In this conversation, Jessica got real about what happened when she started working from home, lost her structure, and found herself in a 20-week outpatient program for mental health and substance use. She came out the other side clear-headed, writing more than ever, and with something to say about what sobriety actually feels like when you strip it down to its simplest truth: “nothing has a grip on me.”

What struck me most about talking with Jessica was how she connects her athletic background, her clinical training, and her financial education into one unified understanding of human performance. The body follows the mind. The mind follows discipline. And discipline, she would tell you, is not a personality trait — it is a practice.

[00:33] Welcome and Introduction

• Josh introduces Jessica as a nurse practitioner, former pediatric oncology nurse, competitive hockey player, stock market analyst, and full-time Substack writer.

• Jessica is the creator of NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health, a mental health and functional medicine newsletter built on science-backed, practical tools.

• Her background spans five years in pediatric oncology, competitive hockey at a high level, and stock market analysis — three fields that all taught her the same thing: capacity matters more than information.

• Jessica calls herself “the friend you’d call at 2 AM — the one who actually gets it.”

[03:39] Her Story: Substance Use, Structure, and Starting Over

• Jessica opened up about a difficult year that began when she transitioned to working from home full-time. Without external structure, she said, “every day is the weekend” — and that freedom became a problem.

• She described getting deeper into stimulant use, which eventually led her to enroll in an intensive outpatient program: group therapy three hours a day, three times a week, plus individual sessions — roughly 10 hours of therapy per week for 20 weeks.

• She had just completed the program about a month before this conversation and had not used any substances since entering it.

• She was honest about the pull that a heavy workload can create: “with all this work it just makes you want to be like… if I just took an Adderall I could burn through this.” She is choosing to do the work differently now.

Key Insight: “I’m not waiting for something to run out. Nothing has a grip on me. So it’s just freeing. And then the peace of mind and the clear mind is priceless.” — Jessica Drapluk

[08:43] Pediatric Oncology and the Long Road to Nurse Practitioner

• Jessica was drawn to pediatric oncology because her aunt had worked in that specialty her entire career. She described it as “super niche nursing” — a sub-specialty most people actively avoid.

• After five years at the bedside, she got her master’s to become a nurse practitioner, graduating right as COVID hit. Clinics were shutting down and NPs were being laid off.

• She pivoted to a flight nurse job with ICE, managing nurses on deportation and transfer flights. She described it as similar to military life — stranded on tarmacs, overnighting in different countries, working exclusively with law enforcement and military personnel.

• She was eventually let go when the contract ended, and she never returned to the clinical workforce. Ghostwriting came next, and then her own Substack publications.

Key Insight: “Bedside nursing is back-breaking work. It’s really hard. It’s not sustainable for anybody for 25 to 30 years. It’s a great rewarding experience but I don’t want to be doing that when I’m 50.” — Jessica Drapluk

[15:47] Writing, Publishing, and Why It Doesn’t Scare Her

• Jessica started writing online in 2021-2022 after watching advice to publish once a week for two years without expecting anything in return. She did it to prove to herself she could keep the commitment.

• She does not schedule articles weeks in advance. Her standard: “The most that I’ll ever have an article in the queue and scheduled is 48 hours tops. That means I was really on it.”

• When asked what she enjoys about writing, she was direct: “It just comes easy to me. It doesn’t really feel like work and it doesn’t feel awkward. It doesn’t feel scary.”

• She now runs three Substack publications simultaneously — NP Fellow, Nurse in the Market, and Unstuck to Publish — plus ghostwriting for two additional publications, producing six original articles per week.

Key Insight: “The reason why you’re publishing online once a week every week for two years is to prove to yourself that you could actually keep up your commitment as a writer.” — Jessica Drapluk

[20:42] Mental Health Now: Routines, Recovery, and Rewiring

• Since leaving the program, Jessica has built her own daily structure: morning yoga, walking twice a week, and continuing to participate in alumni groups from the program Monday through Friday — Canva workshops, bullet journaling, astrology — whatever keeps her connected to a rhythm.

• She described the process of adjusting to sober productivity: “I’m rewiring my brain that staying up all night is not an option.” Work gets done. It just gets done differently.

• The volume of her output keeps her engaged, but she is also learning to rest. She chose sleep over a late-night deadline, and it was a small but meaningful shift.

• The expanded workload also creates its own temptation. She was candid about that tension — and about the fact that she is navigating it without reaching for old shortcuts.

Key Insight: "It keeps me busy but it also — since my problem was with Adderall — with all this work it just makes you want to be like… if I just took an Adderall I could burn through this. There's no friction, you just do it. But I'm just trying to get away from it completely." — Jessica Drapluk

[24:17] Drive, Work Ethic, and Not Wanting to Be Average

• Jessica traced her drive directly to her athletic upbringing. She and her brothers woke up at 4 AM in middle school for hockey lessons before school. Two practices a day was routine. Her father took them to run sprints on the days they did not have practice.

• Her definition of not wanting to be average is specific: “I don’t want to be average as in broke or overweight and tired and in pain like the average person.”

• She sees financial literacy, physical health, and meaningful work as interconnected. The more you build in one area, the more capacity you have in the others.

• She described a clear throughline: more success leads to more people helped; more people helped leads to greater impact and more resources to help further.

Key Insight: “I just don’t want to be average. Like it’s so easy to become above average. Why not?” — Jessica Drapluk

[28:32] The Stock Market as a Skill Anyone Can Learn

• Jessica’s view on investing is rooted in a simple premise: there are only three ways to build wealth — own real estate, own a business, or own other businesses through the stock market. For most people, the market is the most accessible entry point.

• She described the market as “rigged to go up” — it goes up 71% of the time, and the other 29% represents buying opportunities. Her advice to beginners: start with index funds like the S&P 500 (SPY or VOO) or the Vanguard Total Market Index (VTI).

• Her framework for stock analysis moves top-down: start with macro conditions, move through sectors, then drill into individual stocks. She believes most people can learn to analyze the market in 15 minutes to an hour with the right system.

• She plans to offer stock market workshops through Nurse in the Market to help people — particularly millennials — understand how to navigate investing without fear.

Key Insight: “The stock market’s not going anywhere. So if you’re going through something rough, it’s always there for you. And if God forbid you miss it for a day or a week or a month, no one cares. It’s going to be there when you come back.” — Jessica Drapluk

Key Quotes

“I’m not waiting for something to run out. Nothing has a grip on me. So it’s just freeing. And then the peace of mind and the clear mind is priceless.” — Jessica Drapluk

“At the end of the day, having your health intact is what makes being sober worth it for me.” — Jessica Drapluk

“I just don’t want to be average. Like it’s so easy to become above average. Why not?” — Jessica Drapluk

“The reason why you’re publishing online once a week every week for two years is to prove to yourself that you could actually keep up your commitment as a writer.” — Jessica Drapluk

“Bedside nursing is back-breaking work. It’s really hard. It’s not sustainable for anybody for 25 to 30 years. It’s a great rewarding experience but I don’t want to be doing that when I’m 50.” — Jessica Drapluk

Resources Mentioned

• SPY / VOO — S&P 500 index funds (500 stocks), mentioned as a starting point for new investors

• VTI — Vanguard Total Market Index, approximately 1,500 stocks

• E-Trade / Charles Schwab — Brokerage platforms recommended for beginners

• Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) — The treatment model Jessica used: group therapy three hours a day, three times a week, with individual sessions

• Top-down market analysis — Jessica’s framework: macro assets → sectors → individual stocks

Where to Find Jessica

NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health

A mental health & functional medicine newsletter helping you build emotional regulation, mental clarity, and health ownership.

By Jess, The Creator

• NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health — Mental health and functional medicine newsletter (her original publication, running since 2022)

Nurse in The Market

Helping busy professionals navigate the stock market using a systematic approach so you can build wealth on your own terms without looking at charts all day.

By Jess, The Creator

• Nurse in the Market — Stock market analysis, swing trading picks, and investing education: NurseInTheMarket.com

Unstuck to Published

Turn your Substack from an idea into a live, paid publication—in 60 minutes, without guessing what to do next.

By Jess, The Creator

• Unstuck to Publish — Substack-building workshop for new writers; learn to build your publication from scratch in 60 minutes or less. Workshop runs every other Saturday.

• Live Debate with Mick — May 30th, 10 AM Eastern — Eminem vs. MGK: who’s better? Catch Jessica and Mick live on Substack.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her honesty, her energy, and her willingness to share a story that is still unfolding. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

From This Episode to Your Next Step

Jessica spent 20 weeks in an outpatient program, came out clear-headed, and immediately got back to work. She is producing six original articles a week, running workshops, ghostwriting for others, and building toward stock market education. That is not hustle culture. That is what it looks like when your nervous system is regulated, your mind is clear, and you actually have access to your own capacity.

That is exactly what The Sober Creative Method™ is built around.

This 90-day 1:1 coaching experience uses a Release → Create → Become framework to help individuals remove alcohol as the barrier to their most meaningful work.

If you have been wondering what you could actually produce with a clear mind — or if you have started to sense that something is holding you back — this is worth a look.

Explore The Sober Creative Method™

He has been sober for 18 years. He got sober at 20. He never had a legal drink in the United States.

What comes through in this conversation is not a highlight reel. Cory writes about radical life transitions from the inside, in real time, through his Substack Radical Paths—documenting what it actually costs, what breaks down, and what emerges. He is currently anchored in Guatemala, living on 100 square feet of sailboat in over-100-degree heat. And he would not lead with that.

This episode covers what sobriety taught him about doing hard things, how he thinks about fear, and why he believes the struggle itself is where meaning lives.

If you have ever stood at a crossroads between the life you have built and the life you are drawn to, this one is worth your time.

[01:45] Introduction

• Teenage punk from an LA suburb who got sober at 20, went from Portland Community College to a Harvard PhD

• Spent years as a senior federal scientist and congressional advisor, including real-time COVID-19 briefings with members of Congress

• In 2024, rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat by hand with his husband and sailed away—nearly 5,000 miles up and down the East Coast, through the Bahamas, now anchored in Guatemala

• Writes weekly about radical life transitions through his Substack, Radical Paths

Key Insight: “What makes Corey’s story worth paying attention to isn’t the adventure itself—it’s how he thinks about change. He writes about radical life transitions from the inside, in real time... Not in hindsight, not with the benefit of a clean ending.” — Josh Woll

[02:15] Before Sobriety — A Small Life in a Big World

• Grew up in an LA suburb, came out in high school around 2003-2004, and used alcohol and drugs to cope with living in a world that was not welcoming of queer people

• Wanted out of LA badly enough that at 19 he flew to Australia with $2,000 and a one-way ticket, no safety net

• Australia’s drinking age was 18—one of the reasons he chose it—and within a week he was using hard drugs, including crystal meth

• After six months abroad, he came home flat broke, moved back in with his parents, and things got worse

Key Insight: “I know that’s a common thing that people can relate with—they call like geographics—where people deep in addiction will be like, oh, you know what I really need is just to move. Like that’s going to fix everything. And sometimes maybe that works, but a lot of times you just take your problems with you and start new ones.” — Cory Gerlach

[06:20] The Turning Point — A Customer, a Phone Call, a Friday Night

• A customer at the coffee shop where Cory worked recognized something in him—the man had a daughter who had struggled with heroin and he gently suggested rehab

• Cory called on a Friday. They could not take him until Sunday. He told them he would be fine—and that Friday night was the wake-up call

• He did not go into rehab thinking he would stop drinking forever. He thought his problem was cocaine. The realization came when he started identifying with people decades older whose stories matched his exactly

• He saw his future if he kept going, and he made a different choice

Key Insight: “I trusted that in order for me to really have to build a life that I wanted, I wasn’t going to be able to do it while drinking and using—because I knew the way that I did it was not in any moderation whatsoever. I never even had the fantasy of moderation and I was a total and complete mess.” — Cory Gerlach

[15:46] Sobriety as a Foundation — The Mirror Moment

• About a month into sobriety, still living with his parents, Cory caught himself in a mirror and felt something shift

• That moment cracked open a new belief: that being sober, having hope, forming real connections—that was enough

• He carried that anchor forward into everything else: community college, Oregon State, Harvard, government work, and eventually sailing

• The first year and a half of sobriety was the hardest thing he had ever done—and it set the template for every hard thing that followed

Key Insight: “I feel like a millionaire right now. I feel so... I feel like I have everything I need.” — Cory Gerlach

[20:43] From Harvard to Open Water — Building a Radical Path

• After finishing his PhD, Cory built an unusual government career—using his science background to advise on public health policy, including one-on-one briefings with members of Congress during COVID-19

• He and his husband eventually felt they had drifted from their core values of authenticity, adventure, and freedom

• They decided to go sailing with almost no experience—his husband had sailed small dinghies one season; that was the sum of it

• They bought a boat that needed massive work, moved to North Carolina, and spent 10 months rebuilding it by hand before it was sailable

Key Insight: “It wasn’t even like a question of like can I do it—it’s like do I want to do it? And also realizing that if I’m sober, I have everything I need.” — Cory Gerlach

[26:46] Fear Is Not a Stop Sign — It Is Information

• Cory describes himself as an ordinary person when it comes to fear—not wired like Alex Honnold, whose brain literally registers fear differently

• What has changed is his relationship to fear. He does not let it be the deciding vote

• He camped alone in Yellowstone to face his irrational fear of bears. He walked alone through New Orleans and Bogotá to face his fear of violence

• The finding, repeated every time: the idea of the thing is far scarier than actually doing it

Key Insight: “It’s not acceptable for me to let fear stop me from doing things... there’s things I want to do and my first thought is fear and then I’m faced with a decision about, okay, do I do it or not?” — Cory Gerlach

[37:35] Doing Hard Things Is the Point — Easy Is Not the Answer

• Cory pushes back on the idea that the goal is to find a shortcut—he does not advocate that anyone quit their job and become a sailor

• What he does believe is that real change requires committing to a timeline. In sobriety, it was “give yourself a year.” On the boat, it was the same

• Meaning does not come from achieving the dream. It comes from the work toward it—and from discovering that even after you get there, you will want something else

• The challenge is not an obstacle to the life. It is the life

Key Insight: “I don’t know anyone that’s really been able to do like a big life change—including sobriety—that didn’t require a shit ton of work, you know, at least one day at a time.” — Cory Gerlach

Key Quotes

“I trusted that in order for me to really have to build a life that I wanted, I wasn’t going to be able to do it while drinking and using—because I knew the way that I did it was not in any moderation whatsoever.” — Cory Gerlach

“Recovery and sobriety was like one of the first things where I learned that... doing hard things is actually okay. That’s how I get where I want to go next.” — Cory Gerlach

“It’s not acceptable for me to let fear stop me from doing things... there’s things I want to do and my first thought is fear and then I’m faced with a decision about, okay, do I do it or not?” — Cory Gerlach

“We’ve done hard things before and we can do them again.” — Cory Gerlach

“There isn’t really such thing as a happily ever after when we follow our dreams, per se. Things are hard along the way and we have fear and we struggle and we have challenges. We’re able to get through it over time. And over time, you start to have a life that you are really proud of and really love.” — Cory Gerlach

Resources Mentioned

• Free Solo (documentary) — Alex Honnold’s free climb of El Capitan; discussed in the context of how individuals experience fear differently

• Dark Wizard (documentary) — A climber and tightrope walker who operates without safety equipment; referenced when discussing the spectrum of risk tolerance

• The Revenant — Leonardo DiCaprio film; Cory’s mental image when camping alone in bear country

• “Geographics” — The phenomenon in addiction where someone believes moving will fix their problems; referenced from recovery culture

• Radical Paths — Cory’s weekly Substack newsletter documenting life transition in real time

Where to Find Cory

Radical Paths

Honest lessons for navigating radical life transitions — from a sailboat, in real-time, as I live what I teach.

By Cory Gerlach

Substack: Cory writes weekly at Radical Paths—stories about the real cost and reward of radical life change, told from a 30-foot sailboat somewhere in the Americas.

He also works one-on-one with people standing at their own crossroads—people who have built the career, hit the milestones, and still feel like something is off.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for his honesty and generosity of spirit. Documenting a life transition in real time—without a clean ending, without the comfort of hindsight—takes real courage. This conversation is the kind that stays with you.

Is Something Holding You Back?

Cory talks about what happens when you have built the career, checked the boxes, and still feel like something is off. Alcohol often lives in that space. Maybe you have made the rules, reset the counter, had the conversation with yourself more times than you can count. Maybe you are not even sure it is a problem — you just know something keeps getting in the way.

Answer 10 questions, see clearly where you stand, and learn what your next step is.

It takes 5 minutes and it is completely free.

Start here with the free assessment

As a psychotherapist, author, and founder of Sensitivity Management, Jonathan has built a framework that reframes sensitivity not as a flaw to fix, but as a survival mechanism to understand. His work pulls from evolutionary psychology, polyvagal theory, attachment theory, and sensory processing science to explain something most people have felt but never had language for: why feelings hit some of us so much harder than others.

This conversation went deep. We talked about his own path through addiction, the moment he realized sobriety wasn’t just about stopping — it was about learning to manage what was underneath all along. If you’ve ever reached for a drink at the end of a hard day and couldn’t explain why, this one’s for you.

Show Notes

[00:00] Introduction

• Jonathan is the founder of Sensitivity Management, a psychotherapist, and published author with Hodder and Stoughton

• His framework draws on evolutionary psychology, polyvagal theory, attachment theory, and sensory processing science

• His work has been featured in The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and on BBC News and ITV

• He’s currently exploring the relationship between sensitivity and addiction on his own Substack

Key Insight: “Perhaps most relevant to this conversation is something Jonathan plans to explore on his own Substack — the relationship between sensitivity and addiction, the idea that for many of us, substances were a way of managing what felt, at the time, unmanageable.”

[02:01] Jonathan’s Story — Loss, Fear, and the First Drink

• Jonathan grew up in a household where feelings weren’t discussed — his father was born in 1920, and sensitivity wasn’t on the table

• His mother was diagnosed with cancer when he was 11 and died when he was 17; he began drinking and using cocaine as a way to manage unprocessed grief

• He describes feeling “porous” — overwhelmed by stimulation, unable to let things go, running in survival mode for most of his life

• Relapses eventually led him to a reckoning: “my last one was the one where I said, that is it because I left the building and I was no longer me”

Key Insight: “Sensitivity is not what creates my addiction, but it definitely led me to it as a way to escape and a way to regulate.”

[07:55] What Sensitivity Actually Means

• The word sensitivity comes from the Latin to sense, feel, assess, and perceive — it is not weakness, it is a survival mechanism

• We are all born highly sensitive; the difference is in how that sensitivity was conditioned over time

• Sensitivity is about the sensory nervous system — visual, auditory, gut, and interoceptive signals

• The stigma around the word sensitivity prevents people from naming it — and if you can’t name it, you can’t work with it

Key Insight: “We are all sensory beings. The word sensory tells us that we are governed by our sensory nervous systems. When we look at mental health, it’s not all up here — it’s through our visual senses, auditory senses, gut senses, interoceptive senses.”

[13:29] The Sensory Regulation Cycle

• Jonathan developed the Sensory Regulation Cycle to show how sensitivity fluctuates throughout the day

• The cycle: stress event → energy drain → lowered resilience → heightened sensitivity → pitfalls (overthinking, impulsivity, porousness) → sensory spiral → burnout

• When energy is low, resilience is low — and that’s when self-sabotage moves in without warning

• The goal isn’t long breaks; it’s the quality of regulation: “it’s not the quantity of regulation, it’s the quality of regulation”

Key Insight: “When you’re more regulated, you can access the positives of sensitivity — empathy, connection, creativity, strategic thinking. Heightened sensitivity means you’re in survival mode — overthinking, impulsivity, self-sabotage without even realizing it.”

[22:15] Why the End of the Day Feels Unmanageable

• Every sensory input throughout the day — emails, noise, phone pings, screens — drains energy

• By evening, resilience is low, which means feelings surface without a filter

• Impulsivity spikes: you’ll make the call you shouldn’t, pick the fight, pour the drink

• The reframe: “this is not anxiety — this is just because I’m tired”

Key Insight: “How many times in the evening have you thought, I’m going to do that, and you’ve got no resilience to stop yourself from doing it?”

[26:13] Regulation in Practice — What Actually Helps

• Turn off your phone and calm your visual senses first — it’s the most overstimulated of all the senses

• A 20-30 minute window of quality regulation can restore focus, clarity, and energy

• Nature (even just looking at the sky) regulates through the visual sense

• Be honest about which senses are most drained — for Jonathan, it’s visual and auditory

Key Insight: “A small period of regulation and energy management — if I lose energy in one part of the afternoon, I only need 20 minutes. I come out and my energy is back up. Focus, clarity, performance, productivity.”

