449 Transcript
Angela (00:18.926)
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to Addiction Unlimited. I’m your coach, Angela Pugh. Today I want to talk about something you’ve probably heard me say a thousand times. And every time I say it, I can feel people getting a little weird. But bear with me because I will make it all make sense. Okay. The thing is, alcohol makes you lazy. And don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about lazy like you don’t work.Hard. I’m not talking about being unmotivated or unemployed or laying around on the couch or incapable of getting things done. You can be incredibly productive and still be lazy in the way I’m talking about. You can run a company and raise children and manage a household, take care of your aging parents, volunteer at school, make dinner, pay bills, keep all the appointments, and be the person everybody else depends on.

And still be lazy about your life.

Angela (01:33.644)
When you’re drinking, you don’t have to expend time and energy figuring out what fits you or what you enjoy, who you are, what kind of life you actually want. You can go anywhere, do anything with anyone, and drink enough that you don’t care whether you like it or not. Think about how easy you were to entertain when everything revolved around alcohol.

The same bar, the same people, the same conversations, the same stories, the same arguments, the same Friday night, followed by the same Saturday morning hangover. And somehow you counted this as fun. Or maybe you stayed at home. Maybe you sat in the same spot on the couch and watched television for a hundred hours.

You weren’t even particularly interested in what you were watching. You’re probably scrolling your phone at the same time, barely paying attention to either screen, and telling yourself you’re relaxing. Because when you pour that drink, you don’t care if what you’re doing is fun or stimulating or fulfilling. You just drink until you’re numb and don’t care. Alcohol makes nothing feel like something.

Angela (02:59.146)
Alcohol makes doing nothing feel like something. And this becomes a huge problem in early sobriety because boredom is one of the most common reasons people give for wanting to drink again. They say, I’m bored, my life is boring, sobriety is boring, I don’t know what to do with myself. But here’s the thing: you cannot sit in the exact same chair doing the exact same thing.

Making no plans, trying nothing new, and blame sobriety because your life isn’t exciting. Alcohol made it possible to tolerate an uninspired evening. Sobriety makes you aware that you’re wasting your time. In recovery, you have to participate. You have to experiment. You have to find out what interests you. You may

Have to initiate a plan instead of waiting for somebody else to entertain you. But alcohol was one answer for every feeling, one tool for every problem. Stressful day, drink. Can’t sleep, drink. Feeling insecure before a work event or a first date? Drink. Angry with your partner? Drink. Don’t want to make the phone call, drink. Brain moving 900 miles an hour, drink.

And it feels like relief. But all you did was change how you feel about the problem. You didn’t change the actual problem. The decision you were avoiding is still waiting. The unfinished task is still unfinished. The relationship is still disconnected. You’re still insecure about yourself and still have social anxiety. You didn’t have to learn how to regulate your emotions or set a boundary.

build confidence, complete the task, tolerate discomfort, or make a different decision. That’s the laziness I’m talking about. Actually dealing with any of those things takes more effort than pouring a drink.

Angela (05:08.436)
This is something I see over and over with my clients when they’re newly sober. Once they have some distance from alcohol and the alcohol people and the alcohol places, they begin taking

They begin talking differently about their friends and social lives. And they’ll say things like, I don’t really like hanging out with some of those people because they’re really gossipy, or they’re not actually very nice, or everything’s so dramatic. And I’m just not like that. Everybody’s talking behind each other’s backs. And sometimes they feel surprised because those are people they’ve called friends for years.

But alcohol didn’t make those friends less gossipy or nicer or kinder or less dramatic. It made you less aware of how much that behavior bothered you.

When you were drinking, you could sit at the same bar, listen to the same stories, participate in the same gossip, and have another round when the conversation started getting irritating. Without alcohol, it becomes painful to endure. That doesn’t mean everybody has to be cut out of your life. It means you finally have to ask an honest question of like, do I genuinely like these people, or did I like drinking with them? Those are not the same thing.

