One Day At A Time?? How About 10 Minutes At A Time!?!

One DAY at a time?? How about 10 MINUTES at a time!?!

I’m your Coach, Angela Pugh. And what we do here is learn how to live a sober and fun alcohol, free life. The whole point of giving up drinking is to live BETTER and be HAPPIER, and I will certainly give you all the insights I have after many years of sobriety, as well as all my mistakes, life lessons, drama, trauma, and everything I have, lol.  It’s an open book around here!

I remember in the beginning

Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s a bit cliché, and we’re going to break it down and get a little deeper into the concept and how to practice it on a daily basis. You hear it all the time, especially for those of us who are 12 steppers, it’s all over the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous,  One day at a time, 

I remember in the beginning of my recovery I didn’t really understand a lot of the clichés in the rooms. There are all of these weird one, liners that people repeat and, if I’m honest, I didn’t know what any of them meant. I would just smile and nod, lol.  

But I totally get it now, and I understand that the one, liners are just a shorthand version of the long versions. 

We are going to talk about one day at a time and what it means, how it can be helpful, and how to break it down even smaller in those moments of crisis. 

But first, before the deep dive, let’s talk about a few things going on around here and the crazy busy week I’ve had doing some major collaborations with other recovery rockstars. 

First off, I got to be on the Recovery Happy Hour podcast with Tricia Lewis! And I owe you guys a HUGE apology because I totally forgot to tell you about it! This is what happens when you get busy with so many projects,  she had emailed me to let me know my episode was going live and I completely forgot to share it with you!

That’s totally my bad, and I hope you got to check it out because it was a lot of fun and Tricia is absolutely delightful, I’m so grateful I got to meet her AND she is coming on Addiction Unlimited also! 

By the time you are hearing this episode we have already recorded her episode on Addiction Unlimited and it will be going live soon!  I will keep you posted on that. 

Also… another total recovery powerhouse, Jen Elizabeth, author of Shape of A Woman, Jen was on Addiction Unlimited with me a couple of weeks ago and we shared a phenomenal conversation. She is truly a stunning person, inside and out. And Jen does something really cool called Fierce Female Friday. 

This is exclusively on her Instagram @resurektion_of_me (and I will link that in the shownotes) and she featured me last week!!! She asked me to write a piece of my story for her and I did that, I love to write, for those of you who don’t know that.  I started many years ago with an anonymous blog that was very popular in the addiction world way back in the day before everybody and their dog had a blog and a podcast. 

But I wrote a short story and she condensed it to Instagram size which is just a few paragraphs and I was her featured Fierce Female Friday.  

What an honor, you guys, these women are badasses and for all of us to collab is pretty amazing. We are going to do some more collabs, too,  some Instagram live videos and some exclusive video segments only for my Inner Circle Membership members. You guys will get some extra content with all these incredible souls I get to talk to!

And, I took the full story that I wrote, and I posted it in the Inner Circle, so if you are a member you can read the whole thing there, and it’s not very long, I don’t mean to make it sound like a book or something, lol.  It’s pretty short, and you can find it in your member portal. 

That is my busy crazy life, so many phenomenal things going on. 

And, let me embarrass myself here for a minute, too. You know I like to share my struggles as much as my triumphs because I never want to paint a picture for you that because I’ve been sober a hundred a fifty years I’ve got it all together. 

Clean up my mistakes

I want you to know the reality of the situation and that our work on ourselves is an ongoing process. That’s why I talk about my food struggles and laziness and my financial irresponsibility because these are all things I’ve had to work on well into my sobriety. There is no end point, and there is no such thing as perfection. 

The key to all of this is that we never stop trying. It’s okay to make mistakes, as long as I clean up my mistakes and learn from them. 

So you know I started the membership site, the Inner Circle, in April. Just like anything else, there is a learning curve. You get going, you get some feedback, you make some tweaks, and it just continues to get better. 

Now that I am almost 2 months into it, it’s getting really good. I’m sharing content that is thought, provoking and helpful,  I’m sharing what I call ‘quick fixes’ and those are just really cool memes or infographics that can change your perspective by simply reading a sentence or two. We have special insight segments on the 12 steps and since May is the 5th month, we talked about the 5th step this month, and just all kinds of good stuff. 

As we were going through week 3, I came across something on Pinterest that I really wanted to share with Inner Circle members. It took my mindset from a crappy place to a good reminder of perspective and not getting too caught up in negativity, and it inspired me to write a little piece about that. 

So I go into the membership site and I post this thing,  and I was wondering why there weren’t a lot of comments on different thing in the site, because usually, you guys write comments and I write back to you and we have some pretty cool conversations around the things I post. 