[30:10] Addiction, Energy, and Why Recovery Takes Time

• The longer you’re in addiction, the more depleted your energy becomes — and the harder it is to choose differently

• “When people are so depleted in addiction — you know, we’re running on we’re just tired all the time”

• Recovery demands rest first: sleep, naps, restoration — the body is healing and using energy to do it

• Sensitivity management in recovery is not optional: “I have to prioritize regulation on a daily basis and managing my energy on a daily basis out of fear that if I run in a highly sensitive state in survival mode, I will pick up again”

Key Insight: “For me, addiction is a gift because for me, it makes me me. I have to prioritize regulation on a daily basis.”

[33:31] What Addiction Really Means — and What Freedom Looks Like

• Jonathan respectfully disagrees with the “opposite of addiction is connection” framing

• For him: “Addiction is prison. The opposite of addiction is freedom.”

• Sobriety is about becoming someone he recognizes and respects: “Sobriety is someone I know, I like, and I value”

• Community and connection matter deeply in recovery, but freedom is the foundation underneath

Key Insight: “Addiction is complete. Addiction is a complete change of character. It’s someone I don’t like. It’s someone I don’t know.”

Key Quotes

“Sensitivity is not what creates my addiction, but it definitely led me to it as a way to escape and a way to regulate.” — Jonathan Hoban

“I’ve never met someone in addiction that isn’t sensitive.” — Jonathan Hoban

“Addiction is prison. The opposite of addiction for me is freedom.” — Jonathan Hoban

“For me, addiction is a gift because for me, it makes me me.” — Jonathan Hoban

“If you can’t name sensitivity, you’re shutting the door on everything.” — Jonathan Hoban

Resources Mentioned

• Sensitivity Management Framework — Jonathan’s proprietary model integrating polyvagal theory, attachment theory, evolutionary psychology, and sensory processing science

• The Sensory Regulation Cycle — Jonathan’s visual tool mapping how sensitivity fluctuates from baseline through burnout

• Johann Hari — referenced and respectfully challenged; Jonathan’s counterpoint to “the opposite of addiction is connection”

• Ice baths / nature walks — regulation practices Jonathan uses personally to lower ADHD presentation and restore clarity

Where to Find Jonathan

Jonathan Hoban is the founder of Sensitivity Management and an integrative psychotherapist based in London. He works with individuals and organizations including Warner Brothers, the Department for Transport, and firms in the legal and insurance sectors.

Website: www.sensitivitymanagement.com

He’s also launching Live Coffee Shop Talks — up-close workshops across London where he breaks down the Sensitivity Management framework in an accessible, community-centered format.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for his extraordinary clarity and generosity of insight. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

From This Conversation to Your Life

What Jonathan described — that low-level hum of unease at the end of the day, the need to take the edge off, the way sensitivity turns into survival mode when energy runs out — that’s the exact threshold where so many people reach for a drink.

Not because they’re weak. Because they’re depleted and don’t have the tools to do anything else.

That’s what The Sober Creative Method™ is built around. A 90-day, 1:1 journey designed to help you remove alcohol as the barrier to your clearest, most creative work — and build the identity and the practices to sustain it.

If Jonathan’s framework made something click for you today, this is the next step.

Start Here

Shelly is the writer behind Cozy Clarity, a Substack she describes as “a space where soft and strong collide.” Her work sits at the intersection of personal development, mental health, and the lived experience of figuring it all out in real time. Her essays don’t let readers off the hook — they write directly about the gap between knowing something and doing something about it.

In this episode of Clear Conversations, Shelly shares how quitting her job, stepping away from substances, and going nearly a year without a paycheck led her to the work she was meant to do.

It’s a conversation about listening to your body, allowing yourself to feel discomfort, and what happens when you stop running from the same day on repeat.

Show Notes

[00:00] Welcome & Guest Introduction

• Josh introduces Shelly, the writer behind Cozy Clarity on Substack

• Cozy Clarity covers personal development, mental health, mindset, and “the lived experience of figuring it all out in real time”

• This is Shelly’s first-ever Substack Live

Key Insight: “Cozy enough to feel like home, but honest enough to ask something of you.” — Josh, reading from Shelly’s Substack description

[3:06] From Music to Mechanics: An Unlikely Origin Story

• Shelly grew up in a car family but had no interest in vehicles — she was a musician, first-chair bass clarinetist who competed at the national level

• After getting her first car and nearly being taken advantage of by a dishonest tech, she decided she’d never let that happen again and taught herself the trade

• She became an apprentice at a dealership and worked her way up fast, eventually working for nearly every major automotive brand

Key Insight: “After that, I was like, I don’t want anybody else to touch my car again. So I want to learn how to work on cars now.” — Shelly

[5:07] Being the Only Woman in the Shop

• Working as a female mechanic was difficult — Shelly was often the only woman in the shop

• She sought out other women in the industry and tried to learn from them, but each time those connections fell apart under unclear circumstances

• The combination of isolation and lack of genuine support wore on her over time

Key Insight: “I kind of felt isolated from everybody else at a certain point. And so I was kind of using all of that stuff to suppress it and just tell myself it doesn’t matter. Just keep on going.” — Shelly

[7:30] Recognizing the Breaking Point

• When the environment at her last shop changed under new management, Shelly decided it was time to step back from automotive work entirely

• She describes feeling like she was “reliving the same day over and over and over again”

• She quit her job, stopped smoking marijuana (which she’d used daily since age 15), and stopped drinking — all at once, three and a half years ago

Key Insight: “It felt like the same day on repeat. I feel burnt out. I’m reliving the same day over and over and over again. I don’t know how to escape it. So I knew something had to change.” — Shelly

[12:37] A Year of Deliberate Unemployment

• After leaving the automotive world, Shelly stayed unemployed for nearly ten months on purpose

• She tried going back to a heavy-duty shop briefly, realized quickly it wasn’t the path she wanted

• She found Substack, went “full throttle” — started writing, built a website, created digital products

Key Insight: “I just kind of figured I need to take a step back from this and maybe start not going away from it, but just exploring what else is out there and what else would spark my interest. ‘Cause I am a multi-passionate person.” — Shelly

[14:30] Early Sobriety: The First Three Months

• The first few weeks were brutal — the urge to go back was constant

• Family and her boyfriend kept telling her to give it time: “Nothing really happens noticeably in a couple of weeks. Just give it some more time and see how you feel”

• It took three months before she started noticing a real difference, a timeline Josh confirmed matched his own experience

Key Insight: “Before you hit the three month mark, it feels like you’re not really giving it a chance. But after the three month mark... just keep pushing it until you hit that mark and see what your body tells you, see what your mind tells you, see how you feel.” — Shelly

[18:35] Creativity, Process, and the Art of Winging It

• Shelly doesn’t work from a formal creative process — ideas surface throughout the day while she’s working her part-time job and she captures them in her notes app

• Once she sits down to write, more ideas come and things flow from there

• She calls herself “a professional at winging it”

Key Insight: “I usually never go into anything with a plan. It just, I just start and it just comes to me after I start.” — Shelly

[26:25] Sitting Still in a Do-Do-Do Culture

• Shelly and Josh discuss the cultural pressure to always be moving, always be producing

• Shelly believes that doing nothing — sitting with your thoughts for an hour or more each day — is actually productive, even when it doesn’t feel that way

• The practice of listening to your body has guided every major decision Shelly has made: leaving shops, leaving substances, finding writing

Key Insight: “You’re allowed to just do nothing for a while. Just sit there and feel your thoughts, think of new things. You don’t constantly have to be go, go, go... even though it feels unproductive, I think it actually is pretty productive.” — Shelly

Key Quotes

“I started smoking like from the second I woke up to the second I went to bed... it got to a point where I felt like I was never sober. I was never really in a clear mindset.” — Shelly

“I feel like a lot of it has to do with the idea that it’s not really pushed on that you’re just allowed to go out and do your own thing. A lot of people have it in their head that you wake up and you go to work, and that’s just how it is. That’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s not always how it actually has to be in real life.” — Shelly

“Sometimes you really do just have to sit there and be with it, just feel it for a while. Even if that means sitting there and honestly just sitting there and staring at a wall if you need to.” — Shelly

“Give it at least to month three. What I’ve come to find out is after three months, it’s like before you hit the three month mark, it feels like you’re not really giving it a chance.” — Shelly

“I feel like it’s definitely part of the universe is trying to align you for where you actually belong and trying to push you in the right direction.” — Shelly

Resources Mentioned

• Cozy Clarity (Shelly’s Substack) — essays on mental health, mindset, and personal development

• “You’re Not Lazy. You’re Burnt Out, Overstimulated and Craving Peace” — Shelly’s featured essay on running on autopilot and finding your spark again

• Upcoming essay: Part-time jobs and the multi-passionate person — how working fewer hours can unlock more of who you are

• Digital products (relaunching): Anxiety journals, a Digital Creator’s Guide, mental health guides, and automotive maintenance checklists

Where to Find Shelly

Cozy Clarity

A soft space to unwind, reflect and grow through life’s twists and turns.

By Shelly

Website (coming soon): https://www.CozyClarity.com (Shelly posts regular updates on her Substack about the relaunch — follow there for the announcement)

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her honesty, her openness, and her willingness to share a story that’s still unfolding in real time. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

A Note Before You Go

Shelly’s story keeps coming back to the same thing: she listened to her body. Not because she had a framework for it, or because someone told her to. She just kept paying attention to what felt off and made her move.

That’s what this work is about. Not a perfect plan. Not a dramatic revelation. Just getting clear enough to hear yourself — and then having the courage to act on it.

If alcohol has been part of how you cope with the version of life you’re trying to escape from, that’s worth looking at. The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day 1:1 journey built specifically for those who are ready to remove alcohol as the barrier to living more freely.

Not a detox. Not a recovery program. A method for becoming the version of yourself that’s been waiting on the other side of clarity.

Schedule a Discovery Call

As co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a master bioenergetics practitioner, Carolina came to this work through her own body. Years of chronic migraines that started at age five. Hospital visits in her twenties. A corporate career that had her living, as she puts it, “from the neck up.” The healing she found wasn’t through more planning or better strategy. It came through learning to feel again.

What makes this conversation especially meaningful is that Carolina joined the Sober Creative Reset at the start of 2026, not because she identified a problem with alcohol, but as an intentional act of curiosity.

What she found along the way surprised her. A sharpened sense of choice. A wider space between trigger and reaction. And a relationship with her body that had quietly been shifting in ways she hadn’t expected.

Show Notes

[00:00] Introduction

• Carolina Wilke is a co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a master bioenergetics practitioner originally from Brazil

• She brings decades of experience in healing practices, meditation, and embodiment work

• Her journey began with severe chronic migraines that worsened through her professional life, leading her to explore the connection between the body, mind, and energy

• She joined the Sober Creative Reset in early 2026 as an intentional act of exploration, not from a place of crisis

Key Insight: “Can you feel the space between the trigger and the reaction? Because that space is where your power lives.”

[2:16] The Migraines, the Body, and the Early Years

• Carolina’s migraines started at age five and escalated into multiple hospital visits in her early twenties

• Alcohol made the migraines worse. Hangovers amplified an already painful cycle

• She was never using alcohol to cope with negative emotions. She had an awareness early on that she only drank when she felt good, not to mask how she felt

• Looking back, she sees herself as someone who was “living from the neck up” — all calculation and planning with almost no real body awareness

Key Insight: “I can totally see myself living from my neck up. Like I had no body awareness like that. And I was always like calculating the future, planning like ahead of time, trying to figure it out, like all the steps. And if you think about it, like a lot of us do that and it’s freaking exhausting.”

[5:30] The Reset, the Intention, and the Space That Opened

• Carolina had done detoxes before but had never paired them with a clear intention

• The combination of removing alcohol and entering the Reset with focus changed something. The space between trigger and reaction became wider

• Even if she reacted the same way, she noticed she had a moment of choice. The pause itself felt like power

• She credits the intentionality as much as the physiology

Key Insight: “I felt that not having alcohol increased that space for me. It feels like I have a chance to do different. Like it feels like I have a choice.”

[8:01] The Placebo Effect and What Her Body Learned

• After the Reset, Carolina tried a regular beer and couldn’t drink it. The taste of alcohol had become too strong, like rubbing alcohol

• Before finishing the Reset, she had tried a non-alcoholic beer and noticed a full placebo effect: relaxation, warmth, even the sensation of a buzz

• Her body had been trained by years of drinking to expect a response. The physical ritual alone triggered it

• She no longer drinks regular beer. Her body simply won’t tolerate it

Key Insight: “I felt exactly the same way as I feel when I have alcohol. So the relaxation in my body...I almost feel that if I could keep drinking that I would get drunk without the alcohol.”

[16:22] Thinking Your Feelings vs. Feeling Them

• Most people think their feelings rather than actually feel them

• When an emotion arises, the instinct is to jump to analysis: the reasons, the stories, the justifications. That cuts off the feeling before it can move through

• Carolina’s practice: instead of naming the emotion, locate it in the body. Where is it sitting? What does it feel like? Is it tight, tingly, contracting, warm?

• Breathe into it. If you stay present and keep breathing, the sensation passes like a wave. Processing happens. The story loses its grip

Key Insight: “A lot of people, they think their feelings and they don’t feel their feelings. You feel like frustration and then you can’t really name where you’re feeling your body, then you go straight to your mind and all the reasons why frustration is there. That’s the reason why...and then you don’t process that fully and then you live from your neck up and that’s exhausting too.”

[27:50] Creative Practices and the Wisdom of Slow Work

• Carolina starts her work day by lighting a candle or incense and asking spirit to speak through her. It is a practice of becoming a vessel before creating

• She practices watercolor and pottery, both of which demand patience and detachment from outcome

• Pottery in particular teaches her about cycles and timing. A plate takes weeks to fire. Rushing it does nothing

• She sees these practices as training for life: show up, do your part, and trust the process you cannot control

Key Insight: “Both like pottery and watercolor are a great reminder of divine timing because nothing in those two arts are instant. Slow down, wait, enjoy the moment, and detach from the outcome.”

[33:27] Cycles of Creation and Why We Keep Starting Over

• Creation has four phases: create, sustain, destroy, and void. The dopamine lives in the first phase

• Most people never make it through the sustain phase. When the excitement fades and results are slow, they abandon the project and start a new one

• The sustain phase is where trust is built. Skipping it means repeating the same cycle at the same level

• The same pattern shows up in drinking. Numbing cuts off the body’s feedback, which means no lesson gets processed, only a story to loop on

Key Insight: “If we honor all of the phases, the next cycle is always bigger and it’s always greater. But then we want a shortcut and we go back to creation, but we repeat the same cycle.”

[38:05] Meeting Yourself Through Restriction

• Carolina is currently on a multi-substance detox: no alcohol, no sugar, no gluten

• She uses restriction as a tool to observe her own mind. Cravings become teachers

• When a craving hits, she traces it back to the feeling the substance provides: comfort, relaxation, warmth. Then she asks: can I produce that from the inside?

• When she can access that feeling internally, the craving dissolves

Key Insight: “Whatever the alcohol is giving you, it’s in here. We have the ability to produce that without the substance. So if you can catch and relate to food and alcohol as energies and just ask the question, ‘How can I produce that in me without the need of that?’ Your body will give you clues. It will give you maybe movement, maybe music, maybe something that’s actually helpful and nourishing.”

Key Quotes

“I don’t need to have a problem or a perceived problem to try to improve. We can become better or we can choose to do better, even if you don’t have a problem, per se.” — Carolina Wilke

“If you numb your body, you start drinking. So now you don’t feel it. So the discomfort is not there. There’s no lesson. There’s just the story.” — Carolina Wilke

“A mind state has a body state, so if you’re thinking in a certain frequency, you’re going to lead your body to feel in a certain way. But also if you’re moving your body, a body state can influence your mind state.” — Carolina Wilke

“I would suggest to people, if you drink and you think you don’t have a problem with alcohol, go just for the sake of exploration. Because at the end of the day, you’re exploring yourself. I don’t think it’s about exploring alcohol itself. It’s knowing who you are.” — Carolina Wilke

“With so many restrictions, you start meeting parts of yourself that they’re not available when you’re just indulging yourself with feel goods all the time.” — Carolina Wilke

Resources Mentioned

• Sacred Business Flow — Carolina’s business with co-founder Phil Powis, focused on helping entrepreneurs align their bodies and intuition with their work

• Radiant Flow — An embodiment practice Carolina has taught for years, recently opened outside their coaching community (currently waitlist only)

• Sacred Growth Club — The coaching community within Sacred Business Flow where Radiant Flow was originally housed

• Bioenergetics — The healing modality through which Carolina resolved her chronic migraines and which forms the foundation of her practice

Where to Find Carolina

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

To join the Radiant Flow waitlist: sacredbusinessflow.com/radiant-flow

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her extraordinary insight and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

A Bridge to Your Next Step

Carolina said something in this conversation that has stayed with me.

She came into the Reset not because she had a problem. She came because she was curious about who she was without alcohol as part of the picture. And what she found was a version of herself with more space, more choice, and more access to the sensations her body had been trying to communicate for years.

That is exactly what The Sober Creative Method™ was built for.

If you are someone who drinks socially, functionally, casually, and you have never once thought of yourself as having a problem — but you wonder what might be available on the other side of that habit — this is the work.

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day 1:1 coaching journey through Release, Create, and Become. It is not recovery. It is discovery. It is the methodical, supported process of removing alcohol as a variable so you can finally see clearly what has been there all along.

Schedule a Discovery Call

What broke the cycle wasn't a dramatic crash. It was a book. A self-development book in Hebrew, passed along by a friend during COVID, that opened a door he hadn't known was there. From that moment in early 2021, Orel started saying no — to games, to distraction, to the comfortable pull of escape — and started saying yes to building something real.

A few years later, he quit a six-figure software job in August 2023, spent over 600 days failing, pivoting, and shipping, and built WriteStack into a six-figure SaaS — documenting every step of it on Substack under the name Indiepreneur.

This conversation got into the guts of what that actually took: the discipline, the anxiety, the identity shift, and the inner work that runs underneath all of it.

Show Notes

[05:00] The Gaming Addiction — What It Actually Felt Like

• Orel started playing MapleStory around age 8. By 13 or 14, League of Legends had become his primary obsession.

• “Every time I left home, every time I did something else, all I could think about is how much time did I spend outside the game that I could have spent playing the game.”

• During university summers, he played 12 to 16 hours a day, brought food to his room, barely left, and barely engaged with his then-girlfriend.

• The grip wasn’t just about time. His mind fed on games even when he wasn’t playing — he watched streams and YouTube videos, thought about in-game items while out in the world.

• At his peak in Overwatch, he ranked in the top 500 players globally. Then one day in February 2021, he said no to a game invite. “That was when I felt empowered.”

Key Insight: “I don’t think that I could feel anything else but wanting to play, wanting to play games.”

[18:19] The Shift — Books, Habits, and Finding a Partner in Change

• The turning point came during COVID when a friend introduced Orel to a self-development book. He describes it now as objectively not great, but says “it was the only thing that I knew and it really helped me.”

• He started waking up at 5 AM, reading, and building new habits. A good friend joined him on the same journey.

• “We kept motivating each other into reading books, improving the memory, improving our sleep, meditating.”

• They read around 100 reports of companies together to learn stock investing — “stocks and books replaced the video games.”

• Orel credits that friendship as one of the luckiest things in his life.

Key Insight: “It was a journey from trying to do a lot of things together to doing a few things together to doing one thing at a time.”

[20:42] Quitting the Job & Trying Everything at Once

• In August 2023, Orel left his software engineering position, giving himself two to three years of runway from savings and investments.

• He came out of the gate trying to do everything simultaneously — YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts, a Unity game, multiple apps. “Spoiler alert, nothing worked.”

• YouTube alone was costing him 30 to 40 hours a week. He hired an editor. The money didn’t come. He stopped.

• The lesson arrived slowly: focus on one thing, then focus on it long enough for it to matter.

Key Insight: “It took me some time to figure out that I need to focus on one thing. And then it took me some more time that I need to focus for quite some time on one thing.”

[24:16] Building WriteStack — The Pivot That Worked

• After 18 months of failed attempts, Orel gave himself one final six-month commitment. If it didn’t work, he’d go back to a job.

• The initial idea for WriteStack was an AI article generator. He built an MVP in two weeks. People didn’t want it.

• His first real user, Casper, told him the problem wasn’t articles — it was notes. Orel pivoted immediately.

