E102: Alcohol and Your Dysregulated Nervous System With Beth Bowen, LMSW
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Gill welcomes Beth Bowen, LMSW to the show. This episode is your guide to understanding why we use alcohol to attempt to regulate our nervous system and calm us down. Alcohol is a quick fix that brings down intolerable emotions, but drinking to cope makes us even less tolerant of big emotions in the future.
In this episode you’ll learn:
Beth’s experience working with veterans and in the emergency room as a social worker
The idea of “knowing better” better but not being able to change your drinking
The risk to licensure for a medical or mental health professional struggling with substances
Emotion intensity and drinking to regulate emotions
How our nervous system works and how it can become dysregulated
Why we are so drawn to drinking alcohol to regulate our nervous system
What the window of tolerance is and how this can increase the risk of turning to alcohol to cope
Why morality (good/bad, strong/weak) has nothing to do with it
How do identify if you have a narrow window of tolerance and how to improve your ability to tolerate emotions
How to learn healthy coping strategies
Beth is a therapist and sober coach living in Austin, TX with her husband and two boys. She has been sober from alcohol for 4.5 years, and now helps other women change their relationship with alcohol through group and 1:1 coaching. Beth also founded Sober Stories, a multimedia platform dedicated to the power of storytelling in the sober space. Sober Stories publishes new podcast episodes every Friday, featuring interviews of folks all across the sober spectrum.
Connect with Beth:
https://wearesoberstories.com/
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sober-stories/id1612979571
My interview on Sober Stories:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sober-powered-with-gill-tietz-of-sober-powered/id1612979571?i=1000559091670
There were many things that Beth said that really impacted me, but let's talk about 2 of them:
“So much of our drinking comes down to seeking a rapid state change.”
That's the goal right? To change our mood as quickly as possible. It doesn't matter if we're happy and want to be even more happy, having fun and want to have even more fun, or if we're changing negative moods into feeling calm or safe. We get stuck in this loop of instant gratification and when we try to quit drinking it's hard to get used to real life. In real life we can't instantly change our moods, we have to work for it.
“Even though the other things will work, they won’t work as fast (as alcohol does), they might not be as effective at getting us into our window of tolerance, but we do it anyway. And we do it anyway because its all in service of letting our nervous system heal and return to a more stable baseline.”
Doing the work is the critical. I couldn't handle anything in early sobriety because I had trained myself for so many years to rely on alcohol to regulate my mood and nervous system. Over time, I've learned to increase my window of tolerance, and it starts by doing the stupid stuff that you don't want to do (like going on a rage walk!)
Cite this episode
Bowen, B. Tietz, G. Episode 102: Alcohol and Your Dysregulated Nervous System With Beth Bowen, LMSW. Sober Powered. 2022.
