Reframing Time Wasted Drinking
If you're working on living alcohol-free in midlife and beyond, I'm VERY proud of you!
You are making a positive change in your life. Keep your eyes on the road ahead and practice gratitude for yourself in getting you here.
I know what it's like to live with the regret of drinking. In midlife, it's an especially challenging time to face these feelings.
If you're feeling like maybe it’s too late to change your drinking, it’s not!
You're not alone if you get those “cringy” memories from your drinking or think, I should have done things differently.
I'm with you on this and we will face it together.
In this episode, I talk about my two biggest drinking regrets, explain how drinking to cope with regret makes things worse, and show you how passive time spent drinking can be turned into active time spent healing and learning to forgive yourself.
My hope for you is that you will reframe those "time wasted" feelings into motivation and optimism to move forward alcohol-free.
Keep your eyes on the road ahead and practice gratitude for yourself in getting you here.
Mentioned in this episode:
To enroll in Team Alcohol-Free during January enrollment, go here.
Reach out if you would like to work with me privately by sending an email to hellolori@lorimassicot.com.
I really am a big Counting Crows fan - here is the song I was talking about. It's called Murder Of One - you know when things are right on the tip of your tongue? 🙂
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Hey there, welcome to To 50 and Beyond. I am Lori. I am so happy that you're here. This is where we talk about living alcohol free in midlife and beyond. If you're new to the podcast, welcome my friend. And if you're returning back to the podcast, thank you so much for coming back. Reframing time wasted drinking.
Let's be here together. Let's pretend like you and I are out on a walk. We're in some fresh air. We're just talking about this topic. It comes up a lot in conversations I have with my clients and conversations in my community. I remember getting to that point after I stopped drinking about, I don't know, maybe a month or two in and just thinking, I wasted so much time.
I drank for 30 years. I wasted so much time drinking. And I remember saying that. To somebody very close to me and it made her sad because I did a lot of my drinking with her and she said, you haven't wasted this time. I was 45 when I quit drinking. So as we get older, there's more of an urgency and we're thinking, my goodness, time is so precious.
I don't want to waste another minute of it, right? And If you're in this place where you were saying this to yourself, the good news is Once you stop drinking that day the next day you are creating a different future for yourself spoiler alert I'm not going to keep this to the very end the way that I have reframed that type of thinking, my mindset, time wasted drinking is saying to myself, but you're doing something different now.
And that was back in the early days too. You're doing something different now. And man, that was not a one and done conversation. This is a forever practice of forgiveness. And I carry regret today. I don't think that any of us. Can live life without any kind of regret. I think in time, it heals. We're not as tough on ourselves as we are, especially after you quit drinking and you are in that place.
And if you're not, cool, don't think that you're going to get there. Not everybody gets there. This is not one size fits all, but in my experience with talking with so many women over the past seven years, this comes up often. And I want to address it here because of our age, because of our future, and give you that good news that you can change this.
It's never too late. You could be 125 years old and you can change your drinking. What doesn't change it. is drinking because of the regrets. And that's another thing that a lot of women do. And I get it. You get pulled into that feeling of, Oh my gosh, I spent all this time drinking. What's the point? Then they give themselves a break from drinking and they come back to that same question.
Like the regret is pulling me back into it. I can't deal with it. I can't manage it. So the way that you can take action is to get support, whether it's a conversation with somebody that you love and trust and just sharing how you feel because you know when we get the regret out and the shame and the embarrassment and all of that we talk about it oh boy it's so comforting I know it's not easy to do and maybe it's not comforting for you if you haven't tried it recently If you try it, give yourself a break and say, this is how I'm feeling.
I want to get past it. I don't want to carry this with me anymore. Talk to a therapist or a counselor to get it out. Get it out in the pages of your journal. That's what worked for me. I would write notes to myself. If you listen to last week's podcast episode, where I shared my journal reflection at 11 months, I was writing.
Notes to myself to remind myself that yes, those moments, those cringe memories that I get from time to time, I could be walking along singing a song and all of a sudden like, dang it, why did you get so drunk on your wedding day? I was drunk before I even walked down the aisle. Why did you do that? Why did you drink at your mom's?
Deathbed. I drank all day. She passed at two o'clock in the morning. I remember thinking, what did you say? Or what didn't you say? What did you want to say? I live with that. Those are those moments. And I think as humans, there's no way that we can't live with regrets. It's what we do with them going forward.
You can't drink them away. It's just alcohol is making them worse. I love you. If you're in that place, I do. I love you. I wish I could give you a hug. Uh, I know that feeling because for me, I wanted to avoid everything. I wanted to avoid all my mistakes. I wanted to avoid the past and the things that I should've, would've, could've done.
And the drinking just helped me find that relief for a very short time. And then it would bring it back even stronger. And the older I got, I recognized you cannot. Live the next 30 years like you have the past 30 years and whatever you do going forward is going to be different. It's going to be in favor of yourself.
That's why I talk so much about making that commitment to go all in and you're going to hear it more and more as we go forward here on the podcast. It's so important because during this time, that transition, that seems really scary in the beginning and hard to do. You give yourself time away from alcohol and that filter that just drowns you out.
And alcohol is in the picture. You are not, you cannot see your capabilities. You cannot see a fresher story. You can't change the story. And so when you give yourself that time away from it, you learn how to forgive yourself. And even if you don't forgive yourself a hundred percent, it's a little bit better than when you were drinking.
And time is your best friend. It's true what they say, time heals. If you're going to continue to be in that cycle and alcohol is involved, it's not you, it's alcohol. And we cannot drink anything away. We think that we can, I did. I did. I thought that I could. Drinking alcohol is such a passive activity. So when you give it up, There's a real contrast when you give it up.
