Ep 173: How to Drink Less This Summer (Without Dreading Every Party)

Every summer, millions of women tell themselves the same thing: "I'll deal with this after Labor Day."

And every fall, they're right back where they started.

In this episode, Christie makes the case that summer isn't the worst time to do this work — it's actually the best. The barbecues, the girls trips, the family reunions, the cooler full of White Claw at every single event from June through August? That's not the obstacle. That's the laboratory.

If you're a Catholic woman who loves Jesus, keeps her life together in almost every area, but has this one habit that doesn't quite line up with who you know you're called to be — this episode is for you.

In this episode:

• Why "I'll start after summer" is the habit talking — not wisdom
• How your brain is already craving before you've made a single decision (and why that's not weakness)
• Why summer's social pressure is actually the fastest path to lasting change
• What God might be doing in the seasons that feel most inconvenient
• Three things you can do right now — before the next barbecue

Mentioned in this episode:

The Sober(ish) Summer Challenge is coming back this year — and Christie is making it better. Registration isn't open yet, but if this episode resonated, stay close. She'll let you know the moment doors open.

→ Follow Christie on Instagram: @thecatholicsobrietycoach

 → Subscribe so you don't miss the announcement

This podcast is for you if:

You don't identify as an alcoholic but you know something's off. You're disciplined, faithful, and quietly non-negotiable about your evening wine. You've tried to cut back. It worked for a while. And now there's a low hum of something — shame, confusion, frustration — that follows you around.

You're in the right place.

About Christie:

Christie Walker is a Catholic sobriety coach and content creator who has been alcohol-free for 29 years. She works with Catholic women in the gray area — not rock bottom, not fine — using a framework built on Catholic faith, identity in Christ, inner healing, and neuroscience. 

Her coaching programs include the Sober(ish) Summer Challenge, the Sacred Sobriety Lab, and the Sacred Sobriety Kickstart (a free 5-video series for women ready to take a first step).

Know someone who needs to hear this? Send her this episode. It might be the kindest thing you do for her all summer.

You've been meaning to cut back. You've prayed about it. And somehow summer is here and nothing has changed. Soberish Summer combines brain science and your identity in Christ to help you understand what's driving the habit — and leave with a plan that's yours to keep. No strict rules + community, and real support.

$62. Starts July 1 Reserve your spot: https://www.thecatholicsobrietycoach.com

👉🏻 Get started with my FREE 5-Day Sacred Sobriety Kick Start
https://thecatholicsobrietycoach.mykajabi.com/5-day-sacred-sobriety-kick-start

👉🏻 Book a Clarity Call
https://thecatholicsobrietycoach.mykajabi.com/clarity-call

