Urge Tracking

In this episode of Stop Drinking and Start Living, I'm excited to share my 100-day urge tracking protocol to help you gain awareness and control over alcohol cravings. 

Through tracking circumstances, emotions, thoughts and sensations around urges, you can shift your perspective on alcohol and create more freedom and relaxation in their lives. 

Key takeaways include:

1. cultivating embodied awareness of one's nervous system responses
2. moving towards new experiences rather than away from drinking
3. practicing techniques like meditation to balance the nervous system and break habitual coping mechanisms. 
4. I encourage listeners to join my challenge and download my free resources to generate insight and move forward in their sobriety journey.

• Download the urge tracking guide and meditation from Mary's website.
• Track 100 days of circumstances, emotions, thoughts, sensations and actions around alcohol/urges from a neutral perspective.
• Consider doing the tracking with a friend/accountability partner.
• Sign up on Mary's website to access a fearless sobriety masterclass for additional support.

You have everything you need right now to find alcohol freedom with The Stop Drinking & Start Living Course. Join 100's of Women who have successfully eliminated alcohol from their lives using The Five Shifts Processes. Click here to learn more and join.

Transcript

Mary Wagstaff: 5:00

Experiment like you can always make it. This is what we teach our children, right? Walk away. And of course, that's not how it is all the time, but we really have to own our control where we have it. We have to really be honest about the freedom we have, even if it takes a lot of work. You know, I wasn't loving living a nomadic life, but I really was knowing it was a choice. I might not love this life in this brand new community that I've like literally never been to, which has created some resistance for me. But it's a choice. And even if I have to pack up all my things tomorrow and put the house back on the market, it is a choice, and that feels empowering. So there are many, many ways that we could really be stuck right. Like, I understand that there are ways that are out of our control, and there are people in the world that don't have the same freedom. So I want you this week to tap into the places where you have freedom that you are overlooking places where you're creating problems, where there are none. Use your free will to take responsibility for your life. Okay, we have to take responsibility for our human lives. We if we continue to give it away to someone else, we will feel out of control, and we will feel like everything's a problem, and then we try to take control in these other ways, around food, around drinking, and control and manipulate our our sensations, our feelings, our emotions, instead of tuning in and being in our bodies and being in control of what we have control over. And that's really a whole nother episode. So I've created this protocol for you called urge tracking. It's not a new concept. I've used it with my clients in the past, but I don't think I've ever talked about on the show, and if I have, well, here we are again. So urge tracking is an opportunity for you to create more awareness around alcohol. Now, different from saying like calorie counting, which you could use this around food or food cravings as well, or really around anything you're doing, but what it is is an opportunity to come into a neutral relationship with alcohol. So the urge tracking is just the general overview, but what you're going to do is you're going to track 100 days of you and alcohol from a neutral perspective, this isn't about I'm trying to drink, I'm not trying to drink or anything like that. It is about really understanding how the circumstances that you are showing up that are different every single day, right for them, sometimes they're they're similar how what the reaction and the response is in your body, what the thought is, how it shifts cyclically, how it shifts at different phases of the month, how it shifts at different times of the year. And it also helps you step into a place where drinking isn't just a given, okay? And this was one of a this was a huge, huge, huge shifting point for me when I started to actually just take a step back and ask myself, when I started to track my urges, and started to ask myself, Do I even want to drink right now? Like, what is the level of urge that I'm even having right now? Well, actually, I, like, don't even really care if I have a drink. Nothing sounds that great. Great tonight. Let's just see how this goes without a drink, right? And then there's times where the urges are going to be even bigger. Maybe it's like a 10 and you need to then step into the urge meditation that I'm going to that I'm providing for you in this protocol. And you need to feel through it. You need to experience it separate from all of the thoughts, separate from that push, pull conflict that's going on in your head. So when you change your relationship to alcohol or anything, you have got to generate more awareness around it. You have to kind of lift the hood and look around if the car, you know, isn't running great, and you're not able to make it to the gas station, but you have a whole tank of gas, you might want to do some further investigation. But you're not just going to decide without investigating that you know you've got, like, a broken belt or whatever. You're going to open the hood, you're going to look around, and you're gonna stay neutral as much as you can about it. So lasting change is required when you can take a shift of perspective, a different perspective than the one that you've had around alcohol. You've made alcohol a big problem. You've made it mean a lot of things about you, that it's not normal, that this, that the other thing, and this is causing you to stay stuck. So when you can track your urges. You come closer to your relationship to alcohol, but from a new perspective, you can chill out for a second. Okay, so I want you to really decide for 100 days. I know that sounds like a long time, but man, 100 days of paying attention to yourself, This has to take literally two minutes a day. That is it you're going to. Put it by your bedside, and you're going to track your urges. That is what you're going to do. So you're going to go to my website, it's going to be right in the link in the show notes, and you're going to download this free tracking guide and urge meditation and watch your grip around alcohol just kind of soften. This is what's really important. You just want to create a little bit of space, so tracking our urges and cravings creates this idea of neutrality, of awareness, and this is the first step. Awareness is shift number one in my five shifts, process that creates alcohol freedom, that helps you step into sobriety with