Secrets for Rocking Dry January with Casey Davidson

Intro
Welcome to the "Sober Yoga Girl" podcast with Alex McRobs, international yoga teacher and sober coach. I broke up with booze for good in 2019. And now I'm here to help others do the same. You're not alone and a sober life can be fun and fulfilling. Let me show you how.

Alex
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of "Sober Yoga Girl". This is the first episode that I've recorded in a while, so I am super happy to be here. I think it's actually the first one I've recorded since I moved to Bali, which is cool. And I have my guest here with me today, Casey Davidson. And Casey is in Washington state in the States, and she is the host of the "Hello Sunday" podcast. She is a sobriety and life coach. So welcome Casey, how are you?

Casey
Oh, I'm good. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Alex
Happy to have you here. And Casey, how long have you been alcohol-free?

Casey
Yeah, I quit drinking almost six years ago, so it'll be six years in February.

Alex
Congratulations.

Casey
Thank you.

Alex
That's amazing.

Casey
Yeah, it seems surreal now. I remember when getting past day four was, like, impossible, but, yeah, now it just feels like the new normal.

Alex
It just becomes easier and easier at the beginning it's-- every day feels like a challenge. And then you hit a point where it's just you know, your normal life, your new lifestyle or way of being. So, Casey, what was your life like before you quit drinking?

Casey
Yeah, I used to actually call myself a red wine girl. Like, that was how I self-identified. And I, you know, love to drink. Always have. You know, I sort of think, when I went to college, it helped me kind of I thought to come out of my shell and meet people and have fun because I was always sort of hyper-vigilant and thinking about what people might be thinking about me or if I was acting the right way. And I sort of figured, oh, my God, drinking. This is amazing. I shut my mind off and I thought, you know, "anything could happen". I thought it was super adventurous and fun. And I actually played on the women's rugby team in College, which I don't know if you know anything about rugby, but it's sort of a ritualized drinking culture and binge drinking at that. So after every game, you would get together with the other team and have a huge keg party. And we used to go on keg runs where they would put a keg in someone's truck and we would run around for 5 miles stopping and drinking in between the exercise. Yes. So it was not the best breeding ground for, like, a healthy relationship with alcohol. But I was still sort of the straight-A girl. And I graduated college and lived on my own, you know, got a big job at a consulting firm, and was just like, oh, this is what adults do. They drink in their apartment at Loan. And of course, I had no idea how to cook. I went to boarding school and College and ate in the dining hall. So I was, like, making Mac and cheese with a bottle of wine or like, Lucky Charms for dinner. But I was like, see, this is very sophisticated. So, you know, life went on. And I just sort of always was a 365 nights a year drinker. It was just what I did. You know, and it sort of segued from drinks out, you know, at bars with friends in my early 20s to happy hours after work to dinner parties with my husband and all of our friends with the wine flowing to after I had kids. It was just sort of the way I thought I was still claiming my adulthood. So I would go to this big corporate job. I would leave right before having to pick up my kids at daycare, come home and open the bottle of wine pretty immediately, and then proceed to cook and drink and eat dinner and drink and do dishes and drink and get my daughter and son to bed and then sit down on the couch and finish the bottle. And so it wasn't that unusual. That's what's crazy. Like, it was just part of my husband, my life. Everybody knew that I loved red wine, but I was drinking a bottle or more a night, seven nights a week.

Alex
Wow.