• He committed to reading the same five books by Russell Brunson and Alex Hormozi over and over, sent hundreds of direct messages, and stayed in the work.

• On April 6th, Casper became WriteStack’s first paying customer. It grew from there.

Key Insight: “Every other big product for LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever it is focuses on short form... that’s when I pivoted and started seeing more and more traction.”

[29:57] Reaching Six Figures — And Why It Didn’t Feel Like Enough

• WriteStack hit six figures in annual revenue. Orel didn’t celebrate.

• “It just felt like I cannot go below that right now. And the stress of staying above that threshold and even growing more than that was so stressful.”

• When Substack released a native scheduler, he watched 30 to 40 unsubscribes hit in a few days. He described the feeling as everything going to hell — even though he knew, rationally, it wasn’t.

• Every cancellation email carries the same weight. Every slow day on Stripe triggers a spiral.

• He described constantly wanting to check his dashboard mid-conversation: “All I can think about is I should open a new tab quickly and check out Stripe.”

Key Insight: “I have that strong feeling in my heart, like somebody leaves — I mean, feeling so bad about it.”

[36:28] Managing the Mind — Body, Awareness, and Anxiety in Real Time

• Orel talked through his approach to catching anxious thoughts before they take over. The key: notice the body first.

• “If I just relax my shoulders and relax my face, I suddenly feel 60% better, 60% more calm.”

• He described a pattern where unexamined thoughts build on each other throughout the day — each one slightly dimming the mood until something finally tips it over.

• He meditated daily for three years at one point, up to 20 minutes each morning. He stopped, and feels the difference.

• He talked about naming feelings — recognizing anger or anxiety out loud to himself — as another tool for interrupting the spiral.

Key Insight: “I think that’s the number one problem is that we’re not aware even of what’s going on in our minds that we’re just spiraling.”

[50:56] What’s Next — WriteStack x Buffer

• Orel announced on the call (first time saying it publicly) that WriteStack is building a collaboration with Buffer.

• The integration will allow users to schedule content on WriteStack and then post to any platform Buffer supports — Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Threads.

• He’s also designing a tag-to-platform routing system, so specific content types automatically flow to the right channels.

Key Insight: “So people can schedule on WriteStack and then post it on any platform that they want.”

Key Quotes

“All I would do is just play video games and secretly wish I had more time alone to play.” — Orel Zilberman

“Everything that I could do with the thousands or tens of thousands of hours that I spent playing video games, that I could do something else.” — Orel Zilberman

“I said no. And that was when I felt empowered.” — Orel Zilberman

“It took me some time to figure out that I need to focus on one thing. And then it took me some more time that I need to focus for quite some time on one thing.” — Orel Zilberman

“The thoughts just go through your mind, they put the stress on you, they make you feel something, they make your body change.” — Orel Zilberman

“If I just relax my shoulders and relax my face, I suddenly feel 60% better, 60% more calm.” — Orel Zilberman

Resources Mentioned

• WriteStack — Orel’s SaaS tool for Substack note writers: writestack.io

• Indiepreneur on Substack — Orel’s newsletter documenting his journey building a six-figure SaaS

• Buffer — Social scheduling platform; upcoming WriteStack integration

• Russell Brunson — Author; Orel read his books on repeat during the WriteStack build phase

• Alex Hormozi — Author of $100M Leads; referenced for the 100 daily outreach strategy

• At the Height of the Success — Hebrew self-development book that first interrupted the gaming addiction (author not named in conversation)

Where to Find Orel

The Indiepreneur

Join 6,701 readers for a weekly post about entrepreneurship, the life of the entrepreneur and lessons from my entrepreneurship journey.

By Orel

• WriteStack: writestack.io

• Orel documents his product-building journey in real time, including wins, pivots, and the honest accounting of what it costs

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation. To for his honesty and openness. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Do You Recognize This?

Orel’s story hit home for me in a specific way. The addiction he describes — the constant mental pull back to the screen, the counting of minutes, the way the brain starts organizing everything else around the escape — that’s a pattern I recognize. The substance or behavior changes. The underlying architecture doesn’t.

What also struck me was this: the thing that helped him most wasn’t willpower. It was direction. He didn’t quit gaming by white-knuckling it. He replaced it with something that had more pull — books, stocks, building, a friend who was on the same path.

If any part of this conversation is landing for you — if you’re sensing that alcohol has become the default way to decompress, cope, or reward yourself — the first step isn’t a big commitment. It’s just a few honest questions.

The Sober Creative Assessment takes about 3 minutes. It helps you see where you actually are and what might be getting in the way.

Take the Free Assessment Here

So when she found herself going out and planning on two drinks, knowing she’d have three, and ending up with four or five — she noticed the problem. The drinking wasn’t following her rules. She was following the drinking’s.

There was no dramatic bottom. No external pressure forcing her hand. She and her husband had decided not to have kids, which meant there was no built-in forcing function on the horizon. No one was going to make this change for her. As she put it plainly: “The change wasn’t going to happen to me.”

So in June 2019, somewhere over the Atlantic on a flight home from Aruba, she read Sober Curious cover to cover. By December of that year, she stopped entirely. And what opened up in that space surprised her — mornings she could actually use, a brain that wouldn’t stop generating ideas, a writing life she hadn’t known she was waiting for, and a book about how to stop letting your to-do list run your life.

Kerry is the voice behind The Proactive Life on Substack, where she writes about systems, grief, travel, creativity, and what it looks like to build a world rather than just a career. She came to Clear Conversations with no performance of recovery — just the clear-eyed account of someone who saw a gap between who she was and how she was living, and closed it.

[00:56] The Drinking Years: College, Law School, and the Tech World

• Kerry started drinking in college and continued through law school in New York City, where going out was simply “what everyone did”

• In her 30s, after pivoting away from law into tech, the pattern persisted — late nights with coworkers, mornings that were less than stellar

• She reflects that she was “in this boat together” with everyone around her, which made it easy to normalize

Key Insight: “When I look back on that, I think, oh, that feels like bad behavior, but we were kind of all in this boat together.” — Kerry Hoffman

[03:03] The Moment of Recognition: Control and Identity

• Around 2018-2019, Kerry began noticing the disconnect between who she was and how she behaved when drinking

• As a type-A project manager, she set rules she never followed: planning on two drinks and ending up with four or five

• She recognized that without an external forcing function — kids, health crisis, relationship pressure — the change would have to come from her

Key Insight: “I knew that if I wanted to make a change, I was going to have to proactively decide to make a change. The change wasn’t going to happen to me.” — Kerry Hoffman

[09:12] The Strategy: One Drink a Week

• Rather than going cold turkey, Kerry chose a single, clear rule: one drink per week

• She felt an all-or-nothing approach would set her up to declare failure at the first slip

• A trip to Japan four months in tested the rule — she broke it, felt terrible, and came home more committed than before

Key Insight: “I knew that a complex set of rules was going to be too much to manage and too easy to break.” — Kerry Hoffman

[15:30] What Sobriety Gave Her: Time, Writing, and the Morning

• Kerry began waking at 5 a.m. to write, journal, or read — time that had previously been lost to winding down and rough mornings

• She describes a consistent observation: even without a hangover, drinking disrupts sleep and slows the brain’s startup the next day

• She flew herself to Savannah, Georgia for a self-designed three-day writer’s retreat, then did it again in Raleigh

Key Insight: “Ever since I stopped drinking, my brain is always exploding with ideas and fun things to write about, things to do, things to try.” — Kerry Hoffman

[18:52] Creativity Beyond the Canvas: Curiosity as a Practice

• Kerry challenges the idea that creativity belongs only to people who paint, play music, or write

• She describes themed dinner parties, a daily photo practice from a writing class with Ann Napolitano, and actively looking for unexpected details on daily walks

• She connects creativity to curiosity, calling it the most appealing quality in another person

Key Insight: “I think creativity is very closely linked to curiosity. And that’s, I would say, the most appealing quality to me in another person — someone who is curious.” — Kerry Hoffman

[27:46] The Proactive Life: Systems, Grief, and the Book in Progress

• Kerry is writing a book about using systems-level thinking at the personal level — becoming the project manager of your own life

• Her argument: goals rarely make it onto the to-do list because people don’t operationalize them alongside the daily demands

• She also writes about grief, travel, and books on her Substack, and recently started a writer’s group of five people in New York City

Key Insight: “Too often, what we want to do, our goals, the things that we aspire to do, they actually don’t make it onto the to-do list, right? Because there are things that we think about, but we don’t operationalize it.” — Kerry Hoffman

Key Quotes

“I knew that if I wanted to make a change, I was going to have to proactively decide to make a change. The change wasn’t going to happen to me.” — Kerry Hoffman

“The drinking is in charge, not me.” — Kerry Hoffman

“I knew that a complex set of rules was going to be too much to manage and too easy to break.” — Kerry Hoffman

“Ever since I stopped drinking, my brain is always exploding with ideas and fun things to write about, things to do, things to try.” — Kerry Hoffman

“I think creativity is very closely linked to curiosity. And that’s, I would say, the most appealing quality to me in another person — someone who is curious.” — Kerry Hoffman

Resources Mentioned

• Sober Curious — the book Kerry read on the flight home from Aruba that sparked her decision to change her relationship with alcohol

• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott — referenced at a book talk Kerry attended

• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin — Rubin’s practice of choosing a visual theme for daily walks

• Ann Napolitano’s writing class — where Kerry learned the one-photo-a-day practice

• Athletic Brewing — mentioned as an example of how the NA market has expanded since Kerry stopped drinking

Where to Find Kerry

The Proactive Life

A newsletter about life as a series of projects—some planned, some unexpected, all worth documenting. I write essays about travel, relationships, creativity, healing, personal systems, and the messy middle between who we are and who we’re becoming.

By Kerry Hoffman

• LinkedIn: Kerry Ann Hoffman

• Instagram: @soverycary

• Website: soverycary.co

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her extraordinary honesty and insight. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

With The Reset, You Get To Choose

Kerry didn’t wait for a reason. She looked at the gap between who she was and how she was living — and she chose to close it. No external pressure. No dramatic low. Just a clear-eyed decision that the drinking was in charge, and she wanted that back.

That’s exactly the kind of person the Reset is built for.

If you’re getting things done, showing up, functioning — but mornings take longer to come online, focus breaks more easily, and your output doesn’t match your effort — that’s worth paying attention to. Alcohol doesn’t have to feel like a problem to be quietly costing you.

The Sober Creative Reset starts this week. It’s 30 days. One container. Daily reflections, weekly check-ins, and a private space for accountability and support.

No labels. No lifetime decisions. No pressure to decide forever.

This is the Release phase of the work — removing what’s obscuring your footing so you can see what’s actually there.

And this cohort is pay your own price. You decide what it’s worth to you.

Kerry said it herself: the change won’t come to you. You have to decide to make it.

This is where you start.

At 25, after three stints in rehab, a suicide attempt, and a collection of dangerous adventures he can only partially recall, Doan made a decision that no program, sponsor, or support group could make for him. He was exhausted. He quit. What he didn’t understand until his late 40s was that quitting substances wasn’t the same as dealing with the addiction. He had simply moved it somewhere else — into work. Into the all-consuming drive to build, teach, achieve, and impact. Into a PhD completed in three and a half years. Into a newsletter reaching 20,000 people. Into 80-hour weeks that cost him the same things the drinking once did.

Now in his 50s, Doan is doing the harder work — the one without applause. He’s an associate professor of entrepreneurship, an AI education consultant, and a TEDx speaker who has helped shape curriculum at more than 120 institutions worldwide. He’s also a person still learning how to put the phone down, sit with his dogs on a quiet morning, and just be somewhere without his mind already being somewhere else. That tension — between drive and destruction, between output and what it costs you — runs through every minute of this conversation.

[02:08] Growing Up in Indiana: Curiosity, Access, and the Feel-Good Trap

Doan walks back through his teens — parties in Indiana fields, a boarding school outside Detroit with 400 teenage boys, minimal adult supervision, and proximity to a city. No trauma. No triggering event. Just access, older kids, and something that felt good.

• Doan grew up in an intellectual household where parents were “pretty oblivious” — not neglectful, but not paying close attention.

• Boarding school at 16 meant being surrounded by teenagers with “close to unlimited wealth” and little oversight near downtown Detroit.

• He’s explicit that there was no family trauma at the root: “No, it was just friends...we started hanging out with them, and they like drinking beer. I can’t drink carbonation. It makes me throw up. So I was like, can’t do that. What else you got?”

• By 25 he had done rehab, AA, NA — each with an interior motive that wasn’t really about getting sober.

Key Insight: “Literally one day I was like, man, I’m just exhausted.” — Doan Winkel

[07:08] The Transfer: Quitting One Thing, Starting Another

This section is the heart of the conversation. Doan explains what happened after he quit — and why, in his late 40s, he had to admit that quitting drinking wasn’t the same as dealing with the addiction.

• He poured everything into academics and teaching, completing his PhD in about three and a half years when most people in his field take four or five.

• The same addictive pattern — obsession, all-in focus, consequences to relationships — just relocated.

• “It’s done probably on some level irreparable harm with my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kid, just in general, lots of things.”

• His child heading off to college in their 20s gave him a new vantage point: “coulda, woulda, shoulda.”

• Therapy and “the benefit of 50 years of life” have helped him look back and start to see what actually matters.

Key Insight: “I didn’t really change much in terms of consequences of my actions. I just shifted it to a different area.” — Doan Winkel

[17:46] Work Addiction: The One That Benefits Other People

Doan describes the specific shape his work addiction takes and why it’s so hard to treat — because it produces good outcomes for others while doing damage closer to home.

• Teaching gives him the same hit the substances once did: “People giving me feedback on the impact I can...I just want more of that. It’s still wanting more of the same type of feeling.”

• He has no hobbies. When people ask what he does in his spare time, the honest answer is: “I work. Work, go to sleep.”

• He describes the work obsession as emotionally destructive in the same ways as drinking — ignoring marriage, fatherhood, friendships, and the kind of presence that makes someone a whole person.

• Back when he was using, all he could think about was the next drink or the next fix. Now: “I struggle mightily to stop thinking about work — just being present wherever I am.”

• The pattern of thinking has been there since early life. Getting free of it is the actual hard work.

Key Insight: “It’s more still equally, I think, emotionally destructive.” — Doan Winkel

[23:21] Building New Habits: Small Steps, Real Presence

Doan talks about what’s actually working for him now — not grand overhauls, but structured small moments that create space between him and the pull of work.

• His two chocolate lab sisters are a built-in morning ritual: early wake-up, no phone, no TV, just time with the dogs and whatever comes to mind that isn’t work-related.

• When work creeps in — and it does, every single day — he trains himself to redirect: “emails gonna be fine later, still gonna...whatever.”

• Coming home from work, he tries to be curious about his wife’s day rather than launching into a monologue about his own.

• Travel is a bigger reset: “let’s just chill out...it’s not work stuff.”

• He compares the practice to early sobriety: “I’m not going to drink for an hour” — just building the habit in small increments.

Key Insight: “I’m not trying to overhaul anything. I’m not doing anything really big. It’s just these kind of smaller moments to build habits.” — Doan Winkel

[29:13] Creativity, Sobriety, and Transferable Skills

Both Josh and Doan explore the overlap between the resourcefulness required to sustain an addiction and the drive that fuels creative and entrepreneurial work.

• “We had to be creative to keep doing what we were doing. So again, it’s sort of transferred over.”

• The skills of adaptability, reading situations, and staying scrappy under pressure — developed during using days — translate directly to entrepreneurship.

• “There’s skills we’ve developed and ways of thinking and ways of engaging with the world that we developed. We could transfer those to more positive ways and more positive outcomes.”

• Doan describes himself as having “hustle for days” and “creativity for days” — and credits the unconventional route to those strengths.

Key Insight: “We built those skills and they’re actually really valuable if put to use in a positive way.” — Doan Winkel

[30:45] Teaching AI and Preparing Students for What’s Actually Next

Doan shifts into his professional work: why he’s so invested in AI education, what he believes college is failing to do, and how a mastery-based approach is different.

• His TEDx talk — titled “College Can Prepare You for the Real World, But It Doesn’t” — is, in his words, “still very relevant today, unfortunately.”

• He sees his job as helping students get work that’s meaningful, pays the bills, and gives them purpose: “I see my job as helping them do that, as doing everything I can do to help them do that.”

• Most classroom learning isn’t transferable on its own — students need coaching to connect the dots, and they need real projects, not just concepts.

• On AI: “It’s not so much that it’s going to take jobs...it’s the people who don’t know how to use it are going to be replaced by people who do know how to use it. That’s it.”

• He compares AI literacy to internet literacy: not optional, not a threat to identity — just the next thing people need to get good at.

• His mastery-based framework emphasizes real-world projects, accountability, and skill-building over content delivery.

Key Insight: “I don’t need to impart a whole bunch of content or knowledge...What I need to do is coach and train them on how you apply these things and how you transfer this knowledge and these experiences into things that are going to be in whatever you want to do in life.” — Doan Winkel

Key Quotes

“Literally one day I was like, man, I’m just exhausted.” — Doan Winkel

“I didn’t really change much in terms of consequences of my actions. I just shifted it to a different area.” — Doan Winkel

“It’s still wanting more of the same type of feeling. It’s just in a positive way that it’s a positive impact on others instead of a destructive impact on me or on others.” — Doan Winkel

“The people who don’t know how to use it are going to be replaced by people who do know how to use it. That’s it.” — Doan Winkel

“We built those skills and they’re actually really valuable if put to use in a positive way.” — Doan Winkel

Resources Mentioned

• How to Teach with AI — Doan’s free Substack newsletter focused on AI in education

• “College Can Prepare You for the Real World, But It Doesn’t” — Doan’s TEDx talk

• Mastery-based learning — the pedagogical framework Doan uses with students, focused on real projects and skill transfer over content delivery

• Work addiction / behavioral addiction — explored throughout the conversation as a concept distinct from substance dependency, with overlapping patterns

Where to Find Doan

How to Teach With AI

Master 'How to Teach With AI' with simple steps and guides. You can leverage AI to be more efficient in course prep, and to increase student engagement and learning. I want to help.

By Doan Winkel

• LinkedIn — Doan’s most active platform for connection, conversation, and sharing his work: search Doan Winkel

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , , and to for his candor and courage. Showing up honestly — especially when you don’t have everything figured out — is the thing. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

From This Conversation to Your Own

Doan’s story isn’t a recovery story in the traditional sense. It’s something more complicated and, for a lot of people in this community, more recognizable. The addiction didn’t disappear when the substance did. It found other places to live — productive ones, even admirable ones. But the cost was real.

That’s exactly why the work matters. Sobriety is one piece. What comes after — who you’re building, how you’re showing up, what you’re actually doing with the clarity you’ve earned — that’s where The Sober Creative Method™ picks up.

If you’re past the first question and into the harder one — not “should I stop?” but “what do I actually want my life to look like?” — that’s the 90-day work. We go through it together: Release → Create → Become.

Learn More About the Method

By the time a golf ball-sized tumor appeared in his neck—with a 50/50 chance of cancer—Phil had spent years trying to outwork, outsmart, and outlast whatever was happening inside him. What the diagnosis gave him wasn’t a plan. It gave him a reckoning. And from that reckoning, everything changed: his diet, his relationships, his location, his relationship with alcohol, and eventually, the business he built alongside his partner Carolina Wilke.

That business, , operates from a simple premise—your business challenges and your personal challenges are the same pattern showing up in different rooms.

In this conversation, Phil traces the long arc from sickness to clarity, shares where he’s landed on alcohol after 10 years without it, and talks about what he’s building next for people who hold something in their heart but haven’t yet found the courage to move toward it.

[01:00] Phil’s Early Relationship with Alcohol

Phil grew up in the South and started drinking around 15 or 16. He carried that through college, into corporate life in tech in Boston, and into his professional years—never feeling like it was a “problem” per se, but acknowledging there were periods where it was probably more than useful.

• Alcohol was deeply tied to social identity—happy hours, networking, the culture around him. It wasn’t something he questioned; it was just part of how he connected with people.

• The shift only came when his health started to deteriorate, and even then, alcohol was the last thing he was willing to let go of.

• He eventually stopped drinking entirely—and wouldn’t drink again for over ten years.

Key Insight: “I was still so tied into this identity of going and how I was connecting with people and socializing and things like this, that it was hard to let go of.”

[07:00] When the Body Starts Sending Signals

In his late 20s, Phil went from feeling like the picture of perfect health to waking up exhausted, dealing with aches, headaches, and a body that no longer felt like his. Doctors couldn’t pin it down.

• He worked with ancestral health nutritionist Mary Rudick, who had her own story of illness and recovery. One of the first things she asked him to do was cut out alcohol.

