INTRODUCTION
In this week's episode of Midlife AF we talk about happiness, the pursuit of pleasure, and happiness as a form of contentment with the ups and downs of life. I'm talking about this this week, because we often hear of this concept of “the buzz”. And I want to get into a bit more of what that's all about. We talk about what dopamine does, and how the pursuit of dopamine, the amount of dopamine that we receive should be in direct accordance with the amount of effort that we need to put in to create that level of dopamine. So without further ado, I'll hand you over to me - this is a really interesting subject for me, because I think we get very caught up in this concept of the buzz. And the idea that there is something good in it, something that benefits us. And of course, it's always something that benefits us in everything we do. But whether or not it is actually moving us towards our goal, or whether it's just a momentary change of our state of mind. As opposed to planting seeds for our future wellness and our total integration. Anyway, I'll let you have a listen. Enjoy. See you soon.
MAIN EPISODE
02:26
Hello, my friends, and welcome to this week's episode of Midlife AF. So this week, I want to talk about two words, both meaning happiness, both feeling very different, both very related to alcohol use. The first is the Greek word, hedonism, or it's not actually a Greek word it translates as hedonism. And that is the pursuit of pleasure. And the second word I want to talk about is eudaimonia. Now, I probably don't pronounce that correctly. But Eudaimonia is commonly translated to actually mean flourish, to be in good spirit, to be taking care of ourselves. And this is really interesting in terms of the This Naked Mind methodology. Because in This Naked Mind, we talk about switching and seeding. And so this concept of switching is changing our circumstances, changing our moods, switching from one place to another. And a seeding is when we plant something, and we take care of it and we cultivate it and we watch it grow. It's focused potentially on something that's going to happen, not necessarily straightaway, it might be creating something for the future.
Whereas the pursuit of pleasure, for its own sake, on the surface, seems to be more about switching, switching from feeling something to feeling something else, quite quickly. And the reason I particularly want to talk about this is its relationship to dopamine. And its relationship to this thing that we in the alcohol free world, or the mindful drinking world I refer to as “the buzz”. And one of the things that kind of gets my goat a little bit about a lot of the different approaches to being alcohol free is that in many of the approaches, it's kind of referred to as well look, the buzz is the buzz. And we just have to accept that the bus is great, it only lasts for a short amount of time. And lots of bad things happen in our body chemically when we consume alcohol, but we just have to kind of know that the buzz is the buzz, it's only 30 minutes long. And, you know, we really need to focus on the future, you know, how we're gonna, you know, feel the next morning, and the damage that we're doing to ourselves and so on and so forth. Now, that doesn't fit very well in my way of coaching and in the this naked mind methodology because it comes from a place of scarcity. So it comes from a place of fear. And a lot of what we do in drinking comes from a place of fear anyway. So, I prefer if we can unravel the myths that have been created around drinking, I prefer to question whether the buzz is and of itself a good thing. And this is what brings us back to the concept of Hedonism. And the concept of eudaimonia.
04:08
Because Hedonism for me, is, I mean, there's a lot of different things, but using it in this context,
04:18
is about pursuing pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It's about escaping. It's about a kind of relentless escape, because if you think about the way that dopamine works in our bodies, and when we have alcohol or any other substance, we get this incredibly strong amount of dopamine that floods our body. Artificially high, and Andrew Huberman talks about in his amazing podcast about alcohol, he talks about the fact that dopamine is something that should be, you know, the amount of reward that we get from the release of dopamine in our bodies should be equivalent to the amount of effort that we have to put in to receive that award. So for example, if you go rock climbing, you get a high, if you have sex, you get a high, if you catch something to eat it, you might get a high if you grow your own. But, you know, there's all these kinds of you know rewards that you get from a certain amount of exertion, right. And what he suggests is that anything where you're getting a huge amount of dopamine, and you're not having to do very much for it, there's something to be very wary of. And this is similar to the pursuit of pleasure, because when we're looking at pleasure, for pleasure's sake, we're coming from a place and I think this is a place that keeps us so stuck in life. And Russ Harris talks about this in his book, The Happiness Trap, which is where the therapeutic model acceptance, Commitment Therapy, he's the pioneer of that form of therapy. But he talks about this at the beginning of his book, he says, you know, life's not meant to be a constant stream of pleasure. It's not meant to be like that. It's meant to have ups and downs, lows and highs. And the joy, and we often talk about this in the alcohol free and sober-curious community is that