Imposter Syndrome (and why almost everyone has it)
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Imposter Syndrome (and why almost everyone has it)
Imposter syndrome is the pervasive idea that we’re not actually good enough, people think we are better than we are, and at any moment we’re going to get found out and disappoint everyone.
Beyond the workplace
Imposter syndrome is most associated with professionals. It can range from a medical professional who feels like they’ve been projecting an image of confidence too much, to a writer or musician who is sure that their next piece will never live up to the acclaim of previous pieces and everyone will suddenly realize they don’t know what they’re doing, to a middle-manager who feels like nobody above or below them realizes how little they know how to do.
But! Less talked-about (but no less prevalent) is imposter syndrome in other areas of life. New parents tend to feel this strongly, as can the “elders” of a family that everyone looks to for advice and strength and support. Perhaps worst is when the person most responsible for the finances of a household feels like everyone just trusts them to keep everything running smoothly, and maybe they shouldn’t because it could all come crashing down at any moment and everyone will see them for the hopeless shambles of a human being that they really are.
Feelings are not facts
And yet (while everyone makes mistakes sometimes) the reality is that we’re all doing our best. Given that imposter syndrome affects up to 82% of people, let’s remember to have some perspective. Everyone feels like they’re winging it sometimes. Everyone feels the pressure.
Well, perhaps not everyone. There’s that other 18%. Some people are sure they’re the best thing ever. Then again, there’s probably some in that 18% that actually feel worse than the 82%—they just couldn’t admit it, even in an anonymized study.
But one thing’s for sure: it’s very, very common. Especially in high-performing women, by the way, and people of color. In other words, people who typically “have to do twice as much to get recognized as half as good”.
That said, the flipside of this is that people who are not in any of those categories may feel “everything is in my favor, so I really have no excuse to not achieve the most”, and can sometimes take very extreme actions to try to avoid perceived failure, and it can be their family that pays the price.
Things to remember
If you find imposter syndrome nagging at you, remember these things:
- There are people far less competent than you, doing the same thing
- Nobody knows how to do everything themselves, especially at first
- If you don’t know how to do something, you can usually find out
- There is always someone to ask for help, or at least advice, or at least support
At the end of the day, we evolved to eat fruit and enjoy the sun. None of us are fully equipped for all the challenges of the modern world, but if we do our reasonable best, and look after each other (and that means that you too, dear reader, deserve looking after as well), we can all do ok.
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Is Air-Fried Food Really Healthier?
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Air-frying has a reputation for being healthy—and it generally is, provided it’s used carefully:
Just one thing to watch out for
An air-fryer is basically a small convection oven that uses circulating air rather than immersion in oil to cook food. The smallness of an air-fryer is a feature not a bug—if you get an air-fryer over a certain size, then congratulations, you just have a convection oven. The small size it what helps it to cook so efficiently. This is one reason that they’re not really used in industrial settings.
The documentary-makers from this video had their food (chicken, fish, and fries) lab-tested (for fat, cholesterol, and acrylamide), and found:
- Air-frying significantly reduced saturated fat (38–53%) and trans fats (up to 55%) in some foods.
- Cholesterol reduction varied depending on the food type.
- Acrylamide levels in air-fried potatoes were much higher due to cooking time and temperature.
About that acrylamide: acrylamide forms in starchy foods at high temperatures and may pose cancer risks (the research is as yet unclear, with conflicting evidence). Air-frying can cause higher acrylamide levels if cooking is prolonged or temperatures are too high.
Recommendations to reduce acrylamide:
- Soak potatoes before cooking.
- Use lower temperatures (e.g. 180℃/350℉) and shorter cooking times.
- Avoid over-browning food.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Unlock Your Air-Fryer’s Potential!
Take care!
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Cheeky diet soft drink getting you through the work day? Here’s what that may mean for your health
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Many people are drinking less sugary soft drink than in the past. This is a great win for public health, given the recognised risks of diets high in sugar-sweetened drinks.
But over time, intake of diet soft drinks has grown. In fact, it’s so high that these products are now regularly detected in wastewater.
So what does the research say about how your health is affected in the long term if you drink them often?
Breakingpic/Pexels What makes diet soft drinks sweet?