Casey
And it was sort of the elephant in the room. I had a lot of other things going for me that made it somewhat easy to dismiss how much I was drinking. Like, I was working really, really hard to keep all the balls in the air. I had a big job. I, you know, kept everything going. I took my kids to all their things. I just did it with a headache and a hangover and a super fuzzy memory from the night before. When I look back, I was making my life so much harder than it needed to be. Just kind of navigating my day at quarter power and trying to make sure that no one could tell that I was hungover and, you know, had the usual, like, highlight moments of amazing trips to Italy with my husband, where we wine tasted all day. And then, like, 90% of my life was low lights, which was waking up at the couch because he couldn't wake me up at the end of the night, waking up at 03:00 A.M. with my heart beating like crazy and huge anxiety, trying to put on my eyeliner with bloodshot eyes. And then at 05:00 P.M after beating myself up all day for drinking, I'd just be like, oh, my God, today was hard. My boss was hard. You know, I deserve this. It's Thursday, it's Friday. And just wanting to pick up a bottle of wine on my way home. And you know, I was worried about it the whole time, you know, for a good we've talked about this. Like, I was kind of worried about my drinking for about eight years before I finally quit. I started to wonder if I had a problem with my son was six months old. I read "Drinking: A Love Story", that book, when he was six months old and sort of wrote a letter to myself about, oh, no, I think I might have a problem with alcohol. And I didn't quit drinking. I quit for a year when he was five and finally quit when he was eight. So it took me a long time of thinking about it, worrying about it, justifying it, saying screw it, and drinking again, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then one day, almost six years ago, I woke up at 03:00 A.M. I had huge anxiety. You know, I knew enough. I had been a member of some of these secret nondrinking Facebook groups. I'd read the Quit Lit, you know. I knew it was an issue and saw someone post in one of these groups about a sober coach. And I was just like, okay. And I went to work at 10:00 A.M. and I emailed her. She lived in Paris and I signed up for her to be my coach. And that was literally my last day one.

Alex
Wow. My goodness. I just got shivers. You know, there are so many elements of your story that I resonate with. You know, I wasn't a parent by the time that I quit drinking. But so many parts of your journey, including you know, you are a straight-A student, yet also having this binge drinking, you know, playing rugby, and seems like you are juggling almost like two lives and doing it really well. And someone commented on one of my Facebook posts, I posted in this, you know,  girls travel group the other day and mentioned my drinking problem. And someone commented saying, oh, I didn't realize that people who had drinking problems could also have jobs. And I was like, wow, this just shows how messed up our stereotypes are because there are a lot of high functioning people with drinking problems who are highly successful. And you know, that was like my story and definitely resonated with that part of your story, too. You know you had a job, you were a mom, you were juggling all these things somehow with the hangover.

Casey
Oh, yeah. And in fact, the data shows that people with you know, the biggest increase in binge drinking and you know, the heaviest level of drinking are actually people in the really high socioeconomic status. And women aged 35 to 65, particularly white women, have just over the last 20 years, their drinking has skyrocketed. So I think that the perception of people who have a drinking problem is very, very different than the majority of society who struggle with alcohol.

Alex
Right. No, absolutely. And it's a stereotype that prevents people from getting started I think because we talked about this already, it's just this fear of what will people think of me if they know that I have this problem and it's actually a lot more common than we realize.

Casey
Yeah, absolutely. And it's in some ways just like any other health change you might decide to make, in the same way, that someone might decide to become a vegetarian because that aligns with what they want to do with their lives and what their priorities are. Or someone might decide to become a yoga teacher or someone might decide to run a marathon. Right? It is something that people should say, oh, my God, good for you. That's amazing. We're not there yet. So in some ways, it's a habit and a behavior change and simply swapping out what's in your beverage. On the other hand, it is culturally pushed on us and put on this pedestal and highly, highly addictive. So it's an incredibly hard habit to break, but it's one that's incredibly healthy as well.

Alex
Yeah. And so tell me about--so this was this pivotal moment for you when you signed up for a sober coach. What was the big change when you did this?

