Motivation Daily by Motiversity - QUIT DRINKING ALCOHOL MOTIVATION - The Most Eye Opening 12 Minutes Of Your Life

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

What happens when you quit drinking? Quitting drinking alcohol leads to better mood stability, decreased anxiety, and enhanced overall well-being. People who stop drinking often experience a more stable and rewarding lifestyle.Countless people including Tom Holland, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Rich Roll and Dr. Gary Brecka explain why you need to stop drinking alcohol.Special thanks to our partners, subscribe to them here:https://www.youtube.com/@lewishoweshttps://www.youtube.com/@TheDiaryOfACEOhttps://www.youtube.com/@JordanBPetersonSpeakers: Rich Rollhttps://www.youtube.com/@UCpjlh0e319ksmoOD7bQFSiw Rita Orahttps://www.instagram.com/ritaora/?hl=enTom Hollandhttps://www.instagram.com/tomholland2013/?hl=enJordan Petersonhttps://www.youtube.com/@UCL_f53ZEJxp8TtlOkHwMV9Q Dr. Andrew Hubermanhttps://www.youtube.com/@UC2D2CMWXMOVWx7giW1n3LIg Gary Breckahttps://www.youtube.com/@UCLHKyx7IhZ_esCs4TSWAjEg Dr. Daniel Amenhttps://www.youtube.com/c/DrDanielAmen_BrainHealthChen Lizra https://www.youtube.com/@UCMGGa3mrboa0m2XOAInOviA Tony Robbins https://www.youtube.com/@UCJLMboBYME_CLEfwsduI0wQ Music: Ruiqi Zhao - The throne is mineMoments - Things gone wrongCleanmindsounds - Calm Cinematic AtmosphereLost Ghosts - Darkest Space instrumentalThird Age - Mystery instrumental Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners, Motivosity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcasts. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description. I was done. I was like, I'm never going to drink again.

Any more than two drinks a week is risky. So I was a functional alcoholic for many years. We need to move away from this alcoholic culture. Alcohol lies to us. Alcohol causes damage. I know that alcohol is usually bad for you, but I didn't know how bad it was. The quality of my life just sort of declined and declined and declined.

It's a poison. It's a drug. Alcohol is a really bad drug. Well, initially it made me feel like myself. It was like this miracle self where suddenly all of the unconscious anxiety and sense of difference between myself and others seem to vanish. And that discomfort in my own skin turned to, into comfort.

Like I suddenly felt like, oh, maybe this is how everyone else feels all the time. I've discovered this thing where now I feel like, okay, like I can exhale and I can be around other people. Every time I had done something or said something that I regretted, it was when I was drinking. And I thought at one point, maybe I don't want to live a life where I'm continually or even sporadically wishing that I hadn't said or done something. I think. You know, and I'm very much unlikely to do that if I'm sober and clear-headed.

You know, I grew up in a pub, so it was like, there was always drinks going on and, you know, parties, and I was jumping on the bar and singing songs. And so alcohol was just like a real normal thing in my family. And it was fun. It was just a fun time for me in my 20s. But then when I would wake up, it'd be like, silent and it would feel nice. I have family members who will say, I need a drink. That is a sign of somebody that can't regulate their nervous system. Right? Like, I need a cup of coffee. And I'm not being disparaging of these statements.

I've said, I need a cup of coffee. But what you're really saying is that your system requires this chemical to get a lift. It's not a crime for most people. But if you need a drink in order to relax, in my mind, you don't actually have control over your nervous system. I just decided to do dry January. and in doing dry January, it really scared me because I had a really tough time. I couldn't quite wrap my head around how much I was struggling without booze in that first month. And it really scared me.

By the time I'd done six months sober, I really started feeling the benefits. I started sleeping better. I was handling stressful situations better, my relationship was better, my relationship with my family was better, my relationship with my work was better. And I just sort of said to myself, let's do a year.

Let's get through the first year. And then that would be a wonderful achievement. And then by the time I'd crossed that annual mark, I was done. I was like, I'm never going to drink again because this is the best version of myself. It was my go-to to celebrate and my go-to to commiserate.

You're constantly like this, which means that you always have a reason to be drinking, or I felt like I always had a reason to be drinking. I was never a bad drunk or anything like that. I just, when I started, I just couldn't stop. I knew very early on that my relationship with alcohol was different from that of my peers,

because I would be the last person to leave. I was immediately sneaking drinks. I was the one who was throwing up and blacking out when everyone else knew what time it was to go home. I started going out like more and more nights every single week. And then fast forwarding through later years, hiding my drinks, sneaking my drinks, hiding the empties, and doing kind of all the dark stuff that one does when they fall prey to this condition. At the end, I was alone, alienated from my friends. My family didn't want anything to do with me until I sorted this out.

It was very dark for a very long period of time. Because alcohol lies to us. Alcohol lies to us. Alcohol causes damage in the brain. Really? Even a little bit of alcohol causes damage in the brain. It disrupts something called white matter. So gray matter nerve cell bodies, white matter, nerve cell tracks.

So white matter is the highways in your brain that transmit information and impulses. And even a little bit of alcohol has been shown to disrupt the white matter in your brain. Alcohol is more of a sedative. Alcohol's main effect is to reduce the amount of activity in the forebrain, which is involved in planning and inhibiting. It's involved in the no-goes. Right. Right. It's also involved in the sense of self and your self-image, who you think you are in the world.