more confidence and less fear. So you're going to keep track of your urges, your thoughts, the trigger for the first 100 days, even if you do drink, or if you don't drink, or there's no urge at all, you might when you check in, you might realize like, Oh, I'm actually like, not even having an urge. That is huge. That is huge. We just think we want to drink all the time, and we're already thinking about it in our head. And then when the time comes, it's like, I'm gonna have an iced tea and just see what happens. So throughout this process, though, you also want to focus on what you're moving towards when you don't drink, what don't you know, what else is happening. I can't emphasize this enough. We have to look for it. There has to be a willingness to look for that new experience you get to have on the other side of alcohol, even if it's coming closer to yourself, even if it's noticing sensations in your body, but you're experiencing this shift in perspective. So rather than I'm moving away from alcohol, and moving towards more presence, more understanding, more information, more like being more available to my family, whatever it is, feeling more energy the next day. This is going to keep your energy moving towards your intention, rather than away from the expectation of the past. I've always drank. That's always the way that it is. Well, what's your intention for wanting to quit drinking in the first place? Chances are it's something along the lines of feeling better. And really, what it comes down to is being more in alignment with your authentic self, being more in alignment with who you really feel like you are on the inside, and kind of letting the insides match the outside, because we evolve, we change and like alcohol may have worked at one point, and it's not working anymore. So we can kind of drop the story of how it once was step into our adulthood, of taking personal responsibility for our lives, reparenting ourselves and understand what's going on. So this episode is kind of the guide for the 100, 100 urge day urge tracking protocol. So there's the the guide to tracking your 100 urges. There is the meditation to how to process an urge that actually walks you through it. So you take a time out. You're like, it's five o'clock. I'm feeling this urge. I'm gritting my teeth. I'm noticing it. Well, use this opportunity of noticing it to actually see what it feels like to have to sit with an urge and have a beginning, middle and end. And there's also a there's the meditation, but then there's a PDF of how to process an urge, how to actually walk yourself through an urge, so the three step process, and you can have that kind of by your bedside also, and just read through it so you know how to do it without actually having to use the meditation. But why not chill out? I mean, what these meditations do that are also part of the stop drinking and start living course is they give you an opportunity to practice the receiving, practice being present, practice pleasure, because they all relax your set, reset your nervous system. And this is what you're turning to alcohol for, because we don't know how to relax our nervous system on our own. And unless you have a drink, you're just waiting to go for the next thing. And this is something that is habit forming, and we really need as humans. I mean, I find it even without drinking, like I need to consciously practice relaxation. I need to be like, it's okay, you can chill out. We don't always have to be doing something. This is something that is a muscle and it is a habit. So the way that this urge tracking guide works is very simple. You're just gonna and when we take pen to paper, right? So I want you to print it out. Take pen to paper. You're gonna, like, check off the day, right, day one or the date, and then you're gonna write down what the circumstance was, happy hour after work, Sunday morning. Like, who knows, whatever the circumstances, vacation, camping, maybe you. Like five urges in one day. You can write those down. You can make those just part of the 100 urges. It could be days or urges. And then you're going to write down your emotion, your thought and the sensations in your body. So the emotion might be stressed, frustrated, excited, right? They could be any emotion. You're just going to use one word, and then what is the thought that's creating that emotion? So the example I give in the 100 urge tracking sheet is, I'm bored. A drink sounds great, like that's the thought. Very simple, a drink sounds great. And what is the sensation associated with that urge. So you start to come into a more, a deeper sense of embodied awareness. There's a fullness in my tongue. I used to be able to feel the salivating happening, kind of like this bubble in my throat. Maybe your chest is tight, maybe your shoulders are heavy, maybe you're stressed and you didn't even realize it, right? So you get to come into these embodied sensations and tune inward. So what's your action? Then, from this place? Do you have a drink? Do you take a break? Do you take 10 breaths? Do you decide to go for a walk? Ultimately, the goal is going to be some sort of balancing of your nervous system. Typically, when we have an urge to drink, there's like this resistance happening, there's this push pull, there's this the nervous system is not an arrest and digest state. A lot of times, the circumstance is going to be a transition. And this is very, very important for you to start to notice, because when it comes to transitions, we are just not good at it. If you notice, I've talked about this on the show, when kids transition from one thing to the next, they do weird stuff, they talk they move their body in weird way. Maybe they roll around on the floor. They do stuff that we probably shame them for typically, and we're like, sit up straight, or Come on, move a foot faster. They have the genius of still responding to the innate knowing of their nervous system, of their body's wisdom that has been probably shamed out of us or just conditioned out of us to stand up straight, be in line and do what we're told to do. So so this is an opportunity to start to cultivate more of a relationship with your body's wisdom. Creating neutral awareness is going to create a sense of safety for what's happening in your body, instead of just like, freaking out all the time and oh my god, if I don't have a drink, to like, feel a drink essentially makes you feel safe in that moment. You know what to expect. It's a familiar feeling. It's a placeholder. But when you come into this neutral awareness, where am I? I'm right here, right what are the sensations in my body? What's the thought I'm thinking? You become the witness. You get curious. Now there's a sense of safety because you're in the present moment. Okay? So we have to give ourselves time to adjust, and we have to create more awareness. And

