E120 - How & Why I Stopped Drinking

Alex discusses his relationship with alclohol, how and why he chose to go sober, as well as recent cultural trends around drinking and observations on how society deals with the problem of alcohol. He also discussed some tools and mindsets you could adopt in an effort to reduce drinking or any other undesirable habit. 

Dr. Alex Curmi is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Time Magazine Article: 

https://time.com/7203140/gen-z-drinking-less-alcohol/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

NY Resolution / Behaviour Change Podcast: 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1nTR2YzPj1yyO3UzUAv9mO?si=4RCE48uPT3yPDGNb4Y1BzA

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/why-new-years-resolutions-fail-and-what-to-do-instead/id1466932169?i=1000682468734

Transcript

Welcome back. So today I thought I'd do something a bit different. I wanted to talk a little bit about my experiences with alcohol and maybe some things I've observed in terms of how alcohol interacts with society, culture, and other people. And of course, no doubt we'll be discussing a little bit about how alcohol interacts our mental health and our biology and physiology and things like that.

But I think in contrast to podcasts we've made before, I wanted to include a little bit of my personal experience as well. Obviously, as the title of this episode implies this is going to be a podcast about how and why I stopped drinking, and I'm not really trying to change anyone's behavior, but I think if I had one hope for this podcast, it would be.

That it provokes some thought that whatever your relationship with alcohol happens to be, even if you're totally [00:01:00] sober, you might think a little bit differently or perhaps a little bit more deeply about your relationship with alcohol, and perhaps today's conversation might also inform your relationship with other different habits in your life, some of the good and less good habits that you might happen to engage with.

This issue of sobriety is of course, becoming more topical, which is also interesting to watch. I'm gonna put a link in description to an article from Time Magazine that basically indicates that Gen Z appears to be drinking much less while older generations like the boomer generation is actually drinking more.

But a 2024 study apparently found that 30% of 18 to 24 year olds reported drinking less than the previous year. 13% had actually stopped entirely. Another study saying nearly half of young people aged 18 to 34 have given up drinking entirely. Generally influenced by things like health concerns, the [00:02:00] culture shift, potentially a move towards using other drugs like cannabis more.

And there's obviously a lot on social media promoting sobriety. And with that, using interesting industry trends as well, like the rise of low alcohol or zero alcohol drinks. So definitely very topical. Let's get started and hopefully, we'll, we'll enter some interesting territory. To give you some background, I would say my relationship with alcohol was pretty typical.

I started drinking when I was a teenager and continued through most of my university years and adult professional life and. I wouldn't say I had a particularly problematic relationship with alcohol. It's never really something I felt compelled to do. It's never really something I felt dependent on in any serious way.

But as I got through my later twenties and early thirties, I think what started to bother me about alcohol was the degree to which it [00:03:00] was rigidly fixed to certain other aspects of my life, like the the key one, probably being my social life. I never really drank by myself, which of course is a good thing, but it bothered me how much alcohol became the norm in basically any kind of social situation and sometimes work social situations as well and compulsions, or when things become automatic and reflexive.

That's always something that bothered me and I started to worry about to what extent. People use alcohol almost every time when they're in a social situation that it weakens their ability to have a social situation sober. It weakens their social skills or worsens their social anxiety. Obviously social anxiety.

You see something that you see quite common clinically and all the while, of course, um, specializing in psychiatry and mental [00:04:00] health, and you are learning more and more. How much alcohol has such a detrimental effect on the body. In some of my first few years of medical practice working in inpatient hospitals, you just see over and over again people coming in because they are alcohol dependent and their livers are totally malfunctioning, or they've given themselves alcohol related dementia and things like that.

And although my alcohol use was never going to be so problematic that it was gonna get to that point. You do start to realize it's just a choice between poisoning yourself very suddenly and, and, and abruptly versus slowly poisoning yourself in small doses throughout 10 or 20 years. And either, either way, it didn't seem like a particularly good picture.

So as I got into my later twenties and early thirties, I think a lot of what. Motivated me actually wasn't the, the negative [00:05:00] feelings of addiction, which I appreciate. That is a problem for a lot of people for different reasons, but for me it was actually curiosity, like what was available beyond the typical experience that I had been culturally, you know, accustomed to what, what could it be like strangely enough to take away something from my experience and would that change my life in any meaningful sense?

I think having gone through this process with alcohol, it kind of gave me a lot of perspective about lots of different habits and obviously I've talked about habits, quite a fair deal on the podcast and I made that New Year's resolution episode last January, which guide someone as to how to make a new US resolution, and I definitely learned a lot of those principles of behavior change through the lens of alcohol.

