Confidence and sobriety are an interesting combination and a very personal journey. But I wanted to talk about why you may not be feeling as confident as you’d like at any given moment in time.

Here’s the thing as well though… I don’t think that staying sober should be your only goal. You want to enjoy it at some point too to be able to relax into it (whilst not being complacent) and to have a level of confidence that you’ve made the right choice for yourself. Some of that comes with time but not all of it.

When I think of my sobriety I don’t think I’ve stayed sober because of some high level of discipline and I am certainly not sat here today feeling like I need to resist alcohol the way that I needed to in the early days.

Instead, I’ve stayed sober because I’ve changed my relationship with it over time and I’ve now built a life in which not drinking has become increasingly normal.

Some of this happened naturally as the days ticked by but a lot of it didn’t and I put extra effort into achieving. I had to practise things, I had to challenge beliefs and I had to put the hours into learning how to do it. I already had my training from my job supporting people with habit change, but I had to tweak and tailor all of those CBT tools and the psychology I knew to support my own sobriety. I had to stop expecting sobriety to remove all the problems from my life and I had to work through and challenge each and every trigger in the process. Essentially, I needed to build resilience rather than trying to organise my entire life around alcohol.

Sobriety really does get easier with time. But it isn’t simply the passing of time that does it. There is a really big focus at the start of not drinking today, protecting your sobriety at all costs, avoiding all triggers and taking it one day at a time… and those things can be incredibly useful. Eventually you really do want sobriety to be a choice you’re making and a life you’re building and not something you’re constantly managing. You don’t want to feel like you’re constantly resisting alcohol and so with that in mind there is some work to do but it doesn’t need to be gruelling or unnecessarily soul searching.

There isn’t one way to go sober and you may not feel like you have anything deep and meaningful to work through, but what is necessary though is ‘doing the work’ to make sure you’re enjoying your sobriety. It’s bloody hard work to start with but it needs to have it’s rewards or we wouldn’t keep doing it.

Putting the effort in really does reap so many rewards in the longer term. The work doesn’t have to mean following a program but it does mean getting support and learning better ways to deal with whatever the reason was you drank in the first place.

What this process needs to involve is learning what alcohol was actually doing for you. What were you using it for? Was it to quieten your mind, to help you switch off your energy to relax or was it to avoid feeling or facing up to something in your life that needed to change?

For some that may be extreme stress, perfectionism, undiagnosed (or diagnosed) neurodivergence, a fear of boredom, and inability to switch off or struggles when dealing with anger, stress or sadness. It may even be being in the wrong job or the wrong relationship.

One thing that really benefitted my sobriety was getting better at tolerating discomfort before immediately looking to soothe or escape it. Sometimes that discomfort could be big, like a massive stress or worry. But also sometimes that discomfort was seemingly inconsequential like wanting to avoid feeling awkward at the start of a social event or not being able to tolerate a flat evening or something as mundane as a rainy day on holiday.

And this is where learning to regulate yourself comes in too because for a lot of us drinking wasn’t just about going out, it was also about staying in. It was about unwinding, switching off and chilling out. It was a really quick way to change our internal state at the end of the day like a button you could press to move yourself from one state into another. When you quit drinking you remove that button.

That’s when you can also find that you’re left with the feeling you’d quite like to escape but don’t know how to… whether that’s stress, overwhelm, overthinking, worry or even resentment or anger.

Part of this process is learning to accept the feeling for what it is, noticing it and not trying to escape it. Sometimes you need to address what could be behind it, working through it in the moment or getting support to talk it through. You may need to do something practical to bring stress levels down like exercise or walking. You may need to have a window of time when you first get home from work where no one talks to you… not easy in a busy household but I manage this one by going for a walk once Dale is home to watch the girls to help me shift from work state to home state. That isn’t because I’m stressed, it’s actually because I like that window of time to allow my mind and body to slow down naturally.

The important thing here is that regulation doesn’t mean you’re finding another instant way to make every uncomfortable feeling disappear and diving off into a different addiction (sugar, screens or online shopping anyone?). Sometimes it’s learning that you can be stressed, angry, restless or overwhelmed for a while without immediately needing to change how you feel, to just sit with it. Other times it means listening to what that feeling is telling you. If you’re permanently stressed, perhaps something needs to change. Just like if you’re constantly resentful, perhaps you need better boundaries or if you can never switch off, maybe you need to look at how much you’re expecting from yourself. Sobriety doesn’t solve those things for you, but it does remove one of the ways you may have been avoiding them.

Gather the evidence

You could spend a year avoiding anything that feels difficult and, yes, technically you’ve got a year of sobriety behind you. But that doesn’t necessarily give you the same confidence as getting out there and finding out that you can actually do things without drinking.

You build that confidence by gathering evidence from real life. You’ll need to have the craving and then prove to yourself that you don’t need to act on it. You may have a crap holiday or be bored getting through a Christmas party and still not drink. You can have an argument, go to that wedding, deal with a stressful week or even a boring Saturday night and realise you managed all of it sober. These are the things that help you change what you believe you’re capable of in sobriety. It’s not only about the days adding up, it’s about the evidence mounting up too.

I’d also caveat this by saying that this doesn’t mean you need to throw yourself into every difficult situation before you’re ready or deliberately make your sobriety a lot harder than it needs to be either. There were plenty of things I avoided in the beginning because I knew that I didn’t need the additional pressure and that’s absolutely advisable to do. But there comes a point when avoiding everything builds some things up in your mind more than they need to be.

You’ll probably notice that these events may still be difficult at times to start with. There may even be times that you think about drinking in them but you’ll get to the other side and realise you’re far more capable than you first thought. Then the next time you do it you’ll have evidence behind you to bolster your confidence because that’s how confidence works. We don’t get confident then do the thing, we do the thing and then build confidence from the evidence.

But what happens if you do something and find you were miserable? Won’t that prove you do miss alcohol? What if you did feel like you were missing out by not drinking?

Challenge the beliefs

This brings me on to the next big piece of work to do and that’s to challenge some of the beliefs you have around alcohol that you’ll have picked up over the years. Because sometimes you’ll do the thing sober and you won’t particularly enjoy it. I’ve been to events sober that I couldn’t wait to leave, I’ve had evenings where everyone else seemed to be having a brilliant time and I wasn’t and I’ve been on holiday and had moments of boredom.

The difference is that now I don’t automatically interpret the fact things weren’t as rosy as I was imagining them to be as a reason I need to drink or as evidence that I’m missing out by not drinking. This is the most important distinction of all.

We’ve all picked up so many beliefs about alcohol over the years that we actually now see them as facts. Holidays are better with a drink, alcohol helps us relax, you need a stiff drink to unwind or even you can’t toast with an alcohol free drink. We don’t stop to question any of these things when we’re drinking.

You need to question and step back from some of the widely accepted narratives about it being an essential part of life or you’ll always feel a sense of missing out. Alcohol advertising isn’t going anywhere and nor is society’s obsession with consuming or glorifying it. You’ll need to work out what it is you believe in the first place though as a lot of those will be under the surface.

These days if I go to a party and don’t enjoy myself I don’t assume that’s because I’m sober… I realise that I just didn’t enjoy the party for a different reason. Drinking would have simply had me zone out from that lack of enjoyment rather than increasing the enjoyment. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood or maybe the vibe wasn’t there. If I have a flat day on holiday because the rain is relentless, I know that alcohol wouldn’t genuinely have made the day better… it would have just zoned me out a bit and changed how I felt for a couple of hours.

If everyone around me appears to be having more fun after three drinks, I don’t ask myself if I’m missing out, instead I challenge whether I’m remembering only the part of drinking that looked good while conveniently forgetting everything else that came with it.

And if I’m struggling to relax without a drink, these days my mind doesn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that alcohol is necessary. Instead I know that I need switch off without relying on alcohol to do it for me.

That’s the sort of work I mean. Take it gently but you do need to flex those sober muscles at some point and you have to dig out and challenge what you believe about alcohol.

If you’re interested in building on this subject or learning more about strengthening your resilience in sobriety, I’ve popped a discount code for the rest of August (until midnight GMT London time on the 31st August) on my Sober Resilience course making it £99.

I created my Sober Resilience course to help you move beyond simply not drinking and to give you the tools to start building skills that make sobriety feel easier. It draws on my professional training in psychology, CBT, hypnotherapy and behaviour change, as well as my own experience of applying those tools to my sobriety. It’s packed full of thought provoking psychology on this subject, it helps you deepen your sober identity and also gives you tools to deal with difficult scenarios, to relax without alcohol and to distance from unhelpful beliefs about alcohol or about anything else in life that’s holding you back.

If you’d like to read more about the course then you can head to www.louisaevans.com/challenges and use the code FRESHSTART26. You’ll be given instant access to 21 lessons, 11 hypnosis and relaxation downloads and you’ll be able to join the Sober Rebel private Facebook group for friendship and support. It’s yours for life and the recordings are also yours to keep. If you’d like a 1:1 session with me at any point then you can book in with me by messaging on here or by visiting my website.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. She has a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, and combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

You can find out more at www.louisaevans.com.

I’ve been holidaying in St Ives in Cornwall for nearly five decades and so you’d think I would’ve seen it all. It’s always a lovely break, really relaxing and because we all know it so well we can really switch off. We know where to go to get groceries, what to do on a rainy day and where to buy things we may run out of because it’s beautifully familiar. But what I’ve noticed since I’ve stopped drinking is that St Ives has become even more magical (if that’s even possible). This is something that’s surprised me given I obviously didn’t drink as a child when I first came here so I’ve had plenty of time here where alcohol wouldn’t have been a feature. Once I was 18 though, alcohol was firmly at the centre of any holiday.

Maybe it’s that in sobriety I’m returning to that childlike wonder, or maybe I’m just more alive to the experiences around me after years of being dumbed and numbed by alcohol, because that’s how it feels to me when I think back to the years of drinking. I always had one eye on the bar, an awareness of closing time or what was in the fridge to drink and I wasn’t fully present in the moment.

Entertaining the troops

We woke up yesterday morning to torrential rain and tried to plan a day around the children’s energy. Let’s take into account that Dale and I also have a childlike need to be entertained. We’re all bundles of short attention spans who hate being cooped up inside. So the plan was to walk a bit further along the South West Coast Path once the weather dried up a bit to see what it was like, something I don’t recall ever doing before.

I’d always been so scared of boredom in the past and I think that’s a feeling that can be hard to shake. I remember what it felt like to be a child penned into a caravan watching the rain on the window and the idea of not being able to ‘get out’ terrified me. It is a feeling I still carry with me in adulthood and one that I had to address when I stopped drinking.

Anyway, in true St Ives style, the weather soon changed and the clouds cleared so we set off.

As we walked through the town, we grabbed an obligatory Cornish pasty to fuel us, dodging the seagulls intent on stealing our lunch and headed out of town. I had a rough idea of where to set off from and was excited to go and explore, as well as getting moving for the day. Wherever we are I always take in and notice the drinking culture around me. It helps to keep me focussed and grounded in my sobriety. As we walked past the pretty beaches I noticed numerous pubs and bars offering 2 for 1 on cocktails and talking about ‘Happy Hour’. They were rammed full of people at all times of day so I have no idea why there’s a need for marketing… just as I used to be as a drinker, I would have paid anything for a pint if that was the only option.

In sobriety I’m always amazed by how much alcohol was actually making my world so much smaller and distracting me from the good stuff. When I first went sober I didn’t know what to do with all the extra time that opened up in front of me. I panicked at the idea of filling a whole evening without having alcohol as the focus and the idea of a weekend seemed absolutely unending.

It’s no wonder that I then feared a holiday, as a lot of people do, because that’s the core activity for most breaks. Or at least it was for me. Those early days of stopping drinking are tough as you adjust to so many different things. The loss of the ritual, the escape and the drug itself are part of that adjustment.

It was an absolutely glorious afternoon in the end. At one point Dale called us all back to where he was watching the sea as he’d noticed three seals by the rocks. It really does send shivers down my spine when I find myself so ‘in the moment’ as I was yesterday. There’s a part of me that is a bit sad for the version of me that would have stopped at the beach bar and never really explored any further, and I think that’s part of the grieving process that you do go through in sobriety.

I’ve had many trips down to St Ives over the years where I’ve been the one rammed into a pub on the front, sipping drink after drink and then walking back up to the campsite a little ‘soft-focused’. I can’t even say it was weather dependent either because I’ve spent rainy days, sunny days and everything in between, drinking away the afternoon. All of those missed opportunities pop into your mind when you didn’t realise how much even grey area drinking was taking from you. The important thing is what you’re doing now though and what we did yesterday will be a memory that I’ll cherish far more than an unforgettable pint of Korev in a Cornish pub.

Why are we so scared of boredom and why was I so scared of it? Given we’re all immensely busy people, why are we so scared of the time that opens up in front of us when we stop drinking? Surely time is the thing we’re short of and not to be feared?

From this vantage point of being in my fourth year of sobriety with many sober rainy days and holidays behind me I can see that boredom is the thing that opens up our inventiveness. When I think back to my childhood, it was often boredom that opened up my creativity. I’d spend hours playing musical instruments or writing in my diary because I was supposedly ‘bored’. I forced myself to do something, and I was often told that if I didn’t find something to do my Mum would find something for me. I was always told it wouldn’t be that enjoyable either, something like a chore… you have to love 90s parenting phrases, but it worked!

I wanted to say today: don’t be scared of boredom, as much to myself as to you. To remind myself still that boredom is not a bad thing. It signals that you have an active brain and energy to use so it’s a gift. You don’t need to distract or drug yourself. It’s a gateway to something new and potentially something magical.

As we walked along the most stunningly beautiful Cornish coastline yesterday I was taken aback. But also I was quite sad that it had taken me this long to walk just a bit further outside the town I knew so well to experience it. I can say the same about some of the things on my doorstep at home. It’s the days when we’re looking at what to do that we then get creative, we get our trainers or walking boots on and we go and explore.

Alcohol may solve the problem of boredom by zoning us out but it isn’t really a problem that needs to be solved.

What else wasn't I seeing?

Since I’ve stopped drinking I’ve often thought about how much I’ve missed over the years because it wasn’t just in St Ives that I had one eye on the pub opening times. It was everywhere we went and even when we stayed at home. It was always a bubbling thought at the back of my mind. I’d be constantly distracted by monitoring if we had enough alcohol back at home or what time the shops shut on a bank holiday. All of that mental load was taking up valuable working memory.

Talking about being more present is a bit of a cliché when it comes to sobriety but what does that actually mean in practice? I do think on one level, drinking distracted me from the present moment and any boredom that I may have been experiencing, but on the other it was making me lazy. It wasn’t just that it stopped me seeing things around me, it stopped me being curious enough to look for things. Alcohol meant that I was quite content in all the familiar things because it was giving me that instant reward in and of itself.

I have to ask myself if yesterday afternoon felt special because I wasn’t drinking or was it because I’m now in a place of my sobriety that I go looking for things instead of numbing myself and calling it relaxation. These days I do need to seek out novelty in order to feel that contentment and that brings with it a beautiful curiosity alongside it.

I’ve noticed this part of the sober experience is one that is ever evolving so I can’t wait to see where that goes in time. If I’d walked that exact path when I was drinking I would still have noticed that it was a pretty spot, of course I would, but my argument is that in all these years I hadn’t been curious enough to walk it. How sad is that?

It’s wonderful to realise that sobriety has now made me into a person that goes looking for things. Curiosity is a quality I admire so much and I love embodying it. This new outlook makes me very excited to go to new places but also to revisit more familiar places with new eyes.

Is this something you’ve also noticed? Are you now more curious and more willing to explore?

I know how triggering the month of August can be if you’re struggling with your drinking so I’ve placed an offer code FRESHSTART26 on my Sober Resilience course until the end of this month making it £99.

This is the course that will help you wherever you are in your sobriety, teaching you the psychology behind lasting habit change. You can work through it if you’re already sober and want to deepen and strengthen your resolve even further or if you’re still sober curious, to begin thinking differently about your relationship with alcohol. It will take you through 21 lessons and you’ll have 11 hypnosis and relaxations to keep. You’ll also have group access for friendship and community in the Sober Rebel Private Facebook group.

If you’d like that offer or even to book in for a 1:1 session with me then head to my website and send me a message.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner with a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology. She specialises in helping people change their relationship with alcohol, rebuild self-trust and create lasting change using evidence-based psychological tools, CBT and hypnosis.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

You can find out more at www.louisaevans.com.

Sobriety changed my relationship with myself profoundly and I write about a lot of those shifts regularly. Obviously there were physical changes and mental clarity, but one of the biggest shifts for me has been becoming far more aware of what actually feels right for me and what doesn’t. I can no longer deny myself the truth of situations that don’t feel right to me. I don’t think I realised for a long time how much alcohol allowed me to override my own reactions to things and to shut up and put up with things. I wasn’t oblivious to life but I was certainly a little soft focus and not paying attention to the burnout or the gut instinct about some things.

Maybe it was the glass of wine or two at the end of the evening after a difficult interaction or it could have been the drink that took the edge off resentment from not expressing my expectations to others more clearly. It could have been about feeling overstimulation, frustration or even emotional exhaustion. Another big one for me was the loneliness that I often felt when my eldest daughter was a baby and I was a single Mum stuck at home. Alcohol was the thing that helped me switch my brain off and that had the downside of never fully processing why I felt the way I did in the first place.

When I look back now, I can see there were periods of my life where I was tolerating some things and even some people that were just not that good for me. In hindsight it’s easier to spot those situations. The thing is, instead of fully listening to those feelings, I normalised them and minimised them. I told myself I was overthinking or overreacting. Then at the end of the day, alcohol became the relief from that discomfort rather than me really examining the source of it.

I think that’s one of the reasons sobriety can feel so emotionally exposing because suddenly there’s no buffer at all sitting between you and your actual experience of your life. You notice so much more… you notice how certain people make you feel, you pick up on your intuition so much more easily and that’s a good thing in the long run, but can feel disconcerting at first.

You can be more observant of how you react around particular situations or how often you say yes when internally you mean “hell no!”. You also notice how much internal and emotional energy goes into keeping the peace, managing other people’s emotions or trying not to disappoint anybody. It has to be said that all of it was exhausting with alcohol… and without alcohol that has to be faced head on.

For me, sobriety sharpened that awareness enormously. I started recognising how often I’d ignored and pushed through my own needs in order to be accommodating and easy to be around. How I’d minimised my intuition around some people and quashed those recurring gut instincts that something wasn’t right. I am someone who likes to be liked and that meant I was always shape shifting to those around me. I’d become very good at overriding exhaustion, very good at carrying on or telling myself I could cope. And very often I could cope, that was part of the problem because I was really high functioning but I was also disconnecting from myself in the process with alcohol. It solved the problem because it gave me the temporary relief without needing to confront what wasn’t working for me.

