Last week, I felt like I completely bashed alcohol.
And well, I kind of did. Last week’s podcast I talked all about how alcohol negatively impacts our brain, our gut, and more.
But today, I’m going to give you the real stuff.
Today I’m going to talk about how we can all manage our alcohol intake effectively so we can manage or reduce the negative impacts that alcohol has on our health.
I’m about to get pretty personal with you with regard to my relationship with alcohol and where it has been in the past compared to where it is now.
Personally, I’m not going to stop drinking. Or at least I don’t feel called to at this point in my life. And that’s because I enjoy it for one, but it’s also because I feel like I’m in a pretty darn good spot with my alcohol intake and my relationship with alcohol.
I don’t drink during the week - most of the time. Unless there’s a specific event that I will allow myself to drink at. Most of the time if I’m drinking, then I’ll drink to feel a buzz and feel a little drunk, but not excessively.
And every once in a while, I would say that I partake in what would be considered binge drinking, which for men is defined as 5 or more drinks on one occasion and for women it’s 4 or more drinks on one occasion.
I might have done that some during the Fall on some Saturdays when I was watching football all day long. I may do that when I go to a wedding or am on vacation. But outside of some of those times, I don’t participate in binge drinking. And when I do fall into the category of binge drinking, I’m not getting belligerent; I’m not regretting my actions and I’m not putting myself or others in harm's way.
But that’s not how it always used to be.
To be completely transparent with you, when I was in college, I drank a lot. It was so normalized back then to drink heavily on multiple days of the week and I definitely partook in that myself.
I’m somewhat embarrassed to say this but when I was in college, drinking until the point of blacking out was somewhat of a regularity for me. For some of you, that is very scary to hear. But for some of you, you know what I’m talking about.
That was pretty normal and wasn’t frowned upon when I was in college, and so I continued to do it.
Now…
The thought of blacking out scares the crap out of me. And I haven’t done that in years and years. And it’s almost even hard to believe that’s how it used to be for me.
But my body’s relationship with alcohol has dramatically changed. And what I mean by that is back when I was in college and I was drinking I could always keep going. I felt like my body was staying alert and awake and the sensation of drinking and the dopamine and serotonin release kept moving in the right direction.
Nowadays, luckily, it’s not like that. After I have a few drinks, most of the time I start to get tired and don’t desire to keep going. And that has actually changed due to the decreased frequency and severity of my drinking bouts. That’s not a factor of getting older, it’s actually a matter of my neurochemical response to alcohol being different because of drinking less.
I say that to give you hope. Because if your relationship with alcohol or consumption of alcohol is not yet where you want it to be, then know that you can change. Your body does have the ability to actually desire less alcohol, when you drink less of it.
While I don’t condone my level of alcohol consumption when I was in college because it was too excessive, I don’t beat myself up about it either. I take full responsibility for my consumption but it was normalized based on my environment, and hey…I was in college.
But I’m so happy that my consumption of alcohol is nowhere near what it was back then.
And I promise I will get to some practical tips with regard to what you should eat to lessen the detrimental impacts of alcohol, how to regulate your blood sugar more effectively, how to replenish your gut, and how to reduce hangover effects, but first I want to dive into two mindset shifts that have allowed me to manage my alcohol intake more effectively.
1. Productivity
After graduating from college, I became an entrepreneur pretty quickly. And when you’re an entrepreneur and running your own business, you are the only one - at least in the beginning - who is going to move the needle forward.
So, I couldn’t afford to be hungover or feel bad due to needing to be productive to run my business.
The desire to grow my business and be productive on a regular basis, really helped me to manage my alcohol intake.
2. I’m Not In College Anymore
“You’re a grown man, Nick. Act like one.” I needed to have that conversation with myself a number of times.
When I was in college, my responsibilities were still somewhat limited. I still wanted to get good grades, I had a job my junior and senior year, but still compared to the real world, my responsibilities were a whole lot less.
And I know that might not be the case for everyone in college but it was the case for me.
And I knew that once I graduated, that kind of college mentality wasn’t going to allow me to achieve my goals.
That lack of responsibility wasn’t going to be a good or legitimate excuse anymore.
It was time to grow up, put my big boy pants on, and quit acting like an immature college kid.
Okay, now that we have some of my personal story out of the way, let’s dive into some practical tips based on the science presented in the last episode, for how to manage our alcohol intake and reduce the negative impacts it has on our health.