The World Health Organization (WHO) advises people “reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than 10% of their total energy intake. A further reduction to below 5% or roughly 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day would provide additional health benefits.”
But most regular soft drinks contain a lot of sugar. A regular 335 millilitre can of original Coca-Cola contains at least seven teaspoons of added sugar.
Diet soft drinks are designed to taste similar to regular soft drinks but without the sugar. Instead of sugar, diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. The artificial sweeteners include aspartame, saccharin and sucralose. The natural sweeteners include stevia and monk fruit extract, which come from plant sources.
Many artificial sweeteners are much sweeter than sugar so less is needed to provide the same burst of sweetness.
Diet soft drinks are marketed as healthier alternatives to regular soft drinks, particularly for people who want to reduce their sugar intake or manage their weight.
But while surveys of Australian adults and adolescents show most people understand the benefits of reducing their sugar intake, they often aren’t as aware about how diet drinks may affect health more broadly.
Diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. Vintage Tone/Shutterstock What does the research say about aspartame?
The artificial sweeteners in soft drinks are considered safe for consumption by food authorities, including in the US and Australia. However, some researchers have raised concern about the long-term risks of consumption.
People who drink diet soft drinks regularly and often are more likely to develop certain metabolic conditions (such as diabetes and heart disease) than those who don’t drink diet soft drinks.
The link was found even after accounting for other dietary and lifestyle factors (such as physical activity).
In 2023, the WHO announced reports had found aspartame – the main sweetener used in diet soft drinks – was “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (carcinogenic means cancer-causing).
Importantly though, the report noted there is not enough current scientific evidence to be truly confident aspartame may increase the risk of cancer and emphasised it’s safe to consume occasionally.
Will diet soft drinks help manage weight?
Despite the word “diet” in the name, diet soft drinks are not strongly linked with weight management.
In 2022, the WHO conducted a systematic review (where researchers look at all available evidence on a topic) on whether the use of artificial sweeteners is beneficial for weight management.
Overall, the randomised controlled trials they looked at suggested slightly more weight loss in people who used artificial sweeteners.
But the observational studies (where no intervention occurs and participants are monitored over time) found people who consume high amounts of artificial sweeteners tended to have an increased risk of higher body mass index and a 76% increased likelihood of having obesity.
In other words, artificial sweeteners may not directly help manage weight over the long term. This resulted in the WHO advising artificial sweeteners should not be used to manage weight.
Studies in animals have suggested consuming high levels of artificial sweeteners can signal to the brain it is being starved of fuel, which can lead to more eating. However, the evidence for this happening in humans is still unproven.
You can’t go wrong with water. hurricanehank/Shutterstock What about inflammation and dental issues?
There is some early evidence artificial sweeteners may irritate the lining of the digestive system, causing inflammation and increasing the likelihood of diarrhoea, constipation, bloating and other symptoms often associated with irritable bowel syndrome. However, this study noted more research is needed.
High amounts of diet soft drinks have also been linked with liver disease, which is based on inflammation.
The consumption of diet soft drinks is also associated with dental erosion.
Many soft drinks contain phosphoric and citric acid, which can damage your tooth enamel and contribute to dental erosion.
Moderation is key
As with many aspects of nutrition, moderation is key with diet soft drinks.
Drinking diet soft drinks occasionally is unlikely to harm your health, but frequent or excessive intake may increase health risks in the longer term.
Plain water, infused water, sparkling water, herbal teas or milks remain the best options for hydration.
Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Real Benefit Of Genetic Testing
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Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods
Genetic testing is an oft-derided American pastime, but there’s a lot more to it than finding out about your ancestry!
Note: because there are relatively few companies offering health-related genetic testing services, and we are talking about the benefits of those services, some of this main feature may seem like an advert.
It’s not; none of those companies are sponsoring us, and if any of them become a sponsor at some point, we’ll make it clear and put it in the clearly-marked sponsor segment.
As ever, our only goal here is to provide science-backed information, to enable you to make your own, well-informed, decisions.