The rawness of early sobriety…

What changed in sobriety was that I could no longer escape my own reactions in the same way so if something felt wrong, I felt it. If I was overwhelmed, I noticed it much sooner. If a relationship or friendship dynamic consistently left me depleted, overthinking, unsafe or anxious, it became much harder to simply smooth over my feelings and carry on as normal. I became much more aware of my nervous system and the signals it had probably been sending me for years. I felt it if someone felt disingenuous, or if my spidey senses were tingling. Before I would have gaslit myself and drunk on those feelings… but it takes some getting used to so be gentle with yourself in this process.

I actually felt like I’d lost myself somewhere along the way in the last decade or two of drinking. Probably since my mid twenties if I’m honest. I was constantly overriding my own boundaries and making myself agreeable and adaptable.... not wanting to cause a fuss. Not wanting to be ‘difficult’ or confrontational. In fact sometimes I was even running from confrontation. There’s a real difference in side stepping aggressive people for your own peace and running scared from them. I was doing the latter because I had the shortcut of drinking rather than dealing properly with things. I think alcohol can sometimes become part of the coping mechanism for that life because it acts like the reward at the end of the day for tolerating things that don’t truly align with you. The release after over-giving, ignoring your gut instinct or overcompensating.

When you remove alcohol, part of the emotional work that evolves over time is to address the friction and what you’re going to do about it. Like I said at the start of this article, it’s all very well realising you’ve been people pleasing or that you’ve lost yourself over the years but what are you going to do about it to truly advocate for yourself?

These are some of the questions I asked myself in early sobriety in order to reflect on this subject…

Why was I so drained?
Why did certain situations leave me needing escape afterwards?
Why did I feel dread around some obligations?
Why was I saying yes to things that my whole nervous system was resisting?
Why did I feel guilty the moment I tried to rest or to protect my own energy?

and finally…

Who wasn’t I feeling myself around or even safe to be myself around?

Those questions change a lot because once you start listening to yourself properly, it becomes much harder to keep abandoning yourself in the same way. Self awareness is always power.

As I was more present in sobriety I could then become more curious. I became more aware of how different environments affected me and what I liked and what I didn’t. I was more aware of the people I felt calm and safe around versus the people who left me emotionally dysregulated afterwards. This was a massive one for me… feeling calm and safe are my absolute musts in life these days. I value my peace so much. So then I had to have the guts to distance from those I felt a sense of unease around. I think we can all agree that with age comes the wisdom of knowing what is and what isn’t right for you, and who is and who isn’t right.

This is the truth of it… the problem with repeatedly sedating discomfort is that sometimes you also sedate discernment. You stop clearly seeing what is and isn’t working for you. Sometimes you even lose what it is you like or don’t like in that process so knowing what you need to speak up about can be quite a daunting task. The other thing I became so much more aware of was how much energy I’d spent over explaining myself, keeping the peace and trying to manage everybody else’s comfort whilst not honouring my own.

The irony wasn’t wasted on me either because these were all things I was supporting others with in clinic over the years and yet I was using alcohol to avoid. That’s one of my big benefits of sobriety, finally have the time, clarity and courage to put in effective boundaries and to listen to my intuition properly myself, and not just teaching others how to do it.

And to anyone worrying, I don’t think sobriety or boundary setting makes you harder or colder as a person. If anything, I think it personally made me more emotionally available because I was no longer constantly numbing, recovering, suppressing or operating from exhaustion. But alongside that increased emotional capacity came something else too… self respect.

And self respect changes behaviour in the long term because you stop placing yourself in situations that repeatedly hurt you. You become more honest about your limits and less willing to tolerate emotional inconsistency. Above all, you stop treating your own discomfort as irrelevant and you begin listening to it.

These days I advocate for myself. I leave situations earlier when I know I’ve had enough and I hold firmer boundaries around my time and emotional energy. I recognise overstimulation before I hit burnout and say no without guilt. It’s all about allowing myself to acknowledge when something genuinely doesn’t work for me instead of forcing myself to tolerate it indefinitely.

Often alcohol becomes so intertwined with emotional regulation, self soothing, people pleasing, masking, survival and escape that we need to dig deeper when we remove it. Once that coping mechanism is removed, you begin seeing your life much more clearly but you also then have to stand up for yourself and speak up. No numbing, just be honest.

That clarity can feel uncomfortable initially because you can no longer numb the friction between who you are and how you are living and so it does feel really difficult to do, but it’s so worth it. It’s actually one of the most freeing parts of sobriety for me. I’m not difficult but I am honest about how I’m feeling and as a result I experience so much less resentment over things.

You need to be really honest with yourself and address where you may feel overstimulated. Where you may be feeling lonely and how to change that. Is it that you’re masking constantly and you need to gently and systematically remove the mask in certain situations that feel safe to you? Is it time to speak up about any resentment or to step away from needing external validation?

But long term, I think it becomes one of the most freeing parts of sobriety. If you need any support with this then you can always have a session.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner with a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology. She specialises in helping people change their relationship with alcohol, rebuild self-trust and create lasting change using evidence-based psychological tools, CBT and hypnosis.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

You can find out more at www.louisaevans.com.

“What about my holiday?”

It’s often one of the first things that comes up. It was the same for me for years, holidays and alcohol were intertwined in my mind. In fact, if I’m honest, I probably couldn’t imagine one without the other. The holiday started the second we left home, continued with drinks by the pool or in the local bar, included wine with dinner and usually ended with me returning home feeling as though I needed another holiday to recover from the first one.

The strange thing is that when I look back now, I don’t think I was actually looking forward to alcohol. I think I was looking forward to how I imagined alcohol would make me feel and that’s a subtle but important difference.

Because when we start romanticising drinking on holiday, we’re rarely picturing ourselves lying awake at three in the morning with a racing heart. We’re not remembering the headaches, the dehydration, the arguments, the anxiety or the feeling of being slightly disappointed in ourselves. Instead, we’re remembering the first sip of a cold drink in the sunshine. We’re remembering the laughter…the sea views and the feeling of switching off. We’re tapping into the feeling of being carefree.

Something I’ve really noticed in sobriety and now I’ve gained distance is that alcohol often takes credit for experiences that were often enjoyable anyway. I had started to realise that drinking at home on the sofa was one thing (and it was worrying me long before I actually stopped). But drinking a glass of wine while overlooking the sea always felt sophisticated to me. It was just what you did. Drinking because I was stressed was one thing but drinking because I was on holiday was entirely different or at least that’s what I told myself.

Looking back, I can see that my body didn’t seem to share that opinion. Alcohol affected me exactly the same way whether I was drinking in Herefordshire, Cornwall or anywhere else in the world. My sleep still suffered, my energy still dropped, I struggled to stay awake mid afternoon and my mood was still affected. The only thing that really changed was the backdrop.

I think that’s one of the first lies our brains tell us on holiday the idea that somehow it doesn’t count. This is what I call the holiday loophole.

It’s as though boarding a plane temporarily suspends reality. Or if you’re staying in the UK then packing up and driving down the motorway switches you into holiday mode and the rules that applied at home no longer apply.

It’s fascinating when you think about it. We don’t apply that logic to anything else. We don’t stop wearing sunscreen because we’re on holiday. We don’t stop taking medication because we’re on holiday. We don’t suddenly decide that consequences have ceased to exist because we’re in a different country or on a break...

Yet when it comes to alcohol, many of us become remarkably skilled at creating exceptions.

I don’t actually think this is because people desperately want alcohol, I think it’s because people want a break from thinking about alcohol. If you’ve spent months or years trying to change your relationship with drinking, there can be a real temptation to simply hand the decision over for a week and that’s the tempting bit. To stop questioning, stop trying, stop analysing and to stop being the person who is doing things differently to everyone else. To forget sobriety just for a bit.

Another holiday favourite is the all-inclusive argument and I purposely won’t even book an all inclusive holiday now for this very reason. I have had my fair share over the years.

I’ve heard it from clients countless times and I’ve thought it myself.

“It’s all inclusive!”

“I’ve paid for it.”

“I may as well.”

When you really stop and examine it, it’s quite funny. Nobody approaches the dessert buffet with that same level of determination to stack their plates high. Nobody insists on eating six puddings because they’re included in the package. Nobody deliberately stays in the sun until they’re burnt because sunshine is free, yet somehow alcohol gets elevated into this category where consuming more of it feels like good value for money. Sod the hangover… we’ve paid for it!

The reality is that the holiday costs exactly the same whether you drink ten cocktails or none at all. The money has already left the bank account so drinking more doesn’t suddenly make the holiday better value. In fact, when I look back honestly at some of my drinking holidays, alcohol often made the holiday worse value.

It meant mornings spent feeling tired and there were often days where I couldn’t quite be bothered. It meant wanting an afternoon nap and falling asleep by the pool instead of exploring somewhere new that I’d paid a fortune to visit. It also meant entire chunks of the holiday revolving around where and when I could drink next.

And that’s perhaps one of the biggest things sobriety has shown me. Alcohol has an extraordinary ability to become the main event while convincing us it’s merely an accessory.

I remember years ago believing that alcohol made me more sociable on holiday. I would always have tales of talking until the small hours with another couple. In fact I’d sit and chat for hours and once we started motorhoming that sociable element increased even more. There is always someone happy to hand you a beer while they talk about their home on wheels. That was something Dale loved to do… I could lose him for hours on a campsite. But I did it too and alcohol seemed to mean that I’d laugh more and I’d feel more relaxed. Looking back, though, I think I was confusing alcohol with the environment. I was on holiday so I wasn’t relaxed because of the wine… I was relaxed because I wasn’t working. I wasn’t laughing because of the cocktails, I was laughing because I was spending time with people I loved.

Alcohol was standing in the middle of the experience collecting credit for things it hadn’t actually created. And that’s something I’ve noticed a hell of a lot since going sober at all times of the year, not just holidays.

I think that’s why the “everyone else is doing it” argument can feel so powerful too.

You look around a resort and it appears as though everybody has a drink in their hand because very often they do. They’re following that same script that you’re told you should.

For years I looked at other people and assumed they had a relationship with alcohol that I didn’t with envy. I wanted to be a ‘take or leave it’ drinker that could have one occasionally. I thought that all these other people had somehow mastered something that I hadn’t.

The longer I’ve worked in this field and the more conversations I’ve had, the more I’ve realised how little we actually know about other people’s experiences. We don’t see the truth because people don’t often talk about their internal reality and they’re often not even honest with themselves. We see a cocktail in somebody’s hand and create an entire narrative around it. We assume they’re carefree, happy and having this glorious time.

What we don’t see is the anxiety they might wake up with at three in the morning and we don’t see the arguments or the regrets. We don’t see the promises they make to themselves after the third glass or the mental gymnastics taking place behind the scenes in their head. We’re comparing our internal reality to this projection of what we imagine and the truth is we can never know. Maybe this is their reality or maybe it isn’t. But we mustn’t let it sway us because that’s rarely a fair comparison.

Another one of the thoughts that catches a lot of people out is the idea that a holiday should feel special.

It’s such a deeply ingrained belief that we hardly question it. Somewhere along the line many of us absorbed the message that special occasions require alcohol. Birthdays require alcohol. Weddings require alcohol. Christmas requires alcohol. Holidays require alcohol.

As though all these beautiful experiences somehow needs enhancing and I believed that for years too. What I’ve discovered since getting sober is that the holiday was already special.

The sea doesn’t become more beautiful because I had a glass of wine in my hand, the sunset isn’t improved by alcohol and the conversation isn’t improved by alcohol. In fact all of those things become soft focus and a bit messy.

In many ways, sobriety has allowed me to experience those things more fully because my attention isn’t constantly being pulled towards alcohol. I’m not wondering whether I should have another drink. I’m not thinking about where the next one is coming from. I’m not negotiating with myself. My attention is where it should be, which is on the holiday itself.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

You can find out more at www.louisaevans.com.

This week I had a celebration myself in the shape of graduating from my Psychology Masters, and like I do with all situations, I reflected on how things have changed now that I don’t drink. This is something I do regularly. In fact, if you follow me over on Instagram you’ll see daily reflections in my stories as it’s an amazing way to keep consolidating everything I’m learning as my sobriety evolves. It keeps me focussed on the gains and keeps any romanticising of alcohol at arm’s length. You don’t need to publicly post on social media to do this… simply making a note in your journal or stopping each morning to take a moment of gratitude for being sober will keep building your sober identity over time.

As I was queuing to go in and even as I was sat in the graduation hall, I noticed a few things that were markedly different to the last time I’d graduated for my degree and they are all benefits.

Comfort

The first was a sense of calm that I felt. When I had my ceremony for my degree I was still drinking and even the weekend of the event was a bit of a boozy one. We’d gone up to London and made a few days of it which meant by the time the actual day came around I was a bit jaded. The priorities were all wrong. I was an older graduate even then. I’d studied whilst Izzy was a baby and I was a single Mum working full time so it was no mean feat! But still this culmination of all that hard work and effort went by in a bit of a blur. There were all sorts of thoughts running through my head the whole morning we were there from “how long is this going to go on?” to “I wonder where we will eat for lunch (and have a top up)?” and “I hope my stomach is okay…”.

Apologies for too much information but if there’s one thing alcohol reliably did for me, it was to flare up my anxiety and also my IBS. Not great when you’re sat in a hall, penned in and unable to leave. Thankfully both of those things were kicked into touch when I went sober. In fact, pretty much straight away. So working out where the bar is, where the exits are or even where the loo is, is no longer a worry I have. That’s freeing in itself!

This time I just felt so much more comfortable. It’s a long old ceremony but I was present for all of it. My mind wasn’t drifting to worries, it was very much in the moment and no headache in sight.

Presence

Which brings me to expand on not having anxiety in these situations. The last time I walked across a graduation stage I sprinted across. I recall wanting to “get it over” and to make sure I didn’t trip up. It’s sad really when you think about the amount of time and energy that goes into some of these things we want to celebrate whether that’s an academic achievement or even a celebration like a wedding.

It’s normal to feel a few nerves at events like this but it shouldn’t override the experience.

This time I actually wanted to slow things down. I wanted to walk across that stage, look around the room and remember it. There was nowhere else I wanted to be and nothing else I was waiting for. I wasn’t counting down until the ceremony finished because the ceremony itself was the thing I’d come to enjoy.

Freedom of thought

This was probably the biggest thing I noticed, although it’s much harder to explain. My mind just felt so much quieter.

There wasn’t a constant little commentary running alongside everything that was happening. I wasn’t wondering how I’d feel later, whether we’d stop somewhere for a drink afterwards or what the rest of the day looked like. I wasn’t thinking about alcohol at all.

It’s shocking how much space alcohol used to occupy in my thinking. Not just the drinking itself, but everything around it. From planning it, then managing it or even recovering from it. Wondering if I’d overdone it, overthinking everything and telling myself I’d be sensible. Above all it was drinking with one eye on my watch and unit consumption, hoping I’d feel alright the next day.

Even the night before events like this I’d often find myself mentally counting. How much had I had? Could I get away with one more or would I regret it in the morning? Maybe if I drank a big glass of water before bed I’d be alright. It wasn’t something I consciously thought about, it was just part of the routine and it was exhausting. Without alcohol there’s no mental chatter of trying to control it.

Sitting there this week, all of that had gone.

Instead I found myself watching people’s reactions as they crossed the stage. It was an amazing atmosphere and I soaked it all up. I wasn’t distracted by what came next because I was actually enjoying where I already was. I don’t think I’d realised until that moment just how much attention alcohol had demanded over the years.

Then even afterwards when everyone gathered outside in a marquee before heading off for the rest of the day, I was happy to leave and move on to our private celebration. Years ago I’d almost certainly have been scanning to see where the wine was being served before grabbing a glass just because it was there. It wasn’t something I’d have deliberately set out to do, it was just what celebrations involved in my mind and if the opportunity presented itself I would have taken it. This time it honestly didn’t cross my mind. We wandered around taking photos and then went for a lovely meal together. It was only later that I realised I’d never once looked for the bar.

I was really present throughout and the result was that I came home with memories rather than a headache or even regret. I remembered everything… the people, the feeling of walking across the stage and the meal we enjoyed afterwards. Most importantly, I remember feeling proud of myself and on so many levels. I always credit my sobriety with the fact I even did the Masters in the first place. If it wasn’t for the boosted confidence I experienced after hitting a year sober and a need to fill the extra time that had opened up to me, I’d never have had the idea.

One of the biggest worries people have when they first stop drinking is how they’re going to celebrate without alcohol. I completely understand that because I worried about exactly the same thing.

Alcohol wasn’t making these occasions better, it was just making me experience them differently. I spent so much of my previous graduation thinking about alcohol without even realising it. Beforehand I was counting drinks and wondering how I’d feel the next morning, during the ceremony I was worrying about my stomach, thinking about lunch and wondering when I’d next have a drink. Afterwards I’d almost certainly have been looking for the bar before I’d really taken in what had just happened.

On so many levels, sobriety is the gift that keeps on giving.

If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d enjoy a day like this more without alcohol than I ever did with it, I honestly wouldn’t have believed you.

But here we are!

Signing off,

Louisa Evans, MSc Psychology, GMBPsS

I’m always here if you need a session to talk about an event or for support in going sober. If there was anything here that resonated or you’re worried about doing sober events then this is also where my Sober Resilience course can help. It takes you through the psychological side of lasting change. We look at habits, identity, emotional regulation, confidence, relationships and the beliefs that keep pulling people back towards alcohol, with practical exercises and hypnosis sessions to help you put everything into practice.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

You can find out more at www.louisaevans.com.

It’s bonkers really. How can one liquid occupy such a pivotal part in so many different scenarios?

We’ve given it far too much importance and genuinely believe that it’s what makes or breaks an event.

I watch it now with those around me who still drink, boasting about hangovers and claiming they had a ‘bloody good night’ because they can’t remember half of it. Rather than seeing alcohol as the thing that threatens our joy, our peace and our presence, we see it as being the reason something is good. We give it far too much importance and far too much credit for the fun we have.

This is where unpicking some of these belief systems can help in sobriety because, for many, alcohol becomes more than just a drink. We’ve assigned alcohol far more responsibility than it ever deserves. It’s a reward, a comfort blanket, a social lubricant, a celebration enhancer and an emotional support system all in one. Somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing it as a drink and started seeing it as a solution.

The things we believe alcohol is giving us aren’t coming from it at all. The celebration is about the event and the people and not the champagne. The connection with someone else isn’t in the glass of wine (in fact, that’s often what threatens connection). The relaxation isn’t actually about the gin and tonic… in fact that was the thing raising cortisol and stressing our bodies out, leading to a 3am wake up with a racing heart.