It's like, okay, I was passing time. There was a lot of time wasted and now I have more time instead of using that as oh my gosh What am I going to do with myself? I'm bored and all the things that we hear about sobriety when you give up drinking alcohol Be with yourself and go into self discovery to learn more about you and take that time to heal That is your time.
It's no longer passive. You're going into active mode. You are so capable of forgiving yourself if you're in that place. Ask yourself, what can I do to forgive myself today and move forward without drinking alcohol, because alcohol is not the solution. I am. And this isn't a one and done conversation with yourself.
Pause. In those, we call them cringeworthy moments where you just are walking along singing your song and all of a sudden you're like, Oh, dang it. Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why did I make that choice for myself? What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking. I wasn't thinking clearly because I was drinking alcohol.
Now you are. You're not drinking anymore. You're human. All humans make mistakes. Then you go into that active mode. That's what I will do. For the rest of my life when I had those moments, because they will come and they do come, I know that the change that I made from when I quit drinking to today and the progress and all of the hard work and all of those moments where I just wanted to say, This is not worth it.
You've already spent all this time drinking. What's the point? Nothing's going to change. In the beginning, that was very much me. And I just kept going with it. The progress that I've made in recognizing that is that, yeah, I can live with all kinds of regrets because I know I am human and I do make mistakes and I'm going to continue to make mistakes and not the best choice for myself, but I'm able to forgive myself because I'm relying on myself to do it.
I look at the time that I have left, and let me just say this, in doing the math, since I started drinking at 14, I quit at 45, I've spent more years drinking than I have not drinking. I look at the time that I have left, not in years so much, but like, how many Christmases do I have left? How many birthdays do I have left?
How many opportunities do I have to travel with my family and my son? Look at that number. It's not that many. And that's where I get into that hyper focus mode. I want to be very intentional with my time. I don't want to waste any more of it. There's a Counting Crows song that comes to mind. Oh, I just veered off, but you don't want to waste your life.
And what is the song of that number one Counting Crows fan? I can't think of it. I'm going to link it in the show notes, though. It's on the tip of my tongue. And it's, Adam Durrett singing, you don't want to waste your life. And I used to play that song while I was drinking. And like, Oh, I don't want to waste my life.
So when I stopped drinking, I definitely was pushing the fast forward button. Like, dang it, there is an urgency here. Time is ticking. I need to make up for lost time. I'm not like that anymore. I did do a lot within that first couple of years that I wanted to do. And mainly it was taking care of my health.
That was new for me. So I recognize that. As okay, this is totally different. You would not have been doing this if you were drinking. So you're not wasting time anymore. You're being active. You're taking control. You're taking charge. I was able to gain that different perspective of myself. And so when those moments came up, like what the F were you thinking?
I just reminded myself, you were not thinking you were drinking and now you're thinking and you're more clear and you're doing something different. Boom. And I would move forward. We cannot do anything about the past, but darn it, we can sure do something about the future. And one important thing, if you're looking at the entirety of your drinking as wasted time, I want you to give yourself an opportunity to think again about that.
I don't think my time was wasted. I spent a lot of time doing things that I really enjoyed and having fun, especially in my 20s. It wasn't until I got into the darker side of my drinking in my mid to late 30s until I stopped drinking at 45. So I can't really say that I wasted all of that time. When I look back, I do know that I could have made better choices that would have led me into a different life.
This is something else that I do to reframe it. I would never have met my husband in a bar. I would never have had my son. I'm able to remind myself like, those years were not wasted. They were me making the choice for myself at that time that was the best choice for me, and now I'm making different choices.
But I would never have met the most important people in my life if I wasn't in that bar that night and I was in that bar drinking. If you can look at it that way. And remind yourself that moving forward, you're doing something differently. You don't have to define your past on your drinking. Tomorrow is another day to start this new chapter in life.
And the reality of regret is a human experience and alcohol is never going to be the answer. It's never going to take it away, but you can give yourself a different experience moving forward. You can say to yourself, I'm so grateful to myself that I pulled myself out of that because I didn't spend another day or another week or another year or five years drinking alcohol.
I decided to do something about it and I changed. Let's make a pact together to not define who we are today on who we were. 30 years ago or last year or yesterday, let's create this different vision of ourselves and give ourselves this gift of, Hey, you're doing something with your life that feels good to you.
You're making better choices and the past brought you here. I am with you. I am so with you on this. I know for me at 57, the bucket list and everything that I want to do, I'm reminding myself to get on with it. And my word of the year is go, go forward, go for it. All of the things that I can think of with that word and I've been using it and I'm ready to go.
I'm going to go forward with you. So thank you for listening today. If you're interested in joining my community team, Alcohol Free, I'm closing enrollment in just a couple of days. Get in there for the winter enrollment. Next enrollment will open in the spring. We're having so many great conversations in there and we're going into March with the theme of the shift in identity from being a drinker to being a non drinker.
And we're going to talk about forgiveness. We're going to talk about some really cool topics. It's going to be a fun time to join team alcohol free.
You can find the link in the show notes always or by visiting lorimassicot.com. I'll see you next week with my friends Anne and Leigh Walkup Thank you so much for listening. Take care of yourself. Peace.
Hey, there! I’m Lori, the host of the To 50 and Beyond podcast.
Where aging and living alcohol-free are celebrated.
To 50 and Beyond is about self-discovery, living for today, and designing an alcohol-free life that alcohol can’t compete with.
I’m with you.
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