Ep 168: Why Do I Keep Drinking? Four Questions That Finally Help You Figure It Out

Have you been drinking more than you want to — more often, in larger amounts — and you can't quite figure out why? You're not alone, and you're not broken. In this episode, Christie Walker, the Catholic Sobriety Coach, walks you through a powerful tool used inside her Sacred Sobriety Lab called the Critical Thinking Skills Worksheet — a six-category framework designed to wake up the thinking part of your brain right in the middle of a craving.

Christie breaks down four of the most impactful questions from the framework, explains what's happening in your brain when habits take over, and connects the neuroscience to the Catholic tradition of discernment and interior life.

If you've been stuck in a cycle you can't seem to break, this episode gives you a starting point — not a perfect plan, just an honest one.

Topics covered:

• Why cravings feel automatic (and what to do about it)
• The prefrontal cortex and why your thinking brain needs a script
• Four critical thinking questions: Why, What, Who, and How
• How to start — even if you only have 10 minutes and a notes app
• Why this is spiritual work, not just self-help

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Transcript

 Welcome to the Catholic Sobriety Podcast, the go-to resource for women seeking to have a deeper understanding of the role alcohol plays in their lives. Women who are looking to drink less or not at all for any reason. I am your host, Christie Walker. I'm a wife, mom, and a joy filled Catholic, and I am the Catholic sobriety coach, and I'm so glad you're here. Welcome back. Today I wanna talk about a tool that we use inside my Sacred sobriety lab. It's called the Critical Thinking Skills Worksheet, and I'm sure that that title sounds very official and maybe even slightly boring, but I promise you it's neither one of those. It's actually built around six categories. Each of those categories has its own set of questions, and when you actually sit down and work through it, things start to get clear really fast. And clarity for a lot of us is exactly what's been missing when we're starting or working on reducing or eliminating alcohol. Now, I'm not gonna hand you the exact worksheet today because it lives inside the lab, along with a whole bunch of other good stuff, including weekly group coaching and a community where you can actually talk to other women who get it. But don't leave because I am going to walk you through the heart of it right here, right now. So you'll leave this episode with something that you can actually. Use. So let's get into it now. First I wanna speak directly to the woman who needs this most right now. Maybe that's you. Maybe you've noticed that your drinking has crept, like it used to be a glass on Friday night and now it's a glass most nights and sometimes. That glass has turned into two or maybe more, and you're honestly not sure when or how that even happened. Maybe you told yourself it was the holidays or the stress or that rough patch with your husband or just life. And now it's not the holidays anymore and the stress hasn't gone anywhere, and the rough patch is patched and the drinking is still there. You are not weak. You are not a lost cause. You are not alone. What you are is a woman whose brain has gotten very good at a habit that isn't actually serving her anymore. And habits. Even those really, really stubborn ones, , those can be changed. But first you have to slow down and think, and that's actually what this tool helps you do. So here's the thing about cravings. They don't actually come with a pause button. They come with a fast forward button. One minute, you're fine. The next minute you are standing in front of the fridge and you're not totally sure how you got there. I'm speaking from experience that happens to me all the time, and I want you to know that that has nothing to do with your character as a person or your willpower. That's just your brain doing what brains do, and that is running a pattern that it is run hundreds of times before. And as I always say, your brain is efficient. It loves a well-worn path, and if you've used alcohol to cope with stress and boredom, loneliness, whatever, your brain has built a really smooth highway or path for that. It goes something like this. A trigger appears, your brain says, drink, you drink. And you repeat. It happens fast, and it happens below the level of conscious thought, and that's the problem. So maybe you're asking, great, what do I do about that? What we do is we bring it above the level of conscious thought. That's the work that I do here with my podcast is to try to, you know, bring awareness to what might be going on. It's what I do with the coaching I do, and in my lab we slow things down and we ask questions. There's a part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. It's right behind your forehead, and it's the rational thinking, deciding part of your brain. It's the part of your brain that says, stop or wait or hold on. Let me think about this, but it has to be activated and it doesn't just automatically jump in when a craving hits. You have to engage it on purpose, and that's exactly what I designed the critical thinking skills worksheet to do. It hands you a set of questions that help to wake up your thinking brain right in the middle of a moment when your habit brain is trying to take over. So you don't just have to pause. You actually have questions that you can look at and ask yourself while you're in that pause to disrupt that habit loop. And every time you use it, you are literally building new brain pathways. Isn't that awesome? You're doing construction work on your own mind. And it's not me being motivational that is actually neuroscience. Okay, now let's get into the questions and these are going to be super, super helpful for