Casey
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not like I hadn't been trying to stop drinking before because you know, I wrote myself all the letters telling myself I needed to quit, I needed to get my life together, and this was not going to be good. I had the first time I stopped drinking for a year, a friend of mine actually took me to some 12 Step AA meetings, and that was not my path. I just didn't really resonate with it. And actually, at the time, it works for so many people. I have so many friends in the program. But for me, I was like, I don't want to live this way. And it made me be like, well, I'm not that bad. I might as well you know, just go back to drinking at the time. So the reason talking to a sober coach helped me was because I told her, I was honest with her, right? No one hires a sober coach if drinking is working out really, really well for you in your life. So I was like, here's where I am. I'm drinking a bottle or a bottle and half of wine a night, seven nights a week. I feel like garbage. Nobody knows. Nobody's told me to stop. I desperately don't want to stop drinking. Drinking is my favorite thing in the whole world, but I want to feel better. I can't feel the way I feel anymore. I can't have this anxiety. I can't have this sort of I felt doomed. I felt dread. I didn't want anyone to look at me too closely. So reaching out to someone, making a commitment to her. The commitment was, let's get you to 100 days without alcohol, which was crazy at the time. I could only go four. And she knew what I was going to go through. She knew how it felt on day four and day seven and day 15, and why it would be really hard to go out to a restaurant and what I could say to my friends or my coworkers that might help, and how I needed to lower the bar and be kind to myself. And she sort of held my hand through all of those micro steps without making me say, I'm never going to drink again or I'm an alcoholic or this is forever. You know, we just kind of like built up to 30 days and then say, okay, this is awesome. How good are you going to feel at 50? And then we went to 75 and then we went to 100. And then I had a major panic and anxiety attack you know, at work. And it was just at that point I was like, oh, my God, this is awful. I can't feel this way anymore. But I also cannot go back to drinking. I was like, I am not going back to what broke me. So then you add more support than I added a therapist and I added some antianxiety medication and kept going to exercise and kept talking to my sober coach and kept being a member of my groups. And it became my new normal that I used to drink a lot and I quit because I feel better without it.

Alex
Yeah, that's amazing. How did you get from then being at this point that you wanted to become a sober coach or life coach yourself?

Casey
Yeah, I think it's a process. So, you know, in my first year, it was really just navigating the life physically without drinking and picking up new habits and new activities. I ran at Ted K for the first time in years. I went to there's this mindful Triathlon that was amazing, where you do yoga and meditation and do a 5K. So I was doing that. I was putting up a million vision boards. I was really changing how I navigated like, in the first year and in the second year, I was just experiencing joy. I was just enjoying all the little moments. I was going on amazing trips, I was hanging out with my kids. I was just like, I'm proud of myself. I feel good. And then in year three, I was like, okay, what now? Because I'd spent 20 years in the corporate world, climbing the ladder. I was in the digital marketing, director level at big Fortune 500 companies. And yet I had never loved it. All the things women feel right. I felt a ton of pressure. I felt imposter syndrome. I felt like I didn't care, but you know, I was still a straight A girl. And so one morning, I was actually in e-commerce. So the holiday season, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you know, you make all your sales right around Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I woke up on Thanksgiving morning and said to my husband, I don't want to be doing this in five years. I actually don't want to be doing this tomorrow. And you know, I had a job that looked really good on paper. I was at L'Oreal beauty industry, so fun. And yet I just felt like I was dying inside. And so I was talking to my therapist actually, and she was like, you should be a coach. You should be a sober coach. And I was like, oh, I had all these beliefs about like, people won't pay for it. Nobody is sober coaching real. It's life coaching real. And she's a therapist. And she says, Casey, I have ten women I would refer to you tomorrow. You know, we're in Seattle. She's like, there are a million women at Microsoft and Amazon and all these companies who are drinking what you did, who aren't going to go to a 12 Step program but need way more than I can give them in a 50 minutes session once a week. And so I just was like, all right, this is where my heart is. That's where I was spending all my free time. I was completely into self-awareness, self-improvement, and connection. So I went back to coaching school, and that was three years ago.

