10 Ways I Stay the Fuck Sober

That have nothing to do with drinking.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

What is sobriety anyway? I mean, yes, we know it’s not picking up a drink- which is not to imply that not picking up is easy by any stretch of my previously booze-altered imagination- but I would bet if you asked any random sober person what their sobriety is to them, or more specifically what it is exactly that keeps them sober, you would get a wide range of interesting and varied answers. For what it’s worth, I’d like to share with you mine. I promise to keep it real and stop italicizing so much.

Today I am 382 days sober and if that jumble of numbers doesn’t really mean anything in particular to you please refer back to my previous post to find out that I have no concrete answer either. But one thing it definitely does mean (sorry) is that I have learned a few things about maintaining sobriety for a good long time. And what it comes down to for me, at its most straightforward, is that to maintain sobriety is to maintain one thing in particular to the very best of my limited, exhaustible, earthling ability: calm emotional balance.

Chaotic, disordered, obsessive, and conflicted thinking is a hallmark of an addicted mind. What a lot of us are unaware of is that although we drink to ‘calm’ a troubled mind, by doing so we ensure those troubles continue to plague us. And so the cycle is doomed to repeat itself. Until we interrupt the thinking, we cannot interrupt the drinking. (I’m a little annoyed that rhymes.)

Please let’s just realize what this means for a second, though. We are talking about maintaining sobriety long before we might ever even position ourselves near an actual drink. We imagine it’s tough for a person in recovery to be around alcohol or drinkers, and that is often the case, but the truth is that what it is toughest for a recovering person to be ‘around’ is her own thoughts. The battle is invisible to the outside world, but it’s the whole world inside the person maneuvering her brave way through sobriety.

So what are the ten ways to maintain calm emotional balance, you would probably like to know since I promised them from the jump? Let’s dig in.

1. Let out the emotions that must be let out so you can let them go. Bottling up tough emotions is HIGHLY TOXIC for anyone to do and most especially for someone who struggles with addiction. Anger, fury, rage, grief, fear, anxiety. All full of roiled chaotic heightened energy. Some things I do to help them move through me: run, walk, sing, dance, work out, journal, therapy (therapy is relevant to all of this whole list tbh), scream, make art, breathing exercises.

2. Know your triggers and know you are stronger and bigger and more clever than they are. Awareness is everything. Stay alert = stay sober. Triggers are essentially just deeply ingrained thought patterns that have developed over a long time spent associating drinking with positive feelings. The associations are false but damn can they feel loud inside. It’ll pass. Limit exposure to triggers as necessary and when they pop their heads up, acknowledge them, breathe, release. Then distract yourself. Fast. Call someone. Leave the scene. Drink water.

3. Develop a mindfulness practice. This is how you train your brain to ride out emotional storms. It teaches us to detach from everything that does not bring peace. Personally, I am a meditation gal. Every morning, afternoon, evening. And little quick moments throughout the day. Some folks are not fans of meditation because of racing thoughts. Try instead to notice the stillness that surrounds everything else. Nature is a beautiful place to notice that while people and society are general nuttiness nonstop, most of what the universe is made of is silent, ancient, grounded wisdom.

4. Heal the resentments you are holding onto like your life depends on it. Your life doesn’t depend on being right or better than anyone else. We are all fucking disasters to some degree. Everybody hurts just like Michael Stipe so mourningly informed us so long ago (stop it- it wasn’t that long ago it was-okay whatever). We are judge-y creatures by nature, it’s just how it is. But you will be much calmer inside to the extent that you can become aware of the goodness and struggle in all of us. Ways I do this: therapy (see!), spiritual connection, practicing empathy, practicing heaping amounts of self-love and self-forgiveness. To let go of judging others begins by letting go of judging yourself.

5. Get good at identifying your own feelings in any given situation. Most of what we feel are subconscious reactions based on past unresolved issues or hangups. Honor the feeling but try to remember you are not your feelings or thoughts about the feelings. You are the one who notices them. Which means that as soon as you become aware of them, you have already begun to let them go.

