The Truth About Drinking That No One Wants to Hear

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

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2:03Darin Olien:Just type in Darren, D-A-R-I-N, and magically, you get 15 % off. I'm super stoked for Therisage. I love their company. I love what they're doing, and you will too. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. This is another Fatal Convenience. I'm stoked you're here. You're here because you want something better, even though some of these things are confronting. And this one is no joke. This is social drinking. That's right. There is some science around it. And there's also my opinion. And I'm going to lay in my opinion on this one because this one matters a lot to me. Drinking in general, I don't get anything from it.

2:43Don't want it in my life. It killed my father. Alcoholism was on his death certificate. it. It's very rare that they put that on there. But for his case, they couldn't see of any other way when his body shut down other than alcohol. So my dad died directly from alcoholism. But this is not necessarily alcoholism. This is social drinking. Alcohol is a poison. Your body is consuming a poison. So it has effect on your body. Just because you're not binge drinking or drinking every day doesn't mean that alcohol isn't negatively affecting your life. Don't hate me, I know, but this is my opinion. I've had many wake-up calls around alcohol, so I am going to get into it.

3:30Alcohol has gotten a lot of people through stressful times, certainly in the pandemic, but it's also created an infinite amount of problems in our society and in the pandemic, which leads to abuses of all kinds. That's why I'm bringing it up. So this is why it's important to talk about. It's important to talk about uncomfortable conversations. This is one of those. Please don't turn this off. If you're drinking, it's okay. I'm not here to shame you, and I'm not here to tell you not to drink. I don't want that position. I'm not here to do that. I'm not here to judge you, okay? I'm just giving you my honest opinion.

4:13When I was a junior in college, I woke up hungover, in bad shape, and I was starting to get into my major, exercise, physiology, and nutrition. So I started to learn more about what effect this had on my life. Not that I needed anymore with the gripping headache and I wanted to work out. I wanted to have my next day. And guess what? I tried to work out and I threw up. I felt like crap. And so what happened with me is I said, well, what is alcohol giving me? Right? And it was like, well, you're in college. You get to go out with your friends. You get to let loose. You get to relax. You get to do all those things.

4:51And I said to myself, and I don't know where this came from. It popped in my head from maybe the divine itself. And it said, well, eliminate the middleman and just be that. Literally, that's what it said. And I was like, wow, could I do that? Could I eliminate this crutch that I'm having? Could I eliminate this thing that has killed my grandfather and my father and has affected almost every male in my dad's side of the family? Could I break free of this? Could I let loose and be less inhibited into who I am without the excuse of alcohol? Could I deal with my own pain without the excuse of alcohol?

5:34Could this be possible? And guess what? It was. I still went out in college. I had a blast. I danced. I drove my friends to the bars. The bartender gave me water all night. I was sweating and having fun and being a college kid. And I broke free from this grip that gripped my family and gripped myself. So that's the caveat of this conversation, of this fatal convenience. Obviously, we know the history. Fermentation is amazing. Fermentation and ethyl alcohol and all kinds of alcohols from coconut water. I drank fermented coconut water in the Philippines 10 years ago. It was amazing. Just had a sip.

6:17I had fermented shizandra berry in the Sovereign Mountains around China and Tibet. Amazing. China, 7 ,000 BC, they show proof that there was fermented beverages that they used. 3000 and 2000 BC in India. And Greece was one of the first alcoholic beverages that was fermented out of honey and water. In the 16th century, alcohol, aka spirits, was commonly used for medicinal purposes. Of course, there's always an incredible use. In the beginning of the 18th century, the British Parliament passed a law encouraging the use of grain for distillation of these spirits. This is when alcoholism started becoming widespread.

7:05During the 19th century, the temperance movement came to be and was dedicated to promoting moderation and more often complete abstinence in the use of intoxicating alcohol. Fast forward today, roughly 17 million Americans suffer from alcoholism. 17 million. Just a fun fact, Ethyl alcohol is fermented from fermenting yeast, sugars of any kind, fruit sugars, you name it, starches. Incredible way to make pure alcohol. Cleaning. It can clean things really well. You don't have to ingest it. Nearly 88 ,000 Americans die annually from alcohol-related causes. You know this. Alcohol is the most commonly used addictive substance in the United States.