often the joy, the eudaimonia, the flourishing is in the variety of life is in the ups and downs is in the, you know, working out what your triggers are around alcohol, and addressing them and moving through that. Now, that might not be joyful, happy, happy la-la. But what it becomes is often, it may be painful, and you might have to put your big girl pants on. I mean, I've had to have conversations with my husband, where I've actually had to be a grown up and have a proper conversation with him about what's acceptable, and what's not acceptable for me, in a relationship. Terrifying for me. I would much have preferred back in the day, and I think I did this for many, many years was just to, you know, drink, drink the pain of sitting with a discomfort, you know, there's 1000 little cuts, of not being true to myself of being out of integrity for myself, I've been allowing certain behaviours to happen, that I wasn't comfortable with all that made me feel small. Those 1000 little cuts of not being in integrity. And I think that's what Eudaimonia is about, as well. It's all very much about a relationship with yourself. And building that integrity, you know, life isn't a total pursuit of pleasure. And I often speak to clients, and they'll be like, ah, but you know, I was, I was exhausted, and I had a drink. And suddenly, I was able to laugh. And it just felt so light. And it felt so good. And I was able to play with the kids. And I was, and yes, yes, absolutely. That is what dopamine does. Dopamine takes us away. And this kind of euphoria takes us away from what's actually happening. Like we're tired, we need to rest. We're not in the mood for playing with people. We're not in the mood for staying up late. And in order to ignore our needs, and to put on a facade for the world to see, as we are expected to, we have to use some synthetic substance in order to do that. And I'm not being patronising because I get the need to escape. Believe you me, I get the need to escape from reality because reality is hard. And women's lives are hard and things that we have to put up with are hard and the expectations that we put on ourselves a heart. All these things are hard. But it's about choosing our hard. What is our hard going to be? Is our hard going to be abandoning ourselves and our needs for the pursuit of something that actually causes us harm? And gives us a big lie about connection. You know, a lot of us use it thinking that we can connect with our families. Because we stop thinking about the to-do list, we stop thinking about, you know how tired we are and how we just want to sit out, sit down and cut, everybody plays bugger off. But we don't do that. Because that's not acceptable for women, because our job is to make everybody else feel okay. And if we have to stand in our own integrity, and say, I'm not okay right now, and you guys are just going to have to deal with it. That's hard, really hard for us to do because it's new. And so I wanted to talk about the buzz. Because when we get into the buzz, and this is why I really encourage people in the early days, especially if you're not ready to stop drinking yet and you do the awareness worksheets, you know, you're really focusing on getting rid of judgment, getting rid of shame, and blame. And you're really focusing on gathering data, which is what I really suggest people do. In the early stages, when they're not quite ready to take a break yet, while they're preparing to take a break, I really recommend that you spend some time and I've got some awareness worksheets that I'll put in the show notes for today. Which is really feeling into what is that buzz? Like? It's a feeling of elation? Yes. But at what cost? At what cost do we feel elated? Because every time we step away from ourselves, every time we abandon ourselves, we do what we've always done, we show ourselves that we're not going to show up for ourselves, and we let ourselves know that we're not important. And this is what this journey is all about. It's about how we show up for ourselves now as adults, in a way that we were never able to as younger people. And I think this definitely comes for us as women in midlife, it's like, suddenly, all of these coping mechanisms that we have been using to get us through, no longer work for us. Because all of a sudden, our body's changing, our hormones are changing. You hear so many women being diagnosed with ADHD in their 40s and 50s. And the reason being that our hormones change and so our ADHD symptoms become enhanced by the woman changes that we have. And often our perimenopause or menopausal symptoms are very similar to ADHD symptoms. And all this stuff happens and changes. Because our bodies, our hormones, like our estrogen are, you know, trying to leave. Our nurturing hormone’s no longer there, it's no longer there, to put up with all of the crap off everybody. But we've still been conditioned with these concepts that, you know, a woman's work is never done. Resting is lazy. Looking after ourselves is selfish. You know, putting ourselves first is selfish. And, you know, people talk about self care, and they're talking about, you know, dieting, or what, or vigorous exercising or getting your nails done or getting, you know, doing something that tends to have to do with our appearance, getting our hair done, which tends to be about something that's, you know, it's not about our internal. And I know, sometimes, you know, for some people that can feel really good. And there's nothing wrong with that, we all got our own different forms of self care, and I'm not belittling that at all.
