Five healthy ways to avoid Mum-Stress (hint – it’s NOT wine!)
When I was a drinker, I believed that my after-work wine was a reward for getting through a busy day juggling a stressful job and mum duties. I would leave the house early to drop my daughter at day-care before driving to work for an 8-hour day managing a team, deadlines and budgets, then racing […]
Abstinence vs Moderation: Everything You Need to Know
Our last few blogs have discussed my experience reintroducing alcohol and successfully moderating after an extended period of abstinence, and Lucy’s ongoing commitment to abstinence. In team Thrivalist we therefore have one moderate-drinker and one non-drinker. In this blog, I’m summarising our recommendations and then comparing these two choices side-by-side, so that you have all […]
Staying in the Sober lane
Last month Jen wrote a blog about her decision to reintroduce alcohol after a long stint of abstinence and healing. When she first told me about the fact that she was considering drinking again, I nearly fell off my chair. We had spent over a year working together creating a strong message about life being […]
Getting the most out of Febfast
Back in 2014, I decided to take a month off drinking. I’d had a very boozy November, December, and January and my body felt saturated with alcohol. With February being the shortest month, I told myself it was the perfect period to go booze free (the shorter, the less painful, right?). But beyond deciding not […]
Can you drink alcohol normally after having a drinking problem?
There are different models or theories that seek to explain how and why people struggle with problem drinking. The two I want to focus on in this blog are the disease model and the learning model. The disease model tells us that problem drinking happens as a result of a disease that causes irreversible changes […]
Setting yourself up for a successful year!
So many of us love to start the new year by pulling out our journals and setting new intentions or goals to achieve throughout the year. But many of us struggle to maintain the momentum as the days and weeks tick by, and before we know it, we are wrapping up another year without achieving […]
What three years of sobriety has given me
We often forget to take the time to reflect on what we have accomplished, what we have learned and how we have grown. We are so focussed on moving forward, that we neglect looking back and honouring how far we have come. As I sit here today, writing this blog, I suddenly feel like I […]
Feeling your feelings when you’re used to numbing with alcohol
I will never forget how difficult it felt to sit with my feelings when I removed alcohol from my life for the first time in 2018. I felt raw and exposed, like all my skin had been removed. I was so out of practice when it came to sitting with emotional discomfort. I was so […]
How to stop romantisizing about alcohol NOW!
As the weather in Australia starts to warm up, with lockdown restrictions lifted and summer party vibes in the air, it can be enormously challenging as a sober person to not start romanticizing about alcohol. In fact, our students are often sharing with us how this time of year is the most triggering and hardest […]
Learning to live AF is a skill (just like learning to ride a bike!)
When a little girl is learning to ride a bike, she’ll wobble and fall off many times before she rides smoothly. When she’s face down in the dirt, no one says ‘forget it, she’ll never be able to ride properly!’. She’ll be dusted off, plastered up, and told a bunch of encouraging things so that […]