The strange thing is that alcohol has somehow managed to position itself at both ends of the emotional spectrum. We drink when we’re celebrating and we drink when we’re grieving. We drink when we’re feeling nervous and we drink when we’re wanting to relax. We drink when we’re lonely and yet we also drink when we’re surrounded by people. We drink when we’ve had a brilliant day and we drink when we’ve had a terrible one.

It’s sold to us as the answer to virtually every human emotion.

For years I genuinely believed that removing alcohol would leave a hole in my life because I’d attached it to so many experiences. It was my constant companion. In my head I wasn’t just giving up a drink… I thought I was giving up celebration, connection, comfort, confidence and fun. What I couldn’t see at the time was that I had gradually started crediting alcohol for things it hadn’t actually created at all. The laughter we had didn’t come from the fact we were drinking, it came from the people I was with. The joy came from the occasion or celebration. The sense of achievement came from the hard work I’d put in. Alcohol was simply present, yet I’d somehow promoted it to be the star of the show.

What I’ve come to realise is that this matters because the moment we stop giving alcohol so much credit, it starts to lose some of its power over us.

One of the biggest fears people have when they think about going sober is the belief that life will be somehow lacking without it. Sometimes our experiences of the early days of not drinking reinforce that belief but we can worry that celebrations will feel flat, holidays will feel boring, social occasions will feel awkward and stressful periods will feel impossible. But if you push past those early fears you’ll see that you’re far more resilient that you realise and that alcohol has actually created a lot of the problems that it promises to solve.

The problem we tend to have is that we’ve spent years pairing alcohol with virtually every meaningful experience we’ve had and over time our brains start to connect the two together. We think it’s alcohol that creates the fun or solves the problems when actually the reality is that alcohol is the thing that threatens the fun and creates the problems in the first place.

Over the years of drinking we stop seeing alcohol as something that accompanies an event and start seeing it as something that creates the event. Psychologists call this associative learning. If two things repeatedly occur together, our brains begin linking them automatically. It’s one of the ways we make sense of the world, but it can also lead us astray.

Alcohol benefits enormously from this process… as does the alcohol industry.

Birthdays mean a glass of champagne. Christmas comes and there’s wine. Holidays begin with airport drinks in the bar while you’re waiting. A stressful day ends and there’s a large glass of something waiting on the sofa. Over time, our brains stop seeing these as separate things. Instead, the event and the alcohol become fused together. We don’t think, “I’m celebrating my birthday and drinking champagne.” We start to think, “Champagne is part of what makes a birthday special.”

Stressful situations are also another time that alcohol gets the credit for solving a problem. But in reality it isn’t the wine you pour at the end ofthe day that helps you relax, it’s the fact it’s the end of the day and you’re home. The exhale you do is relief and if anything alcohol is then stressing your system behind the scenes, raising cortisol and creating havoc that you’ll feel at 3am.

For me personally, I realised that many of the situations I thought required alcohol were simply situations in which alcohol had always been present. There’s a subtle but important difference because one suggests dependency and the other suggests it’s a habit. One is about it being a necessity and the other suggests conditioning through repetition.

What surprised me was how quickly some of those beliefs started to unravel once they were tested. Not immediately, of course. The first sober birthday felt different (and a bit flat) because it challenged years of conditioning. The first holiday felt unfamiliar because I’d never experienced one without alcohol. But something feel unfamiliar and something feeling unenjoyable are not the same thing. Feeling different doesn’t mean feeling bad.

This is a mistake that a lot of people make in early sobriety of interpreting discomfort or flatness as evidence that there’s something wrong. In reality, ot often just the absence of a familiar habit. Any awkwardness isn’t necessarily proof that alcohol is a missing part that we will never be able to let go of, it’s often proof that our brains are adjusting to a new way of doing things.

The best thing you can do in sobriety is constantly question any assumptions you have so if you find yourself thinking, “This won’t be as good without alcohol,” stop and ask yourself whether alcohol is genuinely the source of the enjoyment in that moment or whether it’s simply that you’re used to seeing the two together.

When I did this, more often than not, the answer was that they’d simply been linked in my mind.

I’d spent years believing alcohol was a massive part of these experiences, only to discover that it had very often been detracting from them. Alcohol risked more than it brought. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d gone off to bed early, or said things I didn’t mean or even just couldn’t recall things.

I think this is where a lot of freedom comes from in sobriety. Not in learning how to resist alcohol forever because that sounds really exhausting and you’ll end up feeling quite hard done by. But instead in gradually dismantling the myths we’ve built around it. Every sober holiday, every sober birthday, every sober Friday night becomes evidence that alcohol added nothing.

I often think of sobriety as an evidence-gathering exercise. Every time I did something without alcohol that I previously thought required alcohol, I collected another piece of evidence. Evidence that I could socialise without it, evidence that I could celebrate without it, evidence that I could relax without it and evidence that I could cope with difficult emotions without reaching for a drink.

One piece of evidence on it’s own rarely changes a deeply held belief especially around something as addictive as alcohol. But dozens of experiences begin to build a different story. The thing you were once so convinced you needed starts to look a lot less essential and once you begin collecting that evidence, something changes.

You stop seeing sobriety as a life of lack without alcohol and start seeing it as a life where alcohol no longer gets to take centre stage. And that is truly freeing!

Ask yourself what it is you really need in those moments that you think alcohol will deliver. If you want relaxation, you can consider what genuinely helps you relax? If you’re after connection, what creates real connection instead of being zoned out around loved ones? You may be seeking confidence or even comfort. You need to work out what will actually deliver all of those things for you.

Sobriety is a wonderful opportunity to stop pouring a drink automatically on every emotion and to ask yourself what it is you really need. To become truly curious. Then you’re in a headspace to properly listen and then to find things that would actually help. Because the other contradiction is that you will want different solutions for what relaxes you and what helps you celebrate. One thing won’t be the ‘fix all’ solution the way that alcohol promises to be.

We spend so many years believing alcohol is the answer that we never really investigate the question properly. We never stop to ask what we’re hoping it will give us and we often don’t deal with any of the real problems we then have in our life.

When we do, we often discover that what we’re looking for whether that’s comfort, belonging, celebration, rest, joy, confidence or relief… was never something we could drink. It’s nearly always something deeper, something more human and ultimately something that no drink could ever provide in a lasting way.

So, let’s stop giving alcohol the credit for the nice things that happen in our lives. Alcohol steals the show. So much so, we question if we will be able to have the same amount of fun without it or if we will be resilient without it as a crutch.

It’s time to knock it off it’s pedestal.

If you’d like a session with me at any point, to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email.

I’ve also put together a guide for the first few days and weeks of sobriety that you can find on my website. Head to www.louisaevans.com and pop your email in for it to be sent through to you.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

You can find out more at www.louisaevans.com.

One of the things I’ve found over the last few years is that there are topics I simply can’t do justice to in an Instagram post, a substack article or even a podcast episode. Sometimes it helps to be able to explain an idea properly, give examples, and explore the psychology behind why we think, feel and behave the way we do. That’s exactly what I want this channel to be.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know that I’m far less interested in telling people what they should do than helping them understand themselves. I think when we understand why alcohol has such a hold over us, why our brains keep pulling us back towards it and why sobriety can feel so difficult in the beginning everything starts to make much more sense. My hope is that these videos help you feel less alone, more informed and more confident in your own decisions.

The video above tackles something I hear surprisingly often. People tell me they’re waiting to hate alcohol before they stop drinking or maybe even waiting for a rock bottom to force them into it. They assume that once they no longer want a glass of wine or feel tempted by alcohol, that’s when they’ll be ready to quit.

The problem is that many of us stop drinking whilst holding two truths at once. We can hate what alcohol is doing to our lives whilst still liking it on some level and that can feel really confusing. Those feelings aren’t contradictory… they’re completely normal. In fact, I think expecting to stop liking alcohol before you quit is one of the reasons people remain stuck for months or even years.

In the video, I talk about why those mixed feelings exist, why you don’t have to wait for them to disappear before you make a change, and how your relationship with alcohol often shifts naturally as you build an alcohol-free life.

You can watch the video here: Are You Waiting to Hate Alcohol Before You Quit?

If you enjoy it, I’d be incredibly grateful if you would subscribe to the channel. Those early subscribers, comments and likes genuinely help YouTube understand who the videos are for, which means there’s a much better chance they’ll reach the people who need them most.

I’d also love to know what you’d like me to cover in future videos. One of the reasons I’ve started YouTube is because it gives me the space to answer the questions that don’t fit neatly into a social media post, so if there’s something you’ve always wanted me to explore, let me know in the comments.

Thank you, as always, for reading my Substack, listening to the podcast, following along on Instagram and now, hopefully, joining me on YouTube too. I’m really excited about where this is going, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Watch here: Are You Waiting to Hate Alcohol?

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

It’s a bit like thinking back to an old relationship or being convinced back to a toxic ex just because they’ve whispered a few sweet nothings to you… we have a tendency to gloss over the bad bits and only remember the good. The challenge when you are sober is that the toxic ex is alcohol and you definitely don’t want to be going back to it. You want to remain firm.

So what is the purpose of fading affect bias?

Nothing tends to happen in the human mind without a pretty good reason for it and so I wanted to share with you some of the psychological reasons we have fading affect bias - what purpose it has and actually where it helps us. It’s important to understand why it exists so that you can ignore it when it creeps in over less helpful scenarios.

✨ It helps with regulation and resilience

Fading affect bias is actually all about maintaining emotional balance and being resilient. Think about it like this, if negative memories stayed as strong in our minds as good ones then we would be constantly re-living trauma or stress which wouldn’t be helpful at all. We’d perpetually be in distress so fading affect bias is a sort of emotional buffer for the brain, making it easier to move on when we’ve been hurt.

✨ It protects our mental health

This obviously has a protective factor to our mental health by taking the sting out of painful things. It boosts the glow of good memories so that we remain upbeat and positive which actually supports psychological well-being in the long run. This protects against ruminating over the past which is energy zapping and can lead to depression or anxiety.

✨ It strengthens our identity

As we go through life if our own personal narratives and story telling about our lives is more positive, then we have fading affect bias to thank. It actually helps us in building a more optimistic sense of self, boosts the idea of having control in our own hands to change our destiny and helps to have a better experience. Those individuals who feel like they have a locus of control (in other words they feel in control of their own destiny) tend to feel more resilient in the face of adversity and challenge.

✨ It has motivating factors

If we place more emphasis on positive memories and stories about ourselves in our mind then that also acts as a motivator for future behaviour. The opposite is also true in that dampening down those bad memories avoids stalling personal growth.

I also joke that fading affect bias also has the benefit of ensuring the human race continues to multiply as we all forget the pain of childbirth or the difficult first few sleepless months when we have a second baby. Without fading affect bias we may all stop at one child!

It’s basically your brain’s way of saying “let’s keep the life lessons but let’s lose the painful sting”.

How does fading affect bias show up in sobriety?

It isn’t all bad news as fading affect bias does help with one area of sobriety and that’s concerned with letting go of those painful and cringeworthy drinking memories. They do disappear and the intensity of them will fade over time… phew… thank goodness for that! It’s often why we can laugh about something embarrassing that happened to us after the passage of time but in the moment it can feel absolutely cringeworthy and impossible to see the funny side.

It’s also why sobriety feels it’s getting easier with the passage of time… (a double edged sword).

When you’re navigating the early days of sobriety it can feel hard going. You’re fighting the wine witch on one hand and then also dealing with the emotional weight of the past which can feel heavy. Maybe you’re replaying shame from a night out with work colleagues or reliving the anxiety of not recalling what you said to someone. Those flashbacks can be exhausting and disturbing. They can also feel really intense and for a while you may feel overwhelmed by these flashback memories you’re faced with.

As time goes on though something amazing begins to happen and that’s the fact you’ll be able to think back to some of those painful times and not experience the emotional intensity, like the sting has gone out of them. You actually then get a beautiful opportunity to reflect but not be pulled under by them. This is where fading affect bias and sobriety work well together.

Those negative memories are fading faster than the positive ones and so the bad thoughts and memories lose a bit of their potency. The good feelings remain so you aren’t constantly being derailed by them.

This built in mechanism for emotional regulation isn’t denial or having a selective memory, it’s actually helping you to move forward and to become resilient. Those emotions start to fade and that isn’t because you’re ignoring them, but because your brain is doing what it’s designed to do which is to lessen the impact of things that hurt us.

This is where you need to be playing on all those positives of sobriety and making a note of them on a daily basis. Things like your first clear-headed morning, a meaningful conversation you truly remember, hitting a milestone you never thought possible—those moments stay emotionally rich. This will shift your memory bank to be filled with pride and clarity and progress. That shift is part of why sobriety often feels easier and more rewarding as time goes on.

Some amazing outcomes of fading affect bias in sobriety are:

• That the hard stuff won’t always feel as heavy so give it time and your brain will heal.

• You’re not weak for having those painful memories, you’re simply human.

• …and you get to keep the joy of all of the amazing things that sobriety brings, front and centre in your brain (if you work at focussing on it, that is…)

The danger of fading affect bias in sobriety

However, fading affect bias can also threaten your sobriety so be wary and spot it as soon as you can. As time goes on and as we forget how bad alcohol made us feel you may start to think…

"Was it really that bad?"
"Maybe I overreacted…"
"Could I just have one or two now?"

Team that with the fact that there is constant alcohol promotion and marketing telling us how wonderful it is, it would be very easy to pop alcohol back on a pedestal and to forget the truth and why you walked away in the first place.

This kind of thinking can sneak in, especially when life feels calmer, and the chaos of drinking feels like a distant memory. You may even begin to believe that alcohol seems less harmful over time than it actually was.

As you move along in your sober journey your mind may drift back to the "fun" parts of drinking like dancing with friends, laughing until you cried, the relief of that first sip after a long day because these are the memories that stay emotionally vivid.

But what about the hangovers? The messy nights? The arguments? The health worries? The anxiety? The broken promises? The regret?

Over time, fading affect bias can dull their emotional intensity, making them feel less real or serious for you. I know that I had to really be aware of this especially then when you see it everywhere in society. It’s when those awful thoughts of moderation can pop in. The moderation myth as I call it… we forget that if we had been able to moderate we wouldn’t have had to go sober in the first place!

I tried to moderate for over ten years and I think that’s evidence enough that it just isn’t possible for me. My argument is that alcohol is an addictive substance so it’s a miracle that some can moderate it but as I’ve said before, we all know those social smokers or the person who doesn’t inhale the whole bag of chocolate buttons. They do exist but it just isn’t something I even entertain. Alcohol hasn’t altered, it’s still highly addictive and we were once addicted to it, even if it was as a grey area drinker. You definitely don’t want to go back there.

Watch that you aren’t downplaying the truth about you and alcohol just because you’ve been subjected to a bit of social pressure or maybe some nostalgia has crept in. Don’t believe your mind when it tells you ‘You weren’t that bad’.

You were. It was. Don’t believe it.

How to safeguard against fading affect bias in sobriety

✨ Keep a “sober truth” journal.
Write down the raw, honest reality of what alcohol did to your mental, physical, and emotional health. Revisit it when FAB kicks in. You can even write a heartfelt breakup letter to alcohol listing out all the reasons you’re dumping it and why you won’t be taking it back… EVER. Even for a one night stand.

✨ Talk about it
Share your memories with someone who knows your story. A therapist or sober friend can help you reality check the narrative your telling yourself and bring some balance to it.

✨ Don’t feel ashamed
Fading affect bias is natural so don’t keep it a secret if those thoughts are creeping in, see it as a signal and definitely not a setback. It’s just your brain trying to make peace with the past and it’s something you need to be hyper-vigilant about.

A final thought from me…

Fading affect bias may have the potential to make you forget just how bad alcohol was, but your body remembers, your relationships remember, and deep down, you remember. If you are spotting it creeping in then reach out to someone and talk it through, recognise it for what it is and see it as a sign that maybe you need to do a bit more work on your emotional sobriety. I’m always here to support you as well, you can have a one off session to nip it in the bud.

The process of being happy in sobriety is in knocking alcohol off its pedestal and placing sobriety on a pedestal… so keep focussed on those benefits and watch that you aren’t let complacency creep in.

Confidence is wonderful but complacency is lethal.

Sobriety is the gift that keeps giving and staying firmly anchored in your truth, not the faded version, is what will carry you forward.

Join me in the comments…

Leave a comment

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

The biggest and most impactful thing I ever procrastinated about was going sober. I would be all for it one minute and then after a few days of abstaining from alcohol, I’d feel the need to delay this life changing decision until another day. It seems madness really, if you know you need to do something why on earth would you put it off?

The first thing to understand is that when you first decide to delay that task you’d rather not be doing you will get a flood of relief (which in itself can be addictive). I know that when I would decide that going sober was a ‘tomorrow problem’ I felt immense relief. This came from two areas… the first was from knowing that I’d get my glass of wine that evening and my ‘fix’ and the second was getting a buzz from the relief of not having to do the hard thing. The longer term consequences of this delay can be feelings of stress, guilt or low self-esteem as you kick yourself for yet again not following through on your promises to yourself or to others. This can affect your self worth and your emotional wellbeing and have some negative psychological consequences to boot.

Whether you’re procrastinating about something like sobriety or whether they’re work tasks or exercise goals, they all tend to stem from a similar place of self doubt, maybe some fears thrown in and some potential psychological barriers.

✨ Denial

So I’ll begin by talking about procrastination when it comes to sobriety but then widen the topic to any subject. So the first and biggest reason that most people will procrastinate about sobriety is denial that things are that bad. This is why I often recommend that if someone is sober curious and not ready to commit, that they log the drinks they are drinking on an app (there are loads to choose from) and to keep an honest journal of how they’re feeling. This is so that they are facing the facts of their relationship with alcohol and to remove this barrier. It’s a form of avoidance and curiosity is the key.

✨ Coping mechanism

There is an additional factor with sobriety and that is a fear of losing your coping mechanism. This is why a lot of people will attempt to put off sobriety until they feel life will have a bit of a lull… no parties, holidays or challenging times. Anyone who’s been sober for a while will know that it’s actually in adversity that your sober muscles are strengthened.

✨ Fear of change

The third that’s relevant to sobriety is a fear of change or a fear of the unknown. Not knowing what life will look like can be a barrier for a lot of change. Change in and of itself can feel quite intimidating and so even positive changes can be met with resistance. It can feel frightening and so acknowledging that you feel scared of whatever it is you’re facing can help you to accept that it’s a big deal. Don’t gaslight yourself, change is a big deal.

