Karolina Rzadkowolska took a break from alcohol for Dry January about four years ago and quickly decided never to go back. How do you know if you’re an alcoholic though? With people drinking alcohol more than ever since the pandemic started there are a lot more people asking this question. There is more of a need than ever for people to look at their alcohol consumption. Karolina shares the benefits of quitting alcohol as well as tips for understanding more about your alcohol consumption habits.
She points out the game of whether drinking is a problem compared to who vs binge drinking vs “being the bum under the bridge” is a slippery slope. Actually most people who consume alcohol over drink. Some questions to ask include whether it makes you feel good, whether the habit is serving you and your current goals. It also has many negative physical effects that may be at odds with optimal health.
Making conscious decisions about alcohol is what is important and recognizing what ways you may be using it as a crutch that keeps you from addressing your true needs.
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How Do You Know if You’re An Alcoholic?
This question is being asked a lot more since the pandemic. Classic signs include:
Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan: Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to The Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today, I am joined by Karolina, and I am not going to attempt her last pale and hers, but she is a health and wellness coach, and as you heard in the bio, she works with people on some alcohol-related stuff, but we’re just gonna have a chat today, and talk about her own personal health journey and sort of how she got into this work, so… Welcome. Carla, can you just give everyone a little background about yourself in your own words, just kind of what your health journey was like and why you started getting into this work?
Karolina Rzadkowolska: Absolutely, Cheryl, thank you so much for the warm welcome. I’m super excited to be here today. I’m talking about a pretty vulnerable weird topic in our society, and that’s awful because honestly, we don’t talk about it very often, and we talk about it in very few instances, one is the time when we are planning on drinking, we’re gonna go to a happy hour with our friends, maybe a dinner party, a winery trip, it’s all very light-hearted, and then we talk about alcohol very seriously, when someone hits from bottom and they have to go to AA and they’re an alcoholic and they have to go to rehab. So how do you know if you’re an alcoholic? It really leaves this huge gap for everyone in the middle to just become analytical and aware of their own alcohol habits without assigning it a label, and so that’s basically where I found myself, I found myself in that middle ground, I drink probably you would say, like a lot when I was in college, I was partying, I had no boundaries around alcohol or my health really, it was just a different time, but I was like a older… By the time I got in my mid and late…
When Alcohol is a Problem
Karolina Rzadkowolska: My mid-20s and late 20s, I totally changed. So many different things in my life. I considered myself a very healthy person, so Monday through Thursday, I eat very well, I worked out, I had my green Jews, I did my yoga, I meditated. And then every single weekend, I still drink. And it was almost as if it was this Mr. Jackal Dr. Hyde behavior were so good during the week that I just couldn’t Wat to let lose on the weekend, and you know what it looked like to me was pretty normal because everyone around me was doing the same thing, everyone around me was having some drinks on Friday, going to sushi, a game night, dare party, wedding, whatever, so it was really felt like the normal behavior around me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I felt every Monday morning, I woke up feeling literally unwell, I was depressed, I was super just apathetic, anxious and just like, Oh, you know, all of the healthy programs I may join the week was just washed away by the weekend, I felt like I was starting five steps backwards when I woke up on these Monday mornings for years.
Karolina Rzadkowolska: And I was always like, maybe we should take a break from alcohol, maybe I just feel a lot better. But it was always the social event on my calendar, it was always some kind of this thing that I thought I had to drink at, and I literally had no permission or excuse, not on drink, and the only thing I’ve ever heard of people who changed the relationship with alcohol was that story of rock bottom, they were hiding vodka in their closet… Or in their desk at work. And I was just really, really bad. And I was like, Wait a minute, if I change my relationship with alcohol, people started seeing that about me, and so I just kept saying step in this relationship for way longer than I knew I was happy, and that’s the thing that finally changed is I heard about dry January and a few years ago, I think it’s a lot more popular now, a few years ago, I was just trickling into the US, and to me it was a God send… It was like, Oh my gosh, I can take a break from hell cop, and I don’t have to explain it to anyone else, I don’t have to…
Taking a Break From Alcohol
Karolina Rzadkowolska: You have any reasons behind it, or have people think a story about me that isn’t true, like I get to just do this privately and finally have an excuse to take a break, Miceli was the permission that I needed that I never granted myself. So I took a break during that January, and I slowly started to fall in love with the alcohol-free lifestyle, my sleep gets so much better, I start feeling so much more here, I start feeling healthier. Every day I’m proud of myself too. There’s nothing like that guilt or that shame, wake up when you feel like you let yourself down versus waking up like, Oh my God, yesterday’s version of me actually looked out for me today, and it just started to feel so good, but then February comes along and I still don’t believe that I can continue this I’m drinking thing because again, only those people are sober, and so I have this mental block where I think, Okay, normal adults strength. Therefore, if I want to be normal, I must drink. And so I went out for my first dinner with some friends and everyone was drinking, and I just did it too, and so I had a few drinking occasions in that February, not even that much drinking necessarily per occasion, but the contrast was so evident for me, like one or two drinks would completely run my sleep, I didn’t sleep as well.