I think. What this process has forced me to realize is the difference between taking a short term [00:06:00] view on a habit and a long term view habits don't really have that much of an impact on the, on the short term. If I am a drinker for one day, if I have a few drinks on one day, that's not gonna impact my life that much.

All that's going to mean is that I'm probably a little bit hungover tomorrow. The. Impact of habits are really felt in the weeks, months, and years. That's where, where compounding happens. So the effect of being a drinker is not felt over a few days. It's gonna be felt over a few years or, or even a decade, and it's gonna be felt very slowly, which is of course is why it's so hard to to quit alcohol if you don't have a hugely problematic relationship with it.

Ironically, people who have a somewhat more serious alcohol addiction, yeah, they might find it really hard, but at least what they have is the strong motivation. Like in those instances, alcohol is often [00:07:00] destroying someone's life. But if you're a casual drinker, like I suspect much of the audience might be, it's really hard 'cause you're not feeling the effects that acutely.

So what I found was with alcohol, I really had to, I. Meditate on what would be the effect of my, albeit really casual drinking over a five to 10 year period. How would it impact my health? How would it impact my social life and my social skills? How would it impact my professional life? What would it get in the way of, and of course, what would it give me?

It's reasonable also to think like, what does alcohol give you? 'cause it's not, if alcohol didn't give you any positives, it's people wouldn't drink at all and. Meditating on that, you just realize that you should choose what habits you engage with or not based on, on the long term. For the most part, you should choose what diet to eat based on what the effects will be over [00:08:00] a 10 year period.

I mean, nowadays, at the moment, people are talking a lot about investing because of all the situation with economic tariffs. And if you're listening to this podcast in five years time, this might date us a bit, but. At the moment, we're in April, 2025, and there is currently a trade war of sorts between the US and China, and so everyone's freaking out because of the stock market, market volatility that's happening.

Very short term volatility over a few days and weeks. And one of the things you learn very quickly if you get into financial investing is that it's all about the long term. Yes, some people try and time things correctly and do the right thing at the right time. But really what most investors tell you it's about is making those short term slightly uncomfortable decisions regularly over time.

And if you do that, then your financial investments will compound and you'll end up with a really good sum of money that continues to work in your favor. And I think the [00:09:00] same is true with other habits. The same is true with alcohol. If you continue to drink over a 10 year period. The negative effects of that will compound albeit slowly, but they will compound you might be in 10 years, somewhat mentally, less sharp, somewhat physically, less able, socially, less sharp.

It's hard to quantify exactly what the effect on your career might be. Um, but even your ability to have fun sober, I think would, would be impacted. I think it's really helpful to keep in mind that when you've been given a mind, when you've been given a human brain. If you've been given a kind of supercomputer and if anyone was ever gifted a supercomputer, one thing they probably wouldn't do, although some people might do it, but most people probably wouldn't slowly and regularly bash it right in the processor and smiled, damage it two days a week for 10 years.

But that's kind of what people do with their brains all the time, and [00:10:00] your brain is really the only lens. Through which you experience all of the different facets of life, and that includes the really hard parts. Yeah. Work and, and diligence and discipline. But it also includes the fun stuff, enjoying sunsets, enjoying time with friends, experiencing moments of profundity, ex experiencing moments of like sub sublime beauty.

And it's not like alcohol just damages your ability to be disciplined and hardworking, although clearly it does. Specifically, it damages the prefrontal cortex, which will affect that, but it also affects your ability to have fun. It affects your ability to have fun in the moment, of course, because the more you drink alcohol when you're socializing, I think over time the more you need alcohol to socialize.

I don't know if that comes across as a controversial statement, but then of course it also affects your ability to have fun the next day when you're hungover in. In which case. [00:11:00] Your liver is processing your alcohol into something called acetaldehyde, which is one of the things that gives you that really, really unpleasant feeling when you're hungover.

So yes, ultimately it's about compounding and the long term. Now, what were the biggest benefits to stopping drinking? I think for me the biggest benefits were definitely more energy and more mental clarity, and I think I really did not appreciate actually how nice it is. To have mental clarity in a social situation and in terms of energy, what I found was if you drink, you have an immediate spike of energy kind of immediately, and that makes sense because alcohol obviously tends to have sugar in it.

