Why you should quit when your up

One of the most surprising and empowering truths in the alcohol-free journey:

The best time to change your relationship with alcohol is when you’re already feeling good.

If that sounds counterintuitive, you’re not alone. Most of us only commit to change when we’ve hit a low—after a fight, a blackout, a painful moment of regret. But what if that’s why it hasn’t stuck?

Inside this episode:

• Why feeling good can be the most powerful time to quit drinking
• How your brain tricks you into thinking it’s “not that bad”
• Why waiting for a rock-bottom moment often backfires
• How to leverage joy, momentum, and natural alignment for lasting change
• What it means to build a life you don’t need to escape from
• Why “just feeling better” isn’t a reason to stop doing the work
• How I use dance, connection, and embodiment as part of my own alcohol-free lifestyle

You’ll also hear about my first-ever ecstatic dance DJ gig (dreams do come true!), and the kind of weekend that reminds me why I keep choosing this path, over and over again.

If you’re ready to stop outsourcing your joy and learn how to amplify your good feelings instead of dulling them, this episode is your invitation.

You’ve tried to cut back on drinking but nothing sticks, you're stuck in the cycle of confusion and convincing. One day you're motivated, the next you're telling yourself it's not that bad. What makes the difference isn’t more information—it’s having a new way to apply it. Click HERE to schedule your free consult to uncover the one thought that will change everything.

DISCLAIMER: This podcast and its contents are not a substitute for rehabilitation, medical treatment or advice. It is for educational and inspirational purposes. I am not a therapist or doctor. The views here are expressed a personal opinion and based on first hand experience. Please consult a doctor if your mental or physical health is at risk.

