Live Naked AF, page 18
You’ve probably heard someone say they can’t seem to have fun without a drink—or maybe you’ve felt that way yourself. Sadly, because of the neurochemical process I just explained, that becomes true. With regular drinking and elevated levels of dynorphin, life begins to feel dull. Flat. Even miserable. But when we stop drinking, our joy returns—often with surprising intensity. People report experiencing lasting euphoric feelings when they first go alcohol free.
Here is the bottom line: Alcohol is the thief of joy. It steals your happiness.
Happiness You Can Count
Let’s explore the truth about alcohol and happiness by taking a closer look at just how happy—or not—alcohol actually made you from a measurable, numbers-based perspective.
Social psychologist and researcher Barbara Fredrickson, well known for her work on positive emotions, identified ten emotions that create our experience of happiness: love, joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, and awe.
Use the chart below to reflect on how alcohol has influenced each of these emotions in your life. For each one, ask yourself:
How did alcohol contribute to this emotion in my life?
How did alcohol diminish or steal this emotion from me?
For clarity and easy reflection, number each of the points you make so you can tally them later. Be honest with yourself. This is your opportunity for clarity, to see your experience clearly and begin to shift it.
Emotion
How Did Alcohol Enhance This Emotion in Your Life?
How Did Alcohol Diminish This Emotion in Your Life?
Love
Joy
Gratitude
Serenity
Interest
Hope
Pride
Amusement
Inspiration
Awe
When you are done, simply count the number of items you listed in each column.
For example:
Emotion
How Did Alcohol Enhance This Emotion in Your Life?
How Did Alcohol Diminish This Emotion in Your Life?
Love
Alcohol made it easier to loosen up in the bedroom.
Even when we had sex, it was hard to remember, and I never really felt connected.
My kids didn’t want to be near me when I was drinking.
Alcohol-fueled fighting has taken a toll on my marriage.
I’ve yelled at my kids more times than I can count when drinking.
I drink heavily on work trips, leaving Brian feeling afraid of what I might do.
I could go through another, but I want you to do this part for yourself.
Here’s what a quantitative analysis might look like:
Alcohol enhanced my happiness in one way
Alcohol diminished my happiness in five ways
Alcohol = 1
Living AF = 5
Winner = Living AF!
It’s eye-opening to see just how much happiness alcohol actually takes from us—and spoiler alert: Living AF always wins. Alcohol promises happiness, but it never truly delivers.
Finding Joy
Happiness is deeply human. It’s beautiful, needed, and absolutely worth pursuing. I’ve spent years chasing it. But in the seasons when my mental health struggles made happiness feel impossible, I began to look beyond happiness. And that’s when I found something even more powerful—joy.
Happiness is an experience that shows up when many, if not most, of the positive emotions on Fredrickson’s list are present. Happiness feels good—but it’s also more dependent. It needs things to line up. It needs conditions to be just right.
Joy is different; it doesn’t wait for everything in your life to be perfect. It doesn’t depend on checking off goals or finally becoming who you think you’re supposed to be. It’s not about your career, your appearance, your relationship status, or any future version of you.
Joy doesn’t need everything to be okay. Joy can exist all on its own. And it’s always here, present in each moment. It lives in the beat of your heart. The rise and fall of your breath. The wind outside your window. The quiet support of the chair beneath you or the ground under your feet. Joy lives in the present moment, always available when we pause long enough to notice that joy is as simple as a life being lived—this life. Your life.
I wonder if joy isn’t so much an emotion as a kind of awareness—a way of paying attention. A shift in consciousness. When we wake up to the reality of being alive; when we touch this improbable, mysterious experience we call existence; when we brush up against something eternal. Something real.
Joy can be found in the moment you stop and really see what’s in front of you—not what needs fixing, but what simply is. Joy arrives when we slow down and stop striving, numbing, or rushing. Joy arises when we find gratitude—not because everything is perfect, but because we’re awake to the miracle that we’re even here on a wild ride of life unfolding, moment by moment.
Joy doesn’t need a grand stage. Often it shows up quietly in the background of the ordinary—waiting to be noticed. I can find joy washing my hands in the warmth of the water. In tending to myself, there is joy. Even the buzzing of a fly once made me smile. And that moment, like most moments, was ordinary—until I paid attention.
Surprisingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, when I let myself feel grief, sadness, or heartache—fully, without resistance—I’m also opening the door to joy. There’s something deeply human and strangely joyful about honoring your full emotional experience. The more I accept my emotions, the more peace I feel. With peace comes joy. And the more compassion I offer myself, the more joy grows.
Joy doesn’t mean we skip over the hard parts. It’s in the tears, in the ache, in the quiet moments when we stop trying to outrun what hurts and sit with it that joy can arise.
I’ve spent my life believing that joy will come once I finally fixed myself. What I now see is that joy has been here the whole time. The road to joy winds through the very emotions I desperately tried to avoid.
There is always somewhere else to go. More to achieve, more to discover, more happiness to find, more connections to make, more presence to embody.
And at the same time, this moment—just as it is—holds all we’ve ever searched for. In a very real sense, although it can be hard to understand, we’ve already arrived. No matter where we are on the path or how far we think we have to go, when we take a minute to connect with the depth of this moment, we realize that here, now, in this, is the only place we need to be. The only place we can be.
Neither the past nor the future actually exist. We can only experience the past within the thoughts we have about it, thoughts we are thinking right here, right now. We can only experience the future in our imagination, and that imagined experience is happening right here, right now. We can’t touch the past; we can’t change it or relive it. We can’t touch the future, either. We can only touch, change, and live this. This moment isn’t just part of life—it is life. And it’s the only place where joy can be found.
This quote is written in large script on my office wall:
I have arrived. I am home. My destination is in each step.
—Thích Nhất Hạnh
What we’re searching for is already here. In your body, your breath, your being. It is the quiet realization that you are enough—simply because you exist. You get to be here, experiencing your unique slice of reality. And that is everything.
Because with joy, we don’t need to go search for it—we just need to remember it already is.
* * *
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To view the references cited in this chapter, please visit LiveNakedAF.com.
Chapter 15
How to Handle “Relapse”
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
—Carl Rogers
A few years ago, I was invited to Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s house to appear on the show Red Table Talk. I wasn’t allowed to know the address, so a driver picked me up. As we wound through the hills outside Los Angeles, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more nervous. I kept reminding myself: Annie, you’ll never have this experience again. Yes, your body is freaking out, but that’s okay—it’s just part of it. Breathe. Just breathe.
Security was so tight that I’m surprised I wasn’t blindfolded. I was dropped off at a movie trailer with my name on it—which was very cool. But then I noticed Kelly Osbourne’s name was on the trailer next door. Even cooler.
I tried on outfits while hair and makeup artists came in and out. I even video-chatted with some friends, showing them the dressing room, and then…I waited, nerves building. I kept peeking out to see if anyone else was around, but it was clear we weren’t supposed to wander around the Smiths’ property without an escort. Finally, when my nerves were at an all-time high, a team wearing Secret Service–style earpieces arrived to pick me up in a black golf cart.
They drove me to the main house and set me up in the green room, which was the Smiths’ personal theater converted into a television production studio. Cameras were rolling, and Kelly was at the famous red table with Jada and her cohosts, Gammy and Willow. I could see them live to my left, and in front of me was a full media wall, screens showing every camera angle.
Although each episode runs for about twenty minutes, they film for two or three hours to capture the best possible material. I had plenty of time to watch Kelly’s conversation before it was my turn at the red table. I even had a chance to use the bathroom and couldn’t resist snapping a selfie on the toilet and sending it to my girlfriends with the caption (just in case it wasn’t obvious): “Peeing in Will Smith’s house!”
But mostly, I was riveted by the conversation. Kelly was telling her story of drinking again during the pandemic after years of living alcohol free.
We’ll return to Kelly’s story, but first, I want to introduce the ALP concept of a data point so you can understand why what Kelly said next made me cry.
Data Points
A data point is when you drink—whether it’s one or several—after you set an intention not to. It can also mean drinking more than you mean to after setting a limit. A data point isn’t exclusive to alcohol; it can apply to any habit or behavior. But let’s focus on drinking.
The premise of a data point is that mistakes are information—simply data that helps us learn and grow. That was the lens I was looking through, and as I listened to Kelly, I realized she had an entirely different lens. For Kelly, drinking again wasn’t just a data point; it was a shameful experience of failure.
This anonymous quote exactly captures how I was feeling at the time:
Why does one drink mean “game over” instead of “reread the instructions”?