Health genomics & genetic testing
The basic goal of health genomics and genetic testing is to learn:
- What genetic conditions you have
- Clearcut genetic conditions, such as Fragile X syndrome, or Huntington’s disease
- What genetic predispositions you have
- Such as an increased/decreased risk for various kinds of cancer, diabetes, heart conditions, and so forth
- What genetic traits you have
- These may range from “blue eyes” to “superathlete muscle type”
- More specifically, pharmacogenomic information
- For example, “fast caffeine metabolizer” or “clopidogrel (Plavix) non-responder” (i.e., that drug simply will not work for you)
Wait, what’s the difference between health genomics and genetic testing?
- Health genomics is the science of how our genes affect our health.
- Genetic testing can be broadly defined as the means of finding out which genes we have.
A quick snippet…
More specifically, a lot of these services look at which single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced “snips”) we have. While we share almost all of our DNA with each other (and indeed, with most vertebrates), our polymorphisms are the bits that differ, and are the bits that, genetically speaking, make us different.
So, by looking just at the SNPs, it means we “only” need to look at about 3,000,000 DNA positions, and not our entire genome. For perspective, those 3,000,000 DNA positions make up about 0.1% of our whole genome, so without focusing on SNPs, the task would be 1000x harder.
For example, the kind of information that this sort of testing may give you, includes (to look at some “popular” SNPs):
- rs53576 in the oxytocin receptor influences social behavior and personality
- rs7412 and rs429358 can raise the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by more than 10x
- rs6152 can influence baldness
- rs333 resistance to HIV
- rs1800497 in a dopamine receptor may influence the sense of pleasure
- rs1805007 determines red hair and sensitivity to anesthetics
- rs9939609 triggers obesity and type-2 diabetes
- rs662799 prevents weight gain from high fat diets
- rs12255372 linked to type-2 diabetes and breast cancer
- rs1799971 makes alcohol cravings stronger
- rs17822931 determines earwax, sweating and body odor
- rs1333049 coronary heart disease
- rs1051730 and rs3750344 nicotine dependence
- rs4988235 lactose intolerance
(You can learn about these and more than 100,000 other SNPs at SNPedia.com)
I don’t know what SNPs I have, and am disinclined to look them up one by one!
The first step to knowing, is to get your DNA out of your body and into a genetic testing service. This is usually done by saliva or blood sample. This writer got hers done many years ago by 23andMe and was very happy with that service, but there are plenty of other options.
Healthline did an independent review of the most popular companies, so you might like to check out:
Healthline: Best DNA Testing Kits of 2023
Those companies will give you some basic information, such as “6x higher breast cancer risk” or “3x lower age-related macular degeneration risk” etc.
However, to really get bang-for-buck, what you want to do next is:
- Get your raw genetic data (the companies above should provide it); this will probably look like a big text file full of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, but it make take another form.
- Upload it to Promethease. When this writer got hers done , the cost was $2; that price has now gone up to a whopping $12.
- You will then get a report that will cross-reference your data with everything known about SNPs, and give a supremely comprehensive, readable-to-the-human-eye, explanation of what it all means for you—from much more specific health risk prognostics, to more trivial things like whether you can roll your tongue or smell decomposed asparagus metabolites in urine.
A note on privacy: anything you upload to Promethease will be anonymized, and/but in doing so, you consent to it going into the grand scientific open-source bank of “things we know about the human genome”, and thus contribute to the overall sample size of genetic data.
In our opinion, it means you’re doing your bit for science, without personal risk. But your opinion may differ, and that’s your decision to make.
Lastly, on the pros and cons of pharmacogenetic testing specifically:
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- What genetic conditions you have
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No, sugar doesn’t make your kids hyperactive
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It’s a Saturday afternoon at a kids’ birthday party. Hordes of children are swarming between the spread of birthday treats and party games. Half-eaten cupcakes, biscuits and lollies litter the floor, and the kids seem to have gained superhuman speed and bounce-off-the-wall energy. But is sugar to blame?
The belief that eating sugary foods and drinks leads to hyperactivity has steadfastly persisted for decades. And parents have curtailed their children’s intake accordingly.
Balanced nutrition is critical during childhood. As a neuroscientist who has studied the negative effects of high sugar “junk food” diets on brain function, I can confidently say excessive sugar consumption does not have benefits to the young mind. In fact, neuroimaging studies show the brains of children who eat more processed snack foods are smaller in volume, particularly in the frontal cortices, than those of children who eat a more healthful diet.