Visit my Website: https://thecatholicsobrietycoach.com

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, Christy Walker. I'm a wife, mom, and a joy-filled Catholic, and I am the Catholic sobriety coach, and I am so glad you're here today I wanna start with something that I know is going to sound completely backwards and maybe even a little impossible to you. And you know that I love when I can get you to say, "Wait a second, what did she just say?" So here's this one for today. I'm here to tell you that summer is actually the absolute best time to work on reducing or eliminating alcohol. Now, I know. I can already hear you. "But Christy, it's summer. There are rosé spritzers and Coronas with lime and hard seltzers at every single event from Memorial Day till Labor Day. My neighbors have a pool. My family reunions are a lot." "And oh yeah, there's vacations. This is literally the hardest possible time." Now, I get it. I do. That is the most reasonable, logical, and completely understandable conclusion to reach. I understand why you think that. But I'm here to tell you that it's also wrong, and by the end of this episode, I'm going to show you exactly why that is, and hopefully, you're gonna close this podcast app and feel weirdly excited about your next barbecue. Now before we dive in, let me just make sure that you know you're in the right place. If you are a woman who loves Jesus, you are disciplined in basically every single other area of your life. You work out, you eat reasonably well, you show up for your people. But there's this one thing, this one habit, that evening glass of wine or the weekend drinking that somehow became a Thursday through Sunday drinking event, or the habit that started as a treat and somewhere along the way has become a non-negotiable, something that you are holding onto even though you know it's probably not doing anything really good for you right now. And you don't think you're an alcoholic. You've-- maybe you've Googled it, probably more than once, and you know that you don't fit that picture, but you also know that something is off. You know it doesn't quite line up with who you want to be, who you feel called to be. And you've tried to stop or cut back, and it worked for a minute, and then it didn't. And now there's this low hum of shame that follows you around. If that's you, that's who I'm talking to today, and I'm so glad you're here. So every year around this time, I hear some version of the same thing. "I'm going to take a break from drinking, but maybe after summer," or, "I really want to do this work, but the timing is terrible. We have a lake house, and my sister's bachelorette, and, oh, there's the Fourth of July. And then the Hendersons, they always have people over, and I can't exactly show up to that without alcohol." And on and on it goes. And listen, that is a completely rational thought. It makes total sense on the surface. But can I ask you something? When exactly is the right time to do this? Because in my experience, after summer, it's football season, and then it's the holidays, and obviously you can't do this at the holidays. And then it's January, and then you're doing Dry January, but maybe that doesn't count because it ends. And then it's spring and Easter, and things start warming up again, and oh my goodness, suddenly it's summer again, and you're right back where you started. Believe me, I know. It happens to me too. There's always a reason to wait. But here's what I wanna say gently and clearly. The waiting is part of the problem. The negotiating and the I'll start after, that's the habit talking. That's your brain protecting the thing it's actually become dependent on. Now, here's what I actually believe about summer. This is the thing that has changed my perspective when I started coaching women through this. Summer doesn't make this harder. Summer makes it more visible. Okay, I want you to think about it. In your regular day-to-day life, a lot of your drinking triggers or cues are private. They're the 5:00 PM thing when you're cooking dinner. They're the end of a long workday. They happen inside your house, mostly alone or just with your immediate family. But summer, summer puts everything out in the open. You've got the social situations, the events where everybody's drinking, and you're standing there calculating whether you can have two or whether two becomes four. You've also got the family dynamics, and I know your family. I've heard about them. They are a lot. Then you've also got the FOMO and the pressure and the people saying, "Oh, come on, it's summer." They mean well, but they're just not helping. All of that discomfort, all of those situations that make you want to cave, that is a situation for collecting data, . That is information about what your habit is actually doing for you and when and why. I want you to see summer as a live laboratory. Be a scientist. Get curious. And if you can learn to navigate Fourth of July parties, a girls trip, a backyard barbecue, if you can do this in the summer, you can do it anywhere. You will have built something solid that January willpower sprints never give you. So let me give you a little brain science here because I think it actually makes this make more sense. Your brain is a prediction machine. Genuinely, that's one of its main jobs. It is consistently scanning your environment, making predictions about what is coming based on what's happened before. And when it predicts a reward, it starts releasing dopamine before you get the thing. So when you walk into a backyard barbecue and you smell the grill, and you hear the ice clinking in someone's glass, and you see the cooler, your brain has already started the craving before you've consciously made a single decision. This is a trained neural pathway. Your brain learned that this context equals that reward, and your brain is just doing its job. So here's why this matters for summer. Exposure in the right context with the right support actually rewires those pathways. Every time you go to the party and don't drink or drink intentionally and differently than you had planned, you are teaching your brain a new prediction. You are literally building new neural circuitry. Summer gives you even more of those opportunities than pretty much any other season. It is inconvenient discipleship, and God has been known to work like that. And speaking of God working in powerful yet inconvenient ways, can we just be honest about something for a second? A lot of us have this idea that we need to get our lives