parties Archives | Hello Sunday Morning

On the road to a better relationship with alcohol, we lean on the people closest to us; our spouses, our friends and our families. When friends help, they get us through the difficult nights, help us move on from our mistakes, and push us not to give up on ourselves. However, if we’re not careful, our support network can also help us make excuses. Having a friend or a family member who is a sort of “partner in crime” can turn defaulting on resolutions into a shared experience, one that somehow feels more permissible than if you did it alone.

The essential takeaway: our support networks have a measurable effect on how we behave. Pursuing relationships with people who have similar goals, helps us achieve our milestones, while other relationships will need work to make sure they function as support and not as obstacles.

Humans are social beings. It’s how we were made. We form close connections because having these relationships make our lives better. Unconsciously, we mirror behaviours practised by the people in our social circle. We base some of our internal definitions of what is okay by looking at how people around us behave. What this means for someone who is trying to change their drinking habits is that the people in your social circle are capable of both helping you or slowing your progress. Communicating effectively about what you need, and how they can best support you, can make the difference between the two.

You can get closer to your goals when your friends help

How can your friends help?

Listen: Sit down with you and have a conversation about what kind of situations can trigger your need to drink. If they know about your triggers, they can back you up and help you cope with them when they occur.

Socialise: Encourage you as you expand your social life with new activities like exercise and events where drinking isn’t the main focus. You can even sweet talk them into accompanying you if you’re nervous to go alone.

Connect: Pursue new people and new experiences, but don’t feel like you have to leave your old mates behind. Ask them to be there for you even if you can’t drink with them.

Three ways your friends help at social events

Understand that sticking to your goals is important to you, and they should not ask you to drink with them if you’re trying not to.
Help you find a non-alcoholic drink to have in your hand to avoid awkward questions.
A good way to hold yourself accountable is to volunteer to be the designated driver for the group. You’ll have additional motivation to stick to your goals, and you will be everyone’s favourite person for getting them home.

We are who we are around

In this day and age, we have a newfound ability to really reflect on who we want to spend our time with. We have access to more communities than we could ever possibly reach out to. What this means for us is that if we want to change who we are and what we do each day, we have the ability to reach out and find people who are doing the same thing. To make connections with people is to be human, and to fear losing these connections is more human still.

Changing what you do with your Saturday nights is scary, because you may lose people who expect you to drink as heavily as they do. The liberating aspect of modern society is that while you may lose some friends who can’t accept your changes, the number of people and communities for you to reach out to is limitless. Your potential to find new people, and new things to do with your Sunday mornings is limitless.

What can you do with this information? Talk to your friends, talk to your spouse. Telling them about your goals with alcohol is good, but telling them about how they can help is better.

Click on this link for more ideas on support.

Returning home after a trip around the world has taught me something valuable about self-love. It’s a busy world, and you’ll feel overwhelmed if you don’t know how to communicate with yourself and listen to your needs. Culture means to be connected, but sometimes we lose contact with ourselves when we search for a connection with others. Sometimes you realise that you have never been connected to yourself.

My teenage and young adult years were extremely fun and extremely horrible at the same time. I needed alcohol to feel okay with who I was. Without being drunk I didn’t really allow myself to have fun, and I always wanted to have fun. For me, it wasn’t like I felt great and thought a drink or two could make me feel even better. I felt out of place, lost, unwanted, stiff, and stressed-out unless I was drunk. I couldn’t see the fun in doing things without drinking, and anything was fun if I could only be drunk doing it.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t like I felt great drinking, either. Once I started I only felt content if I had a new drink in my hand or knew that I had access to more. I rarely enjoyed the moment; I only chased getting drunker. And drunker I got, but not happier.

It felt like someone had sucked the soul out of me whenever I woke up from my drunkenness. Days after drinking I still felt like I would never be able to experience joy again.

Why did I allow myself to drink every week if I knew I would feel so rotten for so many days after?

Alcohol was a part of who I believed I was. I didn’t know who I could be without it. I didn’t know how to have fun without alcohol. Honestly, I thought that a life without alcohol wasn’t worth living. Partying was all that kept me searching for more. I didn’t even care what party I went to, as long as it meant that I could get drunk.

