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 […]
Getting the most out of Febfast
This information will help you to suck the juice out of taking a break from drinking for the month of Feb, to maximise this time to improve your relationship with alcohol (and yourself!) rather than simply pushing pause and going back to drinking in the same way come the end of the month. 1. Find […]
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. 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 used to pouring a glass of […]
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 […]
The Secret Sauce of Sobriety: Self-care
Last month, I was feeling so low on energy I had to spend a few consecutive days in bed. As I was lying there, frustrated that I felt so exhausted but had so much to do, I realised that I had been doing way too much for too long, operating at a ridiculously fast pace, […]
Why an entire health overhaul isn’t the best idea when you first quit drinking
We had an interesting conversation on a recent Thrivalist Group Coaching call. A student shared that she was 11 days alcohol-free and feeling grumpy and miserable. She’d cut out alcohol, caffeine and sugar, while at the same time going from not running at all to running 5km everyday. On top of this, she was trying […]
