Life hack #18: Count the days! Learn best practices from recovering alcoholics
Life hack #18: Count the days! Learn best practices from recovering alcoholics
[00:00:00] Life hack #18. Count the days. Learn best practices from recovering alcoholics. One of the first things I do when I go through a break up is I start going into the no contact method. This is a proven strategy to help people not only cope with a break up, but also start to feel empowered while surviving it.
Right. And so there's so much research out there on the no contact method. If you go to my webpage torontounicorn.com I have a link in the description of this podcast for this episode, because every episode has its own webpage there, and you can actually get additional links to other people's YouTube video's, not even my content, someone else's content, that's super valuable on the topics that are related to the episode. So for this one, I'll put some no contact method videos there as well. But basically the point of no contact is to go completely cold, get like a break in addiction, an addiction to a person, an addiction to, you know, your relationship.
And so that means that you don't contact them. You don't wish them a happy birthday. You [00:01:00] don't look at their Instagram or their Facebook here and there, you just cut yourself off. As effectively as an alcoholic would cut off alcohol, if they were going to be sober. You don't see alcoholics, not a lot of them, successfully quitting drinking by taking little sips of alcohol all throughout the day.
Right. They have to just go cold turkey, is the phrase. And so what a lot of recovering alcoholics do is they have a chip in their pocket that they carry. That says how many days they've been, you know, sober. And they are so damn proud of that chip as they should be. Right. Same with other recoveries, right?
Not just alcohol. And they might get tempted here or there for a drink, but if they're 180 days sober, and they have a bad day and they know that if they have a drink, they have to reset that count down to zero and start again. It is motivating. Trust me, it's motivating. I'm proof and point. Now I'm not an alcoholic, but I do this for break ups and it's helpful. So start [00:02:00] counting. When your last contact was with somebody, that's your start of the no contact.
And then you start counting. How many days has it been? One day, then it turns into a couple of days, then it's a week, then it's a few weeks. And when you're struggling you can look down and see, okay, I've made it, you know, 13 days and 12 hours so far. You know, if I reach out now just to say I miss them I'll have to hit that, you know, button back to zero and then I might feel stupid.
And then I'm back to my healing journey if they, especially, if they don't respond. Right. And then, you know, you kind of have to go back to zero and start again. And so it can be kind of, you know, detrimental to our own progress to have a slip up or, you know, a slip here and there. And so I do find that counting the days that you've been in no contact, counting the days that you've been surviving a break up or, you know, surviving the no contact method is a brilliant strategy that definitely works. So my friend who quit smoking, she told me the same thing. She had a thing in her calendar that would go up until I think it was [00:03:00] two years, after that she stopped counting by day and she started counting by year, but she would look at that every time she wanted a cigarette and be so proud of the number growing, like, you know, how many. Pretty soon
it was like 300 days, no cigarettes. As much as you want a cigarette, how badly do you want that cigarette? If it means you lose 300 days of progress, right? Like it's, it might not win out every time. You know, you might slip up here and there, but when you do and you reset the clock down to zero. You'll remember why you don't want to do that again? So sometimes we do have to learn the hard way. But luckily this life hack to count the days of no contact, count the days you're surviving this break up, will show you that time is moving, cause sometimes you don't know time is moving when you're stuck in grief and sadness. A day a week, a month could all feel the same. And you need to know the time's moving and that you are going to be surviving something. Even if you feel like you're not moving forward.
And sometimes just seeing that you physically survived, like the first 30 days, for example of a break up can be reassuring [00:04:00] that you know you're going to be okay.
Even if it really sucks still, even if you're really sad still, you know, a month is serious. Two months is serious, three months, you know, once you're six months in, I hope that you'll be doing at least a lot better, you know, like, let's be honest. We don't know. Some people recover at different paces. But count the days, give yourself some, some months, give yourself some months to get back on your feet.
Don't be, uh, shortchanging yourself there. I don't think it works very effectively.
