EPISODE 259: WHEN YOUR MIND MAKES A BAD DAY WORSE
The Alcohol ReThink Podcast with Patrick Fox
EPISODE SUMMARY
Have you noticed that when you wake up tired, stressed or irritated, your mind starts finding more reasons to feel that way? A difficult morning can quickly become a negative spiral, and before long the urge to drink can feel like the quickest way to switch off.
In this episode of The Alcohol ReThink Podcast, Patrick Fox explores the idea of an emotional home: the familiar emotional states we return to without consciously choosing them. Through a story about a rainy school run, two dogs and an argument that happened entirely in his imagination, Patrick explains how mood-congruent thinking and emotional inertia can make a bad day feel even worse.
You will learn how thoughts and emotions reinforce one another, why frustration or stress can increase the desire to drink, and how simple actions such as laughing, breathing and changing your physiology can interrupt the pattern before it gathers momentum.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL HEAR ABOUT
ā¢ What an emotional home is and why familiar emotions can become automatic
ā¢ How a bad mood can produce more negative thoughts
ā¢ The connection between emotional triggers and the urge to drink alcohol
ā¢ Mood-congruent thinking and emotional inertia
ā¢ Why naming emotions more precisely can help you understand your patterns
ā¢ Simple ways to interrupt a negative emotional spiral
ā¢ How changing your relationship with alcohol involves learning to be with difficult emotions
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while preserving the meaning and conversational style of the original episode.
OPENING
Welcome to the Alcohol ReThink Podcast, the podcast for men who are ready to rethink the role of alcohol in their lives for good. It's where I share experiences, concepts, tools and coaching. Get ready to radically change how you think about alcohol and stop drinking for good. I'm your host, Patrick Fox. Let's go. You are listening to episode #259 of the Alcohol ReThink Podcast.
THE ARGUMENT THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Hi, welcome back to the podcast. Amazing to have you here with me today. And I'm really excited about this episode because I want to share with you something that happened to me quite recently that I think you're going to benefit from. I was out and about. I'm going to tell you the full story in a minute, but I ended up having an argument with an environmental officer and I was there and I was really angry and defiant and I was trying to explain to him I was a good citizen.
And if you don't know what environmental officers are, they're the people that go around giving out fines for people who drop litter or cigarettes or don't pick up dog poo, etcetera. So I'm having this argument and I'm trying to tell him about all of the other people who are doing things around me, all the litter that I have to see on a daily basis and the fly tipping and how nothing gets done about it. And this guy just wasn't listening. And so I was like, right, I'm going to run away. I'm not going to give him my name.
I'm going to withhold my details. And before I knew it, police were getting involved. And I was just trying to convince everybody that, you know, I was innocent, right? I'd made a mistake. Here's the kicker. There was just one small detail. None of this actually happened. There was no environmental officer. There was no fine. There was definitely no police. This entire confrontation took place inside of my head whilst I was out walking the dogs the other day. Crazy, right? It felt very real, literally felt very real and my brain was very compelling in its argument.
So let me explain how I got there and why I think this is going to be beneficial for you to hear this story.
HOW A DIFFICULT MORNING BEGAN TO STACK UP
So I'd woken up that day feeling a bit tired, had a broken night's sleep, didn't particularly sleep very well. So already, right, you wake up, you're tired, that's going to influence how you're thinking. And then I look outside and it's raining and it's also a little bit dark. And so we're coming to the end of summer. So I can hear my brain going, oh, God, this is the end of summer. Like, this is what it's going to be like for the next few months. You know, a little bit of complaining. All right?
And I had to get up, get my son ready for school and also get the dogs walked in the morning. Well, I've got my mum's dog at the minute and I've also got my dog. So I was trying to get my son ready. We were trying to get out of the house a little bit earlier than we would usually because one of the dogs is like a Ferrari. He just wants to like get on with it. And the other one's a bit of a Skoda.
And he wants to stop and he wants to sniff everything and every tree and bush, you know, whatever, right. And then he's also a rescue dog. So he gets startled very easily as well. So it's a lot to manage. And so I said to my son, right. We need to make sure we're ready so we can leave early. Well, I don't know if any of you have got nine-year-old boys out there, but you know, he was sort of getting ready and I went off and I started getting ready myself. I came downstairs and found him in the front room.
He's got the yoga mat out, He's got some of the little dumbbells that I've got there, and he's doing a workout. You know, I thought doing a workout would be a good use of this time. And look, part of me is like, wow, this is great. I'm having a positive influence on my son. And the other part of me is like, fucking hell, we've got to get to school. We've got to leave in a minute. We're going to be late, right? And so I was trying to manage my mind in that moment.