Most alcoholic drinks do, but then alcohol also causes. Kind of quick release of dopamine, but then whether you continue drinking or not, what you tend to find is, especially if you do continue [00:12:00] drinking, your energy tends to slump. Now, what I found when I quit drinking, and really the way I quit drinking, was I went through a period of about six months where I would probably only allow myself, you know, one or two drinks per event or occasion.

And then kind of organically as I got deeper into the mindset that I mentioned earlier. I just kind of stopped and because I started with a mindset change, the behavior change came quite easily and automatically, and I appreciate that the case. That's not the case for everyone. Some people need to really work on the behavior strategies, especially if alcohol is a big part of their life.

But for me, I was lucky. So I feel like the mindset shift came first, the so-called inner work and then that allowed my behaviors. To change very, very comfortably. I didn't feel like I had to do exert a lot of discipline, and so I managed to transition from very limited drinking to [00:13:00] basically being sober, and I've been sober for about six months.

One of the most surprising things I found really, besides the energy shift I mentioned earlier was just how it activates the insecurities of other people and. In general, when I, you know, tell people I'm not drinking, it's not, I'm not really trying to persuade any, anyone similar to the listeners of this podcast, or I'm not really trying to persuade any of you to quit drinking.

I wouldn't really try and persuade anyone in my personal life or social life, but even just making that statement, you know, no I'm not drinking, tends to activate something in people. And what I found. Quite a lot was I immediately, people would feel some need to justify why they're drinking or talk in some way about their relationship with alcohol, why alcohol might be a problem for them or might not be a problem at all, which I [00:14:00] found strange.

I don't, for instance, find this problem with food as much. Like if someone says they're doing something with their diet, I don't find that people typically respond by. Needing to justify what their relationship with food is. But with alcohol, that seems to be the case, and I kind of think that's the case with alcohol because people aren't stupid.

I think most people basically intuit on some level, even if it's an unconscious level, that alcohol is a bad idea, and I think alcohol is even low Levels of alcohol is kind of an act of self-sabotage when you think about it. I mean, you could look at it physiologically. Of course it's not. Actually hyperbole or metaphor to say alcohol is a poison or a neurotoxin, it literally is.

We don't really discuss that too often. I think you know, the reason why alcohol can cause people to black out or have blurry memories, for example, is because it interferes with the functioning of the [00:15:00] hippocampus. The reason why alcohol makes you off balance or slur your speech. It is because it interrupts neuronal signaling in the, in the cerebellum.

Alcohol is an actual poison, not a metaphorical poison. And so I think some, on some unconscious level people understand this. And so as soon as someone is demonstrating that this doesn't have to be a compulsion, like this can be a choice, like a real choice. And it's really worth pointing out that for many, many people, alcohol is not a choice.

Like if you need to drink more or less in every social situation. It's no longer a choice for you. And I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but I, I think that's the case. And it's, it's threatening, I think, to a lot of people when, when someone demonstrates that there's a choice. So I was really surprised to find that people really had to justify it, and I don't think they should.

You know, people commit small acts of self, self-harm all the time. It's very human. It's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm certainly not exempt from that. [00:16:00] But that's, that's what I saw really commonly, and that's one of the most surprising things I found. The other thing I learned socially when not drinking, and I think this mirrors the point I raised about energy before, just like with energy, I found that you have to kind of gain energy through an event when you're not drinking.

I found the same was true with social anxiety and social fluidity. I think it's pretty normal to go to a social event and feel an extent of social anxiety. And of course alcohol is a quick off switch for that. If you, if you go to a social event and immediately start drinking, it brings you more or less within a few minutes, immediate relief from anxiety.

And I think most people who drink aren't accustomed to the fact that if you go into a social event sober, what will typically happen is you will feel anxious a little bit. Then that anxiety will [00:17:00] fade and fade and fade and then drop to nothing as you're having more and more fun and gaining more and more energy.

So just like with energy, there's this price to be paid. If you can tolerate a bit of low energy at the beginning, you'll then gain and gain energy throughout. And I think the same is true with feeling more socially fluid. You start off feeling a little bit awkward. You have to get into the rhythm of, of socializing, especially if you've been by yourself or.

Trying to accomplish tasks all day. And then you're put into a social situation and most people never get over that hump. They feel that hump and they feel that awkwardness and they think, well, the only way to get rid of that awkwardness is alcohol. But it's not just not true if you just, the people only think that because.

They've been accustomed to drinking for most of their social lives typically, and that might be 5, 10, 15 years of socializing and what one learns pretty quickly over a few weeks and months if you stop drinking entirely, is that like sense of awkwardness and [00:18:00] anxiety goes away pretty quickly and, and then that opens up the possibility for new horizons.