perfectly polished up and cleaned up before we let God into them. Like, we'll sort this out first, we'll get a streak going, and prove that we're actually serious, and then we'll let Him in. But that's, that doesn't work. That's backwards. And I say that as, as somebody who did exactly that for a long time. So here's what I know after over 29 years of sobriety and years of walking women through this. The invitation to freedom usually doesn't come when things are quiet and comfortable. It comes in the middle of a mess. It comes in the hard season, the inconvenient season. It comes in the summer when you're at your cousin's wedding, and the champagne is flowing, and something in you says, "I just don't wanna do this anymore." That moment, that specific uncomfortable and slightly panicked moment, it's not a problem. That's just God nudging you to something better, something deeper, richer, more abundant. And the question isn't whether you have the willpower to white-knuckle your way through the next barbecue. The question is whether you're willing to actually look what's underneath the habit. What are you reaching for? What's missing? What have you been avoiding? That's identity work, that's healing work, and that's the most important thing that you could do this summer So what does this actually look like? practically speaking, what does it look like to treat summer as a laboratory, as a lab, like my sacred sobriety lab, instead of a minefield? The first thing is to go to the things. Don't isolate. One of the biggest mistakes that women make early in this process is avoiding every situation where alcohol will be present. There may be times when you do want to avoid that, and that's okay, but don't just avoid so that you don't feel discomfort. And I, I completely understand that desire, but avoidance isn't going to give you the data, and it doesn't rewire anything. Every time you say no, then you're creating new habit paths, and when you avoid it, the fear is in charge. So go to the barbecue, show up to the party, bring your sparkly water and whatever else, and just go. But go with a plan. Bring your backup drinks. Bring with you things that you want to say when people offer you a drink. And it doesn't have to be anything other than, "No thank you," Or, "Alcohol has been wrecking my sleep lately, even just one, so I'm gonna have to pass." That's it. You don't have to explain anything to anybody. The next thing is to get curious instead of trying to white-knuckle. Instead of walking into a situation and just trying to survive it by clenching your jaw and staring at the veggie plate and counting down the minutes, what if you gently-- genuinely got curious about what you're feeling? When that craving hits, you can ask yourself, like, "What is this about? Am I bored? Is it social anxiety? Is it the desire to belong? Is it something about being with your family or this group of friends that makes you want to just disappear a little bit?" That question, what is this actually about, is worth more than many, many days of white-knuckled sobriety And the last one is to tell one person. You do not have to announce it. You don't have to make a thing about it. Again, those simple, "No, thank you. Alcohol has been wrecking my sleep. It's messing up my gut," whatever, is fine. But find one person in your life, a friend, a sister, a spouse, and tell them what you're doing. Not necessarily for accountability, just so that you don't feel like you're carrying it all by yourself. We were not designed to do hard things in isolation. The Lord created us for community. Okay, so I want to mention something before I wrap up. Last summer, I ran the Soberish Summer Challenge for the first time, and it was one of the most meaningful things I've done in this business. So much so that I decided to do it again for Advent, and it was wonderful. We had women show up who had been trying to get a handle on their drinking for years, and some of them are still with me in the lab and have continued in some of my other programs. It's just been amazing. And there's just something about doing this together in a community with a faith framework guiding it that helps it click in a way for women that it hadn't before, women that have even done other programs. So I just wanna let you know I'm doing it again this year. I'm working on it right now, actually. I'm making it better. I'm going deeper. I'm building out the support in ways that I think are going to make a real difference. I'm also going to be offering a, um, amplified version if you want to really boost your results and the support and accountability you get. I'm not opening registration yet though, because I'm still hammering out all the details, and I wanna have everything in place before I do open registration. But I wanted you to know that it's coming, and if any of this resonated with you today, if you've heard yourself somewhere in this episode, I want you to stay close because when registration opens, I'll tell you first. So make sure that you're subscribed, follow me on Instagram, and tell a friend so you can do it with a buddy. If there's a woman in your life who needs to hear that summer isn't the obstacle, send her this episode and maybe invite her to be in the Sober Summer Challenge with you. It might be a really beautiful and transformational time for you both. All right, friend, here's what I want you to take away from today. The timing is never going to be perfect. Summer isn't the problem. Summer is actually an invitation. Every hard moment that you can think of that will come up this season is actually a chance to learn something about yourself. We talk about progress over perfection. We are gathering information. We are gathering data. We are not looking at these things with judgment or shame. It helps you plan and pr- prepare and lay a foundation that will help you along your journey and help you reduce the amount you drink, so you can have more peace when deciding to take alcohol or leave it. I'll be back again next week, and we're going to start getting into the real question underneath all of this, not just what you're drinking, but why. Because that is where things actually start to shift. So until then, enjoy the rest of your spring. Summer's coming soon, and I will talk to you again 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, thecatholicsobrietycoach.com. Follow me on Instagram @thecatholicsobrietycoach. I look forward to speaking to you next time. And remember, I am here for you. I am praying for you. You are not alone.