I was trying not to become frustrated, but I can feel it kind of starting to build up, starting to stack up inside of me. So I'm aware of the time. I'm aware of how I'm starting to feel and I'm like, right, we need to go, come on, let's go. And just as we're about to leave, he says, āYeah, but I haven't brushed my teethā and I'm like, Oh my God, inside my head. Are you fucking kidding me? Right. So right, go brush your teeth. So anyway, eventually we leave the house. We're definitely not on time.
And it's kind of spitting with rain, right? Not a massive deal, but you know, it's spitting with rain. So I'm tired. Still getting a bit more frustrated. I'm kind of in this mode of wanting to get to school, rushing a bit. But the dogs, they got different ideas, right? Because they just want to go out and have a nice little walk. So one of them's pulling, one of them's sniffing, and between them they started to do what dogs do, right? Like they had to go to the toilet.
So between the two of them, they'd had three poos before we even got to school. I brought four poo bags out with me. I thought that's got to be plenty right? And so I had one poo bag left. And so just before we got to the school, thankfully, we started chatting to another parent and she offered to take my son across a busy junction. I was like, amazing, All right, cool. So I've got the two dogs. We're just going to walk back through the town. So my son got to school, and then I had my mum's dog.
My mum's dog's a Skoda by the way, right. And he decides in the middle of the town centre that he wants to do his third poo. And it's probably the biggest one of the lot as well. I'm like, where the hell is this coming from? And I pick it up, use the bag and I'm about 15 to 20 minutes from home with these two dogs. And so now I'm walking, but I'm very mindful of the fact that I haven't got any more poo bags left with me. And I found that all of these things had been stacking up, right?
I haven't been dealing with them properly because I was in a rush and I was starting to be quite frustrated and annoyed. And this is when that story started in my head, right? Like this is when I started imagining the dog going for another poo, except this time I didn't have any poo bags and there's an environmental officer there. To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen an environmental officer in town before, but this is the story my brain started creating based on how I was feeling. So I imagined another one of the dogs doing a poo.
This time the officer sees it. He wants to dish out an Ā£80 fine because I didn't have a bag. Then I'm there, trying to explain to him. Like dude, I've already used four bags man. Like I always clean up after my dogs. You know, I'm an upstanding citizen. You know there's other people around here who treat the place like shit, and yet he doesn't want to go after them, right? But this is literally all happening in my head. But this man is not listening to me. And I'm getting frustrated with him because, you know, I'm a good guy.
I'm a good person, I believe.
CATCHING THE STORY MY MIND WAS CREATING
And so this situation starts escalating in my mind to the point where I'm thinking about running away. Then I'm imagining the police having to get involved and I can feel it. The outrage is building up in me. My shoulders are rising. My brain is getting hyper-focused on how I'm feeling right now. And then I caught it. I realised what I was doing to myself. Even just telling that story, I could feel the tension rising in me and then let it go because I caught what was happening.
And I started to laugh and I was like, Oh my God, this is insane. Like I've literally just been having an argument for the last two or three minutes in my head and actually all I'm doing is just walking a couple of dogs. So nothing had happened, right? The dogs didn't do any more poos. Thankfully, nobody tried to fine me. But what I did notice and what I really want to share with you all listening today is about just how our mind works, right? And how we can get better at managing how we're thinking and how we're feeling.
But also something that is known as an emotional home, something that Tony Robbins talks about. Because in that situation, as I've just shown you, I was reacting to something I had created entirely in my mind.
WHAT IS AN EMOTIONAL HOME?
And so Tony Robbins talks about something called your emotional home. And it's this idea that we have certain emotions that have become so familiar that we're so used to operating from them that we can return to them quite easily, right? And you can have a think about this, right? Like think about that yourself, think about the people around you. Like what are the emotions that you see people operating from a lot of the time because they've become very habitual.
Now, your emotional home isn't necessarily somewhere that you enjoy going or being or experiencing, but it's just somewhere that your mind, your nervous system have learnt to get to without needing directions. So for one person, it might be that they have that emotional home of anxiety, right? Or just a constant sense of pressure or wanting to do things for other people. For someone else, it could be they're just irritated with the world or they're harbouring a lot of resentment or the feeling that they've got to do everything and no one else can help them, right?