Then you get the benefit of feeling like socially fluid, but also having energy, but also having mental clarity. And it's a, it's a really nice space to be and then you don't have the hangover the next day, which is also pretty good. I think it's interesting to think about alcohol and stress as well.

Obviously one of the many reasons people might drink is to de-stress. That's what people will talk about a lot. And it's very similar to that initial social anxiety I just mentioned. It's very human and very natural and understandable. If we feel a negative emotion to want to give it, to pull that off switch, I just, I'm feeling it, it's unpleasant and I just want it to go away.

Whereas what you learn if you study psychology and mental health is what you want to do with negative emotions is not switch them off. [00:19:00] Exactly. Like that's not the most sustainable solution. 'cause it's quite hard. So even like psychologically, without using drugs or alcohol, just like repressing your negative emotions, it does kind of work in the moment.

But you pay a long-term price because negative emotions, if you repress them consciously, they build up, build up and come out in other ways. And I think the same is true if you repress them with drugs or alcohol or even repress them with work addiction or things like that. What you want to do with negative emotions is process them.

You, you, you want to deal with them in a little bit more of a head-on way. You want to understand why am I feeling this negative emotion and what does it mean and what information can I learn from this, and how should that information affect my behavior or the way I'm looking at things. Differently. So if you look at stress, if you, if you have a lot of stress from your work life, it's worth reflecting If this is happening all the time, you know, what about my work is stressing me out [00:20:00] and how could I potentially deal with it differently?

What practical changes could or should I make around my work to make things a little more tolerable? Uh, and then of course, having allowed yourself to feel and process that stress and let it inform your decision making. There's all sorts of ways to, to de-stress that don't involve any kind of substance.

And of course one of them is actually socializing. So socializing itself, like being with people you really like, sharing experiences, laughing with them, having a good time is itself a huge de-stress, and it just doesn't require alcohol. Yes, as I said before, it may require that period of discomfort first, but that's just gonna go away.

The more you get used to it, the more that would be the case. And then outside of social situations, there's all sorts of ways to de-stress. You know, if you know how to do something like mindfulness meditation, you can get from a pretty stressful place to a pretty unstressed place [00:21:00] within a few minutes if you know how to do that.

Uh, exercise obviously is another really useful tool in the toolkit. Other kinds of breath work as well. So there's a ton of things you can do to de-stress. Then obviously the socializing, which is where a lot of people drink anyway, that in and of itself should be seen as the treatment for stress. And then I would wonder, you know, 'cause I can hear maybe the objections from the listeners know what if the social situation remains really stressful?

Then I wonder what that could mean about the people that you're spending time with. Like, that's the other thing about stopping drinking is it might actually. Make you reevaluate who you're spending time with and how much you actually enjoy the company. It didn't really in my case, but certainly it can, because often when we're sober, we have that increased mental clarity and that can open up the horizons for wanting an actual deeper connection.

And then sometimes that happens and you realize maybe the connection was more based around just the drinking itself [00:22:00] or maybe having that shared experience of. Having fun and not really having that deeper connection with the person. There's another interesting question around how do you handle it when there are moments of temptation or maybe you get a craving to drink, and I think through this process like everyone else, of course there were times when I felt, oh, definitely would be nice to have a drink right now.

You'd feel that urge a lot of times, despite our best efforts, we can feel those compulsions in the moment. I think for me, the easiest technique to handle that kind of thing is to do something called future projection, which is when you have that craving, you then decide to follow that craving mentally to its logical conclusion.

So if you get a craving to do something like. Drink alcohol. You think, okay, what happens if I, let's just play it out. I'll follow that craving. I'll have [00:23:00] the couple of drinks. I'll feel that nice feeling. I'll feel more confident, less anxiety. I. I'll enjoy the taste of it, and then I will feel a bit groggy and then my speech will be slurred and then I'll feel lower in energy and then I'll feel a bit annoyed because I didn't stick to my commitment of not drinking.

And then my sleep will be slightly disrupted. Uh, and which I actually found quite a lot when I did drink, is that even a little bit of alcohol would really disrupt my sleep. And of course sleep is so foundational for health. And then I'd wake up in the morning feeling a bit annoyed and feeling that slight hangover from having drank.

So I really found this useful. I, I found it useful. All sorts of habits to just, if you, when you feel that temptation to automatically project yourself into the future and, and almost give into the craving mentally, and then just follow it through its logical conclusion. So that's how I kind of dealt with.