As a 27-year-old woman who has been through a lot of psychologists, self-help books, podcasts, and treatments, I know that I have a lot of knowledge and inspiration to share with the world. Sharing is good for those who are struggling themselves and also for parents, teachers and other people related to someone who is struggling. It opens up a gateway through which people can relate, understand and then offer help.

This is why I wrote the book, Free The Girl – A story about (finding) self-love,
and share my experiences with feeling like shit. Our minds are scared of change–that’s why it is hard to break habits–but change is just one decision away.

Hot tips for self-love

If alcohol affects you negatively, here are my tips on self-love and how to work with yourself.

To get a grasp of your own relationship with alcohol, ask yourself, ‘Why do I drink?’. If you answer ‘because it tastes good’ then ask yourself if you would choose a non-alcoholic drink if it tasted exactly the same. If not, then why do you drink?

The point of answering this question is to be truthful with yourself. Our brains love to make up excuses for why we do things, but if you ask yourself and really listen in, you often feel the real truth inside.

If you would like to take a break from drinking but it feels like a long stretch, set a reasonable goal. Start with one month if two feels overwhelming. Put the month into a bigger perspective: what is 30 days of your life without alcohol, really? Isn’t it worth giving your body, liver and head a little rest? A month just to check in and see if you feel different, maybe even better than you currently do. Aren’t you curious about how much energy you might get? Wouldn’t it be great to look back and celebrate that you could do it? At the end of the day, it is just a test to see if your life can improve.

Prepare for your time off alcohol and make a list of things to do instead:

Write a list of positive outcomes. What will you get out of taking a break? Put your list on your fridge and read it every time things get hard.
Check if someone wants to do it with you. In that case, you can hang out together if all your other friends are out clubbing. Or you can both go out with your friends if you feel like you’ll be okay not drinking.
What did you use to do when you were younger, before you started drinking? Is there a hobby you have benched?
Visit your grandparents or other relatives that you don’t see often
Catch up on your reading
Use this time to really pamper yourself. Eat healthy food, get outdoors for some natural sunlight, go to bed on time – view it as a spring clean-out!

If you need more inspiration to get this list going, try to put on a seven-minute timer and write down anything that comes to mind that makes you lose track of time or that you simply enjoy doing.

The most important thing is to be kind to yourself.

Speak to yourself like you would speak to your child or best friend. Cut yourself some slack! Keep in mind that it is okay to not always feel amazing. Allow your mind and body to just be, and say to yourself that it is okay. Right now, what I feel is what I feel, how I am is how I am – and right now, that is okay. Life is so much more than we can describe it in words. Follow your interests, follow your happiness and don’t limit yourself to what you know!

Maya Kiusalaas | www.mymondaylove.com

Brad Hopkins, Director at KPMG’s Infrastructure & Projects Group, reflects on the corporate culture of drinking and his three months without alcohol.

Personal drinking habits are an unusual topic to kick around with colleagues. The magic little liquid holds a cherished position in corporate Australia – its ubiquity and impact on our work environment is rarely spoken of.

I have never been regarded as a big drinker and I never thought of myself as having a ‘drinking problem’. Despite this, I was challenged by a friend to tackle three months without alcohol and I finished this stint in May 2017. Now I’ve decided to do another three months, and I’d like to encourage others to have a go. My motivation is old fashioned curiosity – the original stint was so surprising that I’d like to see what might happen next.

So, what can you expect if you join the experiment? I am sure it will vary dramatically by person but I have described a few of my own surprises below.

One month is a good start, but longer is better

I had quit alcohol for a month once before but was persuaded to try a longer three-month stint this time around. The longer break was recommended by a friend, Chris Raine, of Hello Sunday Morning. Hello Sunday Morning’s mission is to provide tools and support to help people assess their relationship with alcohol. The thing I like about this organisation is that they don’t tell you how much you should drink. Instead, they help you learn something about yourself and your habits.