✨ Self efficacy

The final area that may cause you to procrastinate is a lack of self-efficacy or feelings of hopelessness. Do you believe you can do it? If you’ve tried in the past to do it and failed then this may lead to a knock in your confidence. Again, being honest with yourself helps but also building yourself up in the process and rather than saying I haven’t done it in the past, say that “I haven’t done it yet, that doesn’t mean I can’t.”

How to overcome procrastination

Procrastination has a bit of a bad reputation in that people think that those who delay tasks in this way have an element of laziness or are unmotivated but it isn’t that at all. Maybe it’s you who’ve found yourself putting something off, then berating yourself for it. Bringing some understanding to why procrastination happens from a psychological perspective can help.

The definition of procrastination is the voluntary delay of an intended action, despite knowing that this delay could result in negative consequences. It often results in increased stresses and pressures so ends up being a paradox in and of itself. From a psychological perspective it is not just a matter of poor self control. It’s often a coping mechanism for self doubt, low self esteem or self worth and anxious feelings. It is also often fuelled by two things… a fear of failing and perfectionism.

✨ Fear of Failure

The fear of failure is one of the most significant psychological drivers behind procrastination. This fear is not simply about the possibility of failing at a task, but it’s also about any potential consequences that any failure might have. Especially if someone has low self esteem or confidence issues, it can feel like a confirmation that they are not good enough if they don’t succeed at that task.

If you suffer with a fear of failure that you may find yourself delaying or avoiding tasks that you really want to do just in case you fail. So the first thing to do in order to overcome this is to ask yourself ‘what is it I’m afraid of?’.

The other thing to do is to reframe failure as a learning experience. It isn’t a reflection of your worth or even of your abilities, it’s an opportunity for learning and growth. Even in sobriety, those previous attempts will have taught you something about your triggers and that way you’re better positioned to overcome them and not fall for them again. Another aspect of a fear of failure is the potential fear of judgment from others. Many people can procrastinate because they are concerned with how others will perceive them if they fail. It’s really important to remember that every failure is a chance for you to adapt, to change and most of all to improve.

✨ Perfectionism: The Desire for Flawless Outcomes

This brings us to perfectionism. Wanting to be perfect at everything can be paralysing in and of itself. It’s attaching your self worth to the outcome and not trusting in your own ability. Be mindful of not setting unrealistically high standards for yourself - the way to tell is the language that you use about something. Using words like ‘I must have this go well’ or ‘I have to get a distinction on this exam’ will give you a clue as to if your standards are inflexible or even unrealistic. It’s about setting realistic expectations to release yourself from that pressure. What’s the worst that can happen if it doesn’t go the way you want it to? You learn, you course correct and you try again. If you think about it this way - which person do you admire most… the person who keeps trying and learning along the way or the person who never tries at all?

To explain the relationship between fear, perfectionism, and procrastination we can use various psychological theories, but as I use CBT in my clinic the best one I feel that fits is the cognitive behavioural theory. This theory posits that our thoughts and our beliefs will shape and influence our emotions, and our emotions in turn impact our actions. I use the think-feel-act cycle to explain how this works in my clinic.

So if you have a strong fear of failure you may have thoughts like:

“I must succeed” or “If I fail it makes me a failure” or even “failure means I’m not good enough”.

What then happens is that these thoughts don’t make you feel good, they may make you feel anxious and then the behaviour or actions that come from that are avoidance. Cue a flood or relief but then more additional thoughts of not being good enough because you haven’t even tried.

I talk a lot about cognitive distortions which are thoughts that aren’t helpful to us and fall into a few different categories. We all tend to have a pattern of using one or two (or maybe three) cognitive distortion patterns. These are ways of thinking that don’t serve you and that lead to negative emotions or actions.

Common cognitive distortions associated with perfectionism include:

• All-or-Nothing Thinking: Anything less than perfection is failing.

• Catastrophising: If I don’t succeed it will be absolutely unbearable.

• Overgeneralisation: If I fail it makes me a failure.

These ways of thinking create a mindset where anything less than a perfect outcome is an absolute disaster and creates so much pressure that inaction seems like the only choice.

How to overcome procrastination rooted in perfectionism

In order to overcome this type of procrastination you need to address the underlying thoughts and emotions attached. :

1. Reframe it: The first thing to do is to change the way you perceive failure. Instead of viewing it as something to avoid at all costs, try to see it as an opportunity for growth and learning. If you can embrace the idea that failure is a natural part of the process and that making mistakes does not define your worth then you’re half way there.

2. Challenge Perfectionist Thoughts: Identify and challenge perfectionistic thoughts by questioning how true they are. Just because you’re having a thought doesn’t make it a fact. Ask yourself "What would happen if I didn’t achieve perfection?" If you are honest with yourself you will tend to find that the consequences of not being perfect are absolutely fine and not as catastrophic as you’ve led yourself to believe.

3. Make goals achievable: Setting realistic, achievable targets will help reduce feelings of overwhelm and make it easier to start working. Focus on progress, not perfection.

4. Practice Self-Compassion: Be kind to yourself when things don’t go as planned. Self-compassion involves treating yourself with the same understanding and kindness that you would offer to a friend.

5. Develop a Growth Mindset: Cultivate a mindset that embraces challenges and sees failure as an opportunity for learning and improvement. People with a growth mindset tend to procrastinate less because they view mistakes as a natural part of the learning process, not as an indication of personal inadequacy.

You can get out of the procrastination cycle by being honest with yourself, spotting any thinking errors or cognitive distortions holding you back and showing yourself kindness in the process. If you spot perfectionist thoughts you can say to yourself “I don’t think like that anymore…” and then soften the goals off slightly.

Overcoming procrastination requires patience, self-compassion, and a willingness to face the discomfort of failure and imperfection. By reframing failure, challenging perfectionistic thoughts, and focusing on progress rather than perfection, you will be able to gradually reduce procrastination and unlock your full potential. If you’re struggling with overthinking, ruminating or procrastinating then get in touch and we can have a session to teach you some coping strategies to challenge unhelpful thoughts.

Oh and if you are procrastinating about sobriety… go for it. It’s not something you’ll ever regret but not doing it is something you might.

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

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Embracing curiosity

To be curious about something is to have an open mind and to come to it with questions. It’s about not coming with preconceived ideas and being open to challenging your belief systems. It’s a desire to learn new things about something or even about yourself. You can’t be curious and have a closed mind at the same time, because they’re opposing ideas. The very idea of being curious brings with it a need to ask questions and to genuinely and intently listen to the responses. I actually think being more curious makes us nicer to be around and more interested in our surroundings.

Having said that, for many years I wasn’t curious. I actually operated from a place of being scared and that was largely down to the part alcohol played in my life. I was frightened of what my drinking was doing to my health and so I would try to block out sensations in my body that made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t approach events with any sort of curiosity I just drank through them, I wasn’t curious about others because I spent my life firmly planted in my own head and I certainly wasn’t curious about myself down to the alcohol induced anxiety I was experiencing. I didn’t want to be curious or to be shown there was another way to do things because, quite frankly, the idea terrified me.

Then I went sober.

Gone was my safety blanket of the familiar, if painful, routine of having a glass of wine to zone out and not to think about certain things. I had removed my crutch of alcohol to unwind and relax at the end of the day. I no longer had my way of switching off, of dealing with stress and dealing with certain people. My drinking habit had become my comfort zone over the years that had turned out to be anything but comfortable. I was constantly trying to moderate, to restrict my intake and to learn how to take or leave alcohol so that I could keep it in my life in some way. I was clinging onto it with desperation and a genuine fear that life wouldn’t be the same without it. Finally though, and after years of this painful moderation battle I decided enough was enough. On the 31st December 2022 I had my last alcoholic drink and it went out with a whimper. It wasn’t memorable or at a special event but I’d finally made my decision to be sober and I committed to it.

With that decision came a lot of unknowns that I then couldn’t help but embrace… I had no choice! First off I had to work out how on earth I was going to navigate the first few sober days with the thoughts about drinking dominating my mind. Then I had to work out what I was going to do with the time and energy that not drinking had freed up for me, which was quite an intimidating idea in and of itself. I liken myself to the Duracell bunny with my boundless energy and need to be entertained at all times and alcohol was going some way to calming me down a bit. Look out world! The next hurdles were the get togethers with friends, the mini breaks and the holidays that were in the diary. I also had no idea if my marriage would survive us both going sober or if my husband, Dale, would stick to his commitment to go sober with me. This was something I hadn’t asked him to do but it brought another factor into the equation that was an unknown. In a way sobriety had forced me into so many unknowns that I had no choice to become curious…

I began with a genuine curiosity as to what sober Louisa was going to look like. I had no idea. I’d been drinking alcohol from a pretty young age and I had never done a holiday sober, a meal out sober or even a date sober… towards the end I hadn’t done many evenings sober, let’s be honest!

I journaled and considered what I hoped sobriety would bring for me but it was hard to imagine. I hoped I’d lose weight, that my skin would glow, my sleep would improve and that I wouldn’t suddenly realise that Dale and I had nothing in common without the glue of alcohol holding us together. The last one was a genuine fear because our relationship had always been so heavily intertwined with getting drunk or merry that I had to trust that it would all unfold the way it was meant to. What had to be my priority was going sober. It didn’t matter what he did or what it meant, I just knew I couldn’t keep drinking the way that I was. I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic, or at least I didn’t feel that I was. But I also knew I didn’t have a healthy relationship with alcohol and that it seemed to dominate my thoughts. I could take nights off but they were hard fought and I often found myself sulking.

Sobriety may have been the catalyst for change but curiosity became my new mantra that made the world of difference.

How curiosity helps

So what does being curious in sobriety look like and how does it help?

One of the biggest things that people tell me they worry about is other peoples reactions, get togethers or parties and holidays. If you approach all of those things with an open mind and an attitude of curiosity then the whole process becomes more interesting, you are able to hold the outcomes more lightly and you’re able to engage in your ability to observe and not get absorbed by things. It helps you to remove the worry and overthinking and to step back to engage in metacognition.

✨ A party or event

Imagine you’re invited to a wedding or party and you’re feeling really apprehensive about it. You start telling stories to yourself about what others may or may not think about your decision not to drink, you start to worry about how you will feel, you concern yourself with what you’ll say and whether you’ll feel like you’re being left out of things. That sounds like a whole load of anxiety before you’ve even turned up and then you wonder why it didn’t quite go as planned.

Firstly, accept things will be different sober, that’s a given. Then approach the event with curiosity. Instead of worrying what others may think, reframe it to being curious about their reaction, enabling you to step back if that reaction is judgemental or one you hadn’t expected. If someone says something rude to you or questions your decision to drink you can wonder why that may be… you’re less attached to the outcome but also you’re being open minded and understanding of the fact there are many different points of view on alcohol. With a curious mindset you can ask open ended questions of yourself and of others beginning with ‘why’ or ‘how’ in order to see what could be underneath things.

You can also be curious about yourself. Instead of worrying what you will feel like sober, be curious about how you will feel and get excited about the new experiences. It’s going to feel different and it’s an exciting prospect to learn more about yourself.

✨ A holiday

A sober holiday was one of my biggies. All of our holidays revolved around drinks with lunch and into the evening and so rather than worry I’d be bored or feel out of sorts, instead I became curious as to what it would be like to visit places and be truly present. I wanted to learn more about the areas we were staying in, to experience the culture and to watch sunrises with a clear head. I was curious as to what the extra time would bring with it and what we would find to do instead of sitting there mindlessly drinking. Yes it was daunting, but it was also exciting.

✨ Curiosity with myself

I thought I had myself figured out and that I’d achieved pretty much everything I wanted to achieve, but I can tell you now that I hadn’t and I had no idea what I was capable of… I still don’t. I’m a work in progress and I’m now 100% here for it. Looking back I now realise how much alcohol was keeping me in a fixed mindset, believing that I wasn’t able to do some things.

Since going sober I’ve taken up running, I’ve tried horse riding, I’ve fallen in love with Pilates and I’ve graduated from my Psychology Masters. All unthinkable when I was still drinking because alcohol was keeping me so small. My confidence and curiosity were being repressed. These days I’m reading and learning more than I have ever done and these were all things I’d talked myself out of being able to do in the past. I only tried them due to an increase in confidence after going sober and due to bringing a spirit of curiosity as to what I was truly capable of. In short, I stopped restricting myself.

✨ Curiosity with others

We can sometimes approach others imagining they operate from the same set of standards, morals and values as us and then end up bitterly disappointed if they don’t. We can feel frustrated, angry or even hurt by other people if we allow their behaviour to get under our skin. The only person that hurts is ourselves. If we can bring an air of curiosity to any challenging people or interactions, then we can step back and look at other perspectives or potential explanations for any behaviour that doesn’t align with our own value system.

Wondering why someone acts a certain way, thinking about what could motivate them or what could have led to their behaviours or attitudes being the way that they are, can really help when it comes to difficult people. We can be more curious and become less attached to being ‘right’ and reach acceptance more easily. We don’t need to continue to interact if we choose not to and we can still put boundaries in place, but by understanding them better it doesn’t need to upset us as much. In fact, it can be freeing.

These are the key takeaways to embrace a spirit of curiosity in your sobriety or in your life:

✨ Adopt a growth mindset

As you can imagine, I really do believe in having a growth mindset. I wouldn’t be much good at my job if I didn’t. It is actually quite upsetting for me to realise that alcohol had snuck under the radar and had begun to chip away at that in me. I had begun to restrict myself without realising it thanks to alcohol chipping away at my self esteem. I truly believe that anyone can change with the right support, the right information and when they believe they can. Believe you can because you can do anything you put your mind to.

✨ Remove your fear of failure

What can get in the way of curiosity is having a fear of failure. You need to be willing to try and to learn. Be curious to try new things and to do them without alcohol.

✨ Ask more questions

Using open ended ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions, approach each event, person or even your own reaction to things in this way and be genuinely open to considering the different options and responses.

✨ Challenge yourself

Sobriety is an ideal opportunity to try new things. You have more time, more money, more energy and more motivation so make a list of things that you’d like to try or things you’d like to learn. Are there places you’d like to visit? Being in a different environment can spark even more curiosity.

✨ Stay humble

You can’t be curious and ‘know it all’ at the same time. There is always another thing to consider, something to try and an approach of remaining humble before jumping to conclusions. Challenging the ways you used to think is key as well as any belief systems you may hold about alcohol in certain situations. This is something I apply to other areas of my life and not just sobriety.

✨ Spot patterns

Look for patterns, beliefs or repetitive thoughts that are holding you back in order to let them go. Bring a curiosity to your thoughts by journaling and noticing anything that needs shifting. Make a note of any questions that arise as you do new things without alcohol.

✨ Get comfortable with uncertainty

This is a big one. Most of us are drawn to stay safe and alcohol tends to keep us quite restricted. The thing is you can’t be curious and stay static at the same time. You need to get comfortable with uncertainty and not quite knowing the outcome. It’s exciting!

✨ Reflect

As you go about your life without alcohol, taking time to reflect and consider how things are different or better will help you combat any fading affect bias as time passes. I never take my sobriety for granted and I’m always looking at better ways to do things and reflecting on events in order to seek out those sober glimmers. We get more of what we focus on after all!

If you embrace your sobriety and your life with a spirit of curiosity, you’ll find it reduces your need to control external events, it will help you cope better if things don’t go as you expected and more than anything else it enables you to have fun, to be more creative and to connect to life in a different way.

I hope you’ve found this idea interesting and I’d love you to join me in the comments to begin a conversation around it. Do you approach things with curiosity?

Leave a comment

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

Let me start with a little context:

✨ Sobriety Wasn’t Instant for Me

I didn’t get sober overnight. I wasn’t one of those people who had a dramatic rock bottom, woke up one day and never drank again. My story was more gradual and a heck of a lot messier.

It took me over a decade to stop drinking for good. A decade. That’s a long time to be dipping in and out of sober curiosity, attempting short breaks, slipping back, and telling myself it wasn’t that bad. It was agonising and demoralising.

And that’s exactly why I’m writing this. Because if your journey isn’t straightforward either, you’re not alone. Looking back, there are some things I did really well but there are also things I wish I’d understood earlier. So here they are… shared in the hope they help someone else find their footing with sobriety a little faster than I did.

✨ I’d Ignore Others Opinions

This one’s big. Probably the biggest.

For years, I would constantly ask others how much they drank or if they felt my drinking was a problem. I didn’t want the truth at that point, what I actually wanted was a permission slip to carry on drinking the way that I was under the belief there was safety in numbers. If everyone was drinking like me then it couldn’t be harmful (or so I told myself).

But my inner voice wouldn’t let it go, that gut instinct kept chipping away at me. So I kept trying to moderate, take breaks, to set new rules around my consumption only to break them. To seemingly go back to square one. Again and again and again. I would rationalise it all by talking to others for reassurance that I didn’t really need to quit and it kept me stuck for so long.

But the truth is, deep down, I knew. That inner voice was a small, persistent whisper that told me alcohol wasn’t serving me. That it was costing me more than I was admitting and that I didn’t feel like myself anymore.

And I ignored that voice for far too long.

If I could go back, I wouldn’t spend so much time trying to fit into other people’s definitions of what a “problem” looks like. I wouldn’t wait for external validation. I wouldn’t need to hit some arbitrary rock bottom to justify changing. I would simply say: this doesn’t feel right, and that’s enough of a reason to do this scary thing. I’d ride out those hard early days because that was the truth. Instead of doing what I used to do which was getting to about day five, finding it tough the first weekend and then ask someone else about my drinking to give me permission to give in and drink. Funnily enough, I always chose drinkers to ask or people that drank more than me. I wasn’t daft… I knew what I was doing.

So here’s what I’ve learned:

You don’t need a rock bottom reason to get sober. Quiet dissatisfaction is reason enough. A longing for clarity, connection, or peace is enough. You are enough.

✨ I Would Reach Out for Support but I’d Be Selective

One of the best things I ever did was join the sober community on Instagram. Honestly, it was a lifeline. Seeing others speak openly about their struggles, triumphs, cravings, and mindset shifts made me feel less alone. It helped me feel seen in a way that real life often didn’t.

I found people I could relate to, in particular women who, like me, weren’t drinking in the daytime or hitting dramatic lows like a the stereotype we all jump to, but who still felt lost and unsure of how to stop.

However, I also learned (sometimes the hard way) that not every space is safe, and not every piece of advice is good advice. The internet can be empowering but it’s also public. And when you’re vulnerable, newly sober, and figuring things out, you need to be careful who you trust with your story.

If I could do it again, I’d reach out for support and learn to protect my energy whilst in that vulnerable space. I’d connect with those who made me feel grounded and seen and I’d avoid accounts that made me feel ashamed, judged or less than.