But today’s scientific evidence does not support the claim sugar makes kids hyperactive.
Sharomka/Shutterstock The hyperactivity myth
Sugar is a rapid source of fuel for the body. The myth of sugar-induced hyperactivity can be traced to a handful of studies conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s. These were focused on the Feingold Diet as a treatment for what we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a neurodivergent profile where problems with inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity can negatively affect school, work or relationships.
Devised by American paediatric allergist Benjamin Feingold, the diet is extremely restrictive. Artificial colours, sweeteners (including sugar) and flavourings, salicylates including aspirin, and three preservatives (butylated hydroxyanisole, butylated hydroxytoluene, and tert-Butrylhdryquinone) are eliminated.
Salicylates occur naturally in many healthy foods, including apples, berries, tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, capsicums, nuts, seeds, spices and some grains. So, as well as eliminating processed foods containing artificial colours, flavours, preservatives and sweeteners, the Feingold diet eliminates many nutritious foods helpful for healthy development.
However, Feingold believed avoiding these ingredients improved focus and behaviour. He conducted some small studies, which he claimed showed a large proportion of hyperactive children responded favourably to his diet.
Even it doesn’t make kids hyperactive, they shouldn’t have too much sugar. DenisMArt/Shutterstock Flawed by design
The methods used in the studies were flawed, particularly with respect to adequate control groups (who did not restrict foods) and failed to establish a causal link between sugar consumption and hyperactive behaviour.
Subsequent studies suggested less than 2% responded to restrictions rather than Feingold’s claimed 75%. But the idea still took hold in the public consciousness and was perpetuated by anecdotal experiences.
Fast forward to the present day. The scientific landscape looks vastly different. Rigorous research conducted by experts has consistently failed to find a connection between sugar and hyperactivity. Numerous placebo-controlled studies have demonstrated sugar does not significantly impact children’s behaviour or attention span.
One landmark meta-analysis study, published almost 20 years ago, compared the effects of sugar versus a placebo on children’s behaviour across multiple studies. The results were clear: in the vast majority of studies, sugar consumption did not lead to increased hyperactivity or disruptive behaviour.
Subsequent research has reinforced these findings, providing further evidence sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children, even in those diagnosed with ADHD.
While Feingold’s original claims were overstated, a small proportion of children do experience allergies to artificial food flavourings and dyes.
Pre-school aged children may be more sensitive to food additives than older children. This is potentially due to their smaller body size, or their still-developing brain and body.
Hooked on dopamine?
Although the link between sugar and hyperactivity is murky at best, there is a proven link between the neurotransmitter dopamine and increased activity.
The brain releases dopamine when a reward is encountered – such as an unexpected sweet treat. A surge of dopamine also invigorates movement – we see this increased activity after taking psychostimulant drugs like amphetamine. The excited behaviour of children towards sugary foods may be attributed to a burst of dopamine released in expectation of a reward, although the level of dopamine release is much less than that of a psychostimulant drug.
Dopamine function is also critically linked to ADHD, which is thought to be due to diminished dopamine receptor function in the brain. Some ADHD treatments such as methylphenidate (labelled Ritalin or Concerta) and lisdexamfetamine (sold as Vyvanse) are also psychostimulants. But in the ADHD brain the increased dopamine from these drugs recalibrates brain function to aid focus and behavioural control.
Maybe it’s less of a sugar rush and more of a dopamine rush? Anastasiya Tsiasemnikava/Shutterstock Why does the myth persist?
The complex interplay between diet, behaviour and societal beliefs endures. Expecting sugar to change your child’s behaviour can influence how you interpret what you see. In a study where parents were told their child had either received a sugary drink, or a placebo drink (with a non-sugar sweetener), those parents who expected their child to be hyperactive after having sugar perceived this effect, even when they’d only had the sugar-free placebo.
The allure of a simple explanation – blaming sugar for hyperactivity – can also be appealing in a world filled with many choices and conflicting voices.