7:53Again, nearly 17 million American adults have an alcohol abuse disorder. So what makes it convenient? Alcohol is convenient to distract you, distract us, distract people from our stressors and our problems in our life. Okay, I get it. That's what we do. We don't want to go into pain. When we have pain, we want to avoid it. Guess what happens when you avoid it? It doesn't go away. It's doing push-ups in the parking lot, ready to pounce on you at any point. That's nature. That's what happens. It takes our minds off things for a moment, for sure. Absolutely, I get it. Alcohol is always there. It's everywhere you go.

8:37It's socially accepted. It's in every store. It's at every party. For the most part, it is everywhere. Having a drink in your hand feels good, right? And when you're just having water and whatever, you feel the social pressure. Well, guess what? I've practiced for 30 years with that social pressure. Now I stand in my own sovereignty and my own choice for my own reasons without judgment of anyone else. But I get to leave when people get stupid. When there's alcohol around and people act weird, I'm out. Don't judge them, but I'm out. Why should we care? We should care. We should care because the impact that alcohol and alcoholism has on our life.

9:23Unfortunately, the highlight of the majority of people's lives, literally, I can't wait till the weekend. I'm going to get so drunk. I hope you're not saying that as adult anymore. But even as the holidays come up, people break open the alcohol. They're around their family. They're stressed. They have family secrets. They haven't been radically honest with their families and all that stuff. you drink yourself into oblivion. I don't get it. Now more than ever, let's do something different. Let's be honest with ourselves. Let's go into our pain safely with professionals, with deep friends. Let's get the skeletons out of the closet.

10:06Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different plus maybe that exposure to that plastic getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea there's some great solutions you can diy stuff i've got many of these in my fatal conveniences but the easy ones that i use every day and i'm about to travel a lot more and the traveling makes them really easy, I go to bite.

11:10Darin Olien:I bite down on a little tablet which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle and it's refillable and reusable and sustainable and there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents, and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again. You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices.

11:59Darin Olien:So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste Christ without using the tube. I am not here to shame any of you. I have pain too. I went through a hell of a week this week with pain in my body and connected to generations of pain of the men in my life. The men that is in my lineage, my genealogy. I'm not going to get into it all, but what I'm saying is it's so easy to distract. It's so easy to avoid, but I'm telling you, I promise that going through things and not avoiding them is so rich in life.

12:56It has got superpowers. It has access to who and what you really are. You are not the pain. Most often not, pain was perpetrated on you, and then you're just perpetuating it through shame, resentments, you name it. Let's get rid of it. Let's change it. So Dr. George Cobb, director of NIAAA, said the regular heavy drinking can creep up on people. So even if you do only drink casually, alcohol dependence can sometimes just sneak up on you. Long-term drinking can also hurt your heart muscles, making them unable to contract properly. It can also harm liver, pancreas, the immune system. We don't need to affect the immune system in a negative way, that's for sure.

13:48Heavy drinking can prevent the protective white blood cells in the body from attracting bacterial invaders like they're supposed to do. And listen, drinking too much at any given time. That's why when people drink, they can easily get sick the next day because their immune system is in the freaking toilet. Also, it opens you up to certain types of cancer, mouth and breast particularly. Particularly, regular binge drinking can damage the frontal cortex and areas around the brain involved in executive functioning and decision-making. We know that alcohol affects our decisions, don't we? There is strong evidence that alcohol can cause cancer at seven sites in the body and probably others.

14:32Current estimates suggest that alcohol-attributed cancer at these sites can make up 5.8 % of all cancer deaths worldwide. Even without complete knowledge of biological mechanisms and epidemiological evidence can support the judgment that alcohol causes cancer of the esophagus, liver, colon, rectum, and breast. And all the sources are in the show notes. Alcohol is associated with vitamin deficiencies due to malabsorption and poor dietary intake. Here's the thing. When you drink poison, which is alcohol, it shuts down other mechanisms of digestion and absorption because it wants to get rid of the alcohol as quickly as possible and siphon it through the liver.

15:16Brain health risks, brain shrinkage, loss of gray matter, loss of white matter. Whoops. So there's so many effects to avoiding oneself. And I get it. Having a drink every once in a while, having a drink in your hand at social parties is more comfortable. Well, cool. Then put a drink in your hand and just keep it there. And if you want to sip it, fine. Sip it all night or just have whatever the hell you want. I bring kombuchas to my party and I have my own fermented drink. Would you rather stand in your conviction, in your own sovereignty and support yourself and your body or succumb to some other person that you probably don't give a shit about and they have some weird ass point of view about it?

