I love that example, and I love that story so much because it is exactly the moment when something has to change and you recognize it in that moment, why did you want to drink after your shift because it was insufferable to be there, and I've had so many moments like that.  I can feel that from the restaurant industry, from working in 9 to 5 where you're just like, Oh my goodness, gracious 8:45, and I just can't wait to get drunk tomorrow, or I can't wait to go out with my friends tonight and just get drunk because that feels better, because it's a reward.  But that reward becomes the trigger, so if you are in dry January and you are forgetting your reward was being with your friends and making memories instead of getting drunk with your friends, use this moment to figure out your why? And understand the rewards that you want in your life, because dry January can happen every year, it can be the rest of your life that you're dry, you can be sober, you can be in recovery from other things than just alcohol, but really, you don't want to be in dry social hour, you don't want to be in dry January from your friends, you want to be able to be with them and continue to make memories.

Coach Shaun: Why, that's it guys, why? You can keep the why’s of yourself, but just so you understand it and you have a basis to move from and to feel secure and respected.

Andee: Absolutely, I couldn't have said it better. I love it, I love it so much.

Coach Shaun: This is another great one, and as always, thank you so much for coming, for showing up, for bringing your expertise.  Not just your experiences, but as a coach as an athlete, as the phenomenal human that you are, but as the coach that makes so many people's lives better every single day. Thank you so much for being here.

Andee: Oh, Shaun, likewise, thank you. And it's absolutely awesome. It's always a pleasure to be here. We're gonna do it more often. I know, so I'm excited for the next time, whenever that may be.   Whenever we get together again, thank you. Thank you for having me here. I love being able to provide value to your audience and your clients. And yeah, it's just great.

Coach Shaun: Guys, the smiles on her face to say at all, so if you're watching on video, you've already seen it, but if you guys are listening to the audio, I hope you can hear these smiles in our voices, but until next time, with Andee. Thank you so much.  Hope you all enjoy this episode of crash course, on LiveUnbreakable.

Coach Dan: And if we made you smile or just have to think about something in a new way, go ahead and screenshot post or share this episode and we can get your feedback and share more knowledge with the world now get out there and eat, train live subscribe to our crash course podcasts, so you never miss a beat and be sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with it all.