Sobriety doesn’t make you antisocial. It makes you more discerning. Now you have to notice how you feel around people. You have to decide which relationships are meaningful and which ones existed because everybody was available to drink together. You may have to spend less time with some people. You may have to find new people. You may have to tolerate loneliness while you build relationships that actually fit.

Angela (07:03.838)
Alcohol allowed you to skip all of that. You could numb yourself into enjoying almost anybody.

Angela (08:29.054)
And alcohol doesn’t only numb your opinion of other people, it can confuse your understanding of yourself. For years, I would have thought I was an extrovert. I was always out. I was always around a ton of people. I was a bartender, right? I loved bars, groups, parties, and being in the middle of everything. Of course I thought I was an extrovert.

Angela (08:54.232)
For years I would have thought I was an extrovert. I was always out. I was always around a ton of people. I was a bartender, right? I loved bars, groups, parties, and being in the middle of everything. Of course, I thought I was an extrovert. But once I got sober, I learned something about myself. I was never an extrovert. I was just drunk. I didn’t genuinely enjoy crowds or groups in my right mind.

They made me uncomfortable. Alcohol made me comfortable not.

Alcohol made me comfortable enough to tolerate them. And because I repeatedly went to those places, I assumed that must be who I was. But several years into my sobriety, I was out with a bunch of friends one night and we were at a super popular nightclub doing club things. And I was just sitting back observing. And one of my friends looked at me and he said, You’re like a really beautiful wallflower. And we laughed about it, but he wasn’t wrong.

Even when I was out with people, I was usually on the fringe. I was standing back in the background, somewhere near a wall or in a corner, just outside the center of the group. Because sober me doesn’t want to be in the center of a crowd. Sober me doesn’t particularly enjoy crowds at all.

Angela (10:21.9)
And when I started thinking about who I was before I ever drank, it became painfully obvious that I had always been an introvert. I was smart, I was a bookworm, I always had a book in my hand. I couldn’t wait until I could get somewhere quiet and disappear into whatever story I was reading. And I was obsessed with music. I could spend hours with my headphones on, completely lost in it.

Or I’d lie on the floor in front of my parents’ record player with my ear pressed against the speaker, listening to my favorite record, probably at full blast. That was me before alcohol. I didn’t need crowds. I didn’t need constant activity. I didn’t need to be surrounded by people. I liked disappearing into stories and music. I liked being alone inside an experience that moved me. And honestly,

Those were early escape mechanisms for me. I had a very stressful childhood, and books and music were some of the first ways I learned to soothe myself. They gave me somewhere safe to go inside my own head. Now, those weren’t destructive escapes, right? Reading didn’t wreck my life and music didn’t leave me ashamed the next morning.

They were adaptive ways a smart little girl found to comfort herself when she didn’t have control over what was happening around her. Alcohol didn’t invent my desire for relief. It just became a faster, stronger, more efficient way to get it. A book required quiet and attention. Music required me to slow down and listen.

Alcohol could just change how I felt in minutes. And eventually, it didn’t just help me escape stress, it made me capable of living an entire life that didn’t fit who I actually was. Part of my recovery wasn’t becoming a brand new person. It was remembering who I was before alcohol started making all my decisions. The quiet person, the thinker, the bookworm.

Angela (12:32.738)
The girl who could become completely absorbed in music, the person who was restored by solitude instead of energized by crowds. I didn’t become boring when I got sober. I stopped forcing myself to perform a personality that only alcohol made possible. I wasn’t an extrovert who became introverted when I quit drinking. I was an introvert using alcohol to live like an extrovert.

Angela (13:02.284)
When you get sober and start wanting quieter evenings, fewer people, deeper conversations, and more time alone, don’t immediately assume sobriety has made your life smaller. You may actually be returning to your true self.

Angela (13:19.82)
That same clarity shows up around activities and routines, too. Maybe your spouse plays golf every Saturday and then everybody meets at the club afterward. By the time you arrive, they’re already five or six beers in. But when you were drinking, you could catch up, right? You could order a drink and another and numb yourself right into the situation. The noise stopped bothering you, the repetitive conversations become tolerable, everybody seemed funnier.