• Phil made the other dietary and lifestyle changes more easily—fasting protocols, food restrictions—but alcohol took longer. The health motivation eventually won out.

• He didn’t drink for over 10 years, a period that overlapped with his most serious health challenges, including the tumor.

Key Insight: “She’s like, if you’re on any sort of a healing path, this is not going to be helpful for that.”

[11:30] The Tumor, the Surgery, and the Real Recovery

Phil spent about a year and a half walking around with an undiagnosed tumor while going to the Mayo Clinic for biopsies that couldn’t confirm whether it was cancerous. He was living in a low-grade, constant fear.

• He was simultaneously working with (who would later become his business partner) on nervous system regulation and emotional work, doing dietary protocols, and exploring whether he could heal without surgery.

• He eventually had the tumor removed. What followed was a rapid, remarkable recovery—one he credits to the compounding effect of all the shifts he’d made.

• After the surgery, he realized how much of what he’d been doing—even the good, purposeful work—had been driven by a fear that time was running out.

Key Insight: “I couldn’t, before that surgery, I couldn’t even do like one push-up...my nervous system was so fried.”

[17:00] Choosing to Drink Again—and What That Meant

After years of restriction during his illness, reclaiming his health meant slowly allowing things back in. Expanding his diet. Letting himself have birthday cake again. And, eventually, having his first beer.

• For Phil, that first drink in Costa Rica with Carolina wasn’t a relapse or a capitulation—it was a celebratory claiming of his health. A marker of arrival.

• He was clear that this is a deeply personal decision, and that he believes drinking can be a healthy social ritual when done responsibly and in moderation—for some people, in some seasons.

• He joined the January Sober Creative Reset not from a place of necessity, but curiosity: what would it feel like to pause again, from a place of power rather than survival?

Key Insight: “For me in that moment, it was a very beautiful celebratory claiming of my health back again.”

[19:15] The January Reset: Choosing Clarity from Power, Not Fear

Phil came into the Reset asking a question most people in this community know well—who am I when I’m not using this thing to cope, connect, or coast?

• He found the Reset to be a non-judgmental container where people were exploring their relationship with alcohol for very different reasons, and that felt important.

• He’s been health-focused in his 40s in new ways—working toward physical goals he’s never had before—and part of that was wanting to examine alcohol’s role honestly.

• His takeaway: it’s useful in any area of life to periodically question what’s running you and whether you’re conscious of it.

Key Insight: “I think this is a very helpful thing to do in different aspects, not even just with alcohol, but other aspects of your life—is always to be questioning the role that things are playing and just making sure that you’re not being governed by things in ways that you’re not conscious of.”

[23:25] Creativity, Mornings, and What Alcohol Actually Does to the Work

Phil is a 4 a.m. person. His best creative work—everything he writes for Substack, the ideas that flow without friction—happens in those early hours. That’s always been true, with or without alcohol in his life.

• When he does drink, he’s made a clear personal rule: no creative work after that point. The ideas don’t fire the same way. He described feeling “blunted” and “not sharp.”

• He’s never used alcohol as part of a creative process—unlike some of the documented history of writers and artists who did—because his most alive creative time is the morning, not the evening.

• The correlation he’s observed: alcohol signals to his brain that the creative day is over.

Key Insight: “I feel that alcohol does stunt...even though I still drink, I do feel that it stunts my creative process.”

[30:20] What Phil Is Building: Sacred Business Flow and the New Community

Three years into Sacred Business Flow, Phil and Carolina have been working with people who want to bring something from their hearts into the world—usually a business expression—but keep hitting invisible resistance.

• Their existing work requires people to have already made a committed decision to move. But they’ve seen a whole group of people who hold a vision but aren’t quite there yet.

• They’re launching a new community called Radiant Flow—a lower-cost, widely accessible space built around embodiment practices: movement-based, yoga-inspired, breathwork-influenced work designed to build capacity for creative expression.

• The distinction Phil draws: most regulated people have inner practices that maintain a baseline of safety. Radiant Flow is for expansion—for moving through discomfort, resistance, and into the actual creation process.

• Phil is also moving to Rio de Janeiro, settling beachside, and curious about what a new environment will do for his own creative output.

Key Insight: “We’re helping people who hold something in their heart, a desire to create something...and maybe for a variety of reasons, they found it difficult to kind of get traction and move forward with that.”

Key Quotes

“After so many years of it being part of my identity, it was actually a bit confronting.” — Phil Powis

“I realized it wasn’t until after the fact that I realized how much I was carrying around this idea...I had this deeply ingrained kind of subconscious belief that I was effectively slowly dying.” — Phil Powis

“I think there is a way that drinking can be a healthy, social, celebratory ritual when done responsibly and when done in moderation.” — Phil Powis

“Drinking or no drinking, I would say that alcohol has never really been part of my creative process and I see it more as a hindrance.” — Phil Powis

“I think your reset really gave me a really beautiful opportunity just to reconnect with my own journey and to see how I felt.” — Phil Powis

Resources Mentioned

• Sacred Business Flow — Phil and Carolina Wilke’s business and coaching framework (sacredbusinessflow.com)

• Sacred Growth Club — their existing community on Substack

• Radiant Flow — Phil and Carolina’s new embodiment-based community (launching at the time of this recording)

• Mary Rudick — ancestral health nutritionist referenced in Phil’s health journey

• from Zen Habits — a creator Phil worked with during his consulting years

• Mayo Clinic — where Phil received care and biopsies during his illness

Where to Find Phil

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

is co-founder of Sacred Business Flow alongside . Find his writing on Substack as part of the Sacred Growth Club community. Their work sits at the intersection of business strategy and nervous system regulation—helping people move from idea to creation with both clarity and embodied readiness.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for his generosity, honesty, and the kind of story-sharing that makes this community worth showing up for. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

The April Reset Is Open — At Whatever Price Works for You

Phil came into the January Sober Creative Reset asking who he’d be if he chose to pause alcohol from a place of power, not necessity. He left with clarity.

Phil’s testimony from the reset:

I was part of Josh’s Sober Creative Reset in January of 2026. Josh created an incredibly supportive structure for allowing us all to examine our relationship with alcohol and the part we want it to play in our lives. In the end, I am not choosing to abstain from Alcohol fully, but the gift of this challenge was insights on when and why I choose to drink and how I want to approach it consciously going forward. This was a wonderful experience that I would recommend to anyone wanting to examine their relationship with alcohol.

This conversation is a reminder that your relationship with alcohol doesn’t have to fit a label. It just has to be something you’re honest about. The Reset gives you a structured, non-judgmental space to get honest—about what’s running you, what you’re protecting, and what might open up when you create some distance from it.

This April’s cohort is capped at 25 members, and the pricing is now pay-what-you-can. Because the barrier to examining your relationship with alcohol shouldn’t be a price point.

If this conversation resonated, would love to share this experience with you in April.

Join the Reset

As a nurse. As a CRNA holding patients’ lives in her hands. As an executive director managing surgical teams, patient safety, and the invisible weight of being the person everyone else leaned on. As a daughter-in-law who watched her former father-in-law disappear into addiction while his family quietly stopped asking. As a wife who kept saying what she needed — and kept being met with silence.

She gave and gave and gave. And she never once stopped to ask what was left in her own cup.

Then, at 50, a stroke made the choice for her.

A ruptured AVM she was likely born with and never knew about took her career, her ability to drive, and the identity she had spent decades building around strength and responsibility. It stripped away every role she had used to define herself.

What she found underneath — slowly, through a women’s circle, through daily writing, through the courage to finally speak — was something she had been too busy pouring out to notice: herself.

This conversation is about what happens when the cup runs dry. And what becomes possible when you finally decide to fill it.

[00:00] Introduction — A Life Built Around Giving

• Florence is a Michigan-based writer, retired healthcare professional, and the voice behind Becoming You, a daily Substack on intentional living and personal growth.

• She spent nearly 30 years in nursing — including as a CRNA and executive director of a surgical center — before a hemorrhagic stroke at 50 permanently changed her life.

• The stroke came from a ruptured AVM she was likely born with and never knew she had. It took her career, her ability to drive, and the identity she had built around being the one who holds everything together.

• Florence now writes daily for people — women and men — who learned early that it wasn’t safe to ask for what they needed.

Key Insight: “She’s living proof that sometimes it takes losing the life you built to finally start living the one that was always yours.” — Josh Woll

[04:01] The Family That Stopped Asking — Addiction Up Close

• Florence opened up publicly for the first time about her former father-in-law’s alcoholism — a presence she witnessed from the earliest days of her marriage.

• As a nurse, her first instinct was to help. She couldn’t understand why those closest to him had gone quiet.

• Over time she understood: they had tried for years, exhausted themselves, and eventually the silence became easier than hope. His drinking became the family’s unspoken backdrop.

• He would wander from home and turn up at the liquor store. He’d leave family events with beer cans stuffed in his jacket pockets in the summer heat — and nobody said a word, because no one wanted to cause a scene.

Key Insight: “They were saying things to try to get him to help himself, but it’s been so long that they were doing this that they just gave up on him, and this became his normal.” — Florence Acosta

[07:58] The One Word That Makes Help Possible

• Florence and Josh both arrived at the same word when talking about why helping someone in addiction is so hard: open.

• Josh reflected on his own experience — people around him asking if he was sure he wanted another drink, and him being completely certain he was fine. No perspective on what others were seeing.

• Florence connected it back to her father-in-law: he was never open to receiving help. And without that opening, even the most persistent love eventually wears itself out.

• The hard truth: you can’t fill someone else’s cup if they won’t hold it out.

Key Insight: “You have to be open to receiving it, to receive that help.” — Florence Acosta

[13:21] The Cost of Always Putting Yourself Last

• Florence described the particular weight of her anesthesia work: bringing patients to the brink of death and being held responsible for bringing them back.

• But when asked what she did to take care of herself through all of it, her answer was immediate and honest: “I didn’t really take care of myself. I always put myself last.”

• As a nurse, as a nurturer, as a caregiver — she poured everything out and kept running on empty.

• The turning point came in 2019 when she joined a women’s circle: 20 women, meeting weekly for nine months, with two three-day offline retreats. It was the first time she was asked to reflect on what she actually needed.

Key Insight: “I always put myself last. And I didn’t start putting myself first until 2019 when I joined this organization.” — Florence Acosta

[17:23] The Talking Basket — Practicing the Ask

• The circle used a practice called the talking basket — passed around so each person could voice their needs out loud, in front of others.

• Florence was always the last to go. Always shy. Always hesitant to take up space or ask for anything.

• The teachings weren’t meant to be answered to the group — they were meant to be sat with privately. Florence did the work. And through that reflection, she arrived at something simple she had never really let herself believe: I’m important too. I matter.

• That realization — that her cup deserved to be filled too — changed everything that followed.

Key Insight: “We can’t pour from an empty cup, right? So as nurses, we have to fill our cups up, too. Because you can give proportionately. But how can you give yourself emotionally if you don’t fill your cup, too?” — Florence Acosta

[21:23] When an Empty Cup Breaks a Marriage

• Florence connected the dots between her father-in-law’s untreated alcoholism and the slow unraveling of her marriage.

• Her former husband had learned, growing up, to sweep hard things under the rug. He’d done it with his father for years. And when Florence told him what she needed, he did the same thing to her.

• Not out of cruelty — out of habit. Out of a pattern so ingrained it felt like normal.

• The birthday party image captures it: everyone watching her father-in-law leave with beer cans in his jacket pockets. Nobody saying a word. The silence was the problem.

Key Insight: “Brushing under the rug became normal for him. And ultimately, that’s what led to the demise of our marriage.” — Florence Acosta

[27:41] Filling the Cup — Community, Creativity, and Becoming You

• Florence launched her Substack without researching it — she just built the page, started writing, and trusted that the right people would find it.

• What fills her cup now: quality time with her mom, her husband, her stepdaughter. The comments on her Substack. The back and forth with readers who feel less alone because of her words.

• She’s also building something new with her sister — a creative project she can’t fully reveal yet. The shift she named: as a child she preferred to work alone because you can go faster. What she knows now is that you can go farther with someone beside you.

• Her platform, Becoming You, is still growing — and still grounded in the same belief that started it: authentic is the only thing worth being.

Key Insight: “I just want people to come to this space and feel like they’re not alone and they can be themselves authentically. Because if you’re not you, then you’re fake. And we don’t want fake people in our lives.” — Florence Acosta

Key Quotes

“They were saying things to try to get him to help himself, but it’s been so long that they were doing this that they just gave up on him, and this became his normal.” — Florence Acosta

“You have to be open to receiving it, to receive that help.” — Florence Acosta

“I always put myself last. And I didn’t start putting myself first until 2019 when I joined this organization.” — Florence Acosta

“We can’t pour from an empty cup, right? So as nurses, we have to fill our cups up, too. Because you can give proportionately. But how can you give yourself emotionally if you don’t fill your cup, too?” — Florence Acosta

Resources Mentioned

• Becoming You — Florence Acosta’s daily Substack newsletter on intentional living, mindset, and personal growth

• Women’s Circle / Sisterhood — The nine-month community experience Florence joined in 2019, including weekly gatherings and two three-day offline retreats

• Substack — The long-form writing platform both Florence and Josh use to build real, vulnerable community

Where to Find Florence

BECOMING YOU with Florence Acosta

Daily Inspirations about intentional living, mindset, personal development and being the truest version of you.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to for her honesty, her openness, and for trusting this space with a story she hadn't shared before. And to , , , , , and everyone else who showed up and listened — your presence is what makes these conversations worth having.

Your Cup Deserves to Be Full Too

Florence spent nearly thirty years giving everything she had.

As a nurse. As a caregiver. As the person everyone leaned on. She poured and poured and never once asked what was left in her own cup.

Not because she didn’t care about herself. Because she never stopped long enough to check.

Most of us don’t.

We keep going. We keep producing. We keep showing up. And somewhere along the way, the depletion starts to feel like just... the terrain. Normal. Expected. The cost of doing the work.

Alcohol fits neatly into that story. It softens the edges at the end of a long day. It makes the empty cup feel temporarily full.

But it doesn’t fill it. It just makes you less aware of how empty it is.

That’s what 30 days without it tends to reveal. Not emptiness — but capacity. The thing that was there all along, waiting for the noise to settle.

Florence eventually found her way to that question.

What’s actually in my cup? What’s mine?

The Reset is a supportive path to the same inquiry.

30 days. One container. Real clarity. No labels. No lifetime decisions. No pressure.

Just a structured stretch of time to find out what’s underneath.

Learn More About The Reset

Mary Peeples has lived many lives inside one. The theater kid from South Georgia who played Annie at the Fox. The boarding school girl who quietly lost herself trying to fit in. The 23-year-old editor-in-chief who, by her own account, torched it all by 25. And then, the one who finally walked into rehab — not as a breaking point, but as a bridge back.

What makes Mary’s story so powerful isn’t just the sobriety. It’s the honest, patient work of excavating who she actually is beneath all the performances. The writing. The drawing. The day her dad heard her singing around the house again and knew she was coming back to life. The small, sacred acts of a person learning to trust herself.

In this conversation, we talk about perfectionism, identity, creative recovery, and what it really means to dig out your own groove. Mary is currently 530 days sober, building her Substack , and stepping back into music for the first time in years.

This one’s for anyone who has ever lost their creative voice — and wondered if they could find it again.

Show Notes

[0:00] Introduction — The Many Lives of Mary Peeples

• Mary began performing on a national tour of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas at 10 and played Annie at the Fox Theater in Atlanta at 11.

• Even in moments of standing ovations, she was mouthing “I’m sorry” — a perfectionist before she knew what that word meant.

• Singing became her identity in a small South Georgia town, but it also created an early tension between who she was and who she was expected to be.

• Her story is one of a creative person who had to lose nearly everything to finally find what was real.

Key Insight: “The more accomplishments I had, the more fun my life felt. And, you know, the more adventure there was.” — Mary Peeples

[7:13] The Beginning of Drinking — Self-Medicating a Perfect Storm

• Serious drinking began around age 19, following years at a high-pressure boarding school where Mary lost her sense of self.

• She was surrounded by competitive, high-achieving peers and used achievement as a way to make friends and earn belonging.

• An undiagnosed ADHD diagnosis until age 21, combined with rejection sensitivity and a pressured environment, created what she describes as a “perfect storm.”

• Genetics and family history also played a role — Mary speaks openly about this without shame.

Key Insight: “It was me self-medicating my ADHD... partly some PTSD from being in an environment where I didn’t know who I was.” — Mary Peeples

[11:05] Walking Into Rehab — Surrender as a Choice

• Mary knew she was going to rehab for two months before she went, and she chose to do it thoughtfully and methodically.

• She describes rehab not as a crisis intervention but as “my only bridge back from whatever isolated island I had put myself on.”

• The structure of rehab — morning routines, yoga, group sessions — felt oddly familiar, like boarding school or summer camp. Her body found homeostasis quickly.

• The harder part wasn’t getting sober. It was facing the damage she had done to the people she loved.

Key Insight: “Getting sober was easy... It has taken me more than 530 days to start to forgive myself for the hurt and the damage that I did to my loved ones.” — Mary Peeples

[15:31] Creativity in Recovery — Digging Out Your Own Groove

• In active addiction, Mary had lost all sense of creative urgency. The voices of the outside world — expectations, boxes, a lack of nuance — drowned out her own.

• Getting sober gave her the space to ask a question she hadn’t asked in years: Who am I, really?

• She returned to drawing, took art classes, and slowly began writing again — even though writing had felt completely out of reach.

• Her father’s observation that she was “singing around the house again” became one of the most moving markers of her return to herself.

Key Insight: “I dug out my own groove by getting sober. And I once again was fortunate and blessed enough to take a lot of time.” — Mary Peeples

[19:56] Substack and the Unexpected Community

• After a full year away from social media, Mary discovered Substack — the last place she expected to find creativity and community again.

• Writing consistently, even without a clear weekly theme, began to nourish her in ways she hadn’t anticipated.

• Her Substack Little Edits Atelier started as “the healing rack,” a recovery-focused space, before expanding into something more reflective of her full creative identity.

• Writing has also served as an olive branch — healing relationships with friends of 20+ years through the honesty of her words.

Key Insight: “Reading stuff from people like you and writing my own stuff... it has nourished me in a way that I never thought possible.” — Mary Peeples

[21:00] The Toolkit — Practices That Support a Sober Creative Life

• Mary’s recovery toolkit includes: yoga, The Artist’s Way morning pages, daily journaling, drawing, art therapy, and honest communication.

• She completed a 90-day intensive outpatient program after rehab, and the practices she built there became “secondhand nature.”

• Affirmations from The Artist’s Way have been particularly grounding — including “My creativity is meant for divine goodness.”

• Her framing: “staying 10 steps ahead of my subconscious.” Spiritually grounded, practically applied.

Key Insight: “It opens your ears up to your intuition, which then leads to creative choices that you’re channeling from this great big universe.” — Mary Peeples

[25:04] Writing and the Inner Critic — Curiosity vs. the Voices

• Mary’s most recent Substack piece documented 50 days into The Artist’s Way, describing how her inner world now feels “on the tip of her tongue.”

• She drew a beautiful parallel to Homer invoking the Muses in The Odyssey — the idea that true creative power has to come from somewhere beyond yourself.

• Despite her editorial background, she still wrestles daily with inner voices that say “you have no authority.”

• The work is learning to stay in the curiosity without letting the inner critic kill the execution.

Key Insight: “There’s a curiosity that I have. And then like kind of in the back of my head, the curiosity and in the execution, what voices are trying to keep me from believing in myself.” — Mary Peeples

[30:02] What’s Next — Back to Music, Back to Life

• Mary is working at a record shop, returning to music through a path she never could have predicted — and calling it “exposure therapy.”

• She traveled abroad for the first time (to Greece) while sober, describing the willingness to feel fear and do it anyway as a core recovery value.

• Her mom told her over Christmas: “Mary, you’re like your 40-year-old self now.” She took it as a compliment.

• She describes this chapter as the end of a long treasure hunt — and what she’s finding in the trove is “all full of light.”

