Sober Not Somber Hour

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Tuesday's Sober Not Somber hour. I'm Jennifer all and yeah, we're going to be walking through some of my recent thoughts on this rainy Tuesday in Minneapolis. Yeah, it's May 20th, and as if you've seen any of my previous content, I usually have a drink in hand. Hi, Elise. And today's non alcoholic drink of choice is Tennyson. And this particular one is called the Black ginger. And I think it's really interesting in that the story behind it is they didn't actually black pepper is a main ingredient in here and they didn't want to name it or have people know that, like black pepper was a main ingredient because there's a little bit of ginger in here.

So I'm just mixing this straight up with a little bit of sparkling water in my cocktail glass. It's such a pretty color. And the other kind of things in here, in addition to ginger and black pepper are bergamot, grapeseed, and orange. And it is such. We serve this at our events for sauna and sobriety and people just, they absolutely love it. And you can mix it, you can have it straight up on the rocks. You can mix it with peach. And sometimes, you know, we do, we kind of play around and do various mixers, even a lemon, lemonade flavor to it.

And their branding is called Sip with intention is how they talk about their product, which I think is really cool as a marketer. So mindful drinking, being intentional about what you're putting in your body, not drinking alcohol, all very intentional. Okay, cool. B Z O B I T Z has joined and I don't know your name, so welcome. I mean, maybe it's Bob, I'm not sure. Thanks for being here today. I want to tackle a subject. So Luke and I, Luke of Cadre, I was on his podcast last Wednesday and. And let me tell you, he asked some really tough questions.

I have been sober for 10 years, but I haven't felt the need to fully disclose all the details of the painful parts of what happened toward the end of my alcohol use. And I don't feel always the need to do that. But Luke asked some really interesting questions about kind of where I was at at that point in my life. And again, that was 12 years ago when I started to try to get sober. I have over 10 years of sobriety today. So if you're doing the math, that took a couple returns to use to figure out what it is that my relationship with alcohol was and to uncouple that from my life does not Happen overnight for most people who I call sober necessary.

I also labeled myself as an alcoholic and certainly you can make that case. But I definitely needed to be sober. Life or death for me. So what I want to chat about today is anxiety. And this was, I don't know, 12 plus years ago. I thought I handled everything really well. I never would have said I have anxiety. I used alcohol more to kind of turn up the fun and felt like my day to day life was fairly kind of status quo. Like I would go to work, I didn't drink at work, I was productive at work. I worked out, I did all the things.

But when five o' clock hit or that happy hour time hit, you better believe I was thinking about drinking alcohol or would soon be starting product. Probably what I would say is like a five to midnight, potentially seven hours of drinking before I would kind of reset next morning hungover and sort of do the whole thing again. So what I didn't realize, and then Luke and I's conversation was how much anxiety played a huge part toward the last year of my alcohol misuse. And prior to that I had a job in like a, a profession that was more like non profit.

It was very, it was kind of manageable. I knew what I was doing and I had that role for a decade. And when things got crazy is when I took the leap and went to a higher stress job and a different corporate environment that was very demanding. And almost immediately upon starting that role, that triggered something else within me I had never experienced before, which is this level of anxiety in the workplace that drove me to drink even more. So you always hear people talking about like a spiral, right?

Like you, it doesn't typically get better if you've started using alcohol in a certain way. It usually gets worse. So somehow I was able to kind of maintain a high functioning facade for years, two decades really of drinking. And then that last year in that corporate environment just amped up the anxiety and made the connection between anxiety and alcohol just so entwined that they, it just went back and forth between the two. It was like I couldn't wait to get that, you know, glass of alcohol in hand.

By the way, this is non alcoholic, one of my favorite beverages again, Plug for Tennyson out of Austin, Texas. That year was so stressful. And when Luke was prompting this, I was like, yeah, you know, I've never really thought about how my alcohol use changed over my life. And that was one defining moment that just sent me spiraling down because I couldn't handle the anxiety. And that that showed up in all the physical things. Your heart racing, not to mention being hungover and being at work, um, also doesn't feel great.

So this anxiety level kept creeping up before it was really brought to my attention in not the best light that I needed help, that I had a drinking problem. So how many of you listening, you know, live or even after experienced that connection with anxiety and alcohol? I mean for me it was like if I had to list the things. And I think this is good if you are thinking about mindfully drinking is to understand what alcohol actually does for you. And it might not be the same answer for everyone. It's not for me.

Alcohol made me feel good enough. Luke and I talked about that in the podcast too. Like, it's just like this restlessness of like, what can I do to be more engaging, more fun to like fit in. And it was this pressure or this anxiety that had me turn to alcohol. In many cases it made me as an introvert definitely I felt more social and more fun. And then at the end that last year I added on the layer of that helped me cope with having to go into this workplace that caused so much, so much stress. Yeah.

So it's a thing. It's a thing. And if you haven't looked at your relationship with alcohol, it can be hard to discern all the things I, until that conversation recently, I hadn't really been pushed to dig deeper. So I would encourage that if you do have that relationship with alcohol or if you've had it in the past, to re examine it. It's really interesting. It can tell you things about how you engage socially and hopefully with the rise of NA beverages, those cues in social spaces can be a little different.

Like I love that I can have a non alcoholic beverage in hand and no one questions me as to what I'm drinking. No one cares. They just want you to look like you're having fun and engaged. So I can do that. I know everyone can do that. So there you have it. Sip with intention. Try out Tennyson. It's available in three different bottle shops in the Twin Cities. If you're local, you can also find it online. They're a company out of Austin, Texas. So the bottle shops are Lucille's Bottle Shop, the Zero Proof Beverage House and Marigold.

So those three are really great options. And yeah, let's, let's just drink away this cold rainy weather and hope that the sun comes out very soon. Hope everyone has a great evening post happy hour. Just letting some of the anxiety maybe or stress go of the day in a healthy way. I wish that for you all. Cheers. N a cheers.