20 Replacements For Quitting Alcohol & Rebalancing Dopamine

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical, and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools, and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol free. If you want to learn more about Stop Drinking Coaching, then head over to www.soberclear.com. Your brain has been hijacked by alcohol. It has completely unbalanced the reward systems in your brain, which may explain why things feel so flat and grey and things just don't excite you the same anymore. Your brain has got used to a certain level of artificial dopamine that is created by alcohol. So doing everyday things just feels so much more boring and challenging. Somebody with a healthy brain that doesn't drink alcohol gets pleasure from things like exercise, like eating healthy, like spending quality one-on-one time with their family. But people that drink are often taking the path of least resistance. They're going for that quick hit of dopamine because nothing else will feel the same. So we're gonna look at 20 hobbies to help you restore that balance in your brain and get you back to where you were before you started drinking. And we've got five categories to go for. And the very first one is fitness. So before I explain the five different things that you could do, it's all structured around this idea of signing up for some sort of competition. When you drink alcohol, your health takes a hit. So making health and fitness a priority is one of the best things that you can do. You can start to rebuild yourself and recover in a positive way. I'm not talking about being in recovery there. I'm talking about genuine recovery from the damage that alcohol has done to your body. And this is something that I've done in my own life. So I've got a few suggestions for you now. So the first hobby that you can replace alcohol with is CrossFit. The great thing with CrossFit is there's an inbuilt community in a lot of the CrossFit gyms. You can sign up for something called the open, which is an accessible thing that anybody can do that's around February. And also in gyms, is people do things like write their workouts on the board and they have times and things to beat. So there's a scorecard. There's always numbers that you can improve in. And there's certain workouts where you can try and beat your time. But doing CrossFit is something that has improved the quality of my life so much. The second thing you could try is signing up for a powerlifting competition. And you might be thinking, but hey, I'm a 50-year-old woman or I'm 60 and I can't do that. Well, it doesn't actually matter. You're not trying to necessarily be the best person in the whole event. What you're doing is setting a date by this point that you'll be as strong as you can make yourself, and then you follow an exercise program to achieve that goal. But when you've got something on the calendar where at this point you're doing a powerlifting meetup, or they call it meets, you can be progressing towards that all the time. And it gets you into a new environment and you're doing something with a bunch of other people that are all trying to get stronger instead of drinking alcohol. The third thing, and this is what I'm currently doing, is I've signed up for a Hyrox race. Hyrox is good because there's less gymnastics like in CrossFit, but you're really hammering endurance and a lot of running. So you're really working on improving your VO2 Max. It's exploding in popularity at the moment. It's in every pretty much every major city in the world. So I'm quite sure you can either sign up for one nearby or fly to a neighboring country. Why not? But again, you get your date, you get your program, you follow your program, and then you arrive as fit as you can be. It's not necessarily about winning and being number one. It's just about you showing up and working towards something every single day and doing the best that you can. The next thing you can try is number four is finding a bodybuilding coach and signing up for either a photo shoot or a bodybuilding competition. I'll be honest with you, I've tried this in the past. I'm not motivated by how my body looks. I'm motivated by performance. I like to push myself and starving myself to get ripped and uh and just you know do this, I find it a little bit dull. But at the end of the day, this is what I did when I first stopped drinking. I was motivated by not being this bloated, you know, overweight. I don't want to be, I don't want to sound too negative about myself, but I didn't like the way that I looked. I felt like I was weak and I just wanted to look better. So at that time, I did get a bodybuilding coach. And that was really useful for the first six months of not drinking. It got me into the gym, it built me some good habits, it got me around some better people. But I would have taken this much more seriously if I'd had signed up for some competition or photo shoot or whatever. And the next thing you could try is something that's more endurance-based. So you could sign up for a 5K run, a 10K run, maybe even a triathlon. But the takeaway here, and the thing that you can do right now if you're feeling up for it, is actually pause the video and just go and sign up for something. Go on a website, look for high rocks event, look for 5K race, find a date, pay for it, get some skin in the game, and start working towards it. Because now you're getting dopamine from