Alex
Wow. That's so amazing. It's amazing to see stories of-- I think there are so many people that feel when they get sober or when you become sober, you kind of wake up and look around and you're like, actually, this part of my life I'm not happy about. And for me, it was the same. It was my career. But so many of us just remain stuck because we just think this is my career and there's no way out. You know my parent's generation, they just did the same job for their whole life. And so, I think it's so inspiring and amazing to watch people walk away from this career they've spent you know, 20 years building and just pivot and be like, that's not for me anymore. It's amazing. And now you have this coaching.

Casey
I feel like it's kind of like sobriety, too. Right? Because you have seasons in your life. And I had the College season in the early 20s, going out to bar season, and the young mom, wine culture season. And I'm like, I'm allowed to evolve. I quit right before I was 40 years old. And I was just like, what do I want the next decade of my life to look like? Do I want it to be me on a couch kind of slurry, passing out, or do I want to do amazing things and move my body and travel and remember things and build things and hang out with my kids, you know?

Alex
Yeah. And so tell me about so this episode is going to be coming out right before Dry January, which is amazing. And it's great timing because so many people in January feel like it's the right time for them to be giving up alcohol. So what advice do you have for someone just starting out or navigating dry January?

Casey
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love Dry January for a lot of reasons. The first of which is it's become this thing, like, where we think about their stigma around people who decide not to drink out. Dry January is now a global movement. I mean, you hear it everywhere. It is really normal for people to say, I'm giving up drinking in January. I mean, there are articles in the New York Times and Self magazine and everywhere. So it gives people a really low-stakes way to try out a period of time without drinking. And you know, it's 31 days. It is very easy to tell people what you're doing and actually, telling people that you're not drinking for an extended period of time, not just not tonight or I have an early meeting or anything. It's really powerful. The other thing that I like about it is that it gives you enough time to get through the really hard part of stopping drinking, which is sort of your first two weeks where you will probably feel less happy than you were when you were drinking. You've kind of screwed up the dopamine levels in your brain, so you're going to go through a physical withdrawal. You're going to feel irritated and sensitive. You're going to have cravings. They don't last that long. But getting through the first two weeks is really important. And then for the second two weeks of dry January, you can get curious and get excited about what you want to do with your life and your time now that you're not, you know, letting the night slip through your fingers and waking up trying to cope with the day. So if people do Dry January, I really encourage them to not just take alcohol out of their life, but to add more self-care into their lives. So you're going to have time in the evening that you need to fill up and, you know, you just don't want to sit around not drinking and not doing anything else differently. That does not mean that you need to go do a million things, but having sort of anchor activities for the evening, you know, whether it is reading a really good book or taking a bubble bath or doing a yoga class, or going for a walk with a friend, or going hiking on the weekends, like doing an online painting class, like adding stuff in to make your life more full is super important. And also, I'm a huge fan of sober treats. So if you're doing Dry January, I love getting a day counter app, which the one I love is called Undone Drinking. The reason I love it is it calculates not only the days that you're not drinking but also the money you're saving. The bottles not consumed and calories not consumed in alcohol. And I have to tell you that in my 1st 30 days not drinking, I saved $550, which is crazy, and, you know, that's just what it was. But not only that, I did not consume 40 bottles of wine and I'm five foot three, so looking at that number is just insane that I was ingesting that much. So yes, you're on day 17, you're on day 21, you've got five days left in Dry January. Look at all the alcohol you haven't consumed. Look at how you're sleeping well. Look at the money you've saved. And I highly recommend taking that money and investing it in things that are going to give you actual joy and connection and companionship like, get a massage, get sushi, dinner with your best friend and have the hot tea, go on a vacation, get an Airbnb, use that money to actually enjoy life without alcohol.

Alex
I love that suggestion. And I've never heard this before. Anchor activities. I love that. So is the concept to find something that will help you stay grounded and anchored through the evening.

