Jen opens the episode with a warm welcome, mentions it's a summer edition, and describes being at the pool with her daughter to set a relaxed scene. This orients viewers to the tone and context before the main topic.
Jen opens the episode with a warm welcome, mentions it's a summer edition, and describes being at the pool with her daughter to set a relaxed scene. This orients viewers to the tone and context before the main topic.
Jen frames 'environment' as the third pillar of her sobriety work and connects it to choices around alcohol-free living. She explains how this concept complements personal work and peer support.
She recounts her early days sober when bars and alcohol-centric events dominated her social life, leading to returns to use. These anecdotes illustrate how unsupportive environments can derail recovery.
Jen asks viewers to consider which environments support or undermine their well-being and solicits examples in the chat. She also highlights her NA beverage choice (Even) and briefly describes its flavor as a light, celebratory mocktail.
She discusses how she changed friend groups, asked for alternative activities like coffee or yoga, and embraced new hobbies and movement to make drinking less logical. Jen also notes how entrepreneurial flexibility and venues like saunas, studios, and pool time now support her sobriety.
Jen encourages listeners to identify uplifting spaces and to adjust or seek help for environments that don't serve them. She asks viewers to share tactics in the chat, thanks everyone, and signs off until next week.
Hi everyone, welcome in sober not somber hour. I feel like I can say it's the summer edition. I just came in from my pool. I live in an apartment and I have a really cool like pool and outside area and my daughter's there. She's 22 and she just said, hey, I want to come over and hang out and enjoy the afternoon and I'm like. This is why we have the entrepreneur life and the flexibility to say yes to things like that. But yes, I've been up at the pool taking in some sun for the last 20 minutes and popped down to my apartment just to log into Sober Not Somber hour and share what I have to share with you today.
Hi, Emily. Welcome in. It's so good to see you. Yeah, so Sober Not Somber Hour, Jen Varale, your host, and I love to start out by just highlighting NA beverage of choice. And today I am all about even, drinking a little bit of par, which is one of their four varieties. And this is my way of celebrating end of day and happy hour. So I always kind of pull from my experiences from the last time I checked in with y'all to figure out what's resonating right now. And what I'd like to prompt and share with you today is this idea of our environment.
and specifically how that relates to choices that we make, either if we're in long term sobriety or we just want to make better, healthier choices that are alcohol free. So I always say like my work started in this space. I'm coming up on 12 years of sobriety in July, and my work has really always been around this, what I call the third pillar in my sobriety journey. The first two being well, number one, work on myself, like work on the desire to really want to be a sober person and have a sober lifestyle.
And what does that look like? So a willingness and the second pillar being work with peers and AA or with a therapist or counselor to be witnessed by others in this transition into you know, a new identity essentially for yourself. And the third pillar, which is the one that I have focused my work on, which is the environment you're surrounding yourself with. So in sobriety, to me, that looks like a complete reframe of my social activities. And this was 13 some years ago when I first started to get sober.
I didn't, there just weren't a lot of options outside of the bar and restaurants and events that were very alcohol centric in my career at that point. So I struggled. I struggled to find an environment I could be in that would support my need to make a sober choice. And as a result, I had two, what we call returns to use, which is less shaming than relapse apparently, however you term it. I had four months of continuous sobriety, went back into use for about a week and then had another four months of continuous sobriety and then went to Las Vegas.
Not a great idea if you're not like sober solid proof in your in your journey. And then I had four months of the addictive part of a alcoholism that spiraled really quickly, essentially because I was hiding that from friends and family who had known that I had declared sobriety. So that environment piece of it kept tripping me up as I was working on myself and going to AA meetings. I still couldn't quite figure out the environment piece. So I share that because I not only if you're trying to make better choices in sobriety with alcohol, but to prompt you to think about the environments that you are in every day and how do those environments support your health and well-being or detract from it.
So if you've got an example of a healthy environment that you find yourself in, I want to hear it. And if you have an example of a space that's not as healthy that you might need to be in for work or any other reason, what does that look like? And just drop that in the chat if you have any thoughts on that. And if you're watching this after, go ahead and share that too. So as we're pausing contemplating that, even guys, this is so great. This one is it has lemon extract, a little bit of agave nectar, and then a little hint of rosemary.
And it's kind of like meant to be like a play on a Ernie Palmer. And yeah, it's absolutely craveable. And yeah, I think thinking about those environments. So for me, yeah, Emily says Cadre and Team Women, two great spaces where you can feel supported and just empowered to do more. So for me and my early sobriety, two of my main spaces that would throw me off were my existing friend groups because I really still try to hang out with all my group of friends who continue to drink as normies. And I continued to insist to myself that I could handle all that and fit in.
So that is 1 environment I didn't realize that needed to shift. And when I finally got sober, sober for good, I had to change those friend groups and those experiences and be willing to ask those friends to meet me where I was at. So different spaces. I had one friend in particular who was so amazing. She was like, we don't need to go to the bar. We can go get coffee. We can do yoga together. And I was like, really? You would do that with me? And so that was just like one simple start of asking for what I needed, then also realizing how those environments in those spaces really tripped me up.
and frustrated me to no end because I thought I was so driven to achieve these goals by myself. So those toxic environments were not great. And if you can look at what's showing up in your life as being a supportive environment and then what's maybe not as supportive and maybe needs to shift a little, or maybe you need to ask for help in making some sort of change. So in addition to that negative space for me being bars and restaurants and trying to hang with friends who drank way back when, 12 some years ago, I look at my life now and how the environments I'm in support me fully, which is the entrepreneurial environment, which means I can for the most part, pick and choose where and when I decide to show up for different networking events that may or may not include alcohol.
And I can also choose environments like the sauna, workout studios, yoga, hanging out by the pool with my daughter, like all of these things that I know are not going to jeopardize what's at stake with my sobriety. So if any of you are listening and kind of in that early term stage of like, how do I do this sober journey in my life? Like you maybe know you want it, you have some idea of you need it and then it becomes how do I change my habits and my environment to support that? So all sorts of tools and ways to look at that.
But I would say finding new activities for me at least became the game changer for me. And I also, in addition to looking at environments that I would do things socially with people, I also looked at personally, how I could get back out running and doing all the things that I love to do that were active and inspired by movement that would also make the choice to drink not a logical one. So yeah, I would just encourage you to think about your different environments. Where do you feel uplifted? Continue to do that.
And maybe there's one environment or space that's not feeling so great right now. Dig into that and maybe figure out a way to shift that if you need to be there in a way that can feel good for you. So let me know. Drop in the chat later too if you're listening what ways and what tactics are you implementing that allow you to really create the environment that's good for you and support it. Thanks everyone. Have a wonderful Tuesday and we will see you next week. Ciao, ciao.