Transcript

Mary Wagstaff: 1:14

Music. Welcome to stop drinking and start living the feminine way. I'm your hostess. Mary Wagstaff, holistic alcohol coach and feminine embodiment guide here to help you effortlessly release alcohol by reclaiming your feminine essence. Sobriety isn't just about quitting drinking, it's about removing the distortions that keep you disconnected, overwhelmed and stuck in cycles of numbing. Each week, I'll share powerful tools, new perspectives that transform and deeply relatable stories to help you step into the power pleasure and purpose that it is to be a woman. This is your next evolution of awakened empowerment. Welcome to the feminine way the show, my beautiful listeners, so last week, I eluded a little bit to the best time to quit drinking is when you're feeling good and how you can do it different this time. And this is actually another one of the ways that this time could be different, because for most people, I would including myself, you know, this isn't your first rodeo. It's like 99.9% of the time we're quitting drinking when making the decision to drink less or stop drinking, when we feel like crap, right, when the alcohol has created a negative impact on our life. And we're going to talk about this in another episode about the spectrum of rock bottom moments, like what that actually means. Sometimes there's a, you know, there is a positive like cleanse, or you're going on vacation, or you're getting, you don't want to get in shape, or going on a wedding, or there's like, a dry January moment, but most of the time, the negative impact has created the mindset that is like, I'm, you know, I'm done, I'm never drinking again. So so many, so much of the time. It's like, if we're not at like, a full rock bottom moment, then it's like, oh, after some time, we convince ourselves that that things are fine. It's not that bad. You know, nothing really that bad happened. And even if we're at a rock bottom, quote, unquote moment, right? Like that, we need to, like, hit this wall, to make this big, big change after time after that kind of wears out of the the impact of the memory. We can go back to drinking again, kind of forgetting about all of the things that happened during that time, because the brain and the reward system of learning is so, so strong and so so powerful. So most people wait until something feels really terrible, until they take action. Most of the time when people call me to sign up for a consultation, it's because they are exhausted. They're just done. They've gotten had a big blowout with a partner. They, you know, or worse, things have happened. They've just woke up hungover one too many times. And this is so fascinating that this happens if someone makes, say, schedules, a consultation for like, further than a week out. I'm often curious if they'll cancel it. Sometimes, because I know and this has happened where they start to feel better and they're like, Oh no, no, no, I don't need this. And then inevitably, they'll schedule another consultation, right, or two or three like that has happened before. It doesn't happen all that often, but if they put it too far in advance, sometimes it there. They convince themselves that they feel better. They don't. They can do it on their own, that kind of thing. So it's just an interesting thing to watch your brain, right? Like this is one of the points of awareness, right? To see that your brain is telling you again and again, oh, it's not that big of a problem, although it's happened to you repeatedly. You know, multiple times a month, multiple times a year, for many, many, many years, like alcohol has never changed. You keep getting the same results, and what's happening is you're just focused on the alcohol. You're just focused on the impact of the alcohol, and not about the bigger implications of the life that you want, who you want to become. The other things that alcohol is getting in the way of the being able to manage your emotions and take personal responsibility in your relationships, right, maybe stepping into a new career path, creating safety in your life, creating more resourcefulness in your life, really uncovering your passions, your spirituality, your connections, your health, your freedom, like there's so many other layers than just the negative impacts of alcohol. So the reason that the best time to quit drinking when you're feeling good, and I've done many episodes around like the holiday season, and it's we're coming up to summertime, and that's why I am opening enrollment for a private coaching taking you from burnout to bliss out for the summer, because there are so many natural things in our environment during a spring and summer time, if you're here in the northern hemisphere, that are going to make you feel good and are going to be resources for you to create change that you haven't used to intentionally tap into so we want to tap into the gifts of being in natural alignment, right? And if we only associate sobriety with pain, discomfort detox, then we're going to miss the joy available on the other side. But what's happened is that you've associated feeling good, and this is where there's kind of this. What do I want to say? Really big disconnect with people, where they think if they're not, if they don't drink, when they feel bad, and they only drink when they feel good, that it's not a problem. But I think it's like the opposite, like it may I mean, not really, but like it makes sense, if you are going to drink when you felt bad, right? Like, I need a drink. I can't handle this, but we have to ask the question, if you feel great, why are you drinking? Right? And I know what the answer to that is, and that is what it is for you to uncover. We think it's because we want to amplify that, but in the end, all you're doing is dulling and numbing the experience. There's this song for this artist that I like, who he just released. His name is Griz, and it says, I've been so high I can't feel a thing right. Like all you're feeling is this unnatural flood of feel good chemicals. And you're create, trying to create them on demand that you diminish and deplete them. And so actually, a lot of times the things that make you feel naturally good are are still kind of feeling dull, and it's not until you regain some balance and homeostasis with a natural production of these feel good chemicals that life starts to get really, really Good again. So you have to quit while you're ahead and build a life that you don't need to escape, but you have to do that by practicing and through observation. So we create a plan ahead of time by really looking at not your expectations, but what your intentions are, and the things from your environment that you can pull from that are already there, right? Like, again, this isn't about creating positive affirmations, but it's you being in alignment and imbalance already. That's like, oh yeah, I actually do feel really good and tapping into that where you're where you are already more resourced, and that's why I say the holiday season is actually a really good time to do this. Summer time is actually a really good time to do this. Even your birthday, right? You're getting so many well wishes. People are loving on you right now. This isn't always true for everyone, and I've talked about this too, that the opposite could be true for the holiday season as well. When you're feeling good, you're emotionally and physical, physically able to anchor to a new identity. What is the version of me like think about when you accomplish, you know, a long week, it's the weekend. What does that feel like? And we have to practice feeling that. We have to practice embodying the sensations of accomplishment, of lightness, of the possibilities of a weekend ahead where you don't have to work, and you can sleep in, and maybe you go to yoga, maybe you take a walk. I had the I sometimes on the weekends, depending on what's going on. We often have family, family adventure weekends, but sometimes we'll split up the days if Matthew or I want to do our own personal projects. And Ozzy, Matthew's older son was visiting this weekend, so on Saturday, I was working on, I don't think I even told you guys this. This is so exciting. I'm just going to say this. This is another one of the things that I stepped into for why this time was different, was I started doing ecstatic dance all the time. I've always loved to dance, but I started