Why was Kelly so upset about drinking again—especially since she quickly got back on track and we know that almost everyone who tries to stop drinking will drink again? What was the big deal?
Then she said something that brought tears to my eyes. Gammy, Jada’s mother and cohost, asked Kelly if she was still attending her support group. Kelly shook her head and explained that more than 90 percent of the women in her group also relapsed, and the group had dissolved.
This is when a pit opened in my stomach.
How could this be? It was a global pandemic. People were scared, isolated, restless, and uncertain. Lives had been turned upside down. It made sense that drinking, society’s favorite coping mechanism, had spiked. At This Naked Mind, we saw this, too: Our members had an increase in data points. But no one was leaving; our groups weren’t dissolving. If anything, people were leaning on one another more than ever.
My mind was racing. I tried to calm myself with the fact that Kelly was doing so well—she was positive and hopeful. But my thoughts kept spinning. What about the other women in her support group? Did they give up? Were they able to get back on track?
The Rat Park experiments show us how connection, community, and acceptance are vital to successful change. Based on this, if the women in Kelly’s group were drinking again and no longer together in community, would they really be okay?
What was so different between my experience and Kelly’s? Why did the group fall apart when they needed one another the most? Why did they leave one another instead of coming closer together?
I believe this dynamic is driven by shame; the women walked away, too ashamed to return because of failure. But what exactly had they failed at? If we look carefully, we see they had failed at never drinking again. This is what relapse culture teaches: The goal is 100 percent, and if you fall even a fraction short, game over.
100 percent = success
99.9 percent = failure
Where else in life do we measure success this way? We don’t apply this thinking to exercise, healthy eating, parenting, or relationships. Even surgeons account for mistakes, realizing a 100 percent success rate, although ideal, is impossible. And the best baseball players? They fail to hit the ball most of the time.
When a computer learns something new, like how to play chess, it’s programmed with the rules and then it starts making moves. It learns by trying. It makes mistakes, stores the data, and plays again. The faster it makes mistakes, the faster the learning process.
Now imagine if that computer had an inner critic:
Stupid machine! I can’t believe it’s taking you so long to figure this out!
What’s wrong with you? You’re not even worth the parts you’re built from.
It sounds ridiculous, right? A computer doesn’t shame itself. It doesn’t carry guilt. It just learns. And interestingly, that’s how humans naturally learn as well.
How Babies Walk
When babies learn to walk, they fall—a lot. But it’s the process of falling that helps them succeed. Each time they get back up after a fall, they strengthen the muscles in their legs. It is the failing and trying again that builds the physical strength necessary for the baby to succeed at walking.
Failure is not the opposite of success—it’s the path to it. Without failure, there would be no success. Mistakes aren’t detours; they’re the way forward. Science is crystal clear on this point. Studies show that when we approach our mistakes with curiosity and compassion, they catalyze growth and change. Change isn’t linear. Progress isn’t linear. Success isn’t linear. None of these things go simply straight up and to the right. They wind, twist, and double back, and even though progress can look like chaos, it is slowly marching forward.
What We Think Progress Looks Like
What Progress Actually Looks Like
Let’s stop measuring success against the impossible standard of perfection. Let’s start to measure progress instead. Let’s focus on how quickly we get up, not whether or not we fall down. When mistakes are treated as data, not failure, we don’t quit—we grow.
The truth is that people have free will. They’re going to do what they are going to do, and if they feel shame, they will just hide from us when they do it.
The idea of a data point instead of a relapse removes shame. And removing shame supports how the brain learns best: through trial and error.
Here’s a simple logic question: Who is more likely to succeed in living alcohol free, the person who slips up and then quits their support group, or the person whose slipup is met with empathy, encouragement, and a supportive discussion about what they might do differently next time?
The research backs this up. Compassion, both from others and from yourself, strongly predicts long-term behavior change. These two forces go hand in hand.
Now, I know what you might be thinking: But, Annie, if everything is a data point, then I’ll just be tempted to gather more data. I’ll end up on the couch, drunk, with a pint of ice cream, a remote in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other!
I get it. I had the same fear. But I can say from science, experience, and observing thousands of our coaching clients who have successfully navigated the journey of data points, the opposite is true. When people live by a data point philosophy, their drinking drastically decreases over time.
Now, I won’t sugarcoat it. You might end up on that couch—TV on, ice cream in hand, two bottles deep—in the short term. But you won’t stay there.