you. In the critical thinking skills worksheet, it is built around six simple words that you probably learned in third grade. Who, what, where, why, when, and how. And each one of those has a set of questions underneath it. Questions that you ask yourself about your drinking, your patterns, and the change that you wanna make. Now I'm gonna be real with you. All six categories are pretty good, but some of them are going to hit harder than others depending on where you are. So today I'm picking the four that I think are going to be most useful for the woman who is just starting to wake up to this, the one who's thinking, okay. Things have gone a little off the rails and something needs to change, but I honestly don't even know where to start. I'm gonna help you with that. So here we go. The first question we're gonna look at is why, and we are not looking at this from a place of shame. You're not gonna be asking yourself like, why can't you get it together? Why don't you have enough willpower? Why can be a very shaming, condemning type of question, but we don't ask ourself the question in that way. Instead, focus on this question. Why does alcohol seem to be a problem? It's a simple question, but it can actually be surprisingly hard to answer in an honest way because most of us, when we're first asking this, we wanna follow it up by saying something like, I just enjoy it, or Everyone drinks, or, I don't know if it's really a problem. I just wanna cut back a little and maybe some of that is true, but I want you to sit with this question and really go deep with it. Why does it seem like a problem? What is the thing that made you click on this podcast? What is the thought that you have the next morning after you drink that you wish you didn't have? Because somewhere in there is your real answer and your real answer is the starting point. You don't have to share it with anyone. You don't have to post it. It's just good for you to know it, to say it out loud in your car, in front of your mirror, because honestly, naming the problem is the first act of courage in this whole process, and it is courage. The second question is what are the obstacles and my strengths? Notice it asks both, not just what's in your way, but also what have you got going for you. What have you overcome that you can draw from and remind your brain that you've done things just like this before, that you've overcome them. The obstacles that you might be facing might be things like, I don't know what else to do. My social life revolves around wine. I've tried to cut back before and it didn't stick. My husband still drinks and it's hard to be the only one not drinking at dinner. I genuinely don't know what I'm going to do with my anxiety if I don't have alcohol to take it away. Now, those are real obstacles. We're not gonna pretend that they're not. But then, and this is really, really important. What are your strengths? Write both lists the obstacles and the strengths. Because what happens when you look at that page is you will stop seeing yourself as someone things are happening to, . And you start to see yourself as someone who is doing something with resources and with a chance for freedom. That mental shift is important and it will change everything. Okay? Are you ready? Here's question three. That is who does my drinking affect? Who benefits or suffers? We tend to think of our drinking as pretty private. Like it's my thing, it's my choice. It's my evening glass of wine. What's the big deal? It's not hurting anyone, but when you actually sit with this question, it gets deeper, pretty quickly, and that can feel really uncomfortable, especially if you think who does it affect and you think. Maybe your kids. Maybe your kids are noticing more than you think. Maybe it's affecting your husband who's been tiptoeing around something that he doesn't know how to say. Maybe your friendships, which have slowly started to feel a little more surface level, maybe your own body, which has been trying to tell you something for a while. And who suffers? I know that's a even harder word to think about, but it's the right word for this question. Now, here's the thing. I am not asking you to make this feel like a guilt trip. Guilt on its own is useless. It doesn't change anything. It just makes you feel bad and it makes you wanna drink to get away from that. Bad feeling. So that's not the goal of this. The goal here is clarity, because when you can clearly see who's affected by your drinking, including yourself, then you have a reason that's bigger than willpower, and the reasons that are bigger than willpower are the ones that are actually going to hold. Now, when you think of the question, who benefits? This can be really interesting too. It could be your husband who's benefiting because maybe that means that he can drink and you're not going to nag him about how much he's drinking. Or maybe it's your friend who you know, you probably drink more than her, and so she doesn't feel so bad about herself. People can sometimes benefit from our drinking and it's not benefiting us. So take that into consideration as you're answering those questions. The last question we're gonna talk about today is how, and. The one that I like from the how category is, how will making this change benefit my life? I love ending here because this is the one that points forward instead of backward, and that's really what coaching is like. Here you are, and we're moving forward, right? It's so easy for us to get stuck in the spiral of everything that's going wrong, all the ways that you failed, all the reasons that you should have stopped sooner. That spiral is not your friend. That spiral leads you right back to the bottle. So instead, look forward, get specific, get personal, get almost embarrassingly honest about what you actually want your life to look like. Do you wanna wake up without