We can all experience these emotions to different degrees as well. And I think we experience them so regularly that, or sometimes we experience them so regularly that we stop recognising them as places that we visit and we just start thinking that's who we are. And this is where emotion and identity can become confused. That's when you start believing, Oh, I'm just an anxious person or oh, I'm just, I've always had a short fuse, right? Or I just, I'm just naturally a worrier.
I actually was having a coaching conversation with one of the guys I worked with yesterday and we were talking about this exact thing. We aren't anxious people. We're people who experience anxiety, right? And the more that we identify with them, guess what, the more likely we are to keep going back to that emotional state as well.
WHEN FAMILIAR EMOTIONS FEEL LIKE CONTROL
So for me in the past, you know, I found that irritation could easily become anger. And you know, this is what was modelled to me and what I learnt growing up and I can see how it played out, especially with drinking. You know, I remember one of my best mate's girlfriends, like she would tell me about how abrupt I became when I started drinking, how obnoxious that I could become when I was drinking. And so, you know, we gravitate towards these emotions and alcohol, of course, accentuates them, I believe.
So whenever I found something wasn't going my way or I thought it was unfair or someone was doing something I didn't like, or I thought they were being inconsiderate, you know, rather than like dealing with it, I'd get all shitty about it instead. So on that morning when I was having that little barney with the environmental officer, it took me a minute or longer to realise what was going on. I thought everything was happening to me, right?
I was looking out and I was thinking that I was being persecuted by the dogs, by my son, by the weather, right, by an environmental officer, by the police. It's, it's really so interesting when we can start to see our own minds like that. And so whilst the circumstances there were changing, the emotional destination I was heading towards was very familiar. And so I found myself feeling that kind of anger or frustration and it almost feels good in a way, right? Because it can bring a lot of certainty.
And it's not until after the fact that you calm down and you're like, Oh yeah, that wasn't that great, right? Like it actually made me feel really bad. But in the moment, it can feel like you're in control, right? And it can be an attempt to feel in control. And the challenge I find is that we're often trying to control something that's not actually in our control, right? I can't control the weather. I can't control what the dogs do. I can't control my son to a degree, right? There are so many different things that are outside of my control.
But what is in my control is what happens inside of me, right? I can't control how I feel straight away, but I can control how I want to react or respond to how I feel.
HOW THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS REINFORCE EACH OTHER
So one of the things that I teach pretty regularly in coaching, this is a lesson that I've really had to learn the hard way and I'm still learning, right? Like this isn't a game of perfect, OK? This is just about getting to know yourself better so you can close the gap quicker. So one of the things that I teach is that our thoughts influence our feelings, OK? And when something happens, we have thoughts about it. Or when something hasn't happened, we have thoughts about it.
And now those thoughts then begin to influence how we're feeling and then influence the actions that we take next as well. But it also works in the other direction because how we already feel then starts to influence our thinking. So if we're in a state of anger, irritation and frustration, more often than not that produces more thoughts of that emotional quality. And as you can tell, it's not the best emotional quality to live your daily life by. And you may have experienced this yourself. Maybe you've had a similar day to mine, right?
Like you wake up feeling tired, maybe you feel under pressure, maybe you're dreading what's ahead, right? And then as you start your day, you hear something on the news, or you get a text message you don't want or an e-mail from your boss. Or, you know, your kid leaves Lego on the floor and you stand on it, or maybe there's a driver who cuts you off or the traffic lights are always red on the way to work, right? And one day, maybe none of those things bother you.
But on this particular day, it seems like because of the way that you felt to start the day, it starts confirming all of these beliefs that you've got, like other people are inconsiderate, they're idiots. They don't know what they're doing. No one respects your time, right? And you have to do everything by yourself. Of course that's going to feel heavy, right? And that's going to cloud the rest of your day as well.
MOOD-CONGRUENT THINKING: WHEN YOUR MIND MATCHES YOUR MOOD
So those individual events might actually have nothing to do with one another, but because of how you're feeling, your mind is now starting to join them together and is creating a story that matches your mood. Think about that, right? The way that you're feeling and what's happening, your mind then starts creating a story that matches your mood. So psychologists sometimes refer to this as mood-congruent thinking, right? We don't need to get into the specifics of it, but it's this idea that your current emotional state influences what you notice, right? So if you're noticing that everyone's annoying, well, guess what?
