Today’s blog is brought to you on the back of a comment by one of the women completing my November pre-Christmas challenge.
Just as a bit of background, the group is being encouraged to communicate / chat / post in a private Facebook group so that everyone can feel supported by everyone else. They share recipes, struggles, successes and – in this case – confessions!
Here’s what this particular person posted on the group this morning:
I cracked a bit last night and drank some wine ( again). Over all I’ve stuck as closely as possible to the eating and exercises but have failed dismally with the wine and caffeine. Don’t feel I have any excuse as I don’t have young children, instead it’s {personal reason I have omitted to keep this person anonymous} which drives me to the bottle but is this just a poor excuse? I know when stressed what I should do is put on trainers and go for a run but when it’s dark it’s so much easier to say, that glass of wine will take away all the bad feelings!
I thought my response was worth sharing, so here it is:
This is a completely understandable response. We develop poor coping mechanisms over time and genuinely believe that drink / junk food / drugs (insert any appropriate strategy) will “take away the pain” and make us feel better. This is due to having made it a pattern over time and so emotionally you really believe this is the right solution, because you have used it before. Plus society makes us believe this too… Think about it: We often celebrate events with alcohol and an excess of food. Birthdays are celebrated with cake. It’s in our nature.
Of course, as you have experienced, the fact is that it doesn’t make us feel better. Or if it does it is often very temporary and makes us feel worse in the long run. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a glass of wine from time to time, if it’s because you actively choose to sit down and enjoy it. But using wine as a coping mechanism (rather than to appreciate the wine itself) is not ideal. Trying to undo these behavioural patterns, however, is not easy when you are at the height of your stress. And it is not something that can be undone overnight. All those lovely little neurons have created pathways and messages to your brain that take a long time to re-route and change. What ultimately needs to happen is that you find a different coping mechanism. The plus side is that you have found your trigger (i.e. stress and upset caused by your current family situation). But now we need to find a better outlet for that stress. To me, it sounds like running is not actually something you want to do as you have already created a barrier in your mind (i.e. the cold, dark winter weather). So scrap that. It can be anything else…. You might find a favourite piece of music to listen to, or run a bath… It’s not necessarily about trying to relax per se, it’s about trying to find a new habit that triggers the relaxation. Currently, the glass of wine relaxes you but you need to work on a new strategy and that will, sadly, take a while to embed as standard behaviour.
Just to reiterate, I am not saying that an occasional drink is a bad thing, but you want to get to a point where the drink is because you want to appreciate the drink or to accompany a meal, as opposed to purely de-stress.
I went through a phase of drinking to cope with stress a few years back. I don’t know how it happened and it was never bad (I never got drunk), but I started having a glass most nights to ‘wind down”. When I realised this habit had just crept up out of nowhere, I knew I had to act. What worked for me as suggested by a fellow health coach, was pouring a glass of fizzy water with a slice of lime into a wine glass every night instead. It had to be in the wine glass though… For some reason, holding the wine glass actually triggered the same feeling of winding down, even though the contents of the glass clearly did not have the same effect as the wine! I’m not saying it will work for everyone, but you have to try different things. I’d also recommend you try to only drink a glass of wine precisely when you are NOT stressed.
Sorry for the lengthy response, but I hope that helps a bit.
So there you have it chaps. Behavioural changes are not easy but, like anything, they need consistency to create new behaviours. Good luck