something healthy and you're doing a lot of good for your body. Number six, and the new next category now that we're going to talk about is business and career. When you drink alcohol, it can often drain your ambition because you don't feel capable of actually pushing yourself with something that's cognitively demanding. But now it's time to get it back. So number six is to learn a creative digital skill. Now, this is something that I went all in on after I stopped drinking. I started learning YouTube, I started learning videography, I started learning how to write content on the internet, how to make blog posts, and especially now with AI, I'm learning AI tools all of the time. Trying to keep at the forefront of that is hard because there's always something new every week. But learning creative digital skills is not only fun, but also you can make money from this. You can make money through writing, through filming videos, through editing videos. This can be another way for you to earn extra income. Now, the seventh thing that you can do is read more. You could start looking at biographies of historical people that change the world. That's always a lot of fun to dive into biographies. You could read some stop drinking books. You can find some books for your career and how to improve your skills. But when we drink, reading is often bottom of the priority list because we don't really have the focus and the energy to actually sit down and read. But when you stop drinking, the clarity comes back, the ability to concentrate comes back, and you can start reading again. And a good hack here is to buy the physical book and then buy the audio book on audible.com, put the headphones in, put the Audible on 3x speed, and then read at the same time. That is awesome. Number eight is to start some sort of side hustle. Now, this was a big word maybe five or ten years ago. Everybody wanted a side hustle. They wanted their main income and then they wanted something else that could balloon into something bigger. And this is a pretty awesome thing. I mean, this YouTube channel started off as a bit of a side hustle. I was freelancing, I was doing work, and then I made a video about not drinking alcohol, it got traffic. And then at the time I just thought, all right, let's do a few hours here, a few hours there. I wasn't making money from it at the beginning, but then I learned how to solve a problem, and then now it's become a business. But it started by just putting a little bit of effort in every single day into trying new things. The worst case scenario here is you develop new skills by putting yourself out there, trying different things. The best case scenario is you replace your income from your career and you end up being fully self-employed. The ninth thing you can do is document your journey. So start posting things on the internet about your journey of either not drinking alcohol, which some people don't want to do, but why not document your journey of the progress you're making once you stop drinking? So you might have had a goal to start some sort of business for a long time, or you might have had a goal to grow what you've already got, grow your career. Why not start documenting it and teaching other people what you're doing? This creates a nice layer of accountability, but it also helps other people who might be trying to do what you do, but you're one or two steps ahead of them. When you document your journey, you're giving back. Which leads me to the next category, which is spirituality. So the 10th thing that you can do is meditation. Now, meditation is an awesome tool, and you'll find that when you meditate, you will be able to concentrate more, you will feel good, and you're also really learning to sit with discomfort because your brain just can just go all over the place. I've actually done a 10-day silent meditation course in Mumbai, in India. The hardest thing I ever did, it was like being stood in a flamethrower and somebody just going, that's that's the only way I can describe the severity of the pain, internal pain, which is actually crazy if you think about it. All I was doing was not talking to anybody, but it I'm telling you, it was a war. I wanted to quit all the time. But I truly learned to meditate, and at the end of it, yeah, there was a breakthrough. Like I felt completely different. So meditation. Number 11 is Bible study or whatever your holy book could be. You can either do this solo, where some people will wake up every morning and read their holy book for 15, 20 minutes. Some people will do it in a group. They might do it in their local church. I don't know how other religions operate, but I'm sure that there are things going on with holy book studies, Qurans, memorization, all of that. But this ancient wisdom will hit differently when you're clear-headed and not drinking. The twelfth thing you can do is volunteer at your place of worship, your church, your mosque, or whatever. But you can go and do something that's purposeful beyond yourself. You can sacrifice a little bit of yourself. You can go and help other people. That's a great way to make you feel good. And another thing you can do here is go and take a retreat on your own. Go and take your own little silent retreat, two days, go to the woods, go to the forest, go to the lake, go to the ocean, get in nature, bring no screens with you, and just go and totally unplug. This might feel boring, but if we're talking