Healthy foods, healthy brains
Sugar itself may not make your child hyperactive, but it can affect your child’s mental and physical health. Rather than demonising sugar, we should encourage moderation and balanced nutrition, teaching children healthy eating habits and fostering a positive relationship with food.
In both children and adults, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends limiting free sugar consumption to less than 10% of energy intake, and a reduction to 5% for further health benefits. Free sugars include sugars added to foods during manufacturing, and naturally present sugars in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates.
Treating sugary foods as rewards can result in them becoming highly valued by children. Non-sugar rewards also have this effect, so it’s a good idea to use stickers, toys or a fun activity as incentives for positive behaviour instead.
While sugar may provide a temporary energy boost, it does not turn children into hyperactive whirlwinds.
Amy Reichelt, Senior Lecturer (Adjunct), Nutritional neuroscientist, University of Adelaide
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
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How old do you want to be?
We asked you how old you are, and got an interesting spread of answers. This wasn’t too surprising; of course we have a general idea of who our readership is and we write accordingly.
What’s interesting is the gap for “40s”.
And, this wasn’t the case of a broken poll button, it’s something that crops up a lot in health-related sociological research. People who are most interested in taking extra care of their body are often:
- Younger people full of optimism about maintaining this perfectly healthy body forever
- Older people realizing “if I don’t want to suffer avoidable parts of age-related decline, now is the time to address these things”
In between, we often have a gap whereby people no longer have the optimism of youth, but do not yet feel the pressure of older age.
Which is not to say there aren’t 40-somethings who do care! Indeed, we know for a fact we have some subscribers in their 40s (and some in their 90s, too), just, they evidently didn’t vote in this poll.
Anyway, let’s bust some myths…
Aging is inevitable: True or False?
False, probably. That seems like a bold (and fortune-telling) claim, so let’s flip it to deconstruct it more logically:
Aging is, and always will be, unstoppable: True or False?
That has to be “False, probably”. To say “true” now sounds like an even bolder claim. Just like “the moon will always be out of reach”.
- When CPR was first developed, first-aiders were arrested for “interfering with a corpse”.
- Many diseases used to be death sentences that are now “take one of these in the morning”
- If you think this is an appeal to distant history, HIV+ status was a death sentence in the 90s. Now it’s “take one of these in the morning”.
But, this is an appeal to the past, and that’s not always a guarantee of the future. Where does the science stand currently? How is the research and development doing on slowing, halting, reversing aging?
We can slow aging: True or False?
True! There’s a difference between chronological age (i.e., how much time has passed while we’ve been alive) and biological age (i.e., what our diverse markers of aging look like).
Biological age often gets talked about as a simplified number, but it’s more complex than that, as we can age in different ways at different rates, for example:
- Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
- Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
- Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
- Cellular markers or aging (e.g. telomere length)
- …and more, but we only have so much room here
There are things we can do to slow most of those, including:
- Good nutrition (e.g. collagen and lutein, to keep specific parts of the body functioning “like those of a younger person” ranging from the joints to the eyes and brain)
- Anti-oxidant activity (e.g. eating anti-oxidant foods, supplementing with anti-oxidants or other things that mitigate oxidative stress, and avoiding foods that hasten oxidative stress which causes many kinds of aging)
- Getting good sleep (not to be underestimated for its restorative importance)
- Taking care of our cognitive health
- Taking care of our mental health (especially: reducing stress)
- Taking care of our mobility (prevention is better than cure!)
In the case of cognitive decline particularly, check out our previous article:
How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
It’s too early to worry about… / It’s too late to do anything about… True or False?
False and False!
Many things that affect our health later in life are based on early-life choices and events. So it’s important for young people to take advantage of that. The earlier one adopts a healthy lifestyle, the better, because, and hold onto your hats for the shocker here: aging is cumulative.
However, that doesn’t mean that taking up healthy practices (or dropping unhealthy ones) is pointless later in life, even in one’s 70s and beyond!
Read about this and more from the National Institute of Aging:
What Do We Know About Healthy Aging?
We can halt aging: True or False?
False, for now at least. Our bodies are not statues; they are living organisms, constantly rebuilding themselves, constantly changing, every second of every day, for better or for worse. Every healthy or unhealthy choice you make, every beneficial or adverse experience you encounter, affects your body on a cellular level.