Unknown: 18:06

this is it. This is the if you did this for

Mary Wagstaff: 18:10

100 days, after a week, you are going to have so much more awareness about who you are as a human, what your body is telling you the story that your body is inside of you, that you've been kind of burying with alcohol. And again, I know a lot of people listen that are not drinking. You can use this for anything, just as a curiosity of you're eating chocolate at night, or you find yourself scrolling and just kind of getting lost for an hour when you really want to be working on a project, right? Whatever it is, just try this for a week and see what happens. I'm also going to do it with you, so I will report back and and we will compare notes. So head on over to the website. It'll be in the show notes also. Mary wagstaffcoach.com/urge, tracking, and you will get the full protocol, the full download this, this web or episode is going with that, and you can get started. This is such a gift to yourself to start to pay attention and validate yourself in all of the ways that you want everyone else to validate you, and all of the ways that you want people to pay attention to you, this is going to do that for you, so that when you can create an inner sense of safety and an inner sense of self validation, you don't need other people to pay attention to you, because you've got your own back. And if we can't do that for ourselves in our lives, you know, and then we can go out to the people that we love and trust the most and ask them from a from a grounded, confident, embodied, you know, place of like, I'm awesome. I don't really need this, but it would be nice instead of all the defensiveness that creates conflict in relationships and. Man, this is such a game changer for your life in any area. I wish you the best of luck. You've got this going over right now. Share it with a loved one. Share it with a sister friend, and you could even do this with a sister friend, or you know someone in your life that is also trying. This would be such a great I always say, like, the buddy system isn't great when you're trying to quit drinking. But because this isn't really just about quitting drinking, this is about generating more awareness. You could do this and just compare notes and see what's like, what's working for one person, what's working for the other person, and maybe just get some tips and tricks, and that way if someone drinks or doesn't drink, it's you're not depending on that. Because this isn't about not drinking for 100 days. This is about generating awareness for 100 days, and it will actually get you so much further and move the needle so much further in your sobriety journey and in your life than not drinking for 100 days. Would I guarantee that? Have an amazing week, and I'll talk to you soon. None of this would be possible without you. I wanted to say thank you so much for being here. And as a special gift, I want to give you access to a masterclass that I created called fearless sobriety. It is going to walk you step by step through my five shifts process that is going to help you really gain a new perspective on an old habit. And once you sign up and you're registered, it'll take you only about 15 seconds, and you'll be rated. It's on demand. You will receive a bonus guided meditation that's going to help you learn how to experience sensations in your body, essentially from urges, from emotions without freaking out. It's going to help you learn to regulate your nervous system so that you can be in any situation anywhere and feel grounded and feel safe. So head on over to my website, Mary Wagstaff, coach.com it'll prompt you to click the link for the free training, and I will see you on the inside. You.