You're going to find everyone annoying that day. And so it's going to influence what you remember and how you interpret what's happening around you. So on that morning the other day, my mind wasn't simply reporting what was happening. It was creating a story that matched how I already felt. And it just escalated. So my irritation effectively became like a search prompt, right? It kept giving me more reasons to be annoyed. I think about it like this. Think about social media, for example, if you're on it.
So if you've got Instagram or YouTube or whatever it is that you watch, the algorithm gives you more of it. This is how our brains work. This is why social media is so addictive in a way as well. But this is how our brains work. It's kind of got its own algorithm of sorts. So when we are focused on something, we find more of it. So when we're feeling something and we're thinking something, we're going to find more of that as well.
So in that moment the other week or the other day, sorry, my mind responded by creating a massive story about an environmental officer, getting fined, the state of the local town and the police getting involved. It was mad.
HOW IMAGINED STORIES AFFECT REAL LIFE
And I think this happens more often than we realise. In fact, it does. It's just what our brain does. It's designed to make meaning. And if we're not mindful, then our brain is going to create a ton of meaning that's not very helpful and doesn't feel good. So this is where you start having conversations with people in your head about something that you've perhaps been avoiding, like a difficult conversation. And then you start getting emotionally invested in it, right? Like you start thinking of all the things that you're going to say to them.
Or worse still, you have an argument with someone and then afterwards you relive it and you start thinking of all the things you could have said to them, right? But let's just go with like, you're imagining something happening in the future and you're like getting all worked up about it. And then 5 minutes later in real life, you take it out on your kids or you take it out on your partner. Not because of something they've done, but because of the story you've been building and the emotions it has been creating in you.
And so what I think is really key to remember, right, and where sometimes people get this a little bit misconstrued, is that how you feel is real, right? The emotional experience is real, but the story you're telling yourself is optional.
ARE WE ADDICTED TO FAMILIAR EMOTIONS?
Joe Dispenza wrote Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. He does a lot of other work, but he talks about something similar to Tony Robbins' idea of an emotional home, but he talks about like being addicted to certain emotions. And yeah, I'm mindful of using the word addiction because feeling angry or anxious isn't the same as being addicted to alcohol and nicotine. But, you know, I do think that there is some truth in it. Like we can become addicted or, you know, heavily invested in feeling certain emotions because they might create this level of certainty in us. And it feels familiar.
RECOGNISING YOUR MOST FAMILIAR EMOTIONS
Well, actually, let me ask you a question, right? What are the two or three emotions that you find yourself experiencing on a weekly basis now? I would say two or three emotions that feel negative and two or three emotions that feel positive. So what are those emotions and kind of get curious about them because our mind and body knows how to get to them quite easily. Some will be easier to reach than others. So this is where we almost become self-fulfilling prophecies, right? Because we have thoughts that can lead us to taking certain actions, right?
So, for example, to do with alcohol, let's say that you say you're not drinking, but you almost engineer an argument with your girlfriend, let's say, so that you can become pissed off and angry so that you know that the action you take is to go and drink alcohol. Now it sounds really perverse and I don't think we do it on a very conscious level, but sometimes we are kind of almost like manipulating situations or emotions so that we can take the behaviour of drinking in that instance. But there could be lots of different things, right?
EMOTIONAL INERTIA AND THE LANGUAGE OF EMOTION
So there's also a psychological idea called emotional inertia, which describes a tendency for an emotional state to continue once already in motion. So when I was annoyed, it became easier to stay annoyed. OK, I started to notice more things that matched that feeling. Then those thoughts gave me more reasons to feel it. So you might recognise that pattern in yourself and you know, you might not immediately recognise or know the name of the emotion, but you recognise that it's a familiar one.
I heard something the other day that is kind of insane: apparently, there are over 3,000 words in the English language that describe emotions. But many of us rely on the same handful. So āfineā, which isn't really an emotion at all, right? But it's the way we describe how we feel. It could be stressed, right? And stressed is often just another word for fear, right? Underneath it might be something we're afraid of. The word could also be angry, anxious or pissed off, but I think there could be something more specific underneath those words.
And so it might not just be that you're angry. It might be because you feel dismissed. You feel like no one's listening to you. You feel like you're being overlooked, right? Like you feel powerless. And you might not just be stressed, you might feel trapped or inadequate or afraid of something, right? Maybe it's letting people down. Maybe it's fear of what people are going to say if you put yourself out there, whatever. Or maybe if your emotional home is that you're feeling a lot of pressure. Maybe it's the feeling that everything is on you and you can't afford to stop.