You stayed longer.

Angela (13:53.932)
You stayed longer than you wanted to and called it a good time. Now you’re sober. You walk in fully conscious, and it is excruciating, right? They’re loud, they’re repeating themselves, they’re telling you stories you’ve already heard, you feel completely disconnected, and you’d rather be at home with your dog. Then you think sobriety ruined everything. I don’t know how to have fun anymore.

But maybe you never really enjoyed being there in the first place. Maybe you enjoyed drinking while you were there. That’s a huge distinction. Or take like the annual camping trip. This is another one I hear about all the time.

Every year the same group goes to the same place, sets up camp, drinks all day, drinking is the activity. Everybody sits around, starts early, stays up late, and then calls the blurry c

Angela (14:55.264)
Everybody sits around, starts early, stays up late, and then calls the blurry collection of stories and photographs making memories, assuming anyone even remembers them. But now you’re sober, you wake up early because you actually slept. You want a clear head, you want your coffee, maybe you want to journal, take a hike, maybe you want to work in your garden or work in your shop, spend time with your kids, just do something with your day.

Sitting around a campsite for 12 hours watching everybody drink no longer feels like an experience. Right. And again, sobriety gets blamed. I’m not fun anymore. I don’t fit anymore. I guess I can’t do anything. No, you can do anything. But now you’re aware enough to know when you don’t enjoy something and when people are just fucking annoying.

Angela (15:54.048)
Alcohol made it easy to sit around in places you didn’t like with people you didn’t necessarily enjoy doing activities you didn’t care about. It made an unfulfilling life more tolerable without making it more fulfilling. Sobriety didn’t create the dissatisfaction, it removed the thing that made the dissatisfaction bearable. And this is where people get frustrated because when alcohol is gone, you may genuinely have no idea what you want.

Somebody asks, what do you do for fun? And you’re like, I don’t fucking know. What are your hobbies? I don’t know. How do you want to spend your weekend? I don’t know. Who are you hanging out with? Well, I don’t know that either. That doesn’t mean sobriety is boring. It means you spent so much time drinking that you never had to figure out what you actually like. If drinking was the main activity for 20 years, you didn’t have to know what you liked. You knew where people were drinking. You knew

Who would drink with you? You knew which events gave you permission to drink and which routines made drinking easy. Well, now you have to learn yourself. And that takes effort. You have to try things and pay attention to how they feel. You have to notice whether you leave an experience energized or depleted. You have to notice which people make you feel safe, understood, curious, or alive.

And which people leave you exhausted.

Angela (17:27.532)
You have to decide whether you genuinely enjoy the annual tradition or whether you have simply repeated it long enough to call it part of your identity. You have to look at your relationships that may have survived because you drank together. Social circles you may have outgrown, weekends you don’t enjoy, a marriage dynamic you’ve been avoiding, a schedule built entirely around someone else’s preferences.

A lifestyle that looks fine from the outside but leaves you depleted. Sobriety exposes misalignment. It doesn’t create it, it just makes it harder to ignore. And this is where real participation begins because you have choices to make. Maybe you leave the club early. Maybe you stop going every weekend. Maybe you still love camping, but you change what the trip looks like for you.

Maybe you get up early and take a hike and make your coffee and enjoy the outdoors and go to bed when everybody else starts having the same conversation for the fourth time. Maybe you spend less time with the gossipy friends and more time with the one person who can have an honest conversation. Maybe you discover reading or music, art, gardening, running, woodworking, baseball, cooking, travel, volunteering, animals, or something you’ve never tried before.

Angela (18:57.514)
Maybe you learn that you just really love being home with your dog. That’s allowed. The goal isn’t to create a life that looks exciting enough for Instagram. The goal is to create a life that feels true to who you actually are so you enjoy living it.

Angela (19:17.176)
People say sobriety is boring because alcohol created artificial stimulation or it made them not care that they weren’t stimulated. They say sobriety is isolating because their relationships were built around drinking. And socializing is hard because they have social anxiety. Sobriety gets blamed for revealing what was already true. You were already bored.