that low grade anxiety that sits on your chest every morning? Do you wanna be fully present at your daughter's Saturday soccer game instead of running on three hours of sleep, do you want to feel like yourself again, not the foggy, slightly ashamed version, but the real one. What does that life look like? What. Does your future self look like the version of you who has done this work? Write it down, put it somewhere you can see it, because on hard nights and there will be hard nights, you need to be able to look at something that reminds you why this matters. That's not just a coaching technique. That's what hope actually looks like written down on paper. Okay? Now here's the part where I am gonna tell you not to over complicate it. You do not need to have a perfect journaling practice. You do not need to have a special notebook unless it makes you feel happy to have one. You do not need to set aside a whole Saturday to work through your feelings. You need a pen or your phone's notes, app, and about 10 minutes, pick one of those four questions, just one, and write down whatever comes out. Write it messy, write it incomplete, write it half formed. It doesn't matter. But what matters is that you slowed down enough to think and you wrote something honest. You wrote something. That maybe you were having trouble thinking about articulating or facing. And that's it. That's the starting point. And then if you wanna go deeper. If you want to work through the whole worksheet, if you wanna do this in community with other women and have someone coaching you through it, that's what the Sacred Sobriety Lab is for. It's where we work together through tools like this together. We right now we're working through module one just very loosely for whoever wants to, we talk about it on our group coaching calls. We talk about it in our community and we have a real conversation and real accountability, but you don't have to be in the lab to start. You can get started right now with the questions in this episode. Now, I can't close this episode without saying something about why this matters from a faith perspective, because I think sometimes in Catholic circles we have a tendency to make this all about discipline and willpower, like just pray harder, fast, more white, knuckle it in the name of virtue. And yes, prayer matters, fasting matters and sacraments are necessary. But God also gave you a brain. He gave you the capacity for self-knowledge and what the saints called the interior life. He has given you the Holy Spirit to help you look. Ask yourself with honesty and ask What is really going on here? That's not a therapy language. That's the examine, that's what Ignatius was talking about. That's what the whole tradition of discernment is built on, asking Why do I drink? Is a spiritual question, not just a psychological one. Asking who does this affect is an act of charity and conscience, not just self-help and sitting with the question, how will my life be different? That my friend is hope, and hope the catechism tells us is a theological virtue. It's not wishful thinking. It's a confident expectation of good rooted in God's abundant faithfulness. So bring these questions to prayer. Sit with them in front of the blessed sacrament if you can, and ask the Holy Spirit to show you what you need to see. This is sacred work. Do not do it without him. Okay, and now I'm going to close. This is the last thing I wanna close by Talking directly to the woman who almost didn't listen to this episode today. The one who told herself she was too busy or that this probably isn't for her, or that her situation is different or that wor what works for other people probably won't work for her. I know the voice that tells you change isn't possible for you. I know I heard that voice too. I know how convincing it is. I know that it sounds a lot like your own voice, which makes it really hard to argue with, but I'm here to tell you that voice is lying to you. Change is possible. And change is not possible because I said so. It's because that's how God made you. You were not made to be stuck. You were not made to be chained by something or controlled by something. You were made for freedom. You were made for transformation. Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. That's Romans 12, two. That's what this work is. That's what doing. These questions or asking yourself these questions, working through these questions is it's a renewing of your mind, not the fixing of your willpower, not just gritting your teeth until you get through it. It is the renewing. Doesn't that sound gentle? The renewing of your mind, which is exactly what happens when you slow down and you ask yourself questions, and then you let the truth do its work. So this week, pick one question. Just one. Write something down. Let it be imperfect. Let it be the beginning. You, my friend, are more capable than you know, and you are not doing this alone. I thank you so much for being here. If this episode helped you even just a little bit, I would love it if you would share it with a woman in your life who you think might need it. And if you haven't left a review yet, I would be so grateful if you would, because that is how more women find this podcast. All right, I'll see you next week. Well, that does it for this episode of the Catholic Sobriety Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I would invite you to share it with a friend who might also get value from it as well, and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a thing. I am the Catholic sobriety coach, and if you would like to learn how to work with me or learn more about. The coaching that I offer, visit my website, the Catholic sobriety coach.com. Follow me on Instagram at the Catholic Sobriety Coach. I look forward to speaking to you next. Time and remember, I am here for you. I am praying for you.