Your body never, ever, stops changing for as long as you live.
But…
We can reverse aging: True or False?
True! Contingently and with limitations, for now at least.
Remember what we said about your body constantly rebuilding itself? That goes for making itself better as well as making itself worse.
- If yesterday you couldn’t touch your toes and today you can, congratulations, you just got younger by a biological marker of aging.
- If you stopped drinking/smoking/eating a certain way last year, and this year your skin has fewer wrinkles, congratulations, you got younger by a biological marker of aging.
- If you’ve been exercising and now your heart rate variability and VO2 max are better than last month, congratulations, you got younger by a biological marker aging.
- If you took supplements that reduce and/or mitigate oxidative stress (e.g. resveratrol, CoQ10, l-theanine, etc), and you took up intermittent fasting, and now your telomeres are longer than they were six months ago, congratulations, you got younger by a biological marker of aging.
But those aren’t really being younger, we’ll still die when our time is up: True or False?
False and True, respectively.
Those kinds of things are really being younger, biologically. What else do you think being biologically younger is?
We may indeed die when our time is up, but (unless we suffer fatal accident or incident first) “when our time is up” is something that is decided mostly by the above factors.
Genetics—the closest thing we have to biological “fate”—accounts for only about 25% of our longevity-related health*.
Genes predispose, but they don’t predetermine.
*Read more: Human longevity: Genetics or Lifestyle? It takes two to tango
(from the Journal of Immunity and Ageing)
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How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
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Rethinking Drinking
When we’re looking at certain health risks, there are often five key lifestyle factors that have a big impact; they are:
- Have a good diet
- Get good exercise
- Get good sleep
- Reduce (or eliminate) alcohol
- Don’t smoke
Today, we’re focussing the alcohol bit. Maybe you’d like to quit, maybe just cut down, maybe the topic just interests you… So, here’s a quick rundown of some things that will help make that a lot easier:
With a big enough “why”, you can overcome any “how”
Research and understand the harm done by drinking, including:
And especially as we get older, memory problems:
Alcohol-related dementia: an update of the evidence
And as for fear of missing out, or perhaps even of no longer being relaxed/fun… Did you ever, while sober, have a very drunk person try to converse with you, and you thought “I wish that were me”?
Probably not
Know your triggers
Why do you drink? If your knee-jerk response is “because I like it”, dig deeper. What events prompt you to have a drink?
- Some will be pure habit born of convention—perhaps with a meal, for example
- Others may be stress-management—after work, perhaps
- Others may be pseudo-medicinal—a nightcap for better* sleep, for instance
*this will not work. Alcohol may make us sleepy but it will then proceed to disrupt that very sleep and make it less restorative
Become mindful
Now that you know why you’d like to drink less (or quit entirely), and you know what triggers you to drink, you can circumvent that a little, by making deals with yourself, for example
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if I have consumed a large glass of water first” (cuts out being thirsty as a trigger to drink)
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if I meditate for at least 5 minutes first” (reduces likelihood of stress-drinking)
- “I can drink alcohol, if and only if it is with the largest meal of the day” (minimizes total alcohol consumption)
Note that these things also work around any FOMO, “Fear Of Missing Out”. It’s easier to say “no” when you know you can have it later if you still want it.
Get a good replacement drink
There are a lot of alcohol-free alcohol-like drinks around these days, and many of them are very good. Experiment and see. But!
It doesn’t even have to be that. Sometimes what we need is not even an alcohol-like drink, but rather, drinkable culinary entertainment.
If you like “punch-in-the-face” flavors (as this writer does), maybe strong black coffee is the answer. If you like “crisp and clear refreshment” (again, same), maybe your favorite herbal tea will do it for you. Or maybe for you it’ll be lemon-water. Or homemade ginger ale.
Whatever it is… make it fun, and make it yours!
Bonus item: find replacement coping strategies
This one goes if you’ve been using alcohol to cope with something. Stress, depression, anxiety, whatever it may be for you.
The thing is, it feels like it helps briefly in the moment, but it makes each of those things progressively worse in the long-run, so it’s not sustainable.
Consider instead things like therapy, exercise, and/or a new hobby to get immersed in; whatever works for you!
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