Casey
Yeah. And anchor activities are really sort of just something to anchor the time when you would normally drink. Right. So, you know, as willpower runs down at the end of the day. Most people have set up their lives in a way that they want to or feel like they need to check out at the end of the day. Right. They're running too fast. They don't say no enough. They have too many responsibilities. And so an anchor activity is just okay, during this week, I'm going to have super easy dinners Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. After dinner on Monday, I'm going to take a bath. After dinner on Tuesday, I'm going to call my best friend. After dinner on Wednesday, I'm going to watch Shit's Creek just to know what it is. And on the weekends, you need something too. So you're not just either going to your own drinking places and just not drinking or you know, sitting around saying, I don't have anything for myself in my life. And you're also going to be kind of tired and fragile. So in my early days, it was winter. I quit drinking in February. On Saturdays, I would go to my gym, and they had child care for my kids, which was awesome. I needed a break. And I would do slow laps in the pool and then go into the steam room and the hot tub. And then they had a smoothie place right in the gym. So I would get this, like, chocolate peanut butter smoothie. And that was like my anchor activity. Right. I'd go in from one to three or two to four. And then my kids and I would go home. I had some protein, some sugar in my body. I'd done something. I'd have quiet time alone. And then I was like, okay, let's put the day to bed. I'm good. I did something. Or I would go to the garden store and wander around and look at plants I wanted to plan or think about journals I could buy. And you know, you just need something to anchor your days, and you actually need to plan it out.

Alex
And you know what? I love the example that you just gave in particular, because I feel that so many women that I speak to that are mothers would feel like something that you described is selfish. You know, I'm taking time for myself. I'm swimming. I'm going into the steam room. I'm having a smoothie, and my kids are separated from me. But I actually feel that these things make us better parents, you know. It makes us better at taking care of the people in our lives. And I feel like we have this thing. I remember one morning, it was the day of a family member's wedding, and someone said that me exercising that day was selfish. And that was early in my sobriety. Right. It was like I was at something around 150 days. And someone said you know, it's not all about you and your exercise. And I'm like, this is really important for me to stay sober tonight is for me to do this workout before this wedding. And so we have this weird perception in society that, like, prioritizing our self-care is selfish. But it's not because I'm sure your kids, like, probably the difference of how you were as a mom from when you were drinking to when you were doing these self-care weekends is probably like night and day, you know.

Casey
Oh, my gosh, there is so much in there. And one thing I want to see is a lot of women drink because they can do that multitasking while being with their kids. So you can drink and play Candyland, right? You can drink and help with homework. You can drink when your kids are in the bath. I know that sounds bad, but lots of women sit on the floor in their bathroom drinking, you know, a glass of red wine while their kids bathing.

Alex
Right.

Casey
So you feel like you're there with your kids, but you're really not.

Alex
Yeah.

Casey
I mean, anyone who's listening to this and who drinks a lot knows how focused you are on the alcohol and knows how your moods, you relax, but then you can become erratic and you can get, you know, snippy with your kids. And the other thing that I think mothers really feel bad about saying, and I have no shame in it. So I quit drinking when my son was eight and my daughter was two. Kids are a big trigger. When you don't have kids, you're able to sleep in and go to brunch and work out and all these things. And you love kids. But if you are working and you have children and you have a partner that works, you have very, very little time for self-care. And there is a reason that you come home and you're spending and you want to basically knock yourself unconscious with a bottle of wine. And it's because you are not doing enough to take care of yourself.

Alex
That's so true. It's so true. Honestly, I don't know how parents do it. It's hard and really prioritizing that having the courage to put down the drink and find another self-care practice that's going to fuel you and help you as opposed to hinder you is probably really hard. But really--

Casey
Well, if someone's listening to this in January and going to do Dry January, but also working with kids, I suggest a couple of things. Number one, you can plan really easy dinners, and please give up the guilt about how much your kids are watching TV or on the iPad. Like, if you are in early sobriety and breaking this incredibly addictive habit. Like they can eat cereal, Mac, and cheese and watch the iPad all night while you bubble up and read a Quit Lit book or watch a show or take a nap. And that's okay. I would also say proactively, use some of that money that you're not spending drinking. Again, I saved over $500 in 30 days.