about rebalancing the dopamine system, eventually the boredom goes and you start to find pleasure in the smallest things. So now let's look at some exciting things that you can do. Maybe silent meditation retreats aren't the one for you, but having some exciting adrenaline-fueled things can be big. For me, this was big because I'll be honest, when I drank, I would go, it's it's strange to say, but I would go very hyper. When I drank, I wasn't the person that was like, you know, just like that wasn't me. I would drink and then I'd go out and I'd do things and I'd I'd just bounce around and be loud and kind of be like what I am on this YouTube channel, times 10 would have been pretty freaking annoying. But having some exciting things to do, it kind of I kind of needed it. I needed something that felt like I was living life a bit on the edge. Now, these days, I get that with my business and my work. I'm excited by this, but one thing you can do here is my mum's gonna kill me if she hears this, but motorcycle riding. When I stopped drinking, I bought a motorbike. Now, I've since quit riding bikes. I was younger and I don't know, I I just don't want to risk it anymore. I just felt like, especially riding in places like Thailand, I felt like I was just every day I was just rolling the dice, and one day something bad was going to happen. However, what I wouldn't mind doing is potentially doing a motorcycle riding course at a track where you've got the full levers, the helmet, you're not at the risk of somebody just clipping you. At least the mistake is your mistake. And is it going to be a lot safer? The 15th thing you can do is shooting. Again, it's something that requires a lot of concentration. And rather than getting dopamine from drinking alcohol, you get it from target practice, right? From being able to aim and learn a skill. I mean, I did this in Las Vegas with uh Joe. The 16th thing you can do is boxing. You can do some martial art, Muay Thai, boxing, maybe jujitsu. And this is something that will build some confidence in you. And I'm not talking here about that fake confidence from alcohol, I'm talking about real confidence that you can defend yourself physically. I've done a handful of Muay Thai lessons and I've also worked with a boxing coach in Dubai called Rocky Fielding, who's a professional boxer that actually fought Canelo. So I did one-on-one coaching with him. That was awesome. But you're getting the adrenaline here with these activities without the destruction of alcohol. So maybe those things aren't for you, but I think finding an avenue like that can be very helpful. And the final category that we're going to talk about is family life. Because you may have been half present for years, and now you've stopped drinking, you can finally show up properly. So at number 17, we've got travel. Again, this might actually fit into the adrenaline kind of activities for some of you, but getting out of your comfort zone, taking your family to another country, another city, another place where you've never been before, that feels very exciting. It's exhilarating. The 18th thing you could do together is potentially take some sort of cooking class. It's to learn to cook a new cuisine, but do it with everybody. If you've got young children, you can do it with them. Or maybe it's something that you do with just you and your wife. And the great thing with this is it's something that's not revolving around technology. There's no screens there. You'll just be having good fun. You're building something, learning a skill together. So that can be a great thing. And number 19, we've got family goal setting sessions. And this is where you can sit down with your family every month, or maybe every quarter, and you can sit down, write your goals, you can do reflection on the previous month, and you can all hold each other accountable and support each other. Maybe your children are talking about their grades, what they want to achieve with sports, maybe they want to do some side projects at home, but you can lead your family better. You can do some positive habits, teach them some good skills with setting goals, and you can set a great example. Now you're not drinking, of I don't know, doing a high rocks race, right? Doing a 5K run, setting a goal of a certain amount of time, working towards it, showing your family what happens when you stop drinking and how you can just keep working towards goals and make your life better. And finally, the 20th thing you can do is mentor or coach other people. You could do this helping them stop drinking alcohol. You could do this with their career, you could do this for young people. Maybe for you, it's coaching the local football team. But the key with all of these things, every single one of these activities, is you really want to bring your family into all of them. If you're going to CrossFit, bring the children, bring the wife, bring the husband. If you're starting a business, get their input. Try to involve everybody around you. See, alcohol gave you fake confidence, fake relaxation, and it gave you fake pleasure, artificial dopamine. But through doing activities like the ones we've discussed today, you're restoring the natural dopamine in your brain, which means that you can improve the quality of your life so much. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking podcast by Soberclear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit www.soberclear.com.