045: Clarity of Mind
Drinking mimics stress relief while it dismantles your body’s ability to manage it
✨Weekly Insight
Here’s what most people don’t realize: alcohol doesn’t actually reduce stress, it mimics relief while it dismantles your body’s ability to manage it. Every drink disrupts your sleep architecture, spikes your cortisol, and leaves your nervous system more reactive than before. Over time, your baseline stress level rises, and the drink that once took the edge off starts becoming the edge itself.
For me, healthier stress relief looks like meditation, walking, hitting the gym, breathwork, rest, incense, music, and eating food that actually fuels me rather than drains me. These aren’t substitutes for drinking. They’re upgrades.
And I’m not alone in discovering this. Janelle walks, reads, spends time with her family, and prays. She said a moment came on June 9th, 1996, when she felt something shift and heard a voice ask: “You could get worse, but why would you want to?” She stopped drinking that day and never looked back. Her words: “I love being sober. There’s nothing like it in the world.” It’s so true.
What do you do besides drinking to help relieve stress?
🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety
This week I sat down with Phil Powis ❤️⚡️ — strategist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Sacred Business Flow — whose story is really about what happens when the body starts sending signals you’ve been too busy to hear, and whether you have the courage to listen.
Sacred Business Flow - Helping people move from idea to creation — from the head to the heart — and build businesses that don’t require hiding from.
Phil started drinking at 15, grew up in the South where it was woven into the culture, carried it through college and into his tech career in Boston, where happy hour after work was just how you connected with people. He never put a problem label on it. It was social infrastructure. It was part of who he was.
Then at 29, things started shifting in ways doctors couldn’t explain. Fatigue. Aches. Waking up exhausted. He eventually found an ancestral health nutritionist named Mary Rudick who put it to him plainly: if you’re trying to heal, alcohol isn’t going to help that. Phil didn’t fight it outright. He just found the other dietary changes easier to start with. But eventually he stopped drinking — and didn’t drink for over a decade.
During those years, a golf ball-sized tumor appeared in his neck. Multiple biopsies at Mayo Clinic couldn’t give him a definitive answer on whether it was cancerous. He walked around with that uncertainty for about a year and a half — the daily, low-grade fear that things were only going in one direction. He did the dietary work, moved to Costa Rica, started working with Carolina Wilke on the emotional and energetic side, and eventually had the tumor removed. The recovery came fast. What surprised him afterward was how much fear had been driving everything — even the good decisions. He thought he was going to die. And once that weight lifted, he started letting himself back into experiences he’d been locked out of for years, including food, including the occasional drink.
That’s the part of Phil’s story that tends to make people in a sobriety space pause. He started drinking again after his recovery, and he describes it as reclaiming agency — a celebratory beer in Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, Carolina beside him, feeling like someone who’d gotten his body back. He’s clear that this is deeply personal. He still notices that alcohol blunts his creative process — he’s a 4 a.m. person, does his best writing in those early hours, and the nights he drinks he considers himself creatively offline. It just doesn’t work for him in that state.
Which is what brought him into the January Reset. He’d been drinking here and there for a couple of years and got curious about what a pause would show him — not from a crisis, but from a desire to stay conscious about the things that govern his choices. He described the container as non-judgmental and said it gave him space to reconnect with his own journey on his own terms.
We also talked about what Sacred Business Flow is building. Phil described what he called the love-led leap — the moment someone committed to moving their idea from concept into creation. Most of his work has served people who’ve already made that decision. But he and Carolina have been noticing a whole other group: people who hold something in their heart and just aren’t ready yet. The embodiment work Carolina does — nervous system, energy, somatic practices — has mostly lived behind closed doors for private clients. They’re opening it up more broadly, at an accessible price point, for people who don’t need to know exactly what they’re building yet. Just people who want room to explore.
You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.
My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations
Episode 045 with Doan Winkel on March 20 at 10:00a EST
Doan has spent years inside the classroom studying what actually makes learning stick — and what gets in the way. As an associate professor of entrepreneurship, keynote speaker, and creator of the How to Teach With AI newsletter, he’s been obsessing over the relationship between mental clarity, creative engagement, and output quality long before those words got trendy.
In a world moving at the speed of a new AI tool every Tuesday, Doan brings a grounded question to the table: What does it actually take to show up at your best when the stakes are high?
We’re going to talk about presence, performance, and what it means to do your most meaningful work from a clear mind.
If you've ever felt like you're capable of more than what's been showing up on the page, this one's for you.
🎉 Who I’m Celebrating
The Sober Creative Collective recently launched and I’m celebrating one of the newest members - Noelle Richards.
Noelle is creating Foxglove and Flour — a Cottage Vegan bakery, that promotes inclusion, clean ingredients, no artificial colors. Our mission is Baked with Magic, Rooted in Kindness!
She recently said, “From joining this collective I hope to gain a community. A community of individuals from all walks of life and talents, to be here for each other and help each other grow. To learn more about people and their journey. A safe place to share ideas, future projects, get into what feeds our souls. I love learning about people and hopefully bring light to those who feel the world is trying to dim theirs.”
If you would like to join the collective and be a part of building alongside this incredible community filled with all things sobriety and creativity, I’ll leave the link below to learn more.
It was a great week for you and them to create from a beautiful place of being sober.🩷