But do go out and find your tribe, just be selective and listen to your gut instinct as to who you feel safe around. Online or offline, we do need connections to help us to realise we aren’t alone and also to share the frustrations or trials of living a world that seems obsessed with alcohol. There are so many online groups to choose from and many offline meet ups where people focus on different activities other than drinking. I know our sober rebel group is a really safe supportive space and there are lots of groups like that about to choose from.

Also, think outside the box… you don’t have to join something that’s based around sobriety if you can’t find it local to you but joining evening fitness classes can be a good substitute. People tend to be more focussed on health and less on drinking in those spaces if you want to make new friends.

Here’s the truth though: there is no one right way to do this. There’s only your way.

✨ I’d Trust My Inner Voice Sooner

That quiet inner voice that would nag at me never really went away. It was always there, beneath all of the excuses I came up with. That voice is what finally saved me.

Looking back, I realise how wise that voice was. I didn’t need a long list of evidence and I didn’t need to convince anyone else really. I just needed to trust myself and once I did, everything began to change.

So if you hear that voice yourself please don’t ignore it. Don’t drown it out with “maybe next month” or “I’ll just cut down.” Listen. It may be the clearest guidance you’ll ever get.

✨ I’d Stop Romanticising the “Moderation Myth”

For years, I thought moderation was the golden ticket to happiness. I’d see people having one or two drinks and think, Why can’t I do that? I’d promise myself I’d stick to “just weekends” or tell myself I could learn to drink only at weddings. But every rule I made, I broke… over and over again.

It took me a long time to realise that moderation wasn’t something to yearn for. It was a different kind of being trapped. It also just wasn’t the right fit for me or for my alL or nothing brain. In fact, trying to moderate kept me stuck in a cycle of obsession… thinking about alcohol, planning it, regretting it, then starting over. It robbed me of inner peace.

Sobriety, on the other hand, gave me freedom and I wish I’d known that sooner.

✨ I’d Allow Myself to Grieve

One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the grief that came with early sobriety. I thought I’d feel nothing but pride and empowerment (and I did eventually) but in those early months, I also felt loss at times.

There was the loss of social rituals, the loss of the person I thought I was, the loss of a coping mechanism I’d relied on for years and the loss of a way to escape. There was even the loss of being able to artificially switch my brain off.

Grief is incredibly normal. It doesn’t mean sobriety is wrong for you or that it’s the wrong choice. What it actually means is that change is hard. It means you’re shedding old skin and that’s going to feel uncomfortable before it feels good.

If I could go back, I’d hold gentler space for that grief instead of trying to rush past it. I’d tell myself it’s okay to miss alcohol even when you don’t want to drink it. It’s okay to feel sad and sure at the same time. Two things can be true.

✨ I’d Reframe Boredom Sooner

In early sobriety, I was so bored at times. Without wine to punctuate the day, the evenings felt endless. What do people do with all this time? How do they unwind? Where’s the sparkle? I also had my AuDHD to take into account which meant that I was like a coiled spring some evenings. You can read my post about coping with that neurodivergent energy and intrusive thoughts here.

The thing is, boredom is part of the detox and that detox isn’t just physical, but emotional too. I had to relearn how to be with myself. How to sit with stillness and how to enjoy life without being buzzed or zoned out. So what I did was reframe boredom to being peace. I found new ways to rest, to read, to write, to get curious and to create. But at first, it just felt uncomfortable.

If that’s where you are right now, please know that it gets better.

✨ I’d Celebrate the Small Wins

Initially when you first go sober it’s misleading to think that milestones had to be huge to count like hitting a year sober or going on a sober holiday or having a sober Christmas.

But some of the most meaningful wins were really small and quiet. Things like:

• Saying no to a drink and feeling proud.

• Getting through a hard day without numbing.

• Feeling emotions fully even the uncomfortable ones.

• Waking up clear-headed on a Sunday.

Those moments are worth celebrating and they matter so celebrate them. They build the foundations of a new sober life.

✨ I’d Remember: Sobriety Isn’t Just About Alcohol

Quitting drinking is the beginning of something so beautiful but be incredibly gentle with yourself and patient in the process. It will change everything. What surprised me most is how sobriety touches every part of your life and it’s not just about what you remove it’s about what you gain:

• Emotional resilience

• Clarity

• Boundaries

• Healthier relationships

• Boosted energy and joie de vivre

• A stronger sense of self

I’ve had to unlearn old patterns and to rewire my coping strategies. Discovering who I am without the blur of booze hasn’t always been easy but it’s been worth every single moment.

Just begin today…

You don’t need to wait for the perfect time, or a rock bottom and you certainly don’t need to explain yourself to anyone. Going sober is a bold move in a world obsessed with alcohol. Be bold.

If you’d like support you can contact me for sessions, or you can join my online Sober Resilience Course teaching you psychology tools and CBT techniques to support you in sobriety and in life. You don’t have to be in early sobriety to benefit.

Leave a comment

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

We have this misconception that drinking alcohol is a social activity. We think of meetings in the pub, conversations in bars and parties we attended when we were younger. Alcohol is intertwined with socialising in our minds because that’s what many of us have always done and it’s the cultural narrative we’ve been sold. When we think about going out and not drinking, it can feel alien.

Yet since quitting alcohol at the end of 2022, my social life has improved not inspite of, but because of sobriety.

I wanted to bring a slightly different spin on this topic today as well. Often when people talk about gaining a social life in sobriety, it’s because they’ve joined sober groups and made friends who share their sober identity. That’s fantastic, and I’ve done some of that myself. But for some people, that doesn’t fully appeal. I didn’t want drinking, or not drinking, to become the defining feature of my friendships. That’s the point I’ve now reached, three and a half years sober.

It was a journey to get here.

I’m not going to pretend that I cut alcohol out of my life and immediately started going out and partying sober because I didn’t. In fact, the first year of sobriety saw me retreat into what I often call my hermit phase. I kept myself incredibly safe. I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I didn’t want to be around alcohol and, most of all, I didn’t want to be around drinkers.

So I listened to my intuition and stayed away.

The friends I’d had for years completely understood my need to turn down invitations or swap a pub meet-up for a coffee shop. Later, I went through a phase of actively seeking out sober friendships. I joined communities, attended meet-ups and made some genuinely lovely connections. Some of those friendships remain important to me today.

But it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. I didn’t want sobriety to define me to that extent.

What I’ve realised now though, from the vantage point of being at the mid point in my fourth year sober is that I’m more sociable now than I’ve ever been. More than when I was a teenager, a boozy twenty-something and even a drinking ‘Mummy loves wine’ 30+ year old.

Alcohol threatens more than it gives

Don’t get me wrong over the years I have been sociable whilst drinking but actually it’s very often the thing that’s threatens our sociability. It certainly threatened mine at times. When I think to my latter years of drinking, I was actually incredibly antisocial. I’d gone from going out and socialising with friends when I was younger to then being stuck at home, partly because I was a single Mum, but also because I didn’t have the energy or inclination to then go out and do things. It was isolating for so many reasons and wine became my friend at that point. It became my focus for the long evenings.

I also didn’t have the confidence to try new things or even the inclination to. I was very often in a closed off mindset. Then I met Dale and drinking was our bonding activity as we got to know each other. It was how we socialised as a couple and also how we dated. Sometimes we would go out to friends houses for drinks, or go to the pub but often we’d just stay in, him with some lager and me with a bottle of wine. Then let’s fast forward to the next day because the next morning I wouldn’t really want to do things. I was in recovery mode and survival mode. In fact, drinking often and saw me cancel things the next day or at the extreme, to avoid making plans in the first place. And also if I did do things, I wasn’t going to whatever it was, at my best. I wasn’t feeling my most sociable. So even if I managed to get to the gym or to go out to the coffee shop, I wouldn’t want to talk to anybody. I felt depleted before I’d even started.

The loss of mental capacity

I also think we have to really honour how much headspace alcohol takes up when you’re a grey area drinker and you’re trying to stop because often, even if I was drinking and sat in a room with other people, I would be counting the units. I’d never switch off it. I’d be worrying I was too drunk or wondering if I should have another glass or bottle of wine when I got home. I was never really in the room or fully present. I was never really relaxed.

Alcohol became my life in more ways than one. Either I was drinking it, thinking about it or I was recovering from it. I was obsessed with it most of the time and then I’d go to the other extreme and I’d flip the script, becoming obsessed with sobriety. I’d hyper focus on taking a break and listening to quit-lit and then my head would be consumed by that instead.

When you consider how it sees you less likely to engage with others on a deeper level, more likely to cancel and less likely to be present, alcohol isn’t the sociable thing it’s painted as… in fact it’s the thing that threatens your sociability.

Fast-forward to today

Last night I went out to the theatre with a group of friends I’ve met through the Pilates studio I joined last year when I was a couple of years into my sobriety. Even the fact I joined that class was down to sobriety and something I just wouldn’t have done years ago. When I was a drinker, I’d fallen into a rut of going to the gym three times a week, not really talking to anybody and being incredibly frustrated that I wasn’t seeing results. I actually felt quite isolated. My job can be quite isolating working one to one with clients and not in an environment with colleagues and so not having that sense of community really impacted me at times. Every time I thought about going sober and then considered my social circle getting even smaller, that thought would panic me. I actually thought that I would be removing the one thing that was giving me an element of sociability, but the opposite it’s been true because I’m more willing to go and try new things.

Like I say, I wouldn’t have gone to a Pilates studio full stop. I wouldn’t have walked into a reformer class and struck up conversation with others. I wouldn’t have approached these things with an open mindset, being chatty and being confident in the way that I did once I was sober. Sobriety built my ability to say yes to things no end. I then said yes when I was invited out by the lovely group of ladies there who welcomed me with open arms. All these things wouldn’t have happened and I know this to be true because I’ve lived in this area now for 12 years and I hardly knew anyone… these days I know so many people because my head is finally up and looking around.

Last night we watched an amazing play, had laughs and some of the group had a drink, a few of us didn’t. That’s refreshing in itself where alcohol isn’t the sole focus. At one point it would have been my only thought process whether I was drinking or not. In early sobriety, it had to be my focus and now I’m so pleased it doesn’t need to be. The best bit of advice I would give would be to do things that don’t revolve around alcohol. Do different things. We’ve done the odd boozy lunch in the past that I’ve always slipped away from when I wanted to, but we also do lots of other interesting things too… next week it’s an escape room! I actually can’t believe that sobriety has opened the door to connecting with others in more meaningful ways, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re drinking or not. I’m happy to be me. The bonus is that no one in this group knows me as a drinker either so I can really sit firmly in my sober stance and not need to defend it whatsoever.

It’s taken me a long time in sobriety to feel comfortable being around people who drink. In the early days, there can be a huge focus on meeting other sober people and building a sober community, which can be incredibly valuable. But I’ve also learned that it doesn’t have to be limited to that. Some of the most meaningful connections I've made have been with people who do drink, because what mattered wasn't whether alcohol was present, it was whether the activity, conversation or shared interest genuinely brought me joy. The older I get, the more I realise that connection is connection. What matters is finding your people, not necessarily finding people who are exactly the same as you… though a similar sense of humour helps!

Join me in the comments… have you found sobriety changed your social life? Was it for the better or worse?

Leave a comment

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

When you first go sober you become aware of the obvious triggers like a Friday evening or a night out, but then sometimes one will come out of the blue and side swipe you. It doesn’t mean you actually want to drink, don’t panic. It’s just that there has been an association made between an external factor, or an internal driver and you’ve been reminded that’s what you used to do. It can happen at any time.

This article is about those hidden drivers. The ones you might not spot until you pause and reflect and it’s about how to work with your brain, not against it, to start rewiring your internal associations with alcohol.

What Are Invisible Triggers?

Invisible triggers are unconscious, sensory-based cues that spark an emotional or behavioural response in all of us. They’re subtle, often deeply embedded in your environment and routine and can influence your feelings and urges without you even realising it. Unlike more obvious triggers for alcohol like stress, conflict or celebration, invisible triggers can operate seemingly below the surface. They are the everyday experiences and small moments that seem to come from nowhere and lead to you wanting a drink. They often aren’t because you're actively thinking about alcohol, but because your brain has linked some of these invisible cues to the act of drinking over time.

They also often show up when you least expect them. You might feel fine one moment and suddenly experience a wave of desire or longing, without any clear reason the next. That’s the hallmark of an invisible trigger… it can catch you unawares and seem completely illogical at times.

These triggers are often sensory and situational. They’ve been shaped by repetition, association and emotion over time and because they’ve often been reinforced over many years, they can feel incredibly persuasive, even when your logical mind knows you don’t want to drink. That’s why I wanted to write about them today in the hope that this article will shed some light on them and will support you going forward in sobriety.

To give you some examples of how these things can catch you off guard and what they can look like:

• The golden hour sunlight that reminds you of pre dinner Prosecco, catching you off guard on a Thursday evening and stirring a flicker of nostalgia.

• The smell of sun cream and the scent of coconut that instantly places you poolside, cocktail in hand, even if you’re just applying it in a hurry before the school run.

• The chill in the autumn air that signals the return of mulled wine season, creating a cosy craving out of nowhere and an urge to seek out a pub with a log fire.

• That one song that transports you back to a beach bar, with clinking glasses and salt in the air, wrapped in a memory of connection and escape.

These moments bypass all logic and that can often feel upsetting. You’re not actively thinking, “I want to drink now.” Instead, your brain is activating old emotional circuits tied to pleasure, relaxation, fun or belonging. The trigger is not about alcohol itself, it’s about what alcohol represented in that moment of your life.

This is why invisible triggers feel powerful because they’re not rooted in the present moment. They’re often about memory, romanticising, identity and habit. They connect your past experiences to your current emotions through scent, sound, light, temperature, touch and social dynamics. You might not even clock that it’s happening until the craving is already upon you.

I share this because knowledge is power. Understanding them doesn’t mean you have to live in fear of them. It means you get to take your power back. The more you become aware of these cues, the more you can meet them with curiosity instead of compulsion and begin to gently rewire what they mean to you.

Why they can feel strong…

Our brains are prediction machines. They’re like computers that operate in the quickest and most efficient way possible and they’re built to make associations. This is part of what makes habits stick. According to classical conditioning, if you repeatedly pair a stimulus like warm weather with a response like drinking, your brain wires them together.

The cue, routine, reward loop becomes an ingrained pattern.

These associations live in the limbic system, which is our emotional brain, and they’re heavily influenced by sensory input. Smell, in particular, is processed in the olfactory bulb, which connects directly to areas tied to memory and emotion. That’s why one smelling a certain perfume or aftershave can send you back in time. I can still be transported if I catch the scent of my grandmothers perfume and the aroma of roasting pork, turkey and stuffing always takes me back to Christmas Day as a child. I’m sure you can think of similar smells that take you right back to a moment in time.

Once the association is formed, the trigger doesn’t need your conscious approval at all so it just fires. And in early sobriety, this can feel like being ambushed by your own nervous system. Don’t worry though, I’m going to share with you some tips should it happen.

Common Invisible Triggers in Sobriety

Here are just a few examples I’ve encountered in my own life and from working with clients:

Weather

• Sunny days: “This is rosé weather”

• Crisp autumn evenings: “I used to love red wine in front of the fire”

• Stormy nights: “Feels like a whisky and a blanket kind of night”

Music

• Certain playlists, holiday anthems or bar background music

• Songs from your clubbing days or first nights out

• Even ads with that familiar clinking-glass sound track

Social Cues

• Seeing friends post “cheers” selfies on Facebook

• Being handed a drink automatically at a wedding or party (not wanting to be rude and refuse)

• That Friday feeling when colleagues head to the pub

Smell and Environment

• Scented candles used during wine and bath routines

• The sharpness of citrus that once meant G&Ts

• The smell of certain restaurants or pubs

Surely it’s not that deep?

Here’s the thing. It is that deep as in it’s automatic, but it’s also not your fault and you can prepare for it. Even knowing how this works is the first step in demystifying it and removing the urges power.

You’re not weak for feeling drawn to drink when the sun’s out… you’ve done it enough over the years. You’ve built a habit and you’re human. Your brain is doing its job by activating familiar pleasure loops, even when you no longer want it to.

The good news is that just because the pathway is well-worn doesn’t mean it’s permanent. I’ve spoken a lot in articles so far about our ability to learn new habits and to change the way we think. The brain’s neuroplasticity means you can change these associations too. You just need awareness, intention, and repetition.

How to Rewire Invisible Triggers

So here’s a step-by-step approach you can use.

1. Name it and tame it

The first step with breaking any association is simply becoming aware of what’s happening.

• Keep a note on your phone titled “Triggers Log”

• Every time you notice a sudden urge to drink, ask: What was I doing? What did I just smell, hear, or feel?

• Use distancing language like “I notice I was feeling triggered when I heard that song”

Over time, patterns will emerge and by gathering the data you’ll start seeing it’s not you craving alcohol out of nowhere and that it’s often context.

2. Create sensory alternatives

Once you spot the trigger, it’s time to offer your brain a new reward loop with similar sensory input.

• Swap out the chilled wine for an icy elderflower cordial or an ice cold sparkling water.

• Replace the cork pop with a can crack or fizz from a bottled water. My favourite routine at the end of a long day to replace opening a beer was to open a can of dash water. Same sound, different experience.

• Use scented candles, body oils, or perfumes to evoke new states and to create new memories.

• Build new rituals around familiar weather like iced tea and barefoot walks instead of alcohol. It just takes awareness and repetition that you’re creating new neural pathways and new habits to replace old ones.

This works because your brain is still seeking pleasure and familiarity. You’re just giving it healthier associations.

3. Use visualisation to prepare and prewire events

If you’re anticipating a known trigger like a BBQ or holiday, rehearse it in your mind ahead of time.

• Picture yourself there, grounded, holding your alcohol-free drink

• Visualise enjoying the vibe, laughing, feeling confident

• Use hypnosis to imagine and practice feeling amazing in sobriety during the event. I have a hypnosis especially for a sober holiday you may like.

This activates the same brain regions that light up during real experience. It’s called mental contrasting, and it boosts follow-through when the moment arrives. Our brains can’t tell what’s real and what’s imagined and so by rehearsing these events sober you actually create pathways in the brain that believe it’s already happened. This is the start of the new habit forming.

4. Practice mindful interruption

The moment you feel the tug of a trigger:

• Pause

• Take a breath (the 3-6-9 breath is amazing)

• Label the feeling (“This is nostalgia, not desire”)

• Distance from the thought (“I notice I’m thinking…”)

• Choose what happens next

This strengthens your prefrontal cortex, your decision-making centre, and reduces the grip of unconscious patterns.