You already didn’t like some of those people. You already felt disconnected. You already dreaded the camping trip. You already lacked confidence. The stress was already there. The unfinished tasks were already being avoided. The relationship problems were already there. Alcohol just made it possible to stop caring for a few hours. So when you remove the alcohol, it can feel like everything suddenly got harder.

But everything didn’t suddenly get harder. You just became present enough to feel what was already there. Now you have to decide what to do with that.

That’s the part people call work. And yeah, sometimes it’s work. Having a difficult conversation is work. Building confidence is work. Learning to regulate your emotions is work. Finding new friends takes effort. Developing hobbies takes time. Creating boundaries can be uncomfortable. Changing a routine may disappoint some of your people, and that’s scary. But that isn’t sobriety punishing you. Alcohol made it possible to

Passively consume your life. Sobriety requires you to participate in it. You have to care where you go. You have to care who you spend time with. You have to figure out what you enjoy and build relationships that work while everybody is in their right mind. You have to stop waiting for alcohol to turn an uninspired life into an acceptable one. The beautiful thing is.

Angela (21:19.82)
You also get to stop performing a personality that isn’t even yours. You get to stop spending weekends doing things you don’t like. You get to stop calling people friends just because they’re available to drink with. You get to stop confusing numbing with rest and passivity with relaxation. You get to create a life you don’t have to chemically alter yourself to tolerate. That’s the whole point.

Recovery isn’t about filling your schedule with sober assignments so you can prove you’re working hard enough. It’s about becoming an active participant in your own life again. Sometimes that means building something new. Sometimes it means returning to something old, to the bookworm, the music lover, the quiet person, the person you were before alcohol started overriding your preferences. You aren’t boring. You’re learning what you like.

You’re not antisocial. You’re getting more intentional about who gets your time and energy. And you’re not failing because your old life doesn’t fit anymore. You’re finally present enough to recognize what feels wrong and strong enough to start making different choices. That’s how sobriety transforms your life.

Angela (22:43.554)
You stop going through the motions and tolerating whatever’s in front of you. You start choosing your friends, your relationships, your routines, and the way you spend your time based on who you actually are, not based on where you can drink or what becomes tolerable after a few glasses of wine. And yes, figuring all of that out takes effort, but the payoff is huge. Your time becomes more meaningful because you stop wasting it doing things you don’t even enjoy.

Your relationships are more rewarding because you’re more in sync with the people you’re hanging out with. And little by little, you build a life that feels like you, a life you don’t need alcohol to tolerate or escape from.

And if alcohol has become your answer for everything stress, sleep, insecurity, boredom, social anxiety, loneliness, and you have no idea how you’re supposed to live without it, this is exactly the work I help people do. If you’re ready for personal coaching and you’re prepared to make a real commitment to changing your life, book a call with me and see if we’re a good fit to work together. Go to addictionunlimited.com forward slash call and schedule a consultation with me.

And I want to be clear about something too. This call is for people who seriously want to work with me. It isn’t necessary if you’re looking at one of my lower cost, low commitment programs. Like you don’t need me to walk you through those things. They’re very easy and very inexpensive. And you can find those options under programs and tools in the show notes. But when you book a consultation with me, I reserve that time specifically for you.

That means that appointment is no longer available to one of my clients or someone else who needs support. So please don’t book a time as a placeholder or because you think you might feel like showing up that day, right? Choose a time you can commit to, put it on your calendar and show up ready to laugh and have some real conversation with me about where you are and what you want to change. I take your time seriously and I need you to treat mine the same way.

Angela (24:54.424)
So if you’re ready for that conversation, I would love to meet you. You’ll love the options for wherever you are in your journey. Go to addictionunlimited.com forward slash call. You’ll answer a few quick questions, then it’ll take you directly to my calendar. That link is always in the show notes too. Addictionunlimited.com forward slash call. Stop trying to make one tool solve every problem. Let’s build you a real toolbox and a life you don’t need to escape from.

I love you guys. I hope you’re having a fantastic day. And I will see you next week.