6. Beware the artificial highs and lows. This is a tricky one because sometimes the lows are obvious but the highs are not. Artificial highs can sneak through as a kind of jacked-up ‘positivity.’ This kind of over exaggerated happiness, excitement, or forced jolliness totally jams your internal sensory system and shoves you off-kilter emotionally. Just as you want to be aware to temper a bad mood by calling yourself back to your center, you also want to watch for where you are, say, overpromising, overstretching, overexerting yourself in an effort to seem ‘nice.’ Leave the party, turn down the invite, remove all the superfluous exclamation points. You’re cute. It’s fine.

7. Fuck perfectionism all the way to hell. An addiction prone mind is often one that gets high off of extremes. To set your standards so high you cannot possibly reach them is a dangerous game to play because you have already lost before you’ve begun. It’s too extreme. You will make mistakes. You will forget how to do this. You will wonder if you have done everything/anything (see-extremes) right. You will worry you are too far behind or haven’t gotten far enough yet. Settle back into yourself. Honor and celebrate little solid wins. One day at a time helps with this. That’s all this ever is. Mercifully, it’s all it ever needs to be.

8. Do not let ego run the show. Ego only knows how to demand one thing: More. Have more drinks. Have more accomplishments. Be better than Sophie. Make sure you get ahead of Brad. Know more. Read more. Say more. Have more. Buy more. Run faster. Walk more miles, play more instruments, write more, be prettier, be funnier, be more popular, be richer, be cuter, be smarter, be smaller. Be bigger. More chips. More money. MORE. MOREEEE! Nothing you do or have will ever be enough to satisfy the hungry ghost of the terrified empty bottomless ego. Know you are worthy now. And remember that now is all there is. Leave Sophie and Brad alone no one even knows who they are. Stay in your lane. Your lane is plenty enough.

9. Protect against overwhelm. This one starts by getting clear with yourself about what your limits are and the only way to know them is to experience them. Which is to say, you will constantly be using your mindful awareness to notice, assess (without judgment) and regulate your emotional state in any number of a million different circumstances. A quick way to get good at this: Say No when you mean No and say Yes HARDLY EVER. Saying You don’t know yet or You will consider or You will have to get back to someone later are all beautiful honest and lovely things to say. Since getting sober and increasingly with each fine day that passes, I find myself responding to less and less that’s asked of me and more often than not my go to answer is the gift of not answering whenever I feel the slightest bit internally unsteady: I’m happy to get back to you when I am able. Do not give yourself away to anything that will make you unsafe. Ever.

10. Ask the universe for help. This is the mightiest thing you can do though it may seem like the smallest, lamest, most useless, most ineffective, most fluffy/weak/soft. The irony is real, I assure you. But if addiction is the torture of a divided and disordered mind, calling on the eternal peace of a unified and ordered Mind is the only way out of the panicked-thought-loop and into a regulated emotional state. I call that unified peace of Mind a number of different things depending on my mood and the day and the phase of the moon and my wildly varied poetic inclinations, but none of which matter, because it cannot be named. It is my sincere belief that by surrendering my confusion and fear to a power greater than my limited understanding, I am immediately met with healing of a divine, primordial, metaphysical nature. And I believe this because it has proven itself true again and again and again without fail. There is something beyond human understanding that understands us better than we understand ourselves. When you ask it for help it responds with endless compassion and kindness. As long as we are willing to invite it in, we will discover it is all that was ever truly there to begin with. Incidentally, on this one, I know there is a lot of angst around the use of the word God which I do understand. My question to myself and to all of us is this: Would we be willing to entertain the idea that maybe we don’t have issues with GOD, per se, but with the lies we have been fed about what ‘God’ is supposed to be? No answer. Just a question.

Sobriety is so much more than not drinking. And maintaining it in a world hell bent on severing us from it is a monumental undertaking. But if you remove just a few letters from ‘monumental’ you are left with just ‘moment.’ And maybe that’s what all this boils down to at its simplest even in the presence of this heavy, complicated life: Carry less. Let go of more. Which has nothing to do with drinking, I guess. Except everything.