Key Insight: “It’s doing the things and taking the leap even if you’re scared.” — Mary Peeples

Key Quotes

“Getting sober was easy. It has taken me more than 530 days to start to forgive myself for the hurt and the damage that I did to my loved ones.” — Mary Peeples

“I dug out my own groove by getting sober.” — Mary Peeples

“It opens your ears up to your intuition, which then leads to creative choices that you’re channeling from this great big universe.” — Mary Peeples

“I was just a bird with broken wings, seriously.” — Mary Peeples

“It gets dark, but then it gets really, really bright and light, and then you don’t believe that it’s real.” — Mary Peeples

Resources Mentioned

• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron — morning pages practice and affirmations

• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz — referenced in conversation around beliefs and agreements we hold about ourselves

• Homer’s The Odyssey / The Iliad — invoking the Muses as a metaphor for channeling creative power beyond yourself

• Big Fish (film, dir. Tim Burton) — referenced as a metaphor for being a big fish in a small pond

• Ella Enchanted — referenced humorously in the context of gullibility and believing what others say

• Yoga, journaling, and art therapy — all mentioned as consistent recovery and creative support practices

Where to Find Mary

Mary Peeples writes at Little Edits Atelier on Substack — a space where her identity as a theater kid, former editor, and sober creative all fight for the keyboard. Her writing is honest, curious, and worth your time.

Little Edits Atelier

Annie showed up. The editor burned everything. The drunk crashed the party. The sober girl is documenting it all. They're fighting for the keyboard. This is the live feed.

Mary shared this link after our conversation, it’s her performing Annie on stage. The end when she walks off gave me chills. Keep singing Mary!!

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Mary Peeples for her extraordinary honesty, warmth, and willingness to go deep. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

What Becomes Possible When You Can Finally Hear Yourself?

Mary Peeples spent years performing for other people’s approval. The stage. The sorority. The editorial office. Always shape-shifting. Always striving. Always a little louder on the outside than she felt on the inside.

And somewhere along the way, the creative voice she’d had since she was six years old just... went quiet. The writing dried up. The singing stopped. She didn’t lose it all at once. It just slowly slipped away.

530 days later, she’s singing around the house again. She’s writing things that surprise her. She’s trusting the words coming out of her mouth for the first time in a decade.

That’s what clarity does. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Slowly, the way light filters through trees when you’re finally standing still long enough to notice it.

It doesn’t hand you a new identity. It gently returns the one you set down somewhere along the way.

The Sober Creative Reset is 30 days of that kind of attention — daily reflections, weekly group calls, and a small private community of people who are ready to slow down and notice what’s been growing underneath the noise. No pressure. No lectures. Just mornings that invite something from you, and a warm container that holds you while you explore.

The next Reset opens for enrollment tomorrow. Early access pricing is $149 for the first 24 hours — after that, it moves to $199. Twenty-five people. No more.

If something in this conversation resonated — if you recognized even a little of yourself in Mary’s story — that quiet recognition is worth following.

Learn More About The Reset

P.S. You can access all previous episodes here. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you’re always welcome here.

Justin’s story isn’t a traditional sobriety story. He never drank because alcohol made his body feel terrible. Instead, his path to clarity moved through cannabis to manage PTSD, and then guided therapeutic psilocybin work alongside serious therapy to confront what years of trauma had buried inside him. His relationship with substances was always intentional — a tool used out of necessity — and when he no longer needed them, he simply let them go. Today, two years substance-free, he doesn’t frame it as a moral choice. He just doesn’t need them anymore.

What makes Justin’s perspective so powerful is the way his inner healing reshaped his creative work. He shifted from spending 40 hours on a single digital commission to painting vibrant gouache landscapes in 90 minutes from life. He went from being trapped in his head to painting from his gut.

In this conversation, he shares the creative philosophy he’s built along the way — one rooted in deep listening, letting go of outcomes, and discovering what it truly means to be both the artist and the audience of your own work.

[00:02] Growing Up in a Cult — The Roots of Shutdown

• Justin grew up in a highly religious cult with an abusive home life. He was raised to avoid all substances — not from wisdom, but from control.

• For most of his life, he was “very shut down” — suppressing emotions and surviving rather than truly living.

• When he finally achieved financial stability through his art career, his body sent a clear signal: it was time to confront everything he had been carrying.

• He was diagnosed with PTSD and found himself unable to work — his body forcing him to stop and process what his mind had been avoiding for decades.

Key Insight: “My body was like, all right, you’re safe now. Now you got to deal with all your stuff.” — Justin Donaldson

[00:05] Therapeutic Psilocybin and Intentional Healing

• After therapy alone proved too slow — he was too shut down to access what needed healing — Justin researched cannabis for PTSD and psilocybin-assisted therapy.

• Psilocybin works by expanding your capacity to hold and process difficult emotions. It allows you to feel fear or anger without shutting down completely.

• He used cannabis to manage day-to-day overwhelm and psilocybin in structured sessions alongside therapy to confront deep trauma.

• He views his nuanced relationship with substances through one key lens: intentionality, not morality. “What are we using them for?” is the only question that matters.

Key Insight: “Magic mushrooms increase your capacity for emotional processing. So if you were to sort of get scared and you get too scared and you shut down, if you’re on magic mushrooms, you get scared and you can hold it.” — Justin Donaldson

[09:00] The Point of No Return — When You No Longer Need Anything

• Over about 18 months of serious work, Justin stopped shutting down, stopped having rage outbursts, and began truly listening to his wife and children without defensiveness.

• He reached a place where he could process emotions entirely on his own — without needing a substance to expand his capacity to hold them.

• He describes psychedelics as having an inherent “violence” — you’re not in control, and once taken, you must surrender to whatever comes up.

• Substance-free for two years, he frames it simply: the situations that were once overwhelming no longer are. The need dissolved with the wound.

Key Insight: “It got to a point where I just didn’t need those anymore and I can just do the emotional work myself now and have big change and big effects.” — Justin Donaldson

[16:00] Becoming an Artist — From YouTube to 40,000 Followers

• Justin taught himself to paint during a year-long visa wait in America — sitting down with YouTube and oil paints, going outside to find and paint beautiful places.

• After years of freelance gigs and a brief stint coding for a game startup, he committed fully to painting — doing Upwork jobs, bridal portraits, and everything in between.

• Mentors told him to cut everything that wasn’t nature-based — the work he truly loved. He listened, and within a month went from 400 to 40,000 Instagram followers.

• Nature was his escape from the oppressive environment he grew up in. Painting it wasn’t career strategy — it was connection to the peace he had always needed.

Key Insight: “As somebody who grew up in a very oppressive environment, going out into nature and finding things that are just like inherently very beautiful is what was kind of like my escape, the be all end all.” — Justin Donaldson

[21:00] From 40 Hours to 90 Minutes — Surrendering to the Gut

• As his inner healing progressed, Justin’s painting transformed — from 40-hour digital commissions to 90-minute gouache landscapes painted from life.

• Painting from life forces a merciless surrender. Your brain turns off, and something will come out the end — great or terrible. Either way, you finish.

• Counterintuitively, working from the gut made his analytical mind more powerful. Finishing more paintings faster means more learning and more refinement.

• The same healing that allowed him to stop reacting and start listening in his relationships is what freed his creative process entirely.

Key Insight: “Being in my gut has made my head more powerful.” — Justin Donaldson

[23:00] Detaching from Right and Wrong — The Process Philosophy

• Letting go of outcomes is the core of Justin’s practice. Latching onto the end result is exactly what stops you from moving forward.

• When you frame creative work through right and wrong, you stop being able to learn. You either dismiss the good or reject the bad — neither teaches you anything.

• True learning comes from curiosity: “Oh, that’s interesting that it happened that way. I could probably use this over here.” That’s the space where real skill grows.

• Because he paints so many — including many terrible ones — he also regularly reaches the end of a painting and thinks: “How did I do that? That’s awesome.” That feeling is only possible when judgment is removed.

Key Insight: “Detaching from right and wrong is process. And then detaching it from right or wrong as outcome, you actually end up being able to make a lot better decisions and really refine your process.” — Justin Donaldson

[29:00] The Art of Deep Listening — Being Both Artist and Audience

• What lights Justin up most is the convergence — when what he’s seeing, what he’s feeling, and what he’s painting all align at once. “That’s when it kind of starts to feel a bit like magic.”

• Art doesn’t exist without the viewer. “The art doesn’t exist without me and my perception of it doesn’t exist without it.” Every creative act is also an act of psychology.

• The goal is to hold both roles at once — the artist with deep intention, and the viewer with completely fresh eyes, receiving the work honestly and openly.

• This is the same capacity he built in therapy — to stop being reactive, to listen deeply, to receive what’s actually happening without defense.

Key Insight: “Getting everything to line up so that what I’m seeing and what I’m feeling and then what I’m painting kind of all have this convergence. And when you can get them all to sit in that spot where they converge, that’s when it kind of starts to feel a bit like magic.” — Justin Donaldson

Key Quotes

“My body was like, all right, you’re safe now. Now you got to deal with all your stuff.” — Justin Donaldson

“It got to a point where I just didn’t need those anymore and I can just do the emotional work myself now and have big change and big effects.” — Justin Donaldson

“Detaching from right and wrong is process. And then detaching it from right or wrong as outcome, you actually end up being able to make a lot better decisions and really refine your process.” — Justin Donaldson

“Being in my gut has made my head more powerful.” — Justin Donaldson

“Getting everything to line up so that what I’m seeing and what I’m feeling and then what I’m painting kind of all have this convergence. And when you can get them all to sit in that spot where they converge, that’s when it kind of starts to feel a bit like magic.” — Justin Donaldson

Resources Mentioned

• Psilocybin-assisted therapy for PTSD — Justin references peer-reviewed studies on psilocybin’s effectiveness in expanding emotional processing capacity during trauma therapy

• Cannabis and PTSD research — Studies on cannabis use for PTSD symptom management

• Gouache painting — Justin’s primary medium for landscape work, which he also teaches online

• Plein air painting (painting from life outdoors) — The practice that transformed Justin’s relationship with time, process, and creative surrender

• City of Rocks, New Mexico — Justin’s current painting location at time of recording; a dramatic natural formation he describes as canyon-like and endlessly fascinating

Where to Find Justin Donaldson

Justin is actively building his presence and shares his work and teaching across multiple platforms. Search for Justin Donaldson artist on any of the following:

Justin Donaldson

Artist

• Instagram — Landscape painting and process work

• YouTube — Building a video repertoire (his current focus)

• Twitter/X — Active presence

• Online Courses — Landscape painting and gouache instruction via Zoom, with weekly feedback sessions open to all students regardless of when they enrolled

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for his extraordinary honesty and openness. Sharing a journey this personal — from growing up in a cult to finding joy, presence, and creative freedom — takes real courage. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible and meaningful.

Ready to Remove What’s Blocking Your Best Work?

Justin’s story is a powerful reminder that the path to your greatest creative work isn’t about doing more — it’s about releasing what’s in the way.

He found his freedom through years of honest inner work. And when he finally cleared the noise — the trauma, the reactivity, the need to control outcomes — what was waiting on the other side was clarity. Presence. And work that actually felt like magic.

For many of us, alcohol plays the same role that Justin’s shutdown did. It keeps us from feeling. It keeps us from listening. It keeps us from that place where what we’re seeing, what we’re feeling, and what we’re creating finally converge.

That convergence is what The Sober Creative Method™ is built for.

It’s a 90-day journey designed to remove alcohol as the barrier between you and your greatest work. Not because drinking is wrong — but because you deserve to find out what’s possible when nothing is in the way.

Learn More

P.S. You can access all previous episodes here. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you’re always welcome here.

Her story challenges everything the traditional recovery industry teaches about what it takes to heal. A classical pianist who performed her honors recital at 17, Elif was put on the streets by her mother shortly after that performance. Years of spiritual, physical, and emotional isolation led her to what she describes as “almost like a suicide thing”—addiction as a slow form of giving up.

But through spiritual intervention, energy medicine, and a deep commitment to understanding the science behind healing, Elif discovered that recovery isn’t about labeling yourself as an addict forever.

It’s about self-rediscovery.

Elif had the beautiful intention to start our conversation off with the sounds of a Tibetan bowl, but the audio suppression during our live portion made it difficult to hear. She recorded this audio separately and I wanted to include that here for you. Enjoy!

[05:28] The Path to Addiction: Rejection and Hopelessness at 17

Elif shares the devastating catalyst that led her to addiction—being rejected and abandoned by her mother immediately after her honors recital at age 17. The combination of abandonment and other life challenges created a sense of complete hopelessness that eventually led to cocaine use as a form of slow suicide.

• After her honors recital at 17, Elif’s mother decided she didn’t want her anymore and put her on the streets

• Her mother never really spoke with her again

• Combined with other challenges, this led Elif to lose all hope and sense of purpose

• She felt incredibly alone “in all ways, spiritual, physical, emotionally”

• Addiction became a form of slow suicide—a way of giving up on life

• This continued for three years until she was ready to make a different choice

Key Insight: “Addiction was just a way for me. It was almost like a suicide thing.” - Elif Ahmad

[06:40] Spiritual Awakening and Divine Guidance

During active addiction, Elif discovered psychic Sylvia Brown and became fascinated by spiritual connection. This curiosity led to a prayer that changed everything—and opened the door to spiritual guidance that would teach her how to heal without traditional treatment.

• While in active addiction, Elif watched psychic Sylvia Brown on Montel Williams and read her books

• She became interested in developing spiritual abilities and connecting with the non-physical world

• One day she prayed to “mother God” (the feminine aspect of creator): “I just really don’t want to do this anymore. I’m ready to move on.”

• She truly felt ready in her heart

• Within 24 hours, her desire for cocaine completely stopped—”it was like any cords that were attaching me to addiction had been removed”

• The non-physical world then taught her how to replace nutrients depleted during addiction

• She made a promise to Spirit: “If you show me how to heal, I will go on and show others what you have shown me”

• Spent the next 14 years researching allopathic medicine, holistic medicine, naturopathic medicine, energy medicine, mind-body-spirit connection, and meditation

Key Insight: “There is so much help and so much love and support, unconditional love and support from the non-physical realm that is waiting for you. And all you need to do is ask.” - Elif Ahmad

[08:16] The Shower Experience: Choosing Transformation

Elif describes the pivotal moment in the shower where she felt the walls closing in and knew she had to make a conscious choice between continuing on her destructive path or opening herself to transformation and healing. This moment of surrender became the turning point of her life.

• While in the shower one night, Elif felt the walls closing in on her

• She intuitively knew she had to make a decision: continue her current path or open to transformation

• She turned her palms over and said: “Universe, please help me heal from this”

• In that instant, she felt what felt like a warm blanket being put on her shoulders

• In the depth of her physical heart, “it was like two chain links just reconnecting”

• Her life was never the same from that moment

• This experience of unconditional love became the foundation of her understanding that we are never truly alone

Key Insight: “I broke down and bawled my eyes out in that moment because the unconditional love that I felt was something I had never experienced on this physical earth plane by anyone.” - Elif Ahmad

[11:59] Beyond the Medical Model: Epigenetics and Real Healing

Elif boldly challenges the traditional addiction treatment model, arguing it’s designed to keep customers rather than create healing. She explains the revolutionary science of epigenetics—that we are literally above our genetic expressions, meaning if a trigger created a disease state, we have the power to heal it.

• The current approach to recovery is based on old science and a medical model “intended to keep customers”

• Newer sciences (epigenetics, neuroscience, neuroplasticity, energy medicine, science of sound) prove we are far more powerful than we believe

• Everything we say and think bounces back into our subconscious and affects biology at the cellular level

• Every state of disease is a gene expression triggered by something unresolved

• Must address thought patterns and unresolved traumas

• The trigger is never physical—it’s always emotional/spiritual

Key Insight: “Addiction is not who you are. You are far greater. And your purpose on this earth plane is waiting for you to connect with it.” - Elif Ahmad

[16:42] Sound, Frequency, and Voice as Healing Tools

Elif explains her understanding of disease as disharmony in the body’s frequencies, why alcohol is called “spirits,” and how our voice is our most powerful tool for healing—connecting ancient wisdom with modern physics and practical application.

• The body is made of frequencies and sounds

• Your voice is your most powerful tool—we can literally talk ourselves into or out of anything

• Need to be mindful of self-talk—use your voice to lift yourself up, motivate, encourage, and inspire yourself

• Why alcohol is called “spirits”: addiction (alcohol, drugs, gambling, anything) lowers our frequency

• In a low vibrational state, we attract people and situations that are not good

• Any state of disease is a chance to rediscover who we really are, claim our authentic self, and step into our power

Key Insight: “All recovery is, friends, is self-rediscovery. That’s it.” - Elif Ahmad

[30:14] Returning to Childlike Wonder and Spiritual Connection

Elif explains the neuroscience of childhood programming and makes a powerful case for returning to the childlike qualities of openness, curiosity, resilience, and spiritual connection that we lose as we grow older and accumulate layers of trauma and conditioning.

• The Theta State: Up until age 7, we operate in a theta wave state (like the meditation brain wave state—a much slower frequency)

• When we were little and fell down, we just got back up

• Instead of dusting ourselves off when we fall, it becomes something way more intense, and we struggle

• There is “so much more support and love than we see with our physical eyes”

Key Insight: “Jesus, or as I call him, Yeshua, you know, said you need to be childlike. And in a sense that we need to be open and curious and have that sense of wonder again.” - Elif Ahmad

Key Quotes

“Addiction was just a way for me. It was almost like a suicide thing.” - Elif Ahmad

“I really felt that in my heart that I was ready and not even 24 hours later, boom, it just stopped. I didn’t want it anymore.” - Elif Ahmad

“I broke down and bawled my eyes out in that moment because the unconditional love that I felt was something I had never experienced on this physical earth plane by anyone.” - Elif Ahmad

“There is so much help and so much love and support, unconditional love and support from the non-physical realm that is waiting for you. And all you need to do is ask.” - Elif Ahmad

“Addiction is not who you are. You are far greater. And your purpose on this earth plane is waiting for you to connect with it.” - Elif Ahmad

“All recovery is, friends, is self-rediscovery. That’s it.” - Elif Ahmad

“You are loved. You are powerful. You are amazing. You are absolutely beautiful souls. You just need to remember that.” - Elif Ahmad

Resources Mentioned

• Books:

  • “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” by Dr. Joe Dispenza (neuroscience, quantum physics, gene expression)

  • “Resonant Currents” by Wisdom House Publishing (understanding energy and frequency)

• Spiritual Teachers:

  • Sylvia Brown (psychic who appeared on Montel Williams)

• Sciences/Fields:

  • Epigenetics

  • Neuroscience and neuroplasticity

  • Energy medicine

  • Sound healing/science of sound

• Healing Modalities:

  • Reiki

  • Sound healing with Tibetan bowls and tuning forks

  • Hypnosis

Where to Find Elif Ahmad

Elif Ahmad

My name is Elif. Harmony is who we are. Creator of the Musical Life Show . Music means "harmony". Musical Life = " harmonious life". Classical pianist, sound healing. Here, I share my deepest insights and soul knowledge.

• Facebook: Musical Life

• Email: musicandsound2025@gmail.com

• Facebook Messenger: Available for questions and further conversation about topics discussed

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her extraordinary compassion and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Your Non-Traditional Path Might Be Waiting

Elif’s story reveals something essential: recovery doesn’t have to follow someone else’s script. Whether your path includes spiritual practice, creative expression, traditional treatment, or something entirely your own—what matters is that you’re ready to choose transformation.

If you’re sensing that alcohol is blocking your creative potential and personal growth, The Sober Creative Method™ offers a structured 90-day journey designed specifically for those looking to create a new path. Using the RELEASE → CREATE → BECOME framework, you’ll discover what’s possible when you remove alcohol as the barrier to your greatest work.

This isn’t about fitting into someone else’s definition of recovery—it’s about finding your own path home to yourself.

Book a free call to discuss more

lives above a bar. Not near one—above one. The ground floor of her home is De Amer, a cultural cafe and music venue with velvet curtains, a fully stocked bar, and decades of history. For a woman navigating sobriety, this might sound like an impossible setup. But for Inge, a trauma therapist and medicine woman from the Netherlands, it became the perfect teacher.

Inge spent most of her life terrified of being seen. She named her practice after a tree because it felt safer than using her own name. She called herself a regression therapist because it was explainable, professional, contained. But the work she actually does goes far deeper—guiding people across thresholds from conscious problems to unconscious origins, from who they think they should be to who they actually are. When she finally stepped into her truth as a medicine woman and gatekeeper, the fear of rejection showed up louder than ever.

In this conversation, Inge shares her journey from a bottle of whiskey waiting on the counter every night to choosing clarity over comfort. From a throat cancer diagnosis that forced her to face what she’d been suppressing to living above the very place where others gather to drink. This isn’t a story about willpower. It’s about what becomes possible when you stop performing safety and start living from a place of intentional choice.

