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Spending hours the morning after the night before, regretting your choices and berating yourself for overindulging, does nothing to help you prepare for a more productive, more positive tomorrow.
Nor does it help you move forward with changing the way you allow alcohol to show up in your life.
It’s (Not) Such A Perfect Day
Whether you wake up thinking that yesterday was a good day or a bad day can paint the entire canvas of your next 24 hours.
If yesterday went well and you got your to-do list done, spoke to an old friend, sorted out your long-neglected underwear drawer, and made some fun plans for the weekend, well then, today is set to be a breeze.
If, on the other hand, yesterday was just a general crapshoot where you stubbed your toe as soon as you got out of bed and it all went downhill from there, well then, it’s likely that today you’re readying yourself for more of the same.
And the thing is, what we look for in the world is often what we find. So if you’ve woken up with rose-tinted spectacles expecting £5 notes (or $5 bills) to be raining from the sky, the odds are you’re far more likely to spot them when they do.
But if you’re expecting the whole world and his dog to be nipping at your ankles all day, you’ll be far more likely to kick back even when things aren’t really as bad as they seem.
Now you throw alcohol into the mix, and that bad day takes you from a general malaise into a doom spiral of negativity with very little provocation.
The Choice is Yours
So when you’re moderating your alcohol intake and yesterday’s drinking didn’t go as planned, you have two choices.
The first is that you can succumb to the doom spiral.
You can beat yourself up for “failing” yet again, for not sticking to your goals and for overdoing it, when all you planned to do was join the gang for two glasses and then head home, but yet somehow you’ve woken up hugging an empty pizza box or kebab wrapper again.
Or you can accept that your very real, very normal human existence on this planet means that sometimes things go a bit wrong.
And you can take that data and do something with it.
When we drink more than intended, no matter how well-intentioned our initial plans were, it can be so tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater and think, “Well, screw it, I just can’t do this”
But I need you to hear me when I tell you that that’s just not true.
Drinking mindfully and moderating your alcohol intake is a skill.
And like any skill, it can be learned if you’re willing to put the time, effort and patience into it.
Drinking differently doesn’t happen overnight, especially for those of us working to change decades of ingrained behaviour.
I didn’t make the choice to cut back and instantly find myself atop some golden orb of success.
There were many nights when I forgot myself, when I overdid it, and many mornings when I wondered if I could really make a reduction like this stick.
After 24 years of drinking daily, it wasn’t easy to step back and say ‘everything’s different now’.
But in time, with practice, with repetition, with iteration on the things that worked and didn’t work, I was able to find ways to do this that stuck for me.
Catch & Release
So for managing the morning after the night before, before it spirals away from you, I want you to work through a simple yet effective two-step Q&A.
Step 1 – Catch it
Look back on last night and answer these questions honestly for yourself:
- When do you feel the night started to get away from you?
Was it shots, a cocktail too many, not eating before, etc. - How much control do you feel you had to make a different choice if you had given yourself the time to think about it?
Sometimes it’s not that you made the wrong choice; it’s that you didn’t make a choice at all. - What’s one choice you could have made differently that could have changed the course of the evening for you?
It could be a different drink choice in the moment, a different type of venue for your evening or anything else.
Step 2 – Release it
Now you have some idea about where things went off-piste for you, it’s about understanding it as data to inform your next night out, rather than a stick to beat yourself with.
- How can you start your night out better next time?
Food? Water? A plan? Knowing what you actually want from the evening? - What’s one drinking choice you can action to experiment with?
A low/no drink to start with, zebra striping, eating while you drink… (There are lots of moderation techniques for you to explore over on The Moderation Hub) - How can you get your friends to help you?
Did you even tell them you wanted to drink differently? Did you tell them what you need from them? Were they the right friends to be with at this stage of your journey?
(This one is important. And Why Your Friends Can’t Take ‘No’ for an Answer is a good place to dive deeper.)
This is a simple two-step approach that you can use to start unpacking where your night actually went “wrong” and then what you can do about it to ensure progress each time.
It’s purposefully short and to the point because I don’t want you to dwell on what went wrong; I want you to take action on what can go better next time.
And remember, this new way of drinking is about progress over perfection.
Some nights might feel as though they get away from you, but if you insist on treating those as learning opportunities and not moments of failure, you’ll find you can take yourself closer to where you want to go.
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