Alex
That's amazing.

Casey
Hire a babysitter. Hire a babysitter every fucking Saturday in the month of January you know, for 4 hours and take that time for yourself. Go for a run, take a nap. Just go sit in a coffee shop with a magazine.

Alex
Yeah.

Casey
You need to do this for yourself. And you can also, if you have a partner, tell them like, hey, I'm doing this Dry January thing. It's a health kick. But I've heard I'm going to be really tired and really irritable and sensitive the first week. I know it's good for my body, but can you take more of the load this week? Like, can I go to bed at 08:00 P.M. and have you put the kids down? It's going to serve you so well because you won't need to do that forever.

Alex
Yeah. And that's great advice. And I think that is probably one of the things that people might struggle with the most is just not having a plan. Right. And so being well aware of, like, okay, how can I make a plan for success so that I can be practicing self-care when I'm struggling instead of returning back to having a drink?

Casey
Yeah, absolutely.

Alex
Is there any other advice or suggestions you have around that whole Dry January?

Casey
I do. Well, there are a couple of things that I would love someone to avoid as they're doing Dry January because it kind of trips them up. So things I love telling people, joining sober groups, you know, there are a million people doing Dry January. Joining Alex's community, talking to people about the fact you're doing Dry January as a health initiative is awesome. Highly recommend that you lower the bar and invest in self-care. So give yourself a break and plan it out like we talked about. I love non-alcoholic drinks. I love non-alcoholic beer. I know that could be triggering for people. It's not for a lot of other people. So if that is something that you're open to as a substitute, it can be really helpful you know, to have 0.0 or 0.5 or whatever non-alcoholic beer on a Friday night. Like, in my mind, it's the alcohol that's the issue, not the taste. Things to avoid. A lot of people think of Dry January as a reset. You know, you're drinking problematically and you're like, I'm going to take this break, kind of to prove I can do it, to prove I don't, "have a real problem".

Alex
Right.

Casey
And the reward at the end of the month is to drink again. So the first two weeks suck. They just kind of do, you just feel like garbage, and then your entire last time you're counting down to the reward of drinking again, which is sort of just white-knuckling it until you can take a deep breath. And what I would love someone doing this to do is don't think about forever. Don't think about never again, because it'll just trip you up. But use Dry January as a springboard to see how amazing you can feel without alcohol, not as a pause or reset until you can drink again. So treat it like an experiment that's not counting down to drinking. Say, I'm going to do Dry January to see if I like how I feel better not drinking and drinking. To see if I want to keep going into February. To see if I feel amazing on Saturday mornings or I actually go running because I always tell myself I will and I don't. Or if I start playing guitar at night again, you know what I mean?

Alex
Yeah, absolutely.

Casey
Leave it open-ended.

Alex
Yeah, I love it. And then it just doesn't put pressure on you because that's a very scary thing to say. I'm not going to drink forever, whereas a little short period of time or an experiment is a lot more digestible.

Casey
Do you know what I love? I think it was Ruby Warrington in "Sober Curious". In that book, she said if you were going on a date with someone, you wouldn't sit there and decide that on date number three, that you're going to marry them and be in it forever or whatever. That would be crazy. You would just be like, oh, this is going well. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to see if it gets better. Like, maybe we'll go out for two months. Oh, gosh, I still like him. Maybe let's go for three. You wouldn't sit there on date number two and be like, oh, my God, I have to say at this moment, forever or not, I'm going to make a call. But no, I'm going to go back to drinking. This sucks. I'm not ready.