And that's where the pressure comes from, right? Like that self-expectation. And so I think this is why when you start looking at emotions and language, we can start to create a bigger emotional vocabulary for a lot of guys, myself included. At one point, I didn't even think I had emotions, right? Which is obviously a lie because you've only got to go to a game of football or a sport of your choice where men are present and you're going to see the full spectrum of emotions on display, right? And so it's just about learning.
And even if you're not sure, just go, oh, it sounds like that kind of could be what I'm feeling right now. So the more clearly you can describe what you're experiencing or feeling, the easier it's going to become to understand the thoughts and the patterns that are connected to it.
CHANGING YOUR EMOTIONAL PATTERNS
So much of this happens in patterns, man: thoughts, feelings and actions. And so, you know, often we want to make all of these changes in our lives, like we want to get to this place where we think it's going to be better. But if we are still operating from that same emotional home, then when we get there, it's not going to feel the way that we want it. So we can start learning how to operate from different emotional states before we get there. That's going to be far more powerful.
So if you're listening to this podcast and you think, oh, wow, yeah, I can really hear or recognise in myself some of the emotions that I go to. And what I want to offer is this: don't make yourself feel bad about it, right? Like, because remember, if you're feeling bad, your brain's going to find more reasons to feel bad, OK? It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It just means that your brain, your body, your nervous system have become familiar with certain states, right? Me too, right? Which is why I'm sharing it today.
And it's about learning how to start recognising that in yourself because then you get to make a choice. You get to decide whether you want to continue with it.
WHY A BAD DAY CAN INCREASE THE URGE TO DRINK
And so I haven't talked about alcohol a great deal within this episode. So let me just kind of narrow it in or focus it in on alcohol for a minute because I think a lot of guys believe that you're drinking because of what's happened in the day. You've had a difficult day, kids have been a pain in the ass, client was moaning, you lost a contract, whatever, right? So yes, those things may have happened, but there's what happened and there's your perception or interpretation of what happened.
Because often it isn't only the event that creates a desire to drink, it's the emotional story that is created around it, right? Remember what I said a few minutes ago? Like sometimes we actually go out of our way to create those moments so that we can drink. And also, when those uncomfortable emotions start building, guess what? Your brain has already learnt that alcohol's a way to change them. So it's just so fascinating, isn't it? Like when we think about this and it's, this is a human pattern as far as I'm aware, right? Like this happens to everybody.
So alcohol can appear to be a quick way to get out of how you're feeling. But you have to recognise your responsibility for how you were feeling in the first place. Because alcohol, it doesn't change anything, right? Like it gives you some temporary relief, but it's not sustainable. It doesn't help you create a different emotional home. It's just giving you that temporary escape because you're going to wake up the next day, you're going to feel hungover with a dry mouth and a headache and, you know, broken sleep feeling shit. And that cycle is going to happen all over again.
CHANGING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ALCOHOL
I think this is one of the reasons changing your relationship with alcohol is so much more than just removing alcohol. It's about how you learn to be with yourself when you feel tired, when you feel stressed, when you feel annoyed or lonely or disappointed. It's about learning to recognise the stories that your mind's producing when you're in those emotional states. And look, I'm nearly eight years into sobriety, right? And my mind still creates stories. And I don't believe there's an end date where it will stop creating stories until I'm no longer on this mortal coil. Right.
AWARENESS CREATES CHOICE
So it's not about stopping our minds from doing it. It's about learning how we can control it better and recognise it when it's happening. Such an important distinction because I'm not saying you are consciously choosing every thought and emotion that you experience. Absolutely not. The brain is a universe of its own. You know, I didn't choose to wake up after a not so great night's sleep. I didn't choose the rain. I didn't choose to consciously feel irritated. I didn't go, do you know what? I want to feel really irritated today. That's going to like make my day, right?
That's not what was happening. And I wasn't consciously creating some environmental officer to make me feel angry because why would I, right? It doesn't make any sense. But that's the story that my mind started offering me based on how I was feeling. So my job, my responsibility in that moment is to start recognising that when it comes up. And you know what, even after I'd noticed it, I laughed. I walked about a minute or two and then I found my brain going there again. And I was like, no, stop, right? I am not going to do this to myself.
So that's when you really start showing yourself where your control is, where your power is in all of this.
SIMPLE WAYS TO INTERRUPT A NEGATIVE SPIRAL
There are a couple of little ways that you could do it, right? I laughed, right. I saw what was happening and I laughed and I just said like, that's insane like this is not happening, right? This is not happening. Another simple way to do it is just to breathe, guys, right? Like if you find your mind going off on one, just take a minute just to get back into your body, take some conscious breaths. It can make such a big difference.