Show Notes

[03:22] The Beginning: A Bottle of Sherry at 14

Inge traces her drinking history back to age 14, when she bought herself a bottle of sherry while her parents were away for the weekend. She found it disgusting but drank it anyway. Over the years, her relationship with alcohol shifted—sometimes she didn’t drink at all, and other times she used it to numb herself when life felt too challenging or she was deeply unhappy.

Key takeaways:

• Early drinking wasn’t about enjoying alcohol but about the effect it produced

• Periods of not drinking alternated with periods of using alcohol to cope

• The pattern of numbing uncomfortable feelings established early

Key Insight: “A fear of being visible and not living the life that I would like for myself. And this would show up as an uneasiness in me.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[05:11] The Performance of Safety: Hiding in Plain Sight

While married with two young children and working as a housewife, Inge kept telling herself she was happy and that this was the life she chose. But deep down, she knew it wasn’t how she was meant to live. Rather than being honest with herself, she used alcohol to avoid feeling the discomfort of living inauthentically.

Key takeaways:

• Alcohol became a tool to avoid confronting the gap between her real life and her desired life

• The things she truly wanted to do required visibility and showing up authentically

• Fear of being visible kept her trapped in a life that didn’t fit

Key Insight: “With things that I really wanted to do, I would have to be visible. I would have to show up. And, yeah, that was so scary that I just was not going to do that.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[06:42] The Wake-Up Call: Throat Cancer and the Truth

Nine and a half years ago, Inge was diagnosed with a throat tumor. When the oncologist asked if she drank, she lied and said “the odd glass.” In reality, she always had a bottle of whiskey ready and was drinking far more than was healthy while still functioning in her job and family life. This diagnosis made her realize that alcohol likely contributed to the tumor, and that the tumor itself was connected to not expressing herself—keeping everything “just below the throat.”

Key takeaways:

• The physical manifestation appeared in the very place connected to self-expression

• Inge recognized the connection between suppressing her voice and the throat tumor

• She was a high-functioning drinker who maintained all external responsibilities

• The diagnosis forced her to see the truth she’d been avoiding

Key Insight: “I also realized that when things show up here, it has to do with expressing oneself. I wasn’t expressing myself. I was keeping everything, well, just below the throat. I wouldn’t speak up. I wouldn’t say what I really wanted. I was making myself small. Drinking was a way of coping with that.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[09:05] Living Above the Bar: An Unexpected Teacher

For over eight years, Inge has lived directly above De Amer, a bar in her home. When she first joined The Sober Creative Reset, she walked past shelves of liquor every single day. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, she began to see it as an opportunity to practice. The bar is run by her partner, and being present there—sitting at the bar, having conversations while others drink—became part of her sobriety journey rather than a threat to it.

Key takeaways:

• Living above a bar forced daily confrontation with alcohol rather than avoidance

• She learned to be present in spaces where alcohol is consumed without drinking

• The environment became a practice ground for confidence in her choice

• Her partner’s support made the living situation workable

Key Insight: “It’s a great practice to just be present at the bar and be okay with them drinking and me not drinking. And after going through this past month, I even have more confidence in that. Like, this is my choice. I’m not drinking. I don’t need to and I don’t want to.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[14:29] From Hiding to Medicine Woman: Reclaiming Her Identity

For years, Inge hid her true work behind safer, more explainable titles. She named her practice Thuja (after a tree) because using her own name felt too vulnerable. She called herself a regression therapist because it was professional and contained. About a year ago, she made the shift—changed her business name to Praktijk van Inge and started calling herself what she actually is: a medicine woman, gatekeeper, and guide.

Key takeaways:

• Fear of rejection was her lifelong theme, showing up in how she presented her work

• Using a tree name and clinical titles kept her safe but inauthentic

• Stepping into her truth as a medicine woman required confronting deep fears

• The work she does—guiding people through plant medicine ceremonies and deep subconscious healing—deserves to be named accurately

Key Insight: “I was terrified of being rejected. And I see that at work as well. And I named my business after a tree, the Thuja, because that felt less vulnerable than using my own name.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[18:12] The Support System: Partnership and Community

Inge’s partner also participated in The Sober Creative Reset, creating a shared experience that strengthened both their individual journeys and their relationship. This mutual support proved especially powerful when planning their upcoming vacation—for the first time, they looked at each other and decided together not to pack bottles of whiskey and wine for the trip.

Key takeaways:

• Having a partner who participates creates accountability and shared experience

• Previous vacations always included bringing alcohol as a given

• Making the choice together to leave alcohol behind felt like a significant milestone

• Community support through the reset experience provided additional reinforcement

Key Insight: “Previous holidays would always be have a bottle of whiskey, have a few bottles of wine with us. And this time we looked at each other and said, what are we going to do? And both of us went, uh-uh. We’ll leave them where they are in the store and have a holiday without alcohol. So that’s a big difference, yeah.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[18:30] Creative Expression: Shields from Ceremony

Inge creates felt shields that hang on the wall behind her, made after significant ceremonial experiences like sweat lodges or ayahuasca ceremonies. She works with wet felt and wool, building each piece from scratch using her hands, choosing colors intuitively. The process starts with an idea, but the work creates itself as she goes—never coming out exactly as she pictured it beforehand. After the felting process, she adds detail work with her sewing machine. These shields serve as visible representations of profound internal experiences.

Key takeaways:

• Creates art as a way to make special ceremonial experiences visible and tangible

• Works with wet felt and wool, building pieces entirely by hand from scratch

• The creative process is intuitive and organic, flowing beyond initial concepts

• Art serves as integration work, making internal transformation external

Key Insight: “When I have certain experiences that are very special to me, usually they have to do with some kind of ceremony. It could either be a sweat lodge or plant medicine. I like to make something out of it, to have it visible.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[26:57] What Fills the Space: Creativity Returns

When asked what occupied the time previously spent drinking, Inge described returning to walking and her Qigong practice—things she knew were important but often deprioritized when caught in the cycle of thinking she needed to do other “more important” things. Most notably, she started drawing again in the evenings for relaxation. She summarized the shift simply: “Creativity definitely started to flow again.”

Key takeaways:

• Physical practices like walking and Qigong replaced evening drinking

• Drawing returned as a creative outlet and source of evening relaxation

• The tendency to deprioritize self-care diminished without alcohol

• Creativity flourished in the space that opened up

Key Insight: “I started drawing again so that’s you know in the evenings for relaxation I love that stuff...creativity definitely started to flow again.” - Inge Van De Graaf

[31:46] The Research Shows: Consciousness Matters More Than Perfection

Inge referenced a research program called Christy that tracked participants’ drinking behavior through questionnaires once or twice a year. The outcome wasn’t that everyone quit drinking altogether, but that most people were drinking less and were more conscious of alcohol and the role it played in their lives. This perspective shift emphasizes awareness and intentionality over absolute abstinence.

Key takeaways:

• Research supports that increased consciousness around alcohol creates lasting change

• Complete abstinence isn’t the only measure of success

• Awareness of alcohol’s role in life leads to more intentional choices

• Regular check-ins and resets throughout the year compound the impact

Key Insight: “One of the outcomes of the program was that definitely not everybody quit drinking altogether, but most of the people were drinking less, and they were more conscious of alcohol and the role it played in their lives. So when you’re doing these resets throughout the year, imagine what an impact that can have.” - Inge Van De Graaf

Key Quotes

“A fear of being visible and not living the life that I would like for myself. And this would show up as an uneasiness in me.” - Inge Van De Graaf

“I also realized that when things show up here, it has to do with expressing oneself. I wasn’t expressing myself. I was keeping everything, well, just below the throat. I wouldn’t speak up. I wouldn’t say what I really wanted. I was making myself small. Drinking was a way of coping with that.” - Inge Van De Graaf

“With things that I really wanted to do, I would have to be visible. I would have to show up. And, yeah, that was so scary that I just was not going to do that.” - Inge Van De Graaf

“It’s a great practice to just be present at the bar and be okay with them drinking and me not drinking. And after going through this past month, I even have more confidence in that. Like, this is my choice. I’m not drinking. I don’t need to and I don’t want to.” - Inge Van De Graaf

“I started drawing again so that’s you know in the evenings for relaxation I love that stuff...creativity definitely started to flow again.” - Inge Van De Graaf

Resources Mentioned

• De Reis naar Binnen - Inge’s practice name, meaning “the journey inward”

• Praktijk van Inge - Inge’s current business name

• Christy Research Program - Referenced study tracking alcohol consciousness and behavior changes

• Qigong - Movement practice Inge returned to during the reset

• The Sober Creative Reset - 31-day program Inge participated in

Where to Find Inge Van De Graaf

Inge van de Graaf

Nuchtere inzichten over traumaverwerking, spiritualiteit en authentiek leven. Voor gevoelige mensen die vastzitten in beperkende patronen en die verlangen naar de vrijheid om zichzelf te zijn.

Inge Van De Graaf is a trauma therapist, medicine woman, and gatekeeper practicing in the forests of Drenthe, Netherlands. She works with regression therapy, plant medicine ceremonies, and deep subconscious healing through her practice, Praktijk van Inge.

Website and contact information available upon request for those interested in her work.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and to everyone who joined us live for this conversation. A special thank you to for her extraordinary courage and honesty. Your willingness to be visible makes these conversations possible.

Your Turn: The Sober Creative Reset

If Inge’s story resonates with you—if you recognize yourself in the gap between who you’re presenting and who you actually are, or if you’re curious about what might shift when you remove alcohol from the equation for 31 days—the next Sober Creative Reset launches in April.

This isn’t about willpower or perfection. It’s not about labeling yourself or committing to forever. It’s about creating space to see what’s actually there when you’re not numbing, performing, or staying small.

The reset includes daily prompts designed to be short and actionable, weekly group calls with guided meditations, and a community of individuals exploring the same territory. Some participants stop drinking entirely. Others drink less. All of them become more conscious of the role alcohol plays in their lives.

Join the waitlist to be notified

What Georgia discovered through her own messy journey transformed how she helps others. The women she works with are high-achievers who’ve succeeded at almost everything else in their lives. They know an apple is healthier than chocolate. They don’t lack willpower or information. They lack understanding of why they reach for food—or alcohol—when emotions run high.

In this conversation, Georgia shares the surprising parallels between our relationship with food and alcohol, why midlife women are especially vulnerable to these patterns, and the simple practices that help us find joy without numbing. Her insights cut straight to the heart of what we’re really seeking when we reach for comfort.

Show Notes

[00:00] Georgia’s Background and Relationship with Alcohol

Georgia opens up about her university years—drinking until she was unwell, working evening bar shifts, then drinking again the next night. She describes putting herself in dangerous situations while young and feeling invincible.

• Got alcohol “out of her system” quite young and lost interest afterward

• Now notices even one drink disrupts her sleep significantly

• Her partner is teetotal, which naturally discourages drinking

Key Insight: “I always feel better that way. I sleep better. I wake up and I’m less of a monster the next day if I’ve had good sleep.”

[06:20] How Alcohol Affects Women Differently (Especially in Midlife)

Georgia shares her expertise on menopause and alcohol interactions, explaining why the effects feel rougher as we age.

• Women have a reduced ability to metabolize alcohol, so it stays in the system longer

• Poor sleep from alcohol impacts hunger, fullness, emotional regulation, and cravings the next day

• Creates a cycle: alcohol disrupts sleep, leads to caffeine and sugar cravings, which disrupts sleep again

• Hot flashes are more frequent and intense with higher alcohol consumption

Key Insight: “You don’t wake up the next day kind of thinking I can’t wait to eat a salad. You wake up and it’s like I just want carbs and sugar and salty food.”

[10:17] The Menopause Transition and Increased Vulnerability

Georgia explains why midlife is a particularly challenging time and why women often reach for alcohol during this phase.

• Average menopause age is 51-52, but perimenopause can last 5-15 years

• The biggest suicide risk for women is at age 52—right when menopause typically occurs

• Women tend to drink more during this transition due to uncomfortable symptoms and life pressures

• More volume consumed plus reduced metabolism equals compounded effects

Key Insight: “It’s a time of life when women tend to drink a little bit more than perhaps they would have.”

[16:22] From Archaeology to Psychotherapy: Georgia’s Unexpected Path

Georgia shares her unconventional journey through multiple disciplines to arrive at her current work.

• Started as an archaeology student, then pivoted to personal training

• Noticed clients struggling with binge eating couldn’t be helped through exercise alone

• Qualified as a nutritionist but realized clients already knew what to eat

• Now training as a psychotherapist to address the why behind food behaviors

Key Insight: “Everybody knows that an apple is full of fiber and vitamins. It’s not about knowledge. It’s really about why we’re using food the way that we’re using it.”

[19:04] The Purpose Behind Comfort Eating and Drinking

Georgia breaks down the psychological functions that food and alcohol serve—and why we keep returning to them even when we don’t like the results.

• Both can provide distraction from emotions we don’t want to engage with

• Both can numb feelings we’re experiencing

• Both serve as procrastination from coping with difficult emotions

• Both offer unwinding and de-stressing at the end of the day

• The brain can mistake “absence of pain” for joy and start seeking that out

Key Insight: “Drinking or eating can take away the pain for a while and we can start to mistake the absence of pain for the closest to joy that we can reach.”

[23:00] Healthy Practices for Difficult Moments

Georgia offers practical approaches for emotional regulation that don’t involve numbing.

• Practice genuine gratitude for small things that actually gave you something that day

• Try “mindful moments”—running through all five senses to ground yourself in your body

• Focus on something close, then something far away to zoom out from the situation

• Deep breathing when feeling reactive

Key Insight: “No day is 100% bad... there’s always a mix of the two. Very few of us will live a day that is nothing but bad or nothing but good.”

[32:14] Creativity and Simple Joys

Georgia shares how she incorporates creativity into her daily life and the power of returning to childhood pleasures.

• Found a coloring book from COVID lockdown and now colors before cooking dinner each evening

• Enjoys salsa dancing, painting things, and nurturing plants

• Puzzles, friendship bracelets, skipping rope—things we did as kids for no reason other than fun

Key Insight: “Joy doesn’t—you don’t have to earn your joy. We think we do. We think we have to do something and then I can have the chocolate or achieve something and then I can buy myself some new jeans. But sometimes it’s like, you could just color that in right now if you wanted to for five minutes just because.”

Key Quotes

“We don’t do things that don’t serve a purpose. We certainly don’t repeatedly do those things. So a lot of the time it’s kind of understanding, well actually what does this—how does this serve me? What’s it doing for me?” — Georgia Kohlhoff

“Your brain’s doing its best to get you through something.” — Georgia Kohlhoff

“All the childhood stuff that you used to do that had no purpose other than just it was fun, are great things to bring back in.” — Georgia Kohlhoff

“We all get so busy being an adult and getting on with the stuff that we don’t make time for the fun stuff.” — Georgia Kohlhoff

Resources Mentioned

• Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hansen — Book on negativity bias and rewiring the brain for happiness

• Mindful Moments Practice — Grounding technique using all five senses (see, hear, feel, smell, taste)

• The Three U’s Framework — Georgia’s approach: Understand, Unlearn, Unlock

Where to Find Georgia

Flourishing Health

For high-achieving women who know what to eat but can't figure out why they can't do it.

By Georgia Kohlhoff

• Website: flourishinghealth.uk

• Instagram: @georgia.flourishinghealth

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her extraordinary openness and practical wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Ready to Reclaim Your Creative Energy?

Georgia’s insights about food and emotional regulation apply directly to our relationship with alcohol. Both serve the same purpose: numbing, distracting, and providing false comfort when we don’t know how to sit with difficult emotions.

If you’re ready to explore what’s possible when you stop numbing and start creating, The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey to remove alcohol as the barrier to your greatest work.

Because the creative breakthrough you’re seeking isn’t on the other side of another drink—it’s on the other side of clarity.

Learn More

For years, Paul worked as a dance teacher traveling the world, and alcohol remained his constant wind-down ritual. He always felt a hole inside that he tried to fill with substances, sex, and other addictive patterns. Eventually, he recognized the problem and told his partner he needed to stop.

But removing alcohol was just the beginning. In his late 40s and early 50s, Paul embarked on several intentional psychedelic journeys—not for recreation, but as medicine alongside EMDR therapy to clear the trauma, shame, and grief underneath his drinking.

Today, he facilitates The Men’s Circle, where men practice showing up without performance, learning to regulate their nervous systems and build real connection.

His journey reveals that sobriety doesn’t follow one prescribed path—and healing means removing what harms us while still doing the deeper work of repair.

Show Notes

[02:08] Growing Up Gen X: Early Experiences with Substances

Paul shares his California upbringing in the 1970s and his early relationship with alcohol and cocaine.

• Started experimenting with alcohol at age 12-13, introduced to cocaine at 16

• Grew up in an environment of “well-regulated alcoholism” where family members were functional but consistently drinking

• Used substances to fill an internal void he always felt

Key Insight: “I always felt a hole in me, with alcohol and substances and whatever I could find, including, you know, sex and all kinds of other things like that. You know, it’s just that addiction cycle was just heavy within me.”

[04:00] The Decision to Get Sober

Halfway through his dance career, Paul recognized his drinking had become a problem and decided to stop.

• Made the decision with the support of his partner

• His father had been sober for 10-12 years at that point through AA

• Tried AA but found support through family and friends instead

• Has been intentionally sober for 30 years

Key Insight: “I said to my partner, I said, look, I think I’ve got a problem. I think this has become too much a part of my life. And I’ve got to I’ve got to stop this.”

[05:24] Peeling the Trauma Onion: Behaviors vs. Unmet Needs

Paul explains the concept of the “trauma onion” and how healing requires moving from behaviors to understanding deeper needs.

• The outer layer is behaviors (addiction, compulsions)

• The next layer is unmet needs driving those behaviors

• The innermost layers are belief systems and attachment wounds

• Sobriety alone doesn’t address the core wounds that created the need for substances

Key Insight: “On the outside of that onion is behaviors, you know, and on the inside, the next layer in is unmet needs, right? And so I had to figure out what my unmet needs were that were causing those behaviors on the outside.”

[08:17] Psychedelics as Healing Tools: Intentional Work After Decades Sober

In his late 40s and early 50s, Paul used psychedelics intentionally for trauma healing, not recreation.

• Combined psychedelic journeys with EMDR therapy for maximum effectiveness

• Used these experiences to access and process deeper layers of trauma, shame, and grief

• Emphasized these were intentional healing practices, not recreational use

• The work addressed wounds that had been underneath his drinking all along

Key Insight: “In his late 40s and early 50s, he embarked on several intentional psychedelic journeys for healing, not recreation, using these experiences alongside EMDR therapy to clear trauma, shame, and grief that had been underneath his drinking all along.”

[18:27] The Nervous System Revolution: Why Regulation Matters More Than Willpower

Paul discusses how understanding nervous system regulation changed his approach to healing and working with others.

• Most healing work focuses on thoughts and behaviors but ignores nervous system states

• True change requires learning to regulate your nervous system, not just changing your thinking

• Co-regulation with safe others is essential for healing

• The body keeps score and must be included in any real transformation

Key Insight: “Most men don’t need fixing—they need to be less alone, more regulated, and more connected over time.”

[26:31] The Loneliness Epidemic: Why Men Struggle to Make Friends

Paul addresses the crisis of male friendship and why initiation feels so uncomfortable for men.

• Women tend to have multiple friendships with built-in redundancy

• Men have forgotten how to make friends and feel intense discomfort with male-to-male initiation

• Cultural homophobia and toxic masculinity make reaching out to other men feel “yucky”

• Men often dump all emotional needs onto romantic partners, which isn’t fair or sustainable

Key Insight: “We forgot how to make friends. And now initiation with another man feels yucky. It feels awful to try to initiate with another man. Even if you’re having a conversation and say, hey, Josh, I really like this conversation. I’d love to continue it. Could we have coffee sometime or something like that? Even that feels so uncomfortable to most men.”

[30:22] Small Groups and Co-Regulation: Building Sustainable Connection

The conversation wraps with reflections on the value of small, intimate groups for nervous system regulation.

• Both Josh and Paul prefer small groups over large social gatherings

• Small groups allow for co-regulation rather than overwhelming the nervous system

• Consistency matters more than intensity—regular connection with safe people is transformative

• Paul maintains a 40-year friendship where they meet every Sunday to talk about life

Key Insight: “I think just within the small groups that I pick, there just have to be other people that I can co-regulate with, right. There has to be, it can’t be a bunch of non-regulated dudes hanging out together because that just ups the ante of all the nervous system stuff.”