dancing sober, like in the morning. Was on a Sunday, and it was amazing. Well, I'm also a DJ and dreams do come true. You guys. If you're in Portland, I don't think this will come out. It's like gonna come out that day, but I'm gonna send an email out. I am DJing my first ever ecstatic dance for Portland on Wednesday night. I am so excited. So in real time, this is may 14, 2025 but hopefully there'll be more events for you to come to. So anyway, I was practicing my set, getting my set ready, so I feel super confident. So Matthew and Emmett did their project, and then on Sunday, I planned this whole like mommy and Emmett day, adventure date day. And I he had been kind of struggling with writing an essay for one of his tests that he had to do in school. So it was like, you know, what I love to do is I love to go to a coffee shop or the library and do my studying and get out of the environment. So I, like, took him on this coffee shop date, and we did his homework, and I helped him write an essay, and I asked him a bunch of questions, and we went for a bike ride, and we had a picnic by the river, and then we went and got plants, and we had ice cream, and we blasted music in the car and sang, and it was really, really fun. And all of those feelings I got to experience fully embodied, and that would have overrode any feeling that I had, any urge, any feeling of being disconnected or even being down, right? So we have to intentionally look at what's working in our lives. We have to leverage good feelings into even greater freedom. But right now, the only thing that's happened is they are the bridge between how you're feeling that natural, like feel good, feeling of accomplishment, and getting a drink, right so that that sensate like the alcohol is the bridge right now. So we have to create a new bridge, and we have to understand, like, why are you already feeling good? So when you're feeling good, you have to understand why, so that you can tap in to that energy. It's like, wow, I got a lot done today. It's sunny out. There's flowers blooming. I'm gonna go spend the time with my family. I don't have to work. I get to sleep in, like all of those things that you think it's just about a drink and a heightened emotion, but it's really not. And then you have to get curious and ask yourself, well, how do I want to feel? Do I want to keep this going, or do I want to dull this or numbness? Right? Because when with the work that I do with my clients, when we direct, have this directional experience of an embodied emotion, you can actually amplify that so you can really have a heightened experience, versus Having dissociating from how you're feeling and creating like the synthetic experience that actually just numbs how you're feeling and dulls your senses and dulls all of your sensations, right? And dulls all of the experience that you're really having. And you have to pay attention to that and get curious so you step into these new places that create that intentionally, and those are the habits, right? And it's not just about replacing but it's about starting to get curious and proving to yourself that this actually exists without consequences in another way, right? Like by intentionally spending a day with one of your kids and going out on a date and having a little picnic, taking yourself out on a date, and then emotional mastery, so regulating. Oftentimes, we think that we're just going to create this heightened experience, but we're what we're doing is we're actually bypassing emotions we don't want to experience. So even though you feel really good, we'll just use the example of a Friday afternoon, what's happening is, if you don't drink, because you're just used to just drinking like that's kind of the activity that maybe there's stress, maybe there's boredom right on the other side of that, that you actually haven't learned to be with. You haven't learned how to even be with the emotions of celebration without outsourcing it to alcohol. So we go back to a couple weeks ago, when I was celebrating my six years of alcohol freedom, and the question that I invited you into was to learn to do for yourself what you think alcohol does for you. And that's everything that we do in the private coaching container and our Summer Enrollment series from burned out to Bliss. Out. So you have to learn nervous system regulation. You have to learn how to trust and create safety in yourself, and how to create joy and connection intentionally. And we don't do it rushed, right? You had many, many years of creating this process that you have right now, going from feeling good to drinking. So you have to give yourself time and space. But what happens is you notice these little wins along the way that keep you going that you're not recognizing on your own. And so we have to evaluate, we have to measure it. We have to plan ahead of time so you get to celebrate the choice to do something different, and not just the outcome, because every day you are making an embodied choice, right, like you don't have to wait to have six years of sobriety to feel really proud of yourself to start now, it's all The little moments. It's all the little wins of not of and I can't say this enough, it's not about just not drinking, but about who you become in the process, right? It's the way that you show up for yourself, give yourself permission, the way that you take a sacred time out instead of arguing back, right? The way that you make this new decisions. And when you quit from a place of feeling joyful and feeling really good, and you're like, gosh, I want to keep feeling like this, you create a new baseline for yourself, right? You create a new standard of living, all ready? And then you start to associate sobriety with empowerment, with feeling good, with accepting yourself, not waiting for other people to accept you, and not about punishment. It's not about deprivation, right? You stop chasing the temporary highs, and you start to create this balance where you're not on this emotional roller coaster all the time, and when you know we are in cycles and rhythms, especially as women, because we have this ever present flow of emotions throughout a cycle and throughout the rest of our life, we learn how to manage it in a way that creates a steadiness, that it's not a problem. The time in between, you know, a moment of being triggered by something and dysregulated doesn't have to last for days and days, and we learn how to express it. We learn how to tell our loved ones, we learn how to talk to and tell ourselves, right and you end up realizing that alcohol never gave you what you were looking for. It just temporarily numbed the thoughts that were in the way of that right, like alcohol just lowers your inhibitions of the thoughts that you're thinking, instead of creating a new belief structure of who you are. So my invitation to you is, don't wait for another time to convince yourself, right, that you don't, that it's not that big of a deal, right? And it's not about having a quote, unquote problem. That's not it, but that from a place of empowered choice, I'm going to make a new decision right now to see what's possible when I really get to know myself, when I really get to unpack the story, when I can really show up fully confident in any social setting, and really accept myself as an alcohol free person, and not need to make excuses and not need to wait for anyone else to validate my experience. So the way to start this is to jump on a one on one call with me, and when we do that, I can really look at your specific situation and see the belief that you have that keeps coming up again and again and again for you and help you create a new thought from that place. The link is in the show notes. I can't wait to meet you and I'll talk to you soon. The days of white knuckling your way through an urge are over. No more distracting yourself, no more avoiding alcohol, no more resisting. And I am not exaggerating when I say that doing this one thing for five minutes will change not only how successful you are in drinking less, but how much you will love your alcohol free life. You are going to feel so good. So come on over to my website or follow the link right here in the show notes to grab the free urge guide that gives you the exact cheat codes to use to find relief without a drink. And the best part is no deprivation, no missing out, required. I'll see you over. Mary wagstaffcoach.com, you.