5. Make it mean something new

Reframing is a powerful tool. Instead of seeing summer as something you miss out on without alcohol, reframe it to talk about what you’ll enjoy:

• “This season used to mean hangovers and dehydration. Now it means clarity, energy, and connection”

• “I’ve reclaimed my weekends from booze. That’s freedom”

You’re not depriving yourself. You’re rewriting what the season, or smell, or sound stands for. This is all part of the process of placing sobriety on a pedestal and reminding yourself why you’re doing it (and enjoying it).

When It Feels Overwhelming

Some triggers feel really big and so I don’t want to gloss over that fact. A certain bar might remind you of someone you’ve lost or a song might open a wound. This is where self-compassion becomes vital.

You don’t have to push through everything immediately, don’t gaslight yourself or belittle your feelings. Avoidance is sometimes wise but as we know healing doesn’t happen through avoidance alone. It happens when we approach our experience with curiosity, gentleness and time. We can’t avoid some things forever in sobriety. In the early days you can make that judgement but the more you do things and do them proving that you feel good in sobriety, then the stronger the new neural pathway will feel. It’s like you’re flexing your sober muscles.

I hope you’ll see that it isn’t as random as you may have once thought to be thrown by a breeze, a sunset or a perfume that’s stirred up a craving. It may take you by surprise but it doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly weak or that your sobriety is in jeopardy. What matters is what you do with that thought. You’re responding to years of wiring where alcohol was everywhere.

But you’re also rewriting the story. With every mindful moment and every new association, you’re building a new pathway and it’s working. So next time you feel the old tug back to drinking, smile because now you see it and knowledge and awareness are powerful.

I thought I’d include some journal prompts here for you to consider, if you don’t journal then you can take a moment to think about each of these if you like.

✨ Journal Prompts:

1. What sensory triggers have you noticed in your environment?

2. Which ones catch you off guard the most?

3. What new associations would you like to build instead?

I hope you’ve found this both useful and reassuring. Unpicking the habit of drinking alcohol is multifaceted and this is another layer to understand so that you aren’t caught off guard.

A thought is just a thought, you don’t ever need to act. Interrupt it, pause, distance from it, understand it and don’t panic. Create new rituals and routines and know that it was just an invisible trigger that, now dealt with, won’t come back again.

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

Be firm with yourself

Don’t even entertain any thoughts that you will ‘see how it goes’ because we all know how that ends! Make the commitment to staying sober regardless of what happens. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rubbish evening and you get stuck talking to someone chewing your ear off... you are remaining sober.

Commit and then be consistent

There is something called the Commitment and Consistency Principle where we feel an intrinsic motivation to always act consistently especially when we’ve made a commitment to it. If possible tell others you aren’t drinking, but if you don’t want to do that quite yet, make the commitment to yourself and write it out on paper to strengthen it.

Expect it to be different, but better

A lot of the time, people make the mistake of expecting everything to remain the same when they go sober but the chances are it won’t. So don’t kid yourself, expect it to feel different to be walking in sober and socialising without alcohol but I really do advise you put your rose tinted glasses on and really notice those sober positives. This is about encouraging your mind to seek out the gains and not just to focus on any perceived losses. Okay, so you aren’t dancing on the tables or swinging from the chandeliers but you are present, probably a heck of a lot more witty and you’ll be leaving looking as good as when you arrived.

Plan your drinks

Decide what you’re drinking ahead of time, don’t leave it until the moment you turn up, walk up to the bar or are faced with being asked what you’d like. That moment of pause can trip you up if you aren’t careful. If you’re going to someone’s home then take your drink of choice with you. Even if you’ve told them you aren’t drinking alcohol, not everyone thinks to cater for the non drinker and you don’t want to end up feeling like you’re missing out.

Do your research

If it’s in an venue then head to their website and look up the alcohol free options but always have a back up drink that you know will be available anywhere such as a tonic water or sparkling water.n

Practice & rehearse

Then practice and rehearse in your mind walking into the venue (if you know it or make a best guess as to what it will look and feel like if you don’t). Imagine walking up to the bar and asking for your drink of choice or looking to your friend and telling them what you’d like if it’s a BBQ at someone’s house. The act of playing with this in your mind also helps to cement your commitment and the brain doesn’t know what’s real or what’s imagined and so it will feel like you’ve already done it a few times before you actually physically do it.

Have a response ready

Knowing what you’ll say if you’re asked why you’re not drinking will really help you. You can be as honest as you like but know what you’re going to say up front so that you don’t get caught off guard or pressured into changing your mind. Good reasons can be that you’re on a health kick, you’re seeing how you feel without alcohol for a while (a lot of people are doing this) or that you have something planned first thing tomorrow and you want to be fresh faced. Saying you aren’t drinking isn’t suddenly admitting to everyone you’re an alcoholic these days.

Most people don’t care!

What you will actually begin to realise is that most people don’t notice and don’t care whether or not you’re drinking. They care about what they’re drinking.

Plan tomorrow

Book something in for the next morning that you’ll really enjoy. It could be a yoga class, an early morning run or dog walk or a coffee with a friend. If you begin to question your decision then play the tape forward to how you are going to feel climbing into bed clear headed and smiling and then how amazing you will feel knowing you did it and that you have the whole day ahead of you the next day.

If in doubt?

Don’t go. Make your excuses, no event is worth it if you are going to regret it afterwards.

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

I recently recorded a podcast episode with Sammy who is in her first year of sobriety, and listening back to our conversation afterwards I just had to share about it on here too, to talk about some of the things we discussed. I’ve also linked the actual episode below as well if you’d like to listen because within the space of a few months at about five to six months sober she experienced an extraordinary amount of stress and loss all at once and remained alcohol free through it all.

Sammy and I have worked together on her sobriety journey, so I was already aware of some of the difficult circumstances she had been going through before we sat down to record this conversation.

Firstly, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she began treatment, then at the same time her husband Luke became seriously ill with bacterial and viral meningitis and spent weeks in hospital, and then just when she felt she was finding her feet again she lost her beloved dog Rupert. “It was like a war on my family” she said.

Through it all the one thing that remained constant was her sobriety because it wasn’t just about staying strong or positive all the time because as positive as she is now, no one could in those circumstances. She shared with me honestly about how she felt fear, overwhelm, anxiety and how she navigated the emotional impact of everything that was happening around her fully present and with no ‘fuck it’ button to hit. She also spoke about staying sober through it all and how different that experience felt compared to previous periods in her life when alcohol had been her way of coping.

“I’d tried to go sober in the past, and failed, and the reason why I failed is I hadn’t got any kind of tools with me. I hadn’t understood the impact of alcohol on my body… and a big event would come up, and I would hit the fuck it button every single time. The best thing I did was to get tools in place.”

I think that will resonate with a lot of people because for many drinkers alcohol becomes tied to the idea of emotional relief. It’s how it’s sold to us in society. Because sometimes drinking wouldn’t have been about joy or even pleasure, instead it’s about relief for a lot of us that drank regularly. Relief from whatever’s going on around us, from anxiety or overstimulation, maybe racing thoughts, grief, stress, exhaustion or simply the feeling of being unable to switch off mentally. Sammy spoke very openly about drinking up to two bottles of wine a night at one point and how much she had been using alcohol to numb.

One of the things we discussed was the reality that sobriety really doesn’t remove difficult experiences from your life because none of us are protected from loss or illness simply because we stop drinking. If anything, life continues exactly as life does, unpredictable and sometimes incredibly hard, but what can change is the way you move through those experiences and the way you support yourself through them.

At one point Sammy said something when we were talking about those difficult months:

“I knew I was safe in my sobriety… it actually made me stronger. My sobriety and my wonderful family who supported me. I’ll never go back to drinking now.”

And that is such an important reframe because many people fear that sobriety will leave them emotionally exposed, when often the opposite slowly begins to happen. Sobriety becomes the thing that feels stable when everything around you is shifting and that isn’t because life suddenly becomes easier, but because you aren’t adding the problems with additional anxiety. There’s also no longer the added shame, poor sleep, emotional volatility and physical exhaustion layered on top of already difficult situations. In fact the opposite is true. You’re able to give your body proper rest.

What also came through strongly in our conversation was that she didn’t try to get through everything alone. Her family were an amazing support, she stayed connected to others and she kept talking. She allowed herself support and she continued reaching out instead of disappearing into isolation as we can sometimes be tempted to do, and I think that matters enormously because there can be an idea sometimes that coping well means becoming completely independent and self-contained.

In reality, most people sustain long term change through connection and through honesty. It’s about allowing themselves to lean on people instead of white knuckling their way through difficult periods pretending they’re fine.

The reality of early days

Sammy also described how frightening early sobriety initially felt for her especially in social situations and I appreciated the honesty of this because I think people often feel ashamed to admit this part.

“I felt very, very scared. Very alone, very scared.”

That vulnerability is important to talk about because many people assume that if they feel emotionally exposed or even awkward when they’re first venturing out sober in a world that drinks around you, that they’re failing. But often they are simply experiencing themselves without zoning out or any sedation for the first time in years. Especially for people who have used alcohol to manage anxiety, ADHD, emotional overwhelm or internal restlessness.

And that was another thing that’s come out of sobriety for her… an awareness of the endless energy that Sammy feels and how she was using alcohol to switch off at the end of the day. She spoke about receiving an ADHD diagnosis a couple of months ago and described it as feeling like “hand grenades going off in your mind” but that now she has answers to how she’d sometimes felt. Alcohol had become part of how she tried to quieten that internal noise and regulate herself emotionally, so removing alcohol meant having to learn completely different ways of supporting herself.

Something else I found interesting was that she repeatedly returned to structure and routine and how they’ve helped her which is something I’ve benefitted from personally and I know a lot of my clients do as well. She talked of prioritising sleep, yoga, fitness, drinking alcohol free alternatives, reading, walking, connection and keeping certain rituals in place all seemed to become stabilising for her.

I also think there is something so powerful about the fact that all of this happened within Sammy’s first year sober because there can sometimes be a tendency for people to assume that only those with decades of sobriety behind them are capable of getting through difficult things without drinking and that’s why I wanted to write about it because Sammy’s story really does challenge that assumption.

The three benefits

I talk to all my guests about the three areas that have improved most for them in sobriety and one of the things she repeated was that now she feels safe.

“ In sobriety, I feel safe. And I’ve never felt safe in my body or my mind before.”

She wasn’t talking about white knuckling it or even about abstinence, but feeling safety within herself. The feeling that whatever life throws at you, you can deal with it.

Throughout the conversation she also spoke about the practical and emotional changes she’d begun to notice as her sobriety deepened and continues to do so. How much she loves and values better sleep, how much more emotionally stable she feels and how she experiences less anxiety. Feeling physically stronger, more present in relationships, more connected to herself and even more capable of stillness. They were in her Rolodex of sober benefits she joked. One thing that particularly stood out to me was when she talked about yoga:

“I’ve tried yoga so many times in the past but I never got on with it because back then I was incapable of sitting with myself because I think I just hated myself back then… and I’ve really noticed that I can enjoy it now. I really, really enjoy yoga.”

So much of drinking is tied up with the inability to comfortably sit with ourselves. Sobriety isn’t simply the removal of alcohol, over time it often becomes the gradual rebuilding of self trust, emotional safety, self love and self respect.

She also spoke about how dramatically her sleep and anxiety improved:

“My mornings no longer feel like a punishment… my sleep is supporting me in my recovery… and my mental health.”

“I thought that was just quite normal. Really high anxiety, sweaty, hot, bright red, puffy… and I just couldn’t wait until 5 o’clock until I could start drinking. Who knew it wasn’t normal at all!?”

I think many people underestimate how much mental bandwidth alcohol consumes even outside the drinking itself. The hangover anxiety, the overthinking, the physical discomfort. The constant calculations around when you can drink again, whether people can smell it on you, whether you embarrassed yourself, whether you are functioning properly. People adapt to feeling below par and start believing it is their normal state.

One of the things sobriety often gives back is capacity on all levels. Emotional capacity, cognitive capacity and physical capacity. The ability to actually be present for your own life instead of constantly recovering from it.

Sammy said it best “I’ve lost nothing worth keeping and in sobriety I’ve gained the life I’ve always tried to find at the bottom of a glass.”

🎧 Listen to the episode yourself

I think a lot of people will recognise themselves somewhere in Sammy’s story, particularly the fear of whether sobriety can survive real life when life becomes painful or chaotic. For Sammy it was a gradual building of self trust, safety and support around herself instead of continuing to numb everything.

There is also so much more in the full conversation, we cover sleep, emotional regulation, fitness, family relationships, ADHD, routine, anxiety and that really strange process of learning who you are without alcohol sitting in the middle of everything.

If you want to listen to the full episode with Sammy, it’s now live on The Sober Rebel Podcast on all your usual podcast platforms. I honestly think it will resonate with a lot of people, especially anyone who has ever worried about how they would cope sober when life becomes difficult.

Link to listen on Spotify

Link to listen on Apple

Or listen on any of the usual platforms.

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

But when you haven’t had a rock bottom that led you to sobriety, you need to make sure you’re constantly keeping your mindset focussed on the sober gains to avoid fading affect bias. A psychological phenomenon where we forget how bad things were.

Whenever I sit down to write about sobriety, or indeed to talk about it to others, I’m always very mindful that there are so many reasons people come to the decision to quit drinking for good. I know that I’m very fortunate in that I didn’t have a rock bottom, and I always want to remain very respectful that some people do experience horrendous lows before they go sober. But I’d like to think that by promoting and talking about the many realisations I’ve had since my decision to stop drinking at the end of 2022, will go some way to normalising the idea of sobriety for anyone. I even hope that it may even spark the idea in some other grey area drinkers to give it a try and to stick at it through the harder days, because it’s ultimately the biggest life upgrade in so many ways.

Over the years alcohol had woven its way so well into every facet of my life that I couldn’t imagine socialising without it and I also couldn’t really imagine staying home alone without it either. It was the constant and so I hadn’t fully appreciated how much it was taking from me until I walked away.

The opportunities we grab

Which brings me to the latest sober benefit I noticed and took a moment to appreciate…

The other day I leapt at the chance to do an evening reformer class with my favourite teacher. It didn’t start until 7:15pm and so as I got into my car I had a moment of absolute gratitude for my sobriety that came out of nowhere. You’d think at over three years sober I’d be over it by now, but I still take time to spot those sober wins regularly. They’re what keep me focussed and remind me how far I’ve come from those days where I was so desperate to be free of the mental tug of war I found myself in with alcohol nearly every evening.

I never gave enough credit to how much alcohol was keeping my life and my choices small at the time. But a simple thing like working out in the evening, saying ‘yes’ to the opportunity without hesitation and then being able to get into my car and drive at 7:15 at night, were all wins.

Drinking was never really about freedom or even a sense of abandonment for me. I was the sort of drinker who always counted units, always tried to control it and never, ever drove if I’d so much as had a sip. And it’s only when you step away from alcohol that you realise how restricting that was. I wasn’t drinking to get drunk, I was drinking out of habit but that habit was also keeping me housebound as a result.

If there was an activity in the evening that didn’t involve an opportunity to have a glass of wine then I would often turn it down. Once I’d had a glass of wine at home I then wouldn’t leave the house unless I could walk to it. How restricting was that? How much time do we give to considering the many ways that alcohol keeps us under a curfew, after a few?

The more I reflect on it now, the more I can see that alcohol wasn’t just a habit, it also acted as a boundary. A line in the sand and a limitation I was placing on myself that I didn’t do consciously, but it was shaping my decisions all the same.

It wasn’t a curfew imposed by anyone else. It was one I placed on myself, every time I poured that first glass because once I’d had it, that was it. I was in for the night. I couldn’t drive, I wouldn’t offer lifts, I wouldn’t pop out and I wouldn’t say yes to anything that required me to be available, flexible, or responsive.

And it went further than that…

It wasn’t just about what I couldn’t do, it was about what I stopped even considering. Opportunities didn’t feel like opportunities if they fell outside that invisible boundary. A later class, an evening walk, a last-minute plan, helping someone out, even something as simple as going to pick something up that I’d forgotten. All of it became inconvenient once I’d started drinking.

So I didn’t see those options as options anymore instead I saw them as things I’d have to work around my drinking and more often than not, the drinking won.

This sort of decision making and restriction also creates a kind of low-level tension that comes from knowing you’ve limited yourself. I remember evenings where I would feel slightly on edge, not because anything was wrong, but because I knew that if something did come up, I couldn’t respond in the way I might have wanted to because I’d put myself out of action.

Even with the girls, I can see this more clearly now. I would always do what they wanted, always be available, but there were moments where I’d feel that flicker of frustration if I needed to go back out later to pick them up. Not because I didn’t want to obviously, but because I’d already made a decision earlier in the evening that meant I couldn’t.

This is what’s so easy to overlook when you’re in it. Alcohol can feel like a reward, a way to relax, something that marks the end of the day but it also quietly closes doors too. It narrows your world, not in a big way but in dozens of small ways. You stay in more, you do less, you become less available, and not just to others… but to life itself and because it happens gradually, it feels normal.

It’s only when you step away from it that you realise how much space you’ve regained and that’s the win of sobriety that I want to talk about today. I love to spot sober wins wherever I can.

Now, when something comes up in the evening, there’s no internal calculation, no checking whether I’ve had anything to drink and absolutely no hesitation.

I just decide!

I can go to a 7:15pm reformer class without a second thought. I can get in the car at any time, I can help, respond, change plans, or create them on the spot.

There’s a freedom in that which I never associated with sobriety before because I thought freedom was being able to drink, that’s what we’re told. Sobriety is sold to us as restriction and as something that’s boring. How ironic that the opposite is true? It frees us quite literally and means we’re more available to do interesting things. As I write this I’m just about to head off to my very first hyrox class this evening… another new experience that I’d never have done if I was drinking.

Having no self imposed curfew is the best feeling ever. Would you agree?

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

Subscribe now

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

Part of sobriety is about processing how it got to where it did in order to forgive ourselves to let it go fully… then you’re truly free.

I think for a lot of people there can be this tendency to look back on earlier drinking and see it as evidence that they once had control, discipline or balance and then somehow lost it along the way. But when I really examined my own drinking timeline honestly, I realised that wasn’t fully true for me. There were all sorts of external barriers and limitations around my drinking when I was younger that simply didn’t exist later on in life. At the time I didn’t recognise them as barriers because they just felt like normal life, but they were there and were influencing my behaviour and they kept my drinking a bit more under control.

The price of a pint

For example, when I was younger and sat in the pub with a friend, we would be counting out how much money we had in between us for the night, that external constraint of physically not being able to buy more alcohol than we could afford was the thing that often placed a limit on how much we would drink. Sometimes you’d have a drink bought for you but overall, it was a cap on consumption. I would do the same with my weekly wages in the early days. It was a limit as to how much I could spend on wine even if you could get three bottles for £10 from the local shop in those days.