14:04
But when we accept that life has ups and downs, and it's not supposed to be happy, happy la-la the whole time, and that the interesting stuff, is the stuff in the journey is in the unpicking the reasons why we drink, is the discovering who we really are who we really were when we first started to drink when we first started to believe that the world was right when it said that things about us were wrong. Because generally, we drink for a reason, that reason has nothing to do with booze and I say this over and over again. Please bear with me. But that reason has nothing to do with booze. The reason we drink is because we need a way to calm our dysregulated nervous system because the world is not made for women in midlife. It is not there to work in our favour. But the beauty of midlife is that we've suddenly woken up to the fact hormonally that we do not have to be these master nurturers anymore. In fact, we can't be. It's too freaking hard. Yeah, so estrogens leaving the building. We don't want to love anyone anymore in which we wish they'd all just bugger off. And I bet I'm being facetious and silly yet but,
15:30
But genuinely like, it's, it's harder for us to keep giving out, we don't have the resilience. Alcohol takes our resilience away, you know, again, Huberman talks about this in his podcast. It is like, even a small amount of alcohol on a regular basis, reduces our ability to cope with stress, reduces our ability to be able to bounce back from problems. You know, I've talked to so many women, who, you know, we talk about how they're feeling when they stop drinking, when they take a break. And we're so exhausted. We're so exhausted, because so many of us use the sugar in alcohol to help us push through and the numbing agent to help us push through to do all of the things that we don't want to do. This is why to me, taking a break from examining your relationship with or stopping drinking, is a revolutionary, powerful feminist decision. It's not for the faint hearted. Society is not built to support women choosing to stand in their own authenticity, and say, enough’s enough. Yeah, keeping us small and inebriated. And thinking that there's something wrong with us, there are so many parts of the system of society that benefit from that - none of those people are us. And I don't mean to come across all kinds of agitating, but I am agitating, and if you don't like it, then this probably isn't the podcast for you. Because this is a big deal. We have spent most of our lives believing that our lives have to be a certain way, in order for them to be acceptable. Now I saw my mom and my granny, working their fingers to the bone to keep a perfect house. You know, and be so anxious about it. Yeah. So anxious. And anxiety is a way of life for us. Yeah. Busyness is a way of life. For us in our society. And I'm not speaking about this as somebody who is immune to this at all. I spent most of my life in a state of fight or flight. That was my home away from home. And that's how most women spend most of our time. And alcohol feels like the way that we can escape. It feels like the way we can push on through but the question is, should we be pushing on through? And yes, sometimes we have to and that's fine, right? Life’s seasonal, things happen. But if we're constantly stuck in that place of, of fight or flight, if we constantly can't be with ourselves, if it's not acceptable to be who we are. We need to have a look at that, right? We need to have a look at that. Because there's nothing wrong with any of us. We're all beautiful human beings. But when I talk to woman after woman after woman, it's the same thing I hear. It's the same story. It's the same reasons why women drink and again, nothing to do with booze.
19:15
It's to put up with so how about we don't put up this stuff anymore? And how about it's okay not to be happy, happy la-la?
19:24
And how about we don't keep chasing pleasure when pleasure’s actually causing us pain? And how about we revisit what life could be and what this journey could be because to me, the joy is in the journey. That's the adventure. That's the magic. The magic is stopping drinking and being then able to find out all the reasons why we're drinking or any other pursuit that we have that gives us excessive dopamine in return for little effort. Where else are we switching? Where else are we being hedonistic? Where else are we pursuing pleasure in the moment? And forsaking ourselves? Yeah. Because this journey is all about, for me, learning who we are. You know, I had someone in one of my master classes recently. And that was one of their main reasons for drinking. Because they didn't know who they were. You speak to women, you ask women, what do you enjoy doing?
20:36
What's fun? Most of us can't tell you. Because fun is not important. But it's not important. What's important for us is doing all the things that we have to do in order to keep home, keep a family, keep a job, do all of the things.
20:57
And that is so anxiety inducing. It's like our days are being marked. You know, because everything is coming from external validation. And this is where it's about, and some of us find this so hard. You know, reaching in, and trying to find out, you know, what our precious self needs in the moment. And how we can love ourselves enough to give it to ourselves. And never, ever, ever in a million years does our precious self need, when they're stressed, when they're anxious, when they're sad, when they're happy - Never, ever, ever, does our precious soul need for us to abandon it. There are so many cool ways to get natural highs. There are so many great ways to calm our nervous systems to regulate our nervous systems we just haven't been taught them. So this journey is about learning what they are learning and what they are for you. And starting to use those tools started to put those practices in place. So that when you come to a crisis, you have some physical things, some things that have to do with your body to reach, you know. Havening, walking in the grass, and your bare feet, grounding yourself centering, moving, singing, dancing, using vocal toning, there's so many things there. And, you know, again, all these practices, we put all these things into the bucket, into the bucket that's moving us towards the alcohol free or the alcohol break or the sober-curious place where we want to be the goal we keep putting those things in, and eventually the see-saw tips. And suddenly that goal, which we felt was so unachievable, is right there, and we've done it. So just keep putting those good things in, it doesn't matter if you have a slip up, it doesn't matter if you have a data point. That's all that matters in those circumstances that you examine it and you find out what happened, why it happened, and what you need to do to make sure that it doesn't happen again. What's your learning? What are you going to put in place? What's your plan? This is how we do it. This is how we do it. Anyway, thank you guys for joining me this week. It's been an absolute pleasure spending this half an hour with you. Take care