Temptations around alcohol, [00:24:00] and now I just find that the temptation isn't very present at all. There is really something to be said about habit forming, where the longer you follow a habit, just the easier and more automatic it becomes. The last point I want to make about culture and how it relates to alcohol.

Something else that's bothered me for a long time. I know I've talked about a lot of things that bother me today, but one thing that's always concerned me is the first dichotomies that culture and society tends to set up for people. Kind of like a trap. You have to fall into one camp or another. For example, you have to be right wing or left wing.

You have to be pro business or pro-environment, pro individual responsibility versus pro systemic change. In the case of alcohol, I think the false dichotomy that's set up is you can be healthy or you can have fun, but you can't do both. So you're either fun, in which case you drink alcohol like everyone else, or you're choosing to be healthy, in which case you [00:25:00] have to sacrifice having fun, and in some cases being a fun person.

I do think calling back to those trends I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, it sounds like Gen Z is waking up to this kind of lie that of course it's a total fiction that you need to drink alcohol, you need to ingest a literal poison in order to have fun. But it's something I wanted to mention because I think these forced dichotomies happen all the time, and I think it can be really misleading for people.

So if you're listening to this and you are feeling a bit compelled to maybe look at your relationship with alcohol or change it, maybe reduce the amount that you're drinking. One really useful heuristic I found about how to change any behavior, and this is kind of what I use in my behavior change process, is something like inspiration, motivation, intention plan.

Discipline, habit, passion, [00:26:00] and you kind of want to look at all of those different things and see what things can you put in place to maximize them. So inspiration that might be a little bit more of that future projection we already talked about. So imagine what your life might look like in two years, five years, 10 years if you manage to quit drinking entirely.

And what you know, a lot of it is about opportunity cost. What does alcohol get in the way of, for example. Going out and drinking Friday and Saturday night might get in the way of you starting your business on the side that you want to start. And if you stop drinking and you can work on that, then in two years, five years, 10 years, your life might look very different because you managed to quit and, and then you can also look at negative inspiration.

So you can do the same thing, you know, what does my look my life look like in two years, five years, 10 years? Even if you're not drinking that much and you might not have this huge terrible impact of alcohol consumption, it might be [00:27:00] just the kind of mediocrity of where your main might be enough to give you that negative inspiration that pushes you.

And then of course, you've already hopefully come up with the positive inspiration that pulls you and that could be helpful. So that's inspiration. Then there's motivation. So you want to really, motivation is something that obviously waxes and wanes. Sometimes we'll be more positively motivated to do the things we want to do, and sometimes there'll be more negative motivation, and you really want to become the architect of your own motivation.

So you want to structure everything to give you as much positive motivation as possible, and as little negative motivation as possible. So when people are, for example, trying to change their diet. What's one of the first things they'll do is they'll clear the house of junk food, so that will remove the negative motivation that compels them to eat junk food.

You definitely want to do that with alcohol. With With alcohol. That looks like clearing out alcohol from your home. It might [00:28:00] mean spending less time in environments. There is alcohol, although I think there's a careful balance to be struck there as well. Because if you happen to socialize at a lot of events and places where there is alcohol, you don't necessarily want to limit yourself from that because that can really limit your social life, which, which wouldn't necessarily be be a good thing, but it might be worth looking at, you know, where you spend your time and who, who you spend your time with.

You might have different types of friends, friends who drink more, and friends who drink less, and obviously, especially when you're starting out. Definitely, it'll be easier to spend time with your friends who drink less, but as you get used to it and gain more confidence, then that might be the time to hang out more with the friends who do drink.

You definitely want to have like a strong and clear specific intention. You want to have a clear goal and it's always easier to work, work towards a goal when it's specific, and that might be, I want to not drink for 90 days, and it's okay even if you don't quite make it, [00:29:00] even if you have one or two drinks in 90 days.

At least you have a specific goal. Specific goals are much easier because it's much easier to determine how successful or not you're being, and that can be much more grounding. Uh, and, and you want to have a plan. You want to have a plan for all the difficult situations you're likely to encounter. Or I'm gonna be at a wedding, or I'm gonna be on a holiday and that's gonna be tricky.

Or I'm going to a bachelor or bachelorette party. That's gonna be tricky. You want to anticipate when those difficult moments are likely to come up and have a plan, okay, if I get stressed at this event, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take myself outside, I'm gonna talk to this person. Or I'm going to make some notes about things I'm going to tell myself when I'm in the situation, which is a little bit tempting, or I'm going to plan to do my future projection, or things along those lines.