Karolina Rzadkowolska: I woke up feeling the next day, lethargic, I noticed that a few drinks would even lower my mood, so I was feeling really be during dry January. My mood was elevated, I was feeling wonder all in gratitude at higher levels than I’ve ever felt before, and just a few drinks in and I would feel apathetic, frustrated, exhausted, cranky. And I was like, Oh my God, this is not what I thought it was. And so basically, at that point, I decided to take another break in February, and it’s really kinda carried me to four years later, and every single day and month that went to Allen after that, after that February has gotten better and better and better. Not only as my physical health improved incredibly, my self-esteem and my self-worth has gone up, and it also made this huge shift for me where I really got to know myself better, and I really started to feel a lot more confident about other things that were possible for me, it was like, if I could do this. What else could I do? It was this question, and I used to have this 9-to 5 job and I used to feel kind of stuck in my life, and ever since then, I’ve been on this trajectory to go after my biggest goals, like leaving that job, becoming a certified coach, becoming a six-figure entrepreneur writing a book and working with thousands of people all across the globe, making an impact, things that I never dreamed were possible for me, and it all started because of that break from alcohol
How You Feel When You’re Drinking too Much
Cheryl McColgan: Wow. There’s so much that you said are… That I wanna follow up on. And one of the things that I think I forgot to mention to you, we were kinda doing our pre-call thing, is that my minor from school is actually an addiction study, so I definitely have a big personal interest in this, and that was one of the reasons why, when we got in touch about possibly doing the podcast, and I was really excited to have you, especially since you have the book that just came out. But let’s just back up just a little bit so for people. And obviously, you’ve probably read the same things that I have during this time of the pandemic, that alcohol sales are through the roof, people are drinking more than ever to self-soothe, self-Medicaid, and a lot of people, they might start having this sort of sense that you did about like, Hey, I am kind of drinking more right now, I’m not feeling as well, and they might start to have the same kinds of things, thoughts that you did, because I know that the only paradigm that has been promoted in the psychology role for such a long time is really 88 MO, and that is, as you said, sort of a model that is for or what we think it’s for, for people that are just literally have that physical addiction, which maybe you can go through and talk about some of the signs of true addiction and the main thing that we always send in my other degree psychology, both go together, right, but the thing that we always focus on in psychology is, is it interfering with your daily function? And so for some people, that’s a difficult distinction because they have what’s called a functioning alcoholics, people have heard that term too, so this is all a long way of getting to a question for you, just basically, can you talk a little bit about how people can start to identify if it’s a problem for them, how do you know if you’re an alcoholic, what are some of the signs, what are some of the things you went over, some of the wonderful things that you experienced when you quit, but can you also talk about maybe some of the challenges that you had while you were doing it like social functions that you mentioned, for example, or any other things that come to mind?
Karolina Rzadkowolska: Yeah, something like, you bring all this up because there is definitely a historical way of treating alcohol in our society, and it was grounded in this position is… So there’s history here, right? And so we have this way of dividing people, there’s problem drinkers, and there’s normal drinkers, now, the only problem with that division is it absolutely, there’s no understanding on reality and what do we actually look at statistics of consumption levels. Most people over-drink, literally, the majority of people who drink alcohol on a regular basis over drink, so that it’s kind of like you’re playing again. Okay, well, what’s too much over drinking? We’re all over drinking. Right, so what’s too much and at what point do you draw a line, and I think that line is really, really hard to draw because I’m asking yourself if it’s a problem well compared to what… Compared to who I’m not under a bridge. Like that, boom. So maybe I’m okay, right? There’s always gonna be someone worse than you are not, and so what I love to ask my people who start working with me and other clients that come to me is, Does this…
How Do You Know if You’re An Alcoholic by Current Definition
Karolina Rzadkowolska: Have it make you happy. And therefore, it doesn’t matter how much you drink. You could have one daily gossip of wine every single day and yet you’re feeling really Tulare, it can grow the next day, or you could be drinking a lot binge drinking or something like that, and then you could be asking yourself, Is this habit making me happy? And so when it comes to alcohol use disorder, which is the proper name now, we don’t call it alcoholism anymore, and so that’s again, another thing that the labels, the stigma, the judgment, there’s just so much into it, acoustically, has a varying spectrums of diagnosis. Right, so you can have mild, moderate or severe, and so when we think of severe alcohol use disorder, that’s what we think of the stereotypes, the person who’s literally drinking a handle of Okey single day, but my old is actually… The criteria for Miles is pretty low, so you would think of the majority of drinkers who over-drink, that’s literally over and 60% of normal drinkers abuse alcohol. Hello again, this isn’t the small minority of people, This is so many people. This happens too, like you said, alcohol sales just went up, and what we don’t understand too, is we literally live in a society that glorifies alcohol, I didn’t have a chance to choose whether or not consciously…
Karolina Rzadkowolska: I wanted to have it in my life, my 18-year-old version chose because she wanted to fit in, it is conditioned on us, we see the Sex in the City and the scandal, and so much of this glamorization of alcohol in our society that it literally becomes a habit for most people who adopt that, so I really think it’s this questioning of this intuitive asking of really getting to know yourself and being like, Is this serving me? You sure? When I was in college, but is it serving who I want to become? Right, and so again, this kind of changes that traditional question on its head of whether or not it’s interfering in your life, the thing we don’t understand is alcohol has negative effects on anybody who drinks it, because scientifically it does some things to our brain chemistry, to our bodies. And so you’re not crazy, if you feel that is negative effects, if you feel more tired the next day or if you’re feeling a little bit more lower, alcohol actually lowers your levels of happiness, neurotransmitters in your brain, it hikes up the stress hormones in your brain, any kind of drinking will do that to you, so you again, you’re not crazy for feeling those effects, so I’d love to just normalize this conversation to say that, yeah, there’s not just a certain type of person who’s gonna feel this if you’re really being conscious about the role that alcohol plays in your life, you could feel it at any stage, however, obviously, there are different varying degrees of dependence on...