It's kind of interesting. So when people have a drink or two, they feel less inhibited. they also, at least at the early stages of drinking, they tend to feel more confident. They tend to continue drinking. Then they tend to lose their self-image. They forget who they are. They can even go blackout drunk. And the downstream chemicals are interesting.

For a small, maybe 8% of the population, alcohol causes a huge dopamine increase. These are the people that from the first drink, they discover that they are an alcoholic or very prone to alcoholics. I've known people like this, then these are the people that can drink like nobody else. It's not just a tolerance. It's that dopamine system kicking in. Alcohol is an extraordinarily pernicious drug, and if you're inclined towards it, you can be inclined towards it because you're sensitive to its anxiety-reducing properties,

or you can be sensitive to it because it enhances social communication, or because it produces a psychomotor high like cocaine, or all of those at once. And if you're particularly predisposed to alcoholism, you can experience all three at once. The American Cancer Society came out and said, any alcohol increases your risk of seven different types of cancer. And I've been talking about this for 30 years because I have scans. And people who drink any alcohol have lower activity than people who don't drink at all. And obviously, alcoholics have terrible-looking brains.

don't do that. But you've got to ask yourself why. The addiction elevator is always going down. It's a progressive disease. It only moves in one direction. The best case scenario is that person's life stays the same, but in almost every case, it continues to decline. And it will decline to the point where the pain experienced by the person

who is the addict or the alcoholic becomes more unbearable than the fear of the change. And that is where willingness is born. Alcohol is a really bad drug, you know. 50% of murders take place in an alcohol-fueled environment. Either the victim or the perpetrator or both is drunk. It's almost the sole cause of domestic abuse. It's not really the alcohol. It's what the alcohol becomes, right?

So alcohol is, you know, processed through the liver and becomes something called a cedalaldehyde. Cetal aldehyde is a poison. It's what actually makes your brain hurt. It dehydrates the lining of the brain called the Dura, which is what gives you a headache. By the way, headaches don't come from the brain. The brain doesn't have any pain receptors. It's not actually capable of transmitting a pain signal.

We get the pain from the covering of the brain called the Dura. We just finished this analysis actually looking at alcohol and markers of recovery, so heart rate variability and heart rate. And literally with every drink, there's a linear relationship in the decline. Like, and it is significant. So, I mean, yeah, it's, we're talking, even one drink will produce clinically significant reductions in heart rate and heart rate and heart variability. I don't know that any, like, even in a moderate amount of alcohol is good for you. What's the implications for our circadian rhythms that we've been talking about?

Yeah, it's mainly because it impacts sleep. It's going to impact when you go to bed and when you wake up. So I think that's the biggest, the biggest impact. And I think, again, when we go back to melatonin, You know, it's when you're disrupting that sleep onset offset, that's going to obviously have all the downstream negative effects that we've already spoken about. So I suppose if we're drinking, we're staying out later, so we're exposing ourselves to light. So, yeah, there's lots of, we're going to be eating later. There's other behaviors that accompany drinking that kind of pile on the negative effects.

When I hit rock bottom and I started working on myself, I really hit rock bottom. There was a moment in my life at the age of 20 when it was live or to die. That was what was left. It was so bad, like it was like years of spinning down, down, down, down. And then I was sitting one day on the street, like under the sun. And it was like, live or die, what do you want? Because you can't go on like this. And I asked myself, I said, what do you want to live or to die?

So I promise myself that it doesn't matter how many years it's going to take, I'm going to find the way out of this. Keeping a vision for 10 years in harsh conditions in that sense, where you just don't feel good, but it's like you keep going and you keep going, you go like, I'm not giving up until I get there. When you came together, it was one of the happiest moments in my life. Wow.

And one of the moments I'm the most proud of. That alcohol, because it enhances sociability and also suppresses anxiety, is a good social anxiety medication, But the problem is, is you don't learn how to conduct yourself as a sober individual in social circumstances. And you learn very rapidly to rely on the alcohol, not only as a social lubricant, but as the basis of your social behavior. And I would say, you know, to young people who are watching, listening, that's a stupid plan. You should learn how to be in a social group with others when you're sober so that you bloody well know how to do it, especially if you're planning to do anything even vaguely serious and responsible with your life.

Anything I wanted to do was like laid out in front of me. I arrive in California for college. I grew up in Washington, D.C., so I traveled 3,000 miles away to go to school, enter alcohol. And that began the sort of slow decline of my ability to express my potential, not only as an athlete and as a student, but as a human being. Because it just gradually denigrated all of my values and sort of dented, and sort of dented. my aspirations to the point where I no longer really cared about my trajectory or where I was headed with my life. We're going to go through some difficult times, but on the other side of it is spring.

So the beauty is, you know, some winter's a long, some are short. Some are hard, some are easy, but you never skip winter. You don't go from fall and reaping straight to spring. But when you go through winter and get strong, now new springtime happens. If you do well in winter, if you take care of yourself and get strong, that's my goal to help people with right now. I didn't exactly know what to do without that false camaraderie that alcohol produces and that inflation of confidence and and extroversion as well. Yeah, not a wise developmental strategy all things considered.