For me the first month was largely occupied with self-congratulations and predictable outcomes. I lost some weight and saved some money. Far more interesting things happened in months two and three. With time my concentration began to improve, my stress levels declined and my sleep improved.

Why did these changes take so long to materialise? Research on the impact of long-term, low-level drinking is patchy at best. Some theorise that alcohol, even a small amount of alcohol, has a neurological impact which alters our brain long after any hangover abates. Recent studies show that drinking small amounts of alcohol (e.g. 14 units per week) over extended periods is linked to changes in the brain and poorer long-term cognitive function.

Although the research is scant, I find it hard to imagine something that has such a significant impact on our brain in the short term (drunkenness) not having some cumulative impact (concentration, sleep, mood) in the longer term. These longer-term impacts could take time to abate once we stop drinking.

Successful people drink less than you think

For the first two weeks of my sobriety it felt like corporate Australia was awash with booze. I counted no less than twelve work-related drinking opportunities across fourteen days. Friday afternoon drinks, lunches celebrating arrivals, departures and successes, boozy nights out with clients or colleagues. In the corporate world, all of these events provide shared experiences that strengthen our relationships. Alcohol helps people bond at a fairly low cost compared to more thoughtful alternatives.

As I talked more about my sobriety, people shared stories about their own drinking habits and I discovered a lot of non-drinkers and highly disciplined drinkers lurking in the shadows of corporate Australia. Many of these “well considered” drinkers were highly successful business leaders and entrepreneurs who had turned away from alcohol for a variety of reasons.

Some of these people had well-evolved strategies for avoiding alcohol without being conspicuous about their abstinence. They would accept a drink and hold it as a prop, do the rounds at functions and exit early or restrict themselves to half a glass of wine nursed through an evening. These are the tips they do not teach you at graduate training.

Concentration is king

In the second month my concentration began to improve dramatically and the modern curse called “distraction” finally departed. Despite digging through the research, I haven’t been able to uncover why my concentration levels jumped. The cause is probably multi-faceted and I suspect that sleep is a big part of it. Alcohol is a notorious disrupter of sleep – although it helps us drift into sleep, the sleep is less restorative and more prone to interruption. My sleep gradually improved until I was getting 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night in the second month.

Frankly, the reasons didn’t concern me as much as the outcome – I was delighted with my new cognitive superpowers. I had one of the most productive and successful periods of my career.

Moods matter

The modern workplace revolves around our ability to think and interact with other human beings. Our reality as modern workers is that our mood directs much of our approach to people and problems. Mood can skew how you approach somebody, or indeed whether you bother approaching them at all. Whether you are calling on your emotional intelligence or solving a problem, having some control over your mood seems important today.

Any level of hangover, even from one or two drinks, makes me a little bit grumpy. For me, alcohol was a handbrake and encouraged a mindset that was muted and homogenous. As the experiment continued my moods shifted to a place which allowed me to engage more fully with the people and circumstances around me.

Stress less

Like many of us, my job is stressful and it probably always will be. As my dry spell wore on I realised that the glass or two of wine shared with my wife over dinner was actually a way of dealing with a stressful day.

It turns out that alcohol is a terrible antidote for stress and anxiety. Recent research shows that, for some people, being stressed reduces the impact of alcohol resulting in more drinking to achieve the desired result. Drinking causes short-term relaxation but reduces our ability to manage stress. For me, abstinence made me better at dealing with and responding to stress at work and at home. I was harder to rattle and recovered more quickly.

What comes after three months without alcohol?

I am going to dive into a further dry spell for another few months without alcohol. It is not easy, particularly when habits have been entrenched over many years. Whether your own challenge is work stress or Friday night socialising, there are good strategies for dealing with this.

If you’re thinking of giving up or cutting back on alcohol yourself, Hello Sunday Morning offers an app/online program, free for Australians, called Daybreak. Join a community of people on the same mission as you, and see if you notice any of these differences in yourself after three months without alcohol.

Check out our blog on the link between stress and anxiety or chat to a Care Navigator in our Daybreak app to find the best strategies for you.

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