Whatever you do, the aim is not to add anything else to what's already happening, right, in terms of how you're feeling. So how can you disrupt that thought pattern? How can you disrupt those emotions, right? And it can be so simple. It can be breathing, laughing or simply jumping up and down for a minute, right? Like what can you do to change that physiology?
DIFFICULT EMOTIONS ARE NOT THE ENEMY
And again, I want to just be clear: this isn't about getting rid of difficult emotions or pretending that anger or anxiety or disappointment are bad. Like they all have their place, of course, right? Emotions give us information. And they can help us recognise when a boundary has been crossed. For example, they can help us recognise when we're tired or hurt or potentially needing support. But there is a difference between allowing an emotion to be present and allowing it to just completely blow up in our own mind, right?
So you can feel irritated without spending the next day collecting more reasons to be irritated. You can be anxious without needing to know what the future has in store for you, right? You can feel disappointed without turning that disappointment into a judgement about who you are as a human being on planet Earth, right? The emotion isn't necessarily the problem. The problem is how the mind starts narrating the story about how you're feeling. Can you see it and go, wow, that's a cool story. I wonder where that came from. You know, if I can create stories like that, what else?
What else can I create that's actually going to be serving me? You know?
QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU NOTICE YOUR PATTERN
So have a think, guys. Where is it that your mind tends to go when you are tired or stressed or feeling under pressure? Like what is that familiar emotion that you go to? And it's not about beating yourself up, right? It's just about creating that awareness, having that familiarity with it, because then you get to change it and then notice what are the kinds of thoughts that your mind creates when you're feeling it? And then what does that emotional state make you want to do? Like what is the thought-feeling-action cycle? Does it make you want to drink?
Does it make you want to withdraw? Does it make you want to argue or shut down or just overwork, right? And none of those things are right or wrong, but it's just about having that understanding of your patterns and then finally asking yourself, is this somewhere that I want to live? Is this somewhere where I choose to consciously live, right? Show yourself that there is a choice. So look, I want to reiterate, don't judge yourself for whatever you notice because that definitely doesn't help. Because like what's going to happen if you judge yourself right? You're going to feel bad.
When you feel bad, you're going to create more thoughts that make you feel bad. So it's just about recognising that your emotional home, if you want to call it that, you might want to call it something else, but that has been in your life for a long time. It may have started in your childhood. It may have developed through different experiences and repetition. And in some ways it might have made a lot of sense, but it probably isn't serving you now.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO JUDGE YOURSELF
So when I caught myself the other day going back to a familiar emotional home that I've visited many times in the past, I didn't make myself wrong for it. I didn't try and like slap on a load of positive thinking. I just saw where my brain was taking me. I laughed at it, you know, I almost thanked it for being so creative, right? And chose not to keep feeding it. And actually it brought me here to share it with you, right? So as wild as it was, it was also a gift. And that's the opportunity that awareness gives us, right?
Awareness doesn't give us complete control over everything we think and feel, but it does give us a little bit more say over whether we keep following that familiar pattern or routine.
AN INVITATION TO JOIN DISRUPT
All right, guys, if you recognise yourself in what I've shared today and you're looking for support with this, then this is exactly the kind of work that I'm going to be doing inside Disrupt. Disrupt is my signature group coaching program for men who want to change their relationship with alcohol and more importantly, themselves. And we're not just focusing on how to resist a drink and how not to drink every day, right? But it's about understanding how your brain works, your thoughts, how your emotions work. What are the patterns that have been fuelling your drinking up to now? Right.
Well, what are those unconscious saboteurs that you've got? And it's about learning how to interrupt those patterns, how to find ways to deal with stress, pressure, discomfort without needing alcohol to change how you feel. Because my goal is not for you to spend the rest of your life trying not to drink. It's that you have a life where alcohol is just not a part of it. You'll be alongside a group of guys who understand what it's like. They're all committed to making change.
If that sounds like you, you can find out more and apply to join me inside Disrupt using the link in the show notes. It's going to be awesome. I'm so excited to be running it again and to see the incredible changes that come from it.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
All right, guys, that's it for me today. Have a think about your emotional home, what that might be. What are the stories that your brain uses to get you back there? Right? And once you start seeing that, once you start recognising it, you can have a much better chance of choosing a different direction. All right, thank you all for listening. Take care, avoid the environmental officers, and I'll see you again next time. Bye for now.