There was no tapping a card endlessly without thinking. No ordering more through an app while already tipsy. No stored payment details making everything instant and frictionless like you have these days. Sometimes you physically ran out of money and that was that. You’d maybe sit there trying to work out if you had enough left for a taxi home or one final drink and often practicality won because it had to but there was friction built into the process.

There were natural barriers to consuming more alcohol but of course as earnings increased as my career improved, so did my tastes and my spending habits. I no longer had that barrier to consuming as much as I wanted to and this was a challenge in itself because once I’d had one glass of something I always thought it was a good idea to have more. My prefrontal cortex was offline and all bets were off. It wasn’t that I was more disciplined when I was younger at all, it was external factors that capped my behaviour. When those barriers shifted then I had to govern my behaviour internally and that’s where it was so much harder, especially once I’d started drinking.

That’s one of the things I think people often misunderstand about alcohol. They think the person who drank less in their twenties necessarily had better self control than the person they became later on. But often life simply changes. You have more money, more autonomy and more stress. There’s more emotional responsibility, a lot more privacy but also more exhaustion. Overall there is a heck of a lot more access. There are fewer people questioning what you’re doing (in fact they’re often egging you on) and more social permission to do it.

Is this why drinking timelines often escalate as we age? There’s also the normalisation of it in society too that creates an external permission to drink more. From ‘living a little’ when you’re younger to dealing with the stresses of parenthood when you’re in your thirties… you’re either going to go one way or the other. You’re either going to drink less or drink more.

I also think there’s something about adulthood that changes the relationship we have with alcohol psychologically. When you’re younger there are often more social consequences attached to visible drinking. You may still live at home so you may have less privacy. You may even worry more about what people think. Then as you get older drinking often becomes woven into adult identity itself. Wine becomes associated with sophistication, success, stress relief, parenting, holidays, girls’ nights, reward and relaxation. It stops being seen as reckless and starts being marketed as deserved.

If you trace your drinking timeline back, maybe you’ll see similar imposed barriers yourself. Sometimes that would be financial, or maybe social. Maybe you had a partner or a group of friends at one point who enabled you to drink with free abandon or the opposite of ones who drank less and you felt it limited you. Or maybe you didn’t care what others did?

Maybe you had children and couldn’t go out as much for a period of time so your drinking reduced naturally or maybe the opposite, your drinking ramped up through boredom. Maybe you trained for something physical and alcohol no longer fitted as easily into your week. Maybe you lived somewhere remote and had less access to pubs, bars or shops. Maybe you were surrounded by people who drank heavily and it normalised your own behaviour further or maybe you were around people who barely drank at all and that acted as a natural brake on your own consumption.

Sometimes a barrier could be someone seeing you buying alcohol in a shop, for some again that doesn’t stop them. But for me I would often feel uncomfortable buying large amounts in one go because there was still a sense that someone might notice so I would always have a one liner at the checkout as an excuse. A party I was hosting or I’d joke of having a ‘hard day’. There was still a degree of friction there, even psychologically. I know for other people shame doesn’t stop them at all, but for me it sometimes interrupted the automaticity of it. It forced a pause.

That’s the thing with barriers and friction. They don’t necessarily stop behaviour completely but they can interrupt momentum. They can create a moment where the thinking brain has a chance to reappear before the impulse takes over fully which is so key with addictive substances and automatic behaviours.

Barriers can be financial, peer pressure, not wanting to embarrass yourself, not having access to alcohol late at night, not wanting to drive after drinking, having children in the house, a partner questioning how much you’ve had, work commitments the next day or simply not having enough alcohol available once the shops have shut. Sometimes these barriers are conscious and sometimes we barely notice them at all until they disappear.

When friction disappears

There’s been a lot of talk recently about delivery apps and the increasing concern around how easily alcohol can now be accessed. Years ago if you ran out of wine at 10pm then that was often it. There was a natural stopping point built into the evening. You might complain about it, you might wish you’d bought more, but there was still an interruption between the urge and the ability to immediately act on it.

Now we have shopping apps and Deliveroo. I never used those myself as I didn’t live in an area that has access to it but I understand they will literally deliver alcohol to you at any time, on the same evening. That’s removed any friction whatsoever from consuming more and more. If I had had access to it then my drinking would have known no limits and that is scary.

There’s even sometimes PayPal Pay in 3 on these apps as well… that’s terrifying so even the financial barrier can now disappear. You don’t even necessarily need the money available in that moment to continue drinking. When you start to look at addiction through that lens you realise just how much environment, accessibility and modern convenience shape behaviour. We often talk about addiction as though it exists purely inside the individual but human behaviour is constantly influenced by what surrounds us.

And the difficult thing with alcohol is that unlike many other substances, society often applauds the escalation of drinking habits for quite a long time. Expensive wine becomes a sign of taste, drinking becomes associated with adulthood, success, coping, motherhood, socialising, reward and stress relief all at once. The barriers don’t just disappear, in many ways the world actively removes them for you.

That’s why I think understanding your own drinking timeline matters so much. Not to shame yourself or endlessly analyse every decision you made, but to understand the conditions that allowed alcohol to become more embedded in your life over time. You need to remove some of the shame and blame because it’s often all we knew. We were surrounded by it and alcohol is a highly addictive substance. Because when you can see it clearly, it stops being about whether you were weak or lacking discipline. It’s about far more than that.

I also think this understanding can bring a huge amount of compassion towards ourselves, particularly for people who have spent years beating themselves up wondering why they could never seem to moderate once they started. Alcohol changes decision making itself. Once the prefrontal cortex begins to go offline, the part of the brain responsible for rational thought, long term planning and impulse control becomes less effective. That’s why so many people make promises to themselves at 10am and break them at 10pm. They think it’s hypocrisy or weakness when in reality alcohol itself changes the brain state in which decisions are being made.

For me, sobriety involved accepting that the version of me who had already started drinking was never going to be the version making calm, measured decisions around stopping. The decision had to happen before the first drink because after that the negotiation always changed.

How we can use this in sobriety…

And in sobriety, many people consciously start rebuilding friction points again. This is key. They stop keeping alcohol in the house, they delete delivery apps, they even avoid certain routines, shops or environments for a while. Not because they are incapable, but because they understand themselves better now and they want to create new habits. They understand that once the thinking part of the brain goes offline, the version of them making decisions later in the evening is not operating with full capacity.

Sometimes recovery is not about becoming more disciplined, instead it’s about becoming more honest about the systems, environments and patterns that were encouraging your behaviour all along.

And strangely, I think there’s freedom in that understanding because once you stop seeing yourself as fundamentally flawed and start understanding the interaction between psychology, biology, culture, stress, access and environment, you stop carrying quite so much shame. You can look back with more honesty but also more compassion.

Sobriety for me was not just about stopping drinking. It was about understanding why alcohol fitted so neatly into my life for a period of time, why it escalated, why it became emotionally useful and why removing it eventually became necessary. That understanding helped me let go of the idea that I had simply failed at moderation through lack of character. It’s what makes me so happy that I’m sober and free from it.

If you’d like to learn more about the psychology behind habit change and build more emotional resilience in sobriety, my online course Sober Resilience goes far beyond simply stopping drinking. It explores the deeper psychological patterns behind alcohol use, emotional regulation, identity shifts, mindset, nervous system regulation and how to create a life that genuinely feels better without alcohol.

The course includes 21 video lessons, hypnosis and relaxation sessions including my ‘Enjoying Sobriety’ hypnosis, practical psychological tools and ongoing group support. It’s designed for people who want to understand themselves more deeply and strengthen long term sobriety in a realistic and compassionate way.

You can find out more here:

https://www.louisaevans.com/sober-resilience

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

In the second article I moved into what happens when something actually does happen, when there is criticism, a misunderstanding or a sense that you’ve been judged, and how sobriety changes your ability to respond to that rather than react to it. This article goes a step further, because it isn’t just about how you feel in those moments or how you respond to them, it’s about how those things can then shape your behaviour over time, the decisions you make, the things you say and don’t say, what you tolerate and how much of yourself you actually show up as. It can lead you to hiding parts of yourself for fear of that criticism happening again.

I’m going to share a little bit more about my own personal experience of this because I spent a lot of my life not wanting to upset or offend anyone and when I look back properly that came at a cost, because it wasn’t just about being considerate or easy to be around, it was about managing how I was perceived so that I didn’t become a target.

Sometimes in the past I’ve put up with behaviour that I knew wasn’t right. Maybe it was someone I met that I wanted to impress so I glossed over those misogynistic comments. At times I’ve tolerated people being unkind and situations where I could feel something was off and I didn’t say anything, not because I agreed with it but because I didn’t want to be in their line of fire. I’ve been conflict avoidant (to ridiculous levels) for most of my life and agreed with things I really didn’t. I stayed quiet when I sensed someone was being cruel, I filtered myself in conversations where I should have held my ground and I stayed in relationships and environments that didn’t feel good for me because the alternative of being disliked, being talked about, being on the outside, felt worse than abandoning my own instincts.

This was a problem I’d had from a very young age and it was something I really had to work hard to stop doing. My natural default is still to try to be likeable but over the years I now employ a firmer stance, I do stand up for myself more and I’m always a work in progress. I’m never going to be confrontational but I’m learning not to be a push over.

And when I look at all of that behaviour honestly, it wasn’t about being nice, it was about staying safe. This is the first thing that helps you loosen your grip on trying to control the narrative around you. Personally, it was about keeping myself out of situations where I might be judged, criticised or rejected, and I never really questioned it at the time. It just felt like the way I was. If you do this, as I did then you become someone who is easy to be around, someone who doesn’t rock the boat, someone who can adapt quickly to other people, but underneath that there’s a constant calculation going on. What do I say here, what do I not say, how do I keep this comfortable, how do I make sure this doesn’t turn on me or that they don’t turn on me.

And this isn’t limited to neurodivergence. You don’t have to have ADHD to recognise this pattern. If you’ve ever felt the need to keep the peace, to not make things awkward, to not be the one who speaks up or disagrees, then you’ll know exactly what I mean. For some people it might be occasional, something that comes up in certain situations, and for others it can feel more constant, more ingrained, but the underlying driver is the same, a desire to avoid discomfort, to avoid rejection and to stay in connection. This may also be described as being a ‘people pleaser’.

How RSD keeps you small

The reason that pattern keeps repeating itself is because of how deeply rejection is felt for some of us. It’s not a light feeling of “oh well, never mind”, it’s physical and it stays with you. A comment, a shift in tone or the sense that someone has misread you or reduced you to something that doesn’t feel true can impact your body for hours and sometimes days or weeks (sometimes even years). Your mind replays it, tries to make sense of it, looks for where it went wrong and there’s a real pull to fix it or avoid it ever happening again. So of course you start adjusting your behaviour and you try to stay one step ahead of it. When something hurts at that level, it makes sense that you would try to protect yourself from it. You keep yourself safe or so you think...

And this is where it starts to influence how you live. It’s no longer just about what you feel, it’s about what you do. It affects how much of yourself you show, how often you speak up, what you tolerate and how long you stay in situations that don’t feel right. I wasn’t trying to be liked… I was trying to not be disliked, and those two things look similar on the surface, but they are very different underneath.

There have been different versions of this for me over the years. I’ve had situations where I’ve been spoken to in a way that felt patronising or sexist and I’ve said nothing. Times where my work was minimised or knowledge dismissed and instead of addressing it I would explain myself more, try to be understood and walk away hurt. Sometimes it’s been more subtle and you can feel that shift happen without anything ever being said directly to you, that sense of being talked about and again my instinct wasn’t to challenge it, it was to stay agreeable and not make it worse.

And when I look at all of those situations properly, the common thread isn’t just what other people were doing, it’s actually about my response to those things and how quickly I moved into the role of managing it. Trying to solve it, correct it or stay out of the line of fire.

How alcohol played a part

Alcohol made all of that easier in the past. It didn’t remove the sensitivity I felt, but it dulled the impact of it. It softened my awareness of what I was tolerating and it reduced the emotional intensity of those moments. It made it easier to laugh things off, to brush things aside, to tolerate conversations or environments longer than I should have, because I didn’t have to fully sit with how it really felt. It gave me a way to override that internal signal that something wasn’t quite right, or to convince myself that it didn’t matter as much as it did. And when something hurts as much as this does, having a way to take the edge off it feels like a solution.

Sobriety takes that away and it’s important to acknowledge that because you need to look at better boundaries and coping strategies. It removes the buffer and it sharpens your awareness, not just of other people but of yourself, of what feels aligned and what doesn’t, of where you’re holding back and where you’re overriding your own instinct to stay comfortable. You notice more, you feel more, and you don’t have the same option to switch it off, which means you are now fully experiencing both the discomfort of the situation and the reaction it creates in you. That can feel like a lot at first, because you’re no longer numbing the impact of it, you’re right there with it.

And this is where the real shift begins, because avoiding rejection doesn’t just protect you, it limits you, and more honestly than that it teaches you to abandon yourself to stay safe. It teaches you that it’s better to stay quiet than to risk being misunderstood, that it’s better to agree than to be challenged, that it’s better to tolerate something that doesn’t feel right than to deal with the discomfort of speaking up. Over time that becomes your default, and the longer you stay in that pattern the harder it is to step out of it, because you haven’t built any evidence that you can handle what happens if you do.

Building that evidence

Sobriety starts to change that, not by making those moments easier straight away because they’ll sometimes feel worse to start with. But by giving you the opportunity to respond differently. Yes, you feel the discomfort fully, but you also have the clarity to see what’s happening and the ability to choose what you do next. And that choice shows up in small moments where you can choose to act differently. It can be small and doesn’t have to be a big declaration. It’s saying something when you would have stayed quiet in the past or not immediately smoothing something over… leaving an awkward pause. Maybe allowing a bit of tension without rushing to fix it or trusting your instinct about someone instead of overriding it because other people seem fine with them. You can find yourself stepping back from situations that don’t feel right, even if you can’t fully explain why but standing by that instinct you’ve had.

None of that feels comfortable at first… in fact it can feel more exposing, because you’re no longer buffering the emotional impact of it, you’re experiencing it fully. But every time you choose not to abandon yourself in those moments, you build more trust in yourself, you show yourself that you can feel that discomfort and still hold your ground, that you don’t need to shrink yourself to stay safe.

Be brave and be seen

And this is where the idea of being seen becomes important, because you can’t grow your life, your work or your relationships without being visible in some way, and you can’t be visible without opening yourself up to being misunderstood, disagreed with or not liked. That’s part of it and sobriety puts you in that position anyway, because choosing not to drink already sets you apart. It already creates moments where you’re different, where you’re not blending in, where you might be questioned or judged and every time you stay with that, every time you don’t override your decision to make someone else more comfortable, you’re building evidence that you can tolerate it.

This isn’t about becoming someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks because that’s too out of character for some of us to even contemplate, instead it’s about becoming someone who isn’t ruled by it. Because the sensitivity might still be there, you might still feel it, you might still notice the shifts, the tone, the reactions, and it might still hurt, but it doesn’t get to decide what you do next and that’s where things start to change because you’re no longer organising your choices around avoiding discomfort, you’re making decisions based on what actually matters to you, and that’s a very different way to live.

What I’ve had to do, slowly and very deliberately, is expand my comfort zone in a way that actually teaches my nervous system something new. Not through theory, but through lived experience because understanding why you do something doesn’t automatically change it, your body still needs evidence that you are safe doing things differently.

For me that meant doing the very things I had spent years avoiding. It meant allowing myself to stand out instead of blending in, to be different instead of agreeable, to be vocal instead of managing how I was received. This started in small decisions where I chose not to override myself…. maybe saying something without softening it and sitting with the discomfort. Not immediately leaping to soothe a moment of tension or letting someone misunderstand me without rushing to correct them. Each of those moments felt uncomfortable (even painful), and at times exposing, but they also became proof. Proof that I could tolerate it and that I didn’t fall apart.

My public outing was a private lesson

Going public about my sobriety was one of the biggest versions of that. At the time it didn’t feel like a strategy or a bold move to make, it felt like a risk if I’m honest! I was very aware of how it might be perceived, how it could be judged, how it might not fit neatly with people’s expectations of me professionally. I was scared that I’d lose respect from peers and my standing as a therapist. But I also knew that staying hidden wasn’t working for me anymore. I needed it to be public to stick to it and I needed accountability so I did it anyway, and that became a turning point. I’d chosen to be seen, knowing full well that being seen comes with the possibility of being misunderstood and judged.

From there, things started to build. The podcast, speaking openly, sharing more of my work, my views and my thinking, all of it required the same thing. Tolerating that exposure and allowing different opinions. And not trying to control how everyone interpreted me… I had to get comfortable with being disliked, disagreed with and even challenged. Of course it did happen… but over time, that repetition changed something and it isn’t that I no longer feel a fear of rejection or being disliked, because I still do but it no longer rules me.

That’s the part I think that is often misunderstood. You don’t wait until you feel completely confident or unaffected to make that bold move because that will keep you stuck, instead you move while it still feels uncomfortable, and in doing that you create the safety you’ve been waiting for. You show your nervous system, again and again, that being visible, being different, having a voice, doesn’t lead to the outcome you once feared.

And that’s where things start to open up across all areas of your life. Not just in your work, but in how you move through the world full stop. Because you’re building a life that reflects who you actually are instead of moving from a position of fear. It’s gently expanding your comfort zone and that way you give it a chance to catch up.

So now if I get criticised it still hurts, I still feel it, I still notice it, but it no longer stops me. Because the reality is you can’t be seen and you can’t help people without that risk. You can’t build a career, you can’t grow something meaningful, you can’t put your voice or your work out into the world and expect that everyone will understand it, agree with it or respond to it in the way you’d hope. That’s not how it works. Being visible comes with exposure, and exposure comes with the possibility of judgement, misinterpretation and criticism. Some people won’t like your message and some won’t like you. You’ll trigger some, you’ll irritate others and there will still be mean people out there who need to attack or moan because they aren’t happy in their lives… but it isn’t worth keeping small for because that’s the crying shame in people pleasing. Think of the change you could make?

What’s changed for me is that I no longer use that as a reason to stay small. I don’t take the discomfort as a signal to retreat or to force myself into being something more acceptable. I recognise it for what it is, a reaction, a feeling, a moment, and I let it be there without letting it decide what I do next. Because the alternative, staying quiet, holding back, filtering everything to avoid any kind of negative response, that costs far more over time. It limits your work, your voice and the people you could reach.