Key Quotes

“I always felt a hole in me, with alcohol and substances and whatever I could find, including, you know, sex and all kinds of other things like that. You know, it’s just that addiction cycle was just heavy within me.” - Paul Overton

“We all have this little onion we need to peel. On the outside of that onion is behaviors, you know, and on the inside, the next layer in is unmet needs, right? And so I had to figure out what my unmet needs were that were causing those behaviors on the outside.” - Paul Overton

“A lot of men aren’t closed off by nature. They’re just well-trained.” - Paul Overton

“We forgot how to make friends. And now initiation with another man feels yucky. It feels awful to try to initiate with another man.” - Paul Overton

“Most men don’t need fixing—they need to be less alone, more regulated, and more connected over time.” - Paul Overton

Resources Mentioned

• EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

• The Men’s Circle - Paul’s men’s group, meets twice weekly (once online, once in-person for walks)

• Nervous System States: Ventral vagal (safe/social), Sympathetic (fight/flight), Dorsal vagal (shutdown/collapse)

• Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy - Used intentionally as medicine for trauma processing

Where to Find Paul Overton

Trauma informed support for men seeking stability and connection.

Ground offers support for men navigating stress, isolation, and overload. This work helps men slow the pace, reduce internal pressure, and show up more fully with themselves and the people they care about.

http://www.groundmenswork.com

He currently offers a paid tier but everyone gets the same content free right now. He welcomes subscribers, comments, and engagement.

Paul Overton

Helping men drop performance, untangle conditioning, and return to presence, honesty, and a grounded sense of self.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation and to for his extraordinary honesty and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

From Removing Substances to Restoring Capacity

Paul finished his dance teaching career while drinking. He could function. But the real work began when he started peeling back the layers—understanding what the alcohol was covering, why the hole was there in the first place.

Without alcohol, Paul started doing EMDR. He used psychedelic medicine. He began facilitating The Men’s Circle. He learned about nervous system regulation. His capacity didn’t just grow—it opened to work he couldn’t have done while braced.

If you’re sensing that alcohol is keeping something braced inside you, that friction is real. And it’s costing you more than productivity—it’s costing you the capacity to repair what’s underneath.

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey to help people remove alcohol as the barrier to their greatest work. Not about deprivation—about repair. Moving from functioning to restoring.

Learn more about The Sober Creative Method™

Today, Sam is a Full Professor of Creative Pedagogies at Edinburgh Napier University, founder of Consilience (the world’s first peer-reviewed science and poetry journal), and creator of Slow AI—a Substack newsletter with nearly 6,000 subscribers that challenges how we think about artificial intelligence. He’s secured a quarter-million-dollar research grant to study AI literacy and built a career at the intersections of science, poetry, and technology.

His journey reveals the difference between functioning and living—and how sobriety creates the space to figure out which one you’re actually doing.

Show Notes

[03:13] The Last Drink and the Doctor’s Advice

Sam’s sobriety began with a panic attack misdiagnosed as heart palpitations and a doctor’s casual suggestion that changed everything.

• December 22, 2007—Sam was 23, blacked out at his friend’s birthday party

• Went to hospital the next day with what felt like heart palpitations; turned out to be an anxiety attack

• Doctor’s advice: “Don’t drink for a month because you have an alcohol-induced anxiety attack”

• Sam stopped and realized “I don’t want to get back to this”

• Used to black out frequently—would wake up with no memory of the night before

“Basically, I remember exactly what happened. I blacked out. I used to black out a lot when I drank.”

[04:32] Playing the Fool: When Drinking Becomes Your Identity

Sam describes becoming “the clown and the fool and the joker”—a character people expected rather than who he actually was.

• Naturally extroverted—”an extrovert’s extrovert”—but drinking amplified certain traits into performance

• Examples: jumping into a canal and catching dysentery, necking a whole bottle of ouzo just to make people laugh

• Friends would say “Oh, it’s Sam, he’s doing something crazy again when he’s drunk”

• His wife has never seen him drink; many current friends haven’t either

• Still experiences social awkwardness at events, but his closest friends accommodate it naturally—like excluding him from alcohol bills on trips

“You end up becoming a version of yourself that’s not true.”

[08:17] “Might Not Even Be Here”: The Weight of That Decision

Sam reflects on the magnitude of quitting drinking, calling it “singularly the most important decision I’ve ever made in my life.”

• In his last year of university, made it to the final five for a TV presenter position on T4 (major UK station)

• Thought at the time: “If I ended up doing something like this, this would be the end of me”

• Now wakes up at 5am every day thinking “The day is going to be good”

• Says directly: might not even be here if he hadn’t made that decision

“It’s singularly the most important decision I’ve ever made in my life and I would say I would be a different person. Maybe not even be here, legitimately, if I hadn’t have made that decision.”

[12:03] The Mugging Sam Can’t Remember

Sam shares a chilling story about being mugged while drunk—with no memory of it happening.

• Woke up one morning, couldn’t find his watch

• Bank called asking if someone trying to use his card for a prawn sandwich and £50 cash was him

• Realized he’d been mugged the night before—followed across a park to his house, keys in the front door

• The attackers had been involved in knife attacks; Sam was “really lucky”

• Funny twist: wore a £10 watch, but remembered exactly what it looked like—person got six months for stealing it

[13:53] Functioning vs. Living: The Exponential Growth

Sam makes a critical distinction about what changed with sobriety—not just productivity, but capacity to actually live.

• Could function while drinking—finished top of his year, edited the newspaper, ran a radio station, played squash

• Since becoming sober: “My capacity to live has exponentially grown”

“You can function, right? You can function. Because you’re good at it and you can kind of do it in your sleep, but you’re doing yourself a disservice because that’s all you’re doing. You’re not living. You’re just functioning.”

[16:03] From Pure Science to the Liminal Spaces

Sobriety opened creative pathways Sam hadn’t explored—moving from atmospheric physics into interdisciplinary work.

• High school was “pure science”—maths, further maths, chemistry, physics

• Always interested in poetry and being in a band, but was driven down the science path

• When he became sober: became president of Theatre Society, went to Japan on a scholarship to study science and theatre intersections

• Started performing poetry publicly

• Research now explores science, poetry, and AI—”to help amplify voices of people who’ve traditionally been underserved and underheard”

“I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that if I had still been drinking, man.”

[19:29] 300 Newsletters Before Bed: Community as Coping

Sam shares his nightly routine that centers around connection and community building.

• Lives just outside Edinburgh in the hills; exercise and writing are his main outlets

• Before bed every night: goes through the 300 newsletters he subscribes to, likes them all, leaves meaningful comments on most

• On bad days: “everything will be fine because there’s Substack”

[21:31] Slow AI: Why Are We Accelerating?

Sam explains the philosophy behind Slow AI—challenging the mainstream narrative that AI should make us faster.

• Started when ChatGPT came out in October 2022; Sam tested it for poetry writing

• Realized it’s pattern recognition—good at strict forms, less good at meaning

• Many creators teach prompt engineering and AI usage well

• Started in July, now nearly 6,000 subscribers

“We’re using AI to accelerate output, but why the hell are we doing that, man? This is a tool. We should be using AI to free up time for ourselves so that we can have real human connections with other humans rather than just accelerate towards this meaningless output.”

[25:48] AI Literacy Isn’t About Better Prompts

Sam launched a paid tier the day before this interview—a year-long curriculum on critical AI literacy.

• AI literacy is NOT how to write good prompts—it’s “knowing when to use AI and when not to use AI”

• Year-long program with at least one monthly webinar

• Each session: discussion of peer-reviewed paper, testing prompts, then dialogue

• Based on Lev Vygotsky’s concept of “the more knowledgeable other”—knowledge and hierarchy are interchangeable, not top-down

• Goal: “use the tools to free back up more time for us to have meaningful human connections”

• All written content remains free; paid tier is about community learning

[29:30] The Joy of Recommending: Building Community Through Service

Sam gets genuine excitement from recommending books, films, and other people’s Substacks.

• Gets “goosebumps” thinking about recommending favorites like “100 Years of Solitude” (his favorite book)

• Intentionally recommends Substacks that aren’t on rising lists—people with less than several thousand views who “maybe need a bit of a boost”

• Recommendations often lead to collaborations

• References Vygotsky again: bringing people together creates “critical mass for meaningful education”

“I love community, man. Like that’s what my entire research is around and like what I’m about as well.”

[31:17] Sharpness and Fearlessness: How Sobriety Unlocked Creativity

Sam identifies two key ways sobriety increased his creative capacity.

• Sharpness: mental clarity and precision of thought

• Fearlessness: willingness to step outside expected roles and experiment

• Was “always the clown and the fool and the joker” but wanted to be “a bit more than that”

• Realizing he could step away from that role gave him courage to try new things

• Started performing poetry publicly in his mid-twenties

• Can dance till 3am sober—or leave at 12:20 when tired: “I know I’m tired, so I’m going home”

• Recognizes the moment when everyone’s drunk and he’s sober: “You’re just chatting shit. You’re not making sense to me.”

Key Quotes

“You end up becoming a version of yourself that’s not true.” - Sam Illingworth

“It’s singularly the most important decision I’ve ever made in my life and I would say I would be a different person. Maybe not even be here, legitimately, if I hadn’t have made that decision.” - Sam Illingworth

“You can function, right? You can function. Because you’re good at it and you can kind of do it in your sleep, but you’re doing yourself a disservice because that’s all you’re doing. You’re not living. You’re just functioning.” - Sam Illingworth

“I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that if I had still been drinking, man.” - Sam Illingworth

“We’re using AI to accelerate output, but why the hell are we doing that, man? This is a tool. We should be using AI to free up time for ourselves so that we can have real human connections with other humans rather than just accelerate towards this meaningless output.” - Sam Illingworth

Resources Mentioned

• Slow AI Newsletter - Started July 2024, nearly 6,000 subscribers

• Slow AI Curriculum for Critical AI Literacy - Year-long paid program (inaugural discount: 50 pounds/~70 USD)

• Consilience - World’s first peer-reviewed science and poetry journal

• 100 Years of Solitude - Sam’s favorite book

• Lev Vygotsky - Soviet psychologist whose concept of “the more knowledgeable other” informs Sam’s teaching

Where to Find Sam

Slow AI

Get weekly Slow AI prompts that help you think with more intention, create with less pressure, and develop a calmer, more human way of using AI.

By Sam Illingworth

• Sam’s promise: “If you DM me, I’ll always get back to you”

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to Professor for his wisdom, generosity, and honesty. Your presence makes these conversations possible.

The Space Between Functioning and Living

Sam finished top of his year while drinking. He edited newspapers, ran radio stations, played squash. But he was functioning, not living. The difference? Sharpness and fearlessness. The clarity to think precisely and the courage to step outside the roles that alcohol locked him into.

Without alcohol, Sam became president of the Theatre Society. He went to Japan. He started performing poetry. He built a research career at the crossroads of science, art, and technology. His capacity didn’t just grow—it “exponentially grew.”

If you’re sensing that alcohol is keeping you in functioning mode, that friction is real. And it’s costing you more than productivity—it’s costing you the fearlessness to experiment and the sharpness to know who you actually are.

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey to help people remove alcohol as the barrier to their greatest work. Not about deprivation—about reclamation. Moving from functioning to living.

Learn More

After years sober, he quit his job and started a mango farm in Cambodia. Then he relapsed. His mom had to come rescue him. He came home and started over, this time building his entire life around his recovery instead of keeping it siloed from everything else.

Now he wakes at 4:30 AM to write in his basement, working on his memoir The Mango Tango and publishing Perfection is the Enemy of Progress, a newsletter for people living the non-traditional path.

This conversation explores the guilt-fear-shame cycle, what it means to relapse after years sober, and how to leave enough white space in the calendar for life to come to you.

Show Notes

[03:33] Growing Up in an Alcoholic Home

Jake grew up in a home where he could basically do whatever he wanted. He started drinking young, hosting parties at his house on Thursday nights, taking his mom’s car before he had a license. He loved everything about how drinking took away anxiety and made him feel free. But even as a teenager, he could tell he was drinking too much.

• Decided to go to West Point thinking structure might help him avoid addiction

• Did well initially until he got a DUI visiting his brother at Penn State

• Met all the “bad kids” at West Point—when addicts find their people, they’re back off to the races

• Spent three years there before getting kicked out

“I grew up in an alcoholic home. What that meant for me was not that I was surrounded by trauma at all times, but I could basically do whatever I wanted. I started drinking at a young age.”

[05:47] Losing His Identity and Drinking Even Harder

When Jake got home from West Point, he lost his identity. He thought he’d ruined his life. He started drinking even more heavily. He went to rehab at 21 but was quick to say he was “cured” and didn’t have a problem.

“When I got home, I was really like I lost this identity. I thought I ruined my life. And I started to drink even more heavily.”

[07:00] The Obsession: Every Day About Getting Alcohol

In sobriety, Jake learned that addicts have this obsession where even when they’re not drinking, they’re thinking about it—how to get the next one. Every day in high school was about planning how to ensure he’d get alcohol that weekend.

• Started as weekend hard drinking and a couple weeknights

• But the mental space the addiction took up was as significant as the actual drinking

• This obsession continued through his twenties

“In sobriety I’ve learned that I have, you know, we have this obsession where even when we’re not drinking we’re often thinking about it and how are we going to get the next one.”

[08:08] A Fifth a Day: Drinking Before Work

After rehab, things got really bad. Jake started drinking every day, waking up and drinking. He became what he thought was a stereotypical alcoholic—a daily drinker whose whole life and cycle was built around drinking.

• In his early 20s, drinking a fifth a day around the clock

• Taking his “medicine” in a couple different stretches throughout the day

• Meticulously planned and managed

• Working in finance, going to the liquor store at 9 AM when it opened

• Drinking flask bottles in the bathroom and going back to work

“I worked in finance and I would go out for a morning coffee and I would go to the liquor store at nine, right when it opened in Philadelphia. And I would drink like one of those flask bottles in the bathroom and then go back to work.”

[11:01] The Hardest Part to Describe: Knowing It’s Wrong While Doing It

Jake had already been to rehab. He’d already self-identified as an alcoholic. The hardest part of addiction to describe is how you can continue to behave this way while there’s a very quiet voice in the back of your head saying “this is dumb, this is going to head towards disaster, you’re not supposed to be doing this.”

• That quiet voice is drowned out by an extreme, very intense voice saying “I need this right now, I need my relief”

• Like having “a head full of recovery and a belly full of booze”

• Living in this middle state of knowing you have a problem but doing it anyway

• Really isolating and not fun at all—lying to yourself, lying to everybody around you

“The hardest part of addiction to describe to anybody from the outside is how you can continue to behave in this way while there’s a very quiet voice in the back of your head that is like, this is dumb. This is going to head towards disaster. But it’s just drowned out by this extreme, very intense voice of like, I need this right now. I need my relief.”

[13:17] The Guilt-Fear-Shame Cycle

Everything for Jake was rooted in fear. He was scared of facing the world, scared of his behaviors. Stuck in this shame bubble, drinking to silence guilt and shame that was all rooted in fear.

• Most addicts wake up every morning and the first thought is “I don’t want to drink today”

• That might be a 10-second thought immediately followed by drinking

• Every day knowing you need to do something different but ashamed of being stuck in this rut

• Feeling guilty over how you fell to your addiction the day before

• Scared it’s never going to resolve itself—stuck on that hamster wheel

“Everything for me was rooted in fear. I was scared of facing the world. I was scared of my behaviors. You’re kind of stuck in this shame bubble and it’s like you’re really like drinking to silence that guilt and shame that is all rooted in fear.”

[16:11] The Moment of Clarity: Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

Jake had a rare moment of clarity where he looked around at his life and realized: I am lonely. I am miserable. I’m just sick and tired of being sick and tired and living on this hamster wheel of doom.

• Called somebody and said “I need help”

• Couldn’t seem to control it—every day telling himself he wasn’t going to drink but ending up drinking

• Asked for help and started getting involved in 12-step programs

• Did the steps and started to believe in a life in recovery

“I just had one of those rare moments of clarity where I looked around at my life and it was like, I am lonely. I am miserable. I am, I’m just like sick and tired of being sick and tired and living on this like hamster wheel of doom.”

[17:36] Four Years Sober and Heading to Cambodia

After four years sober, Jake was working his career but started realizing something. When he got sober, he associated his adventurous risk-seeking personality with his addiction. He thought that was the dude that gets you in trouble—you have to be the opposite of him. Wear a suit, go to work, live a stable life.

• Sobriety gives you confidence in yourself

• Eventually felt confident enough to do something adventurous without the wheels falling off

• Could be more of his authentic self without living in a protective bubble of routine

• Talked with people in his sober community who said sobriety isn’t about giving up on life and surrendering to structure

“Sobriety gives you like a lot of confidence in yourself. And I eventually just reached the point where I felt confident enough in my sobriety where I was like, I can do something adventurous and like the wheels aren’t going to fall off.”

[19:14] Relapse in Cambodia: Fermented Banana Moonshine

Jake started the mango farm and lived in the jungle. It was all going really well. Then he relapsed in this lost-in-translation moment on the farm where guys drilling a well were doing a ritual toast thing. They passed around a gasoline jug of fermented banana moonshine and said he had to drink it.

• Trying to explain alcoholism in a foreign language

• Had drifted away from his recovery—wasn’t talking to sober people, wasn’t helping anybody

• Thought he was cured, convinced himself “I could just have one and I’ll be fine”

• Like a real alcoholic, that was not the case—had one and was immediately off to the races again

• Nasty relapse in Cambodia, his mom had to come rescue him

• Got really bad really quick

“By that point, I had really like drifted away from my recovery. Like I hadn’t done anything to maintain my recovery. Like I wasn’t talking to sober people. I wasn’t helping anybody. I like thought I was cured and convinced myself like, oh, I could just have one and I’ll be fine. Like a real alcoholic, like that was not the case for me.”

[20:14] Starting Over and Building Life Around Recovery

Jake came back and started over from the beginning, really digging in with the program. He focused on putting sobriety first and not drifting from it. Went on to work in the addiction field to stay closer to sobriety, really building his life around his recovery.

• In his first stint in recovery, it was very siloed—had his career, aspirations, adventurous side, and then separately had his recovery

• Let enough distance get between those two lives that he put himself in a risky position again

• Second time around, built everything around recovery instead of keeping it separate

“In my first stint in recovery, it was very siloed. I had this career and these aspirations and this adventurous side. And then I had my recovery. And I let enough distance get between those two lives that I put myself in a risky position again.”

[21:36] Alcoholism is Progressive: It Picks Up Where You Left Off

The second relapse was a lot more intense. Alcoholism is a progressive illness, and it picks up exactly where you left off. If you have years sober, the clock doesn’t magically wind itself back and you’re not starting at the beginning.

• Even more intense shame and guilt when you have years sober and leave that behind

• Drinking while knowing he’d blown up this very good stretch of his life and the recovery he’d built

• Made the shame over what he was doing feel even more intense

“Alcoholism is a progressive illness, and it picks up exactly where you left off. Like, if you have years sober, the clock doesn’t magically wind itself back, and you’re back starting at the beginning.”

[33:46] The Creative Life: 4:30 AM and Playing with House Money

Jake wakes at 4:30 AM for a two-hour uninterrupted creative block before his wife and daughter wake up. From 4:30 to 6:30, it’s just him in the basement with music. He lights a candle, makes coffee, writes, and tries to avoid distractions and the noise of life.

• Sometimes working on Substack posts, sometimes editing or adding to the book, sometimes writing query letters for agents

• Has this sacred block in the morning that he protects

• If he sticks the landing in that time, the rest of his day is playing with house money

“I wake up at 4:30 and from 4:30 to 6:30, it’s just like me in the basement with the music and I light a candle and I make my coffee and I just write and I try to avoid distractions and the noise of life.”

[35:54] Straitjacket or Smoking Jacket: Leaving White Space

A sponsor once told Jake: You’ll either feel like you’re in a straitjacket or you’re in a smoking jacket in life. You really want to go for the latter. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re constantly living in stress and constantly setting yourself up to fail.

• Thinks in terms of weekly goals, not daily to-do lists

• When he tried to structure things too much, he wouldn’t get things done and his inner critic became harsh

• Wakes up and prays: “I don’t know what the day is going to bring, but I’m going to let it come to me”

• Leaves enough white space in the calendar for opportunities to come to him

• By the end of the week, accomplished everything he needed to do plus more stuff he didn’t plan for that was really good

“I wake up and I pray and I’m like, I don’t know what the day is going to bring, but I’m going to let it come to me. So I definitely try to live my life in a day where I leave enough white space in the calendar for the opportunities in the day to come to me.”