15:59And ultimately, they just have judgment of themselves. So if you stand in your own sovereignty not drinking, then they just want to pull you in to their judgments of themselves for drinking because they probably don't want the crutch themselves. You know that. Abstinence from alcohol over several months to a year may allow structural brain changes to partially correct. This is directly from the NIH. Abstinence also can help reverse negative effects on thinking skills, including problem solving, memory, and attention. Each and every one of our bodies is equipped to complex, beautiful, sophisticated functions that have the ability to heal and allow us to endure.

16:43So when you avoid alcohol, there's a possibility and high probability that the brain can partially correct some of the damage that the alcohol has done over time. What can we do instead? Well, don't avoid pain, shame, sadness, grief, resentment. Stop avoiding that. If you want to drink, fine. Again, this is not here to shame you. Do whatever you want. You're your own sovereign being. I am just providing you information and insight. Alcohol abuse and dependence can often arise by using alcohol as a coping mechanism. Okay. The thing is, America certainly and around the world, we celebrate alcohol.

17:26I don't know why, but that's what we do. We celebrate it. When we get off work, when we're feeling down, we drink a suppressant. Alcohol is a suppressant. So when you're feeling off or you've had a hard day or you want to unwind, you reach for the alcohol. It's kind of this catch-all to like take a break, unplug from society, unplug from your own pain. Coping mechanism is something that helps a person deal with something that's difficult. I get it. Absolutely. We all have them, even overeating. Many other types of addictions are all about avoiding some perceived pain. Unfortunately, though, alcohol is a coping mechanism that's only temporary and is outweighed by this long-term negative effects on our health, relationships, poor decisions, and it just has this pleomorphic effect in our lives.

18:24People using alcohol on a consistent basis that are having a hard time may be coping with difficult emotions. They've had a challenging life event. They're bored. They're stressed. Insomnia. There's trauma or PTSD or just social anxiety. But like I said, bring your own virgin cocktail mixes to your party. Bring your own kombuchas. That's what I do. Easy. People don't even know. Just fill it up, put it in the cool jar, sugar-free mojita, mocktail, soda water, fresh mint, crushed, all that stuff. And here's the thing. You could drive your friends home. You can drive yourself home. You don't have to now worry about getting pulled over and all of this other ancillary things.

19:12Giving up alcohol in the society pressure is a win. Believe me. And if you really want, here's some brands to look out for. There's one called Seedlip. Seedlip is actually the world's first distilled non-alcoholic spirit, which is free of sugars, sweeteners, allergens, additives. I didn't even know about all this stuff. I just go for my kombucha. So the question to ask yourself, why do you feel so much pressure to drink? What's really behind it? Is casual drinking really that casual? Is the social pressure really so much pressure that you are doing something that you may not want to? And if you are drinking, then just drink.

19:53Be responsible and slow down, but at least give yourself an option. Give yourself the awareness. Ask yourself, what is the motivation of my drinking? So if the next day you feel off or weird, now you have to sit with any of that. And it could drive into more shame, more resentment, more fear. And then that's the opportunity to then start sitting with that stuff. So again, this is mental health more than anything. My father suffered in a big way with mental health and physical health that drove him to start drinking. And it didn't go well. It wasn't going well in my life. I had a lot of challenges around it.

20:36And thank God the spirit came in of some kind and told me, you don't have to drink. You can do something else. And I woke up to that fact as a junior in college. So again, if you want to drink, that's fine. If you don't, that's great. But again, my biggest thing with alcohol, give yourself a choice. And if you're doing it for reasons that are destructive or avoiding pain, this is the opportunity to look into that so that you're not driven in your life through pain and you're driven through healing and opportunity that that pain can give you. There are benefits to looking at our pain, shame, resentment, fear, anxiety.

21:27Believe me, I get it. look at it, look into it, get some support, and realize that you don't have to just drink just because other people are. Be your own free-thinking sovereign being. Okay, that was it. Thanks for tuning in to The Social Drink. And remember, I'm only bringing this up out of love and respect for your life and for yourself. And that's what this is all about. So listen, tune in, do with it what you want, and just know I love you.