Alex
Yeah, that's a great comparison. And it's so true because that's the way a lot of people end up where they are now. Like, I know my uncle had said, I'm just not going to drink today. I'm just not going to drink tomorrow. And now he's like five years sober or something. Right? Same for me. I'm just not going to drink for 28 days, 90 days, a year. And now I'm two and a half and, you know, you're six. And so it's just having that open mind about it.

Casey
And I think it's different like, so many of us have said, I'm not going to drink tonight or I'm not going to drink this week or I'm only going to drink on the weekend. There is some middle ground. That's the sweet spot. That is not saying forever or never again but is also not saying, "I'm trying to drink less". Like saying, I'm going for 100 days or I'm doing Dry January. What it does is it takes the decision off the table. You've already made the decision. Now you're just executing it and you don't get that decision fatigue of debating back and forth. Well, what about this weekend? Well, there's this party. No, I really shouldn't. Like, that's exhausting.

Alex
Yes. The decision-making fatigue around it.

Casey
Yeah.

Alex
All right. I have a question for you about Dry January. So do you have any programs or specific things coming up in January that people could get in on if they were curious about a sober life?

Casey
Yeah. Well, first of all, on my website, which is Hello Sunday Coaching, I have 30 tips for your 1st 30 days that literally will walk you through resources, how you'll feel on day two, how you'll feel on day four, what to do your second weekend, all that kind of stuff. So if you're doing Dry January, do yourself a favor and grab the blueprint. This is like 30 pages of free resources that will really set your mind right to get going. So I encourage you to pick that up. It's totally free. It's 30 tips for your 1st 30 days at my website. And I also have a podcast, the "Hello Someday" podcast. I've got some amazing guests coming up in January. Alex, also, you can listen to her episode because she's on in December talking about how to break up with Booze. So you can listen to that episode. But we're going to be talking about how to do Dry January on the podcast and being "Sober curious". Ruby Warrington, the author, is my guest and all that kind of stuff. So those are two great resources.

Alex
Amazing. Cool. That's awesome. I'm actually, as you described that 30 tips for your 1st 30 days. I think I'm going to go download it because that sounds great.

Casey
You should. Yeah. No, it's really good.

Alex
All right. I have one more question for you. I know you've given us lots of advice and ideas for the Dry January, first 30 days. But if you had one sort of nugget of wisdom around going alcohol-free, what would it be?

Casey
I would say that if you are listening to this podcast and you are tuned into the work Alex is doing and you are evaluating your relationship with alcohol, you need to be really, really proud of yourself. I can't tell you how many thousands of women out there and men who struggle with alcohol, who never take the step. It's brave and it's hard and it's good. And it doesn't have to define your life. It can just simply be a health choice that you are making because you feel better without alcohol than you do with it. So don't spend a lot of time debating what it means. Just start seeing if you feel better.

Alex
I love it. Oh, my goodness. That just gave me shivers. And you're so right. And I say that to a lot of my clients, especially people that are you know, trying to be alcohol-free and then having a drink and then trying and having a drink, I'm like, well, you're already you know, laughing people that aren't even questioning their relationship with alcohol, right? You've taken that first step and it's so true. Anyone that's listening to this podcast, even if they're still drinking is still taking that first step and that is something to be so proud of. So that's a great thing to end on. Casey, thank you so much for being on the show. It was so amazing to hear your story and get to know you and I really appreciate you being vulnerable and open with our community, I will post all the links and everything in the show notes. So if people are interested in connecting with Casey, you can find her and hopefully, we will connect again soon.

Casey
Yes. Thank you so much. And I am loving following you and living vicariously through your adventures in Bali. It seems so exotic and interesting and exciting. So I've loved getting to know you.

Alex
You too and hopefully you visit me one day for a sober yoga retreat. It would be amazing.

Casey
Cool.

Alex
All right. Take care, Casey.

Casey
Bye.

Outro
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of "Sober Yoga Girl" with Alex McRobs. I am so, so grateful for every one of you. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next one and leave a review before you go. See you soon. Bye.