Key Quotes

“When I got home, I was really like I lost this identity. I thought I ruined my life. And I started to drink even more heavily.” - Jake Summers

“The hardest part of addiction to describe to anybody from the outside is how you can continue to behave this way while there’s a very quiet voice in the back of your head that is like, this is dumb. This is going to head towards disaster. But it’s just drowned out by this extreme, very intense voice of like, I need this right now. I need my relief.” - Jake Summers

“I just had one of those rare moments of clarity where I looked around at my life and it was like, I am lonely. I am miserable. I’m just like sick and tired of being sick and tired and living on this like hamster wheel of doom.” - Jake Summers

“Sobriety gives you like a lot of confidence in yourself. And I eventually just reached the point where I felt confident enough in my sobriety where I was like, I can do something adventurous and like the wheels aren’t going to fall off.” - Jake Summers

“I had a sponsor, you know, one time tell me like, you will either feel like you’re in a straitjacket or you’re in a smoking jacket in life. And you really want to go for the latter.” - Jake Summers

Resources Mentioned

• Perfection is the Enemy of Progress - Jake’s Substack newsletter (@jakesummers3)

• The Mango Tango - Jake’s memoir (currently with literary agents)

• Pep Talks - Jake’s planned podcast series (coming sometime in 2026)

• 12-Step Programs - Jake’s path to recovery

• The Guilt-Fear-Shame Cycle - Treatment concept Jake learned working in the addiction field

Where to Find Jake Summers

Perfection is the Enemy of Progress

My personal Substack

By Jake Summers

Jake writes for people standing at the fork wondering what’s on the other side of the leap, people who’ve already jumped and are figuring out who they are now, and people in recovery from addiction, failure, or the story they told themselves about who they were supposed to be.

The Distance Between Recovery and Everything Else

Jake’s story reveals something crucial about sobriety: keeping it siloed from the rest of your life creates risk. In his first stint of recovery, he had his career, his aspirations, his adventurous side—and then separately, he had his recovery. He let enough distance get between those two lives that he put himself in a risky position again.

The second time around, he built his entire life around his recovery instead of keeping it separate. He went to work in the addiction field to stay closer to sobriety. He talked to sober people. He helped others. He didn’t convince himself he was cured.

This isn’t about making recovery your only identity—it’s about not creating distance between who you are in recovery and who you are everywhere else. The silos create gaps. And in those gaps, practices that sustain recovery—connection, honesty, service, accountability—begin to fade. When you stop talking to sober people, when you stop helping others, when you drift from the daily habits that keep you grounded, relapse finds room to grow.

The work isn’t just staying sober. It’s building the practices that make sobriety sustainable—integrated into your creative life, your relationships, your work, your identity.

Ready to Stop Living on the Hamster Wheel?

If Jake’s story resonates—if you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, if you’re realizing the quiet voice saying “this is dumb” is getting drowned out by the loud voice saying “I need this right now”—you’re not alone.

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey designed to remove alcohol as the barrier to your greatest work. It’s not about structure for structure’s sake. It’s about building practices that sustain recovery while honoring your creative side—so sobriety isn’t siloed from everything else you’re trying to create.

This isn’t traditional recovery. It’s for those who want connection, accountability, and daily habits that keep you grounded while you build something meaningful.

Learn More

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and to for his extraordinary honesty and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

What’s Next

The Sober Creative is more than a newsletter—it’s a movement of individuals reclaiming their creativity by choosing clarity over coping.

The First 31-Day Alcohol-Free Reset has officially started!

If you missed this opportunity to join, there are going to be more coming this year.

Click the link below and enter your email in to be put on the waiting list.

The Next Reset

🎯 Take the Drinking Assessment: This assessment reveals certain areas where alcohol may be the exact thing that is quietly sabotaging your creative potential. It’s free and only takes a few minutes.

✍️ Read the Essays: Stories and strategies for building a clear, creative, and intentional life.

🎙️ Join Clear Conversations: Honest talks with creative professionals navigating the intersection of sobriety, self-discovery, and breakthrough work.

💬 Curious about your next step? If you’re sensing that something’s holding you back, but you’re not sure what—reach out. Coaching, community, or clarity—it all starts with a conversation.

✨ The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey to remove alcohol as the barrier to your greatest work.

Unlock Your Potential

Each step forward is an act of becoming.

Thanks for walking this path with me.

Josh

☕️ Support the Sober Creative: If a subscription feels like too much at the moment but you’d still like to support the work here, you’re welcome to contribute in any amount. Consider it a coffee in support of clarity, creativity, and what’s being built at The Sober Creative.

Buy Me A Coffee

P.S. Missed previous episodes? Browse the Clear Conversations archive to explore more conversations with creative minds in sobriety.

I’ve listened to transformation stories, watched people articulate what they couldn’t see while they were in it, and built a community around the idea that removing the fog reveals the work you were always capable of.

But I haven’t directly told you my story. Not really.

After a year of asking others vulnerable questions about their relationship with alcohol, I finally turned the mic toward myself. This wasn’t easy. But if I’m going to guide others through their transformation, I need to be willing to share my own messy, beautiful journey.

What you’ll hear in this episode is raw and unscripted. The childhood bullying that shaped my self-image. The depression that grew quietly through high school. The decades of using alcohol to escape feelings I didn’t know how to process. And ultimately, how I found my way to a place where my body finally feels like home.

This is my story. Not the highlight reel, but a glimpse into the real one.

Show Notes

[02:00] A Beautiful Childhood with Hidden Struggles

Growing up, my childhood looked perfect from the outside. Loving parents, lots of activities, good friends. I moved frequently—Sacramento to Florida to Kentucky and back—before finishing high school in Florida.

• Moving frequently taught me to adapt quickly and build relationships, though sustaining deep connections was more challenging

• High school brought bullying experiences that “nicked” me in ways I’m still unpacking

• Being called “Poindexter” by a friend’s peer created a lasting wound about not being capable or tough enough

• Looking back at photos from that time, I can see the unhappiness that was growing inside

• Depression began taking root, though I didn’t have the awareness to name it yet

Key insight: The experiences that shape our beliefs about ourselves often happen in moments we don’t expect, and their impact lasts far longer than the moment itself.

[05:00] Escaping Through Substances (Even When They Made Things Worse)

My relationship with drugs and alcohol started in high school, primarily smoking weed and drinking. The irony? Even though I used these substances to escape, they often made my anxiety worse.

• I remember smoking alone and becoming paranoid that the laughter from a late-night TV show was directed at me

• Despite the discomfort and nervousness, I kept using because I was trying to escape something deeper

• The pattern continued for years: asking “why do I feel this way?” while using the very things that made me feel worse

Key insight: We often continue destructive patterns not because they work, but because we don’t know what else to do with the feelings we’re trying to escape.

[09:00] The “Why” Question That Haunted Me

For years, I was stuck in a loop of asking “why do I feel this way?” I had a good life, supportive relationships, a great job. From the outside, everything looked fine.

• Our minds and bodies evolved to keep us safe from physical danger, but now they react to emotional threats the same way

• When uncomfortable thoughts arise, our bodies tense up, and we don’t know what to do with that sensation

• The cognitive awareness that comes with adulthood can become a burden when you’re constantly analyzing your own thoughts

• Drinking was my way of numbing the constant mental chatter and self-questioning

Key insight: Depression isn’t about having a “bad” life. It’s about not knowing what to do with the thoughts and sensations that arise, even when everything externally looks good.

[12:00] My First Drink and Family Estrangement

My older brother gave me my first drink. We’re now estranged and haven’t spoken in years, along with my parents on that side.

• This early introduction to alcohol set a pattern that would last for decades

• The numbing effect of alcohol became my primary coping mechanism

Key insight: Our earliest experiences with substances often come wrapped in complicated relationships that influence how we use them for years to come.

[20:00] The Career That Enabled My Drinking

Working in the film industry for nearly 20 years created the perfect environment for my alcohol use to flourish unchecked.

• The industry normalizes and even celebrates drinking culture

• Long hours and high stress made drinking feel like a natural “reward”

• Being surrounded by others who drank heavily made my own consumption seem normal

• I was a high-functioning alcoholic, which made it easier to deny there was a problem

Key insight: When your environment normalizes the behavior you’re struggling with, it becomes nearly impossible to see it clearly.

[25:00] The Turning Point: When I Finally Let Go

Five years ago, I made the decision to stop drinking. It wasn’t a dramatic rock bottom, but rather a quiet realization that alcohol was keeping me from becoming who I needed to be.

• I didn’t follow the traditional AA path, though I respect it deeply

• My spiritual beliefs center around nature and interconnectedness rather than organized religion

• Last year I discovered Recovery Dharma and now facilitate weekend meetings

• The decision to stop wasn’t about hitting rock bottom but about recognizing I wanted something different

Key insight: You don’t need to lose everything to decide you deserve better. Sometimes the quiet realization that you’re ready for change is enough.

[35:00] Finding Home in My Own Body

When asked where recovery happens, my answer surprised even me: place resides within. Recovery isn’t about changing your location but about making peace with yourself.

• This body, this container, is home

• Creating a place of comfort and ease within yourself is the work

• It requires support through therapy, community, and sometimes medication

• I was on Prozac for several years and came off it five to six months ago

• Having community support has been essential

Key insight: Recovery is about creating a home within yourself that you can feel comfortable and at ease in, regardless of external circumstances.

[40:00] The Power of Simply Listening

One of the most beautiful aspects of recovery communities is the practice of holding space without trying to fix or advise.

• In Recovery Dharma (like AA), people share and others simply listen

• There’s no cross-talk, no advice-giving, just witnessing

• When you hear someone else’s experience, you often recognize your own story

• The power isn’t in solving each other’s problems but in not being alone with them

Key insight: Sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer another person is our full attention without trying to fix, solve, or respond.

Key Quotes

“They nick you. You don’t know when they’re going to come, but they hit you. And it’s like, man, is that who I am? This nerdy guy that doesn’t know how to fight and is not capable.” - Josh Woll

“I just remember so many years just like asking why, like, why do I feel this way? Like my life is good. You know, I’ve got support, I’ve got friends, I’ve got great job.” - Josh Woll

“Place really resides within. This me, this container is home. It’s how does this place, like how do me living in my body create a place that I can feel comfortable with and ease with?” - Josh Woll

“It’s so beautiful to sit there and just listen to someone and, you know, that’s why I think it’s so powerful about community. You just listen to someone else’s experience and most likely you’ll experience something similar yourself.” - Josh Woll

Resources Mentioned

• Recovery Dharma: A recovery community that blends Buddhist principles with recovery support (described as “Buddha meets AA”)

• Prozac (SSRI): Mentioned as part of Josh’s journey with managing depression

• The Sober Creative Reset: 31-day program with daily email prompts, weekly meetings, and an awareness tracker

Where to Find Josh

The Sober Creative

The Sober Creative shows how removing alcohol restores the energy, clarity, and capacity that gets buried under incomplete recovery—with practical strategies and real stories from people who've made the shift.

By Josh Woll

• Clear Conversations Podcast: Interviews with professionals navigating sobriety

Ready to Do Your Own Deep Work?

If this conversation resonated with you, if you’re tired of asking “why do I feel this way?” while numbing the answer, there’s a path forward.

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey designed specifically for people who are ready to remove alcohol as the barrier to their greatest work. This isn’t about powering through cravings or simply stopping drinking. It’s about the deeper transformation that happens when you finally create a home within yourself.

The framework follows three phases:

• RELEASE → Let go of alcohol and the stories that kept you stuck

• CREATE → Build new patterns and rediscover your creative power

• BECOME → Step into the version of yourself you’ve been avoiding

This is 1-on-1 coaching for those who are ready to do the real work. Not surface-level motivation, but the messy, vulnerable, transformational journey toward becoming a version of yourself you keep falling in love with.

Learn More

Thank you

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning in. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

What’s Next

The Sober Creative is more than a newsletter—it’s a movement of individuals reclaiming their creativity by choosing clarity over coping.

The First 31-Day Alcohol-Free Reset has officially started!

If you missed this opportunity to join, there are going to be more coming this year.

Click the link below and enter your email in to be put on the waiting list.

The Next Reset

🎯 Take the Drinking Assessment: This assessment reveals certain areas where alcohol may be the exact thing that is quietly sabotaging your creative potential. It’s free and only takes a few minutes.

✍️ Read the Essays: Stories and strategies for building a clear, creative, and intentional life.

🎙️ Join Clear Conversations: Honest talks with creative professionals navigating the intersection of sobriety, self-discovery, and breakthrough work.

💬 Curious about your next step? If you’re sensing that something’s holding you back, but you’re not sure what—reach out. Coaching, community, or clarity—it all starts with a conversation.

✨ The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey to remove alcohol as the barrier to your greatest work.

Unlock Your Potential

Each step forward is an act of becoming.

Thanks for walking this path with me.

Josh

☕️ Support the Sober Creative: If a subscription feels like too much at the moment but you’d still like to support the work here, you’re welcome to contribute in any amount. Consider it a coffee in support of clarity, creativity, and what’s being built at The Sober Creative.

Buy Me A Coffee

P.S. Missed previous episodes? Browse the Clear Conversations archive to explore more conversations with creative minds in sobriety.

Then something shifted. After discovering Josh’s newsletter, she made a decision that would transform everything. Today, over 60 days sober, Anna writes 3,000 words every morning—finishing entire articles before most people start their workday. She’s built “For the Masters: AI Creative Mastery,” a newsletter dedicated to helping mid-career creatives close the gap between the excellence they can see and the work they can actually make. But her approach isn’t about AI replacing creativity—it’s about using it as a thinking partner while protecting the authenticity that makes your work yours.

This conversation explores how sobriety creates the clarity necessary for deliberate practice, why removing what numbs us might be the most important creative decision we make, and what happens when you stop running on autopilot and start building work you’ll be proud of in five years.

Show Notes

[00:00] - The Demon on Your Back: Anna’s Story with Marijuana

• Anna’s substance of choice wasn’t alcohol—it was marijuana, legal and easily accessible in Michigan

• She describes addiction as feeling like “a demon on your back”—doing things you don’t want to do, experiencing paranoia, caught in a cycle of unproductivity

• Coming from a family with a history of drug issues, she was a “late bloomer” who started heavily after moving out three years ago

• The creative cost was devastating: she couldn’t work, couldn’t get it done, would smoke throughout her entire day

Key insight: “People don’t take it as seriously because it was weed, right? And for whatever reason, people don’t think it’s as bad, but it was literally destroying my happiness. It was destroying my productivity and it was destroying my life.”

[07:00] - The Immediate Transformation: From Fog to 3,000 Words

• Within days of getting sober, Anna went from creative paralysis to writing 3,000 words every morning

• She now finishes an entire article before most people start their workday

• The shift wasn’t gradual—it was immediate and dramatic

• Sobriety revealed that her creative potential had been there all along, just obscured

Key insight: “I write 3,000 words a morning now, which is insane. I literally finish an article a morning. Every morning.”

[11:30] - The Taste-Skill Gap: Why Mid-Career Creatives Get Stuck

• Anna identifies the core frustration of mid-career creatives: you can see what great work looks like, but you can’t consistently make it yet

• This isn’t a talent problem—it’s the taste-skill gap, where your refined taste outpaces your execution

• Most creatives at this stage either break through or burn out

• The gap doesn’t close through validation or understanding—it closes through years of deliberate, focused practice

Key insight: “You’re at the exact moment where most mid-career creatives either breakthrough or burn out. Virginia Woolf felt this at 33. Miles Davis felt this at 28. The difference wasn’t talent: it was which path they chose next.”

[15:45] - AI as Thinking Partner, Not Replacement

• Anna’s mission is helping creatives use AI without losing their authentic voice

• She teaches five core practices: gap audits, edge practice, constraint experiments, volume cycling, and reverse-engineering protocols

• The focus is on extracting frameworks from masters and building systematic skill development

• AI should augment craft, not replace it—it’s a tool for analysis and ideation, not for drafting

Key insight: “I don’t want your 30 years, 40 years, 20 years, 10 years, five years of experience creatively to go down the drain because you used AI and now you don’t know how to not use it.”

[21:00] - Finding Your Limits: The Authenticity Boundary

• Anna learned the hard way that letting AI draft for her stripped away her voice

• She experienced a crisis moment where she felt like she couldn’t write without AI after using it extensively

• Her personal boundary: AI never does first drafts—it has to be her from the start

• She now only uses AI for idea generation, prompt creation, and occasionally grammar checks (though even that can “take some sauce out”)

Key insight: “I am never again going to have AI do a draft for me ever first pass. It has to be me. And then from there, I kind of went to a stage where I allowed AI to improve my draft, but I still didn’t like the output. So now I just write it and I improve it on my own.”

[26:00] - The Hundred Prompts: Sobriety’s Creative Abundance

• Since getting sober, Anna has created over 100 AI prompts for creative development

• She’s building a library of tools to help others close their taste-skill gap

• Her Substack offers one free prompt per article, with more extensive prompts behind a $20/month paywall

• Future plans include opening a community space and offering one-on-one sessions

Key insight: “I’m sitting on probably like a hundred prompts being sober, just having more to do. I’m sitting on a hundred prompts and just waiting for the right time to send them out.”

Key Quotes

“It was literally destroying my happiness. It was destroying my productivity and it was destroying my life.” - Anna Gibson

“I write 3,000 words a morning now, which is insane. I literally finish an article a morning. Every morning.” - Anna Gibson

“I don’t want your 30 years, 40 years, 20 years, 10 years, five years of experience creatively to go down the drain because you used AI and now you don’t know how to not use it.” - Anna Gibson

“I am never again going to have AI do a draft for me ever first pass. It has to be me.” - Anna Gibson

“I’m sitting on probably like a hundred prompts being sober, just having more to do.” - Anna Gibson

Resources Mentioned

For the Masters: AI Creative Mastery - Anna’s Substack newsletter focused on helping mid-career creatives achieve mastery through deliberate practice and AI-enhanced learning

The Taste-Skill Gap Framework - Anna’s approach to understanding why mid-career creatives can see excellence but struggle to execute it consistently

Five Core Practices for Closing the Gap:

• Gap audits (identifying where the gap is widest)

• Edge practice (deliberate work at skill limit)

• Constraint experiments (forcing skill development)

• Volume cycling (building reps systematically)

• Reverse-engineering protocols (studying what you can see but can’t do)

AI Prompts Library - Anna offers free and paid prompts for creative development, including reverse-engineering tools and 2-week gap-closing plans

Where to Find Anna Gibson

For the Masters: AI Creative Mastery

For Creatives Who Are Mastery-Minded and AI Augmented.

By Anna Gibson

Ready to Remove Alcohol as a Barrier to Your Greatest Work?

Anna’s story demonstrates what becomes possible when you strip away the fog and commit to showing up fully present. From creative paralysis to 3,000 words a morning. From scattered effort to deliberate practice. From autopilot to intention.

If you’re sensing that something’s holding you back—whether it’s alcohol, substances that numb your edge, or patterns you can’t quite name—you don’t have to figure it out alone.

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day program specifically designed for creatives who want to unlock their full potential by removing alcohol as a barrier. Through personalized coaching, proven frameworks, and a supportive community, you’ll build the clarity and creative momentum Anna describes—without compromising your authenticity or waiting years to close the gap between the work you can see and the work you can make.

Curious about your next step? Let’s talk. Coaching, community, or clarity—it all starts with a conversation.

Schedule a Call

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her vulnerability, wisdom, and commitment to helping creatives build work they’ll be proud of. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

What’s Next

The Sober Creative is more than a newsletter—it’s a movement of individuals reclaiming their creativity by choosing clarity over coping.

The 31-Day Alcohol-Free Reset starts on January 1st.

If you want to see what your creativity feels like without alcohol in the way, this is your moment.

Your Sobriety Begins Here

🎯 Take the Clarity Quiz: This assessment reveals certain areas where alcohol may be the exact thing that is quietly sabotaging your creative potential. It’s free and only takes a few minutes.

✍️ Read the Essays: Stories and strategies for building a clear, creative, and intentional life.

🎙️ Join Clear Conversations: Honest talks with creative professionals navigating the intersection of sobriety, self-discovery, and breakthrough work.

💬 Curious about your next step? If you’re sensing that something’s holding you back, but you’re not sure what—reach out. Coaching, community, or clarity—it all starts with a conversation.

✨ The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day journey to remove alcohol as the barrier to your greatest work.

Unlock Your Creative Potential

Each step forward is an act of becoming.

Thanks for walking this path with me.

Josh

☕️ Support the Sober Creative: If a subscription feels like too much at the moment but you’d still like to support the work here, you’re welcome to contribute in any amount. Consider it a coffee in support of clarity, creativity, and what’s being built at The Sober Creative.

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P.S. Missed previous episodes? Browse the Clear Conversations archive to explore more conversations with creative minds in sobriety.