And if I’m honest, sobriety has been a big part of that shift. Without the option to switch off or soften those feelings, I’ve had to learn how to sit with them properly and move anyway. I’ve had to build that tolerance, that capacity to feel uncomfortable and still stay aligned with what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

So yes, it still hurts sometimes but it no longer runs the show and that’s the difference.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety, RSD, ADHD experiences or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

But there’s another layer to this that I think is important to talk about, because in that article I was mainly focusing on what’s happening internally. All of those thought patterns and the reactions, the way your brain interprets things… sometimes when nothing has actually happened at all.

This topic today is slightly different because sometimes something has actually happened. Sometimes something is said, or implied, or repeated or maybe you’re treated unfairly. Maybe it’s gossip, or others being unkind. Sometimes you’re misunderstood, sometimes you’re judged, criticised or talked about in a way that feels completely unfair and if you already have a tendency towards rejection sensitivity, that bloody hurts. I have had this happen a few times in my life professionally and personally and it almost feels like a physical pain in the injustice of it all. There you are, having tried to be agreeable in ‘people pleasing mode’ and someone has taken offence anyway. Maybe you’ve tried to impress and spoken too much and they’ve decided not to like you. Or maybe you’ve kept quiet and they’ve taken offence to that too. I think it’s important to learn about some of these social challenges because they’ll still exist in sobriety… in fact you’ll be even more aware of them and more present in having to work through them.

I’m sharing this not because it still impacts me in the way that it used to when I was younger (age helps too), but because it’s exactly what I’ve worked through, studied deeply, and now help others manage… sobriety, my ADHD diagnosis, and awareness gave me the clarity, and this is now the heart of what I teach people.

So what do you do when this happens?

Because this is where it gets difficult. It’s one thing to notice that your brain is scanning and trying to protect you but seeing things you can argue don’t truly exist. It’s another thing entirely when there is something real to respond to.

In the past, I would have gone straight into reaction mode and my mind would latch onto it immediately. I’d rush to try to sort the problem out and to ease the pain I felt in that moment. I’d want to understand it, fix it and to correct it. I’d replay it, analyse it, look for where it had come from and what I needed to do to resolve it. There was a real urgency to it, like it needed to be dealt with straight away. When you’re ADHD or AuDHD the urgency and the rejection sensitivity causes you to be far too impulsive to act.

That urgency is the first thing to understand, because it’s not really about the situation itself. It’s your nervous system trying to get back to safety as quickly as possible. You feel dysregulated and you want to soothe that in yourself. If something feels like rejection then your system reads it as a threat and sometimes this may not even be logically, but it can certainly be physically. That’s why it feels the way it does. The racing heart, the tight chest and the inability to let it go. You’ll play it over and over and get really upset by it if you have RSD. So the instinct is to act, to do something that removes that feeling.

And this is where alcohol used to come in for me because it would blur the edges a bit, soothe urgency and it temporarily dulled the reaction. It gave me a way to not have to sit with it, either by switching off completely or by giving me a false sense that it didn’t matter as much.

But what sobriety has shown me is that reacting quickly almost always makes things worse. Not because you’re wrong to feel what you feel, but because when you respond from that state, you’re not actually responding to the situation. You’re responding to the discomfort and you won’t make the best decisions.

So the first shift is learning how to pause and we aren’t waiting until you feel completely regulated but you just need a deliberate decision to not act immediately.

That might look like writing it… but not sending the message. Not replying straight away, saving it in drafts. Not trying to explain yourself or correct something in that moment and just giving yourself space. Because that space allows your nervous system to settle, even slightly and without that settling of your system, everything else becomes much harder.

The second shift is separating what actually happened from what your brain is doing with it. This is simple to say, but not always easy to do and it takes practice. Maybe you’re dealing with something at the moment that you can use as you read the rest of this article or maybe you can think of a scenario in the past?

What was actually said?
What do I know for certain?
What am I adding on top of this?

Because the brain is very quick to fill in the gaps and to tell stories, especially when it’s already primed to expect rejection. It will create a full narrative in seconds, and that narrative will feel completely true. But that doesn’t mean it is true.

Sobriety has been a big part of this for me, because I can actually track that process now and I can more easily see the truth. Alcohol used to distort my interpretation of situations and conversations like it does for us all. When I was drinking, everything blurred together. The feeling, the story, the reaction, it all became one thing and in sobriety I can see the layers and nuance more clearly.

The third shift is accepting that not everything needs a response.

This was a big one for me… in fact it was a massive one.

Silence is a response.

There’s such a strong pull, especially if you’re sensitive to rejection, to correct things, to explain yourself, to make sure people understand you properly. To bring things back into alignment. But not everyone is open to understanding you and not every situation improves with more explanation. Sometimes responding just keeps you in the loop and sometimes the most regulated response is to step back and let it sit for a moment, even when that feels uncomfortable.

I’ve learned the best response is no response and distance. The fire goes out if you starve it of oxygen. Sobriety has helped me with this because I don’t have that immediate escape so I have to sit with the discomfort of not resolving it straight away. And over time, that has built a tolerance that I didn’t have before.

Another important shift is learning to tolerate being misunderstood.

This one is uncomfortable, because it goes against everything your brain is trying to do. If you are someone who scans, adapts and tries to get it right, then being misunderstood feels like something that needs fixing. But the reality is, if you are visible in any way, in your work, in your relationships, in your opinions, then some level of misunderstanding is inevitable.

And this is often not because you’ve done something wrong, but because people see things through their own lens and with their own projections and this is where sobriety has been a turning point for me.

Because choosing not to drink already sets you apart and it already puts you in a position where you might be questioned, misunderstood or judged. And every time you hold that line, you are building evidence that you can tolerate that. You’re showing yourself that you don’t need to change who you are to stay comfortable.

So what does this look like in practice? Let’s summarise:

It looks like noticing the urge to react, and not immediately following it.

It looks like giving yourself time before responding, even if that time is just an hour or a day.

It looks like writing out what you want to say, and then deciding whether it actually needs to be said. Processing in this way by writing or journaling is always a good idea.

It looks like reminding yourself that not every thought you have about a situation is a fact.

It looks like letting some things go, not because they don’t matter, but because engaging with them would cost you more.

And it looks like building trust in your own judgement, rather than trying to manage everyone else’s perception of you.

This isn’t about becoming someone who doesn’t care because that wouldn’t be realistic for someone with RSD. It’s actually about becoming someone who can feel it, notice it and still choose how to respond because the goal isn’t to remove rejection sensitivity entirely. For many people, that sensitivity will always be there to some degree. What changes is whether it runs the show.

If you’re recognising yourself in this, in the urge to fix, to explain, to replay, to manage how you’re being seen, then this is exactly the work I focus on inside my ADHD Regulation course. Because understanding it is one part of it, but actually being able to pause in the moment, to create space between trigger and reaction and to settle your nervous system is something that needs to be practised. It’s something I’ve personally had experience of myself.

Inside the course we work directly with these patterns, rejection sensitivity, overthinking, emotional reactivity and that pull to act quickly when something feels uncomfortable. There are structured lessons to help you understand what’s happening and why, alongside targeted hypnosis sessions designed specifically for the ADHD experience, including work on softening rejection sensitivity and reducing those looping thought patterns.

So you’re not just trying to think your way through it, you’re learning how to respond differently in real time. Because sobriety gives you the awareness, but this is the work that helps you use it.

Next week I want to look at the true cost of staying likeable, because when sensitivity to rejection is running things, it doesn’t just affect how you feel, it shapes how you behave, what you say, what you don’t say and what you end up putting up with.

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.

My struggle to regulate when it was undiagnosed and I was still drinking was a vicious loop. The intense feelings and reactions to the world around me were often the reason I used a glass of wine at the end of the day to shut the energy and internal chatter off. One of those things was the fact that I was always hyper aware of the people around me. I was highly attuned to them, noticing shifts in tone, changes in energy and also the smallest differences in how someone responded to me. I could read the room really quickly but then I’d also feel a sense of responsibility for anything I was picking up on which was the hardest part of socialising.

What would often then happen is that I would constantly be scanning and amending what I was saying, replaying conversations afterwards and analysing them in detail, looking for the moment that any shifts may have happened, searching for what I could have said or done differently or how I came across.

Alongside that there was the constant mental activity, with thoughts looping, anticipating and second-guessing. My mind never seemed to shut off, particularly at the end of the day when everything caught up with me and I was trying to decompress, and it felt like my brain was always ‘on’.

I’ve spoken before about trying to switch off that constant physical and mental energy, the sense of always being slightly alert even when there’s no obvious reason to be. But what I want to focus on here is something more specific, and that’s social scanning and how that links into rejection sensitivity.

Because for me, the two are closely connected, in fact one feeds the other, as the more aware I was of subtle shifts in people, the more likely I was to interpret them as meaningful, and the more I interpreted them, the more I felt the need to respond, adjust or correct in real time. This creates a loop and I don’t think this is limited to those who are diagnosed or who identify as neurodivergent, as a fear of being judged, of getting it wrong socially, of saying too much or not enough can sit underneath a lot of people’s relationship with alcohol.

Although I’ll speak from my own experience of AuDHD, you may see yourself in some of the things I talk about as we’re often not just drinking for obvious reasons but for the solutions it provides to social discomfort.

So what do I mean by social scanning?

Personally, in my work, this ability to read, interpret and react is incredibly useful. I’m sensitive to shifts in tone, I notice body language, what’s being said and also what isn’t and it helps me understand people quickly and respond in a way that feels accurate and connected. Everyone reads social cues to some extent but especially with AuDHD or ADHD that system is more sensitive.

For someone who is neurodivergent, your brain is often trying to stay one step ahead because uncertainty feels uncomfortable, sometimes intolerable. So what happens is the brain compensates by scanning for patterns and trying to reduce that uncertainty as quickly as possible. There’s also the additional challenge of often feeling slightly on the outside of things like friendship groups as if everyone else has a manual on how to interact socially and yours is missing a few important pages. Maybe in the past you’ve had experiences of being bullied or picked on which have raised your defences or moments where, despite best intentions, you’ve put your foot in it, said the wrong thing, talked too much or done something without meaning to which led to being criticised or excluded. That feels painful, especially when you’ve been so hypervigilant to try to avoid it in the first place.

What happens then is that you learn to scan, to predict and to protect yourself from the pain of those experiences repeating, telling yourself that the answer is to be agreeable, to be likeable and to remain alert at all costs.

Doesn’t everyone do this?

We all socially scan to a degree because the human brain is built to predict and we don’t tend to like not knowing where we stand. We scan for tone, facial expressions, pauses and reactions, trying to answer one underlying question which is “am I okay and safe here?”

We’re also looking to reduce the risk of rejection and whether someone is neurodivergent or not most people carry some level of sensitivity to being judged, excluded or misunderstood as this is an innate psychological need to belong. Scanning the environment becomes a way of working out if you’ve said the right thing, adjusting before something goes wrong and avoiding conflict or disapproval.

For some people this need is just something that occasionally occurs to them but for others, especially if you are sensitive to rejection, it’s constant and automatic.

If you’ve grown up with ADHD what often sits underneath this is a long history of being corrected. There’s a high likelihood that you’ve received significantly more feedback than your peers about how you should behave, what you’ve got wrong or how you’ve come across. Being told in different ways that you were too much, too loud, too distracted, too sensitive or wrong in social situations. Some estimates suggest that children with ADHD receive thousands more corrective or negative comments across development and that repeated experience leaves a mark. The brain begins to anticipate disapproval before it happens, becoming quicker to scan for it and more motivated to avoid it. So the scanning, the adjusting, the effort to get it right is something that’s been shaped over time

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)

Rejection sensitivity, often referred to as RSD, is not simply a fear of being disliked. It’s a heightened sensitivity to the possibility that something has shifted in a social interaction even when there’s no clear evidence that it has. It can be triggered by something small, a change in tone, a pause or even a look that’s open to interpretation but the response it creates feels immediate and significant. It isn’t a conscious decision to overanalyse but a fast, automatic process where the brain flags something as potentially important and the body reacts before there’s been time to fully make sense of it which can feel like panic and dysregulation.

In the context of ADHD this tends to be amplified because emotional responses are often quicker and more intense and the ability to regulate or step back in the moment can be harder to access. In that moment what you really need is the ability to pause and think it through which can be difficult to access when dysregulated. So instead of noticing something and weighing it up logically and applying perspective, the reaction is already underway. The mind then tries to catch up by analysing what might have gone wrong, replaying the interaction and searching for meaning and because your attention can latch onto whatever feels important thoughts can linger, loop and grow in significance.

What’s important to understand is that this isn’t about being overly sensitive in a simplistic sense but about the combination of speed, intensity and your nervous system struggling to let go once something has been flagged as socially relevant. Your brain is doing what it’s meant to do, trying to predict, make sense of ambiguity and reduce uncertainty but in doing so it can create an emotional response that feels disproportionate to what’s actually happened.

Adapting in real time

This scanning is useful to some extent because you’re able to match someone’s energy, adjust your tone and stay aligned with the other person and in a moderate sense this is simply social intelligence and how connection works. Social scanning itself isn’t the problem, it’s when that system doesn’t switch off, becomes hyper vigilant and is driven by fear rather than curiosity, at which point it shifts from being a tool for connection into a way of managing anxiety.

And of course this is where alcohol comes in as a way of turning up the “I don’t care” dial in the moment and letting go of some of that vigilance.

Masking and mirroring

The more you scan the more you notice. The more you notice the more you interpret. And the more you interpret the more likely you are to feel that something needs to be corrected which is where mirroring comes in.

If you’re neurodivergent or socially anxious then mirroring is often used and is an adaptive strategy to help you navigate the unpredictability of a social setting. This isn’t literally copying someone (though it sometimes can appear like that) but it might look like becoming more agreeable, liking similar things and even echoing accents subconsciously for acceptance. At the other end of the scale it’s not disagreeing with anything and making sure that there is no cause for dislike. For me I would soften my opinions, say yes to things, avoid offending, match someone else’s energy or hold back parts of myself in order to keep the interaction feeling safe. It felt like I was being considerate, aware and socially intelligent but it was also exhausting.

Over time this becomes learned. If at any point you’ve felt misunderstood, too much or slightly out of sync socially even in subtle ways the brain begins to compensate. You learn, often unconsciously, that adjusting yourself leads to better outcomes, fewer awkward moments and less risk of disapproval and that reinforcement is powerful.

But the cost is that you are constantly monitoring yourself while you’re interacting rather than simply being in the interaction. Some part of your attention is always evaluating, adjusting and trying to get it right and over time that creates a level of cognitive and emotional load that can be difficult to sustain.

So when you look at it properly, masking and mirroring aren’t about being fake or inauthentic, they are about managing uncertainty, maintaining connection and protecting yourself from the discomfort of getting it wrong when you’re already processing more things and more quickly than most, which is exactly why alcohol felt like it helped at the time. But I want to add in here that so does sobriety when you give it time.

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How sobriety helped my RSD

It was only once I got my AuDHD diagnosis and also went sober that I really picked up on just how much I was doing this and how much it was taking out of me.

In my work it’s essential and makes me very good at reading people and responding appropriately but in a social setting it’s exhausting because the cost of that constant adjustment is that you are rarely fully at ease in yourself as some part of your attention is always focused outward, monitoring, adjusting and trying to maintain connection.

It creates a kind of internal pressure where you’re not only managing your own experience but also how you’re being received at the same time which is why alcohol felt so appealing because it softened that process. It softened the intensity of the scanning, reduced the need to keep adjusting and created a temporary sense of ease where I was no longer analysing every interaction in the same way, turning down the volume on that constant question of whether I was getting it right.

The difficulty is that it doesn’t change the underlying pattern, it doesn’t reduce the sensitivity or remove the need for regulation, it simply postpones it, often bringing it back more strongly once the effects wear off and when you add a hangover and the worry about what you said or did it compounds everything. Also add in the fact if you can’t remember the evening thanks to alcohol you will have even less control over what happened or how you came across.

I often reflect on that early hermit phase of sobriety and I think part of it was the shock of experiencing all of this without any buffer, having to sit with it fully before I had the tools or resilience to manage it differently. That’s where sobriety made some things harder before it helped. Which is why the work in sobriety becomes less about removing alcohol and more about understanding what alcohol was doing for you in the first place.

Now I have calm clarity. I know about my AuDHD, I understand that a lot of the time my RSD can be triggered and I don’t panic in that moment. I set boundaries more effectively because there was nothing worse that having all of that going on and a whole heap of drinking shame on top. I am now present, alert and fully aware of my energy levels at all times. There’s even comfort in knowing what I’m saying throughout the whole event or evening which reduces that hangiexty feeling the next day after drinking of replaying and not being sure.

It’s also meant allowing myself to sit with that discomfort without immediately trying to fix it which is not always easy particularly when the urge to resolve it feels strong.

Over time that pause creates space and sobriety slows down the emotional reaction enough to allow a different response, one that’s not driven purely by urgency or fear but by a more balanced understanding of what’s actually happening and without the added layer of shame because you know what you’ve said, who you’ve said it to and there’s nothing left for your mind to fill in.

That’s real freedom.

If you’re recognising yourself in this, in the constant scanning, the looping thoughts, the emotional spikes that feel immediate and hard to shake, then this is exactly the work I focus on inside my ADHD Regulation course. It’s built around the reality of how your brain and nervous system actually operate, not how you think they should. We work with the patterns you’ve just read about, including rejection sensitivity, overthinking, impulsive responses and the difficulty accessing a pause in the moment. There are structured lessons to help you understand what is happening and why, alongside targeted hypnosis sessions designed specifically for the ADHD experience, so you’re not just thinking differently but learning how to feel and respond differently as well. That includes work on softening rejection sensitivity, creating space between trigger and reaction and reducing the intensity of those mental loops that keep you stuck. You can go through it at your own pace, return to it when you need it and use it as a way of building regulation that actually holds, rather than relying on something external to switch it off.

I want to continue this topic next week when I’ll share useful and actionable advice to help you with RSD and how sobriety really helps.

If you’d like a session 1:1 with me to talk about sobriety or any other challenges you’re facing that you’d like support with, head to my website and send me an email or message me on here.

About Louisa

Louisa Evans is a UK-based practitioner specialising in behaviour change and helping people change their relationship with alcohol. With a background in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and a Master’s degree in Psychology, she combines psychological understanding with practical, compassionate support to help people build self-trust, develop healthier habits and create lasting change.

Her work is informed by psychology, cognitive behavioural approaches and hypnotherapy, with a focus on making complex ideas accessible and practical. Alongside her one-to-one work, Louisa is the creator of online courses, a podcast and educational resources designed to help people understand themselves better and make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives.

She is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a Senior Member and Registered Supervisor with the ACCPH, and a registered member of the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR). Through her clinical work, writing and teaching, she has supported thousands of people to build confidence, strengthen resilience and create lasting change.