So that's intention and plan. And of course there's the role of discipline. As I mentioned before, if you're trying to give up [00:30:00] anything, there will be times when you have cravings and temptations and you need to have a plan for that and sometimes need to have discipline as much as you set everything up to maximize the positive motivation, minimize the negative motivation, which means you need to use as little discipline as possible.

There will be times when it's just hard and you have to accept that discipline. I think discipline can be thought of as a muscle that. The more you use it, the more able you are to use it. And in those crucial moments when you need it, it's gonna be there. But it is worth keeping in mind that I think across a day discipline can get exhausted and willpower can get exhausted.

So that's why you want to set up your motivation correctly, as I just mentioned. As I said, habits, habits will take hold. Do have faith that if we can do this for like 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, it will become automatic as is every habit in your life. Like you [00:31:00] probably didn't have to be particularly inspired or motivated to brush your teeth today or to prepare food or to go to work, and that's because a lot of that is unconscious force of habit.

And then leave the room open for passion. As strange as it is, doing something unusual, even if it's subtracting something like subtracting alcohol can inspire passion. It can be really interesting and inspiring to explore new experiences, and it can be really confidence building because. You're suddenly able to do something which most people find really challenging and maybe which you found challenging for a long time.

And it's always really, it's always really confidence building when you push through something difficult and then achieve a sense of peace or accomplishment on the other side. That that's something that I've found and clients I've worked with have found is always really satisfying. So. You want to leave the [00:32:00] door open for you, you might become more passionate about this and it might lead you to make other choices with which are a bit more, you know, health conscious.

It might inspire you to change your diet or it might inspire you to do more physical exercise. And of course, these things also compound within each other. Like if you were drinking and now you managed to stop. That means your sleep is gonna be better, which means you, when you wake up on Saturday, you're gonna be much more likely to have energy and the ability to exercise if you wish to.

If you exercise, then you're probably gonna be more motivated to eat healthy. If you exercise and eat healthy, your sleep will be better and so on. So definitely make room for the passion that if you make some headway with this, probably it can ignite something in you and really inspire a lot of confidence.

I. Could then you could translate in into other aspects of your life as well. So if you listen to [00:33:00] this and you feel a little compelled maybe to change your own relationship with alcohol, that's how I would go about doing it. But as I said at the beginning, I'm not necessarily intending this podcast to motivate someone else to change necessarily, but I do hope.

Listening to this has at least caused you to reflect a little bit on your relationship with alcohol or perhaps your relationship with other habits that you have, and I hope that you got something from it. If you have any feedback or mild criticism or harsh overt criticism, feel free to email us as always at Thinking Mind podcast@gmail.com.

If you'd like to support the podcast, as always, you can share it with a friend. Give us a rating or a review wherever you listen or watch that really helps people to find us. Please follow or subscribe if you're not already. That really helps the podcast to grow, and as the podcast grows, we can continue to make it better and better.[00:34:00] 

If you want to support us further, check out some of the links in the description. At the moment, I'm not taking on new psychotherapy clients. I do have a waiting list for that, but I'm not adding anyone new to the waiting list at the moment. I am in the next few months looking to take on more behavior change coaching clients.

So what that means is. Whatever aspect of your life you want to change. One of the big factors at play there is someone's behavior. So in contrast to psychotherapy, which is generally a longer, slower process where I might work with someone to improve their self-awareness and reflect on their past and process different experiences.

With behavior change coaching, it's a lot more about aggressively targeting a set of behaviors, making a very clear and specific plan to help you move towards your goal. So if you're listening to this and you have a very clear goal that you want to work on and you feel very motivated to work on that [00:35:00] goal, you can contact me and we can work on it together one-on-one.

For that email, Alex k kmi therapy@gmail.com and put coaching in the subject line. Of course, as much as possible, I do want you to be able to access all of the tools that you need to change your behavior on the podcast, and I try my best to do that. But working with someone one-on-one can be super helpful because it gives you that accountability and it can often shave weeks, months, years off of the time you need to accomplish that goal.

So if you're interested in that, do reach out. As I mentioned before, there is a podcast I released in January of this year. I'll put a link to that as well in the description. That is the New Year's Resolution podcast. Of course, you don't just have to use that at New Year's, but it's a very much in depth step-by-step plan mentioning a lot of the principles we mentioned today and more about how to build behavior change from the ground up in order to maximize your chances of success.

[00:36:00] As always, thank you for listening, and we'll see you here next time.