“Could I Ever Just Have One Glass Of Wine With Dinner?” #health #holistic

“Would I ever be able to control my drinking so it’s just one glass of wine when I go out for dinner?”

Maybe you can get on board with being sober most of the time, but there are a few situations where you just can’t imagine not drinking. A nice meal out. A holiday. A celebration.

In an ideal world, you’d love to be able to drink on those occasions. So can you get there? Let’s talk about it. 

Key points

You must begin with a complete break first

If you’re anything like me, you probably won’t want to hear this. But if you’d like to become a take-it-or-leave-it drinker, you do need to practise the “leaving it” part for a good long while first. You need to build up that sober muscle and get used to not drinking. Because if you really want to be that “just one drink on a special occasion” person, then sobriety is going to have to become your norm, most of the time.

Taking a complete break gives you time to work on fixing the things that got you drinking in the first place. More often than not, your drinking is filling a gap for something you’re missing or a skill you don’t have yet. So you might need to do some work on creating new coping mechanisms and handling life a bit differently. This is the work we do inside my Getting Unstuck coaching programme.

After doing the work, the question changes

If you take a proper break from drinking (anything from 6 weeks to 100 days) and do it right, you’ll come out the other side feeling great physically and mentally. If you do your myth busting work and find new coping mechanisms and let new habits form, you will feel very different about alcohol. You’ll be much less impressed and drawn to it. You might actually feel free from it. 

So then the question shifts. It stops being “Can I have one glass of wine with dinner” and becomes “Why would I want one glass of wine with dinner? What would be the point?” That’s the place I’m at these days and this is what I want for you too. This position puts you in control again. When I was drinking, I never thought I’d stop loving wine, but now I don’t even like the smell of it!

What’s realistic here? 

Let’s say you stop for a while but you don’t do the mindset work or get coached through this, and at the end you still miss wine. Could you go back to drinking occasionally? It’s not impossible, but it’s not likely. Just think about what you’d say to a smoker, who took a break from smoking and then planned to only light up on “special occasions”. It’s risky, right?

I often work with women who’ve stopped for a while and then gone back to drinking “a bit,” only for it to slowly increase again. Sometimes the effort of trying to stop after just one glass of wine takes up so much mental energy, it’s not worth it. There’s nothing shameful about this. I think going back to drinking can be part of the journey and help you figure out what you really want.

The good news…

The main thing I want you to understand here is that there is a way out of this that feels genuinely good. Your choice isn’t between “drink and be miserable” or “stay sober and be miserable.” There’s a way of doing this that leaves you feeling so good, you don’t even want that glass of wine with dinner anymore. This is something I can support you with inside my Getting Unstuck coaching programme.

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