But I was getting nothing. And I was getting super nervous!  I was like, oh my gosh, do they not like anything I’m posting? Am I doing a terrible job? Maybe I need to do more???

I start freaking out

Like a good alcoholic I start freaking out and immediately blowing everything out of proportion,  that’s when I realized,  I had been posting all this content that I was so excited about, but I never hit the Publish button on the Week 3 category!  So all the content was still private where only I could see it!!!

OMG!!!!!  Seriously, I felt so ridiculous and embarrassed. 

I sent out an email to all the members and apologized, and told them about all the stuff that was available now that I fixed it, and then I drowned my feelings in ice cream. 

And that’s the reality of life,  no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you want everything to be perfect, sometimes you are going to forget to hit the ‘publish’ button and cause a mess. 

And here’s the truth,  a few years ago I would have let that little incident take me down. I would have blown it out of proportion, I would have beat myself up about it and obsessed over how embarrassed I felt, I would have told myself that everyone is going to be mad at me for not getting their content out and they are all going to want to leave the membership because of it, I failed them, I’m not good enough… all those crazy messages the committee likes to feed us. 

Instead, I practiced what we are going to talk about today, one day at a time,  and I didn’t get consumed in the 4 days that the content wasn’t available, I didn’t let that guilt and fear ruin my whole day or week,  I got myself back in the moment, realized there is nothing I can do about those 4 days, but what I can do is get it handled and let my members know what happened, and apologize! 

Lesson learned, I promise you that will never happen again!

If I step back and look at it logically, I am super grateful this happened in the first 6 weeks of my membership so I did get to learn that valuable lesson,  and even more grateful that it was only 4 days!!!

I have to stay in today, and figure out what I can do today,  not stress about how I don’t have a time machine to go back and change something 4 days ago,  but what can I do today, to get me closer to my vision or my goal. 

And what I could do that day was tell everyone what was going on and let them know it was my mistake. Period. So that’s what I did. 

One of the greatest struggles in sobriety is getting stuck in the past, or getting wrapped up in future tripping. 

What’s going to happen, what might happen, what should I do about what might happen, will I be okay, will I turn into a pumpkin…yada yada yada. 

What we forget is, the only thing you have any control over is today. The very next moment. 

You hear all the time in AA people telling these really funny stories about getting caught up in the future. I remember one lady, she and her husband are both doctors, and she was talking about how that morning she was looking at her son and thinking about how hard medical school is going to be for him. Thinking about the long hours and studying and sleep deprivation. 

And she said, then, I had to remind myself that he’s 5. 

I couldn’t imagine New Year’s Eve without alcohol

Or, you hear people say one of their objections in giving up alcohol is that they can’t imagine having a wedding without booze, but today, in this moment, they aren’t even dating anyone. 

Or me! One of my big hang ups was that I couldn’t imagine New Year’s Eve without alcohol, now, in my defense, I was a bartender and NYE was a pretty epic event in my annual plans, but I was so caught up in that thought, how would I ever get through that. The truth is, I have never had a single NYE where I wanted to drink. 

And I was a sober bartender on NYE for many years. It didn’t even bother me. And now that I’m old, I’m not even awake for NYE so it seems really pointless to have worried about it now. 

Now I spend NYE worried about all of you getting through that time and staying sober and sending prayers out to all of you and all the guys at my sober living houses, I spend my evening trying to mentally save all of you. That probably sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. 

I want to break this down even further, also,  in a way that saved me when I was brand new sober.  I couldn’t manage one day at a time,  I was doing 10 minutes at a time. 

We talk about habits and the power of habits and rituals.  When I got sober, I was still bartending. And on a typical night at work, I would start drinking around 8pm. 

At the end of my bar there was a cooler where all the kegs were and all the bottles of liquor that needed to be kept cold. And me, like a good alcoholic, had a stash of paper cups in the cooler so I could sneak in there and pour myself nice cold shots. 

My brain was accustomed to having its first drink around 8, and just because I wasn’t drinking anymore, didn’t mean my brain wasn’t thinking about it. It was a ritual I had built over the course of years so it wasn’t going to go away just because I quit. 

This is when I learned to take a craving or a thought or a difficult moment and take it 10 minutes at a time. 

As the 8 o’clock hour would approach each night, the committee would start chirping at me talking about having a drink. It would be reminding me of my stack of paper cups in the cooler and how easy it was to walk in there and how quick it was, and no one would know. 

Distracting the committee

My brain had its own ritual, and I was standing in its way. So I would find things to do for 10 minutes at a time to distract the committee. 

This is what I talk to you guys about all the time, the importance of distracting the committee when it’s being a jerk. 

What I see happen all the time is we fall apart in the discomfort. When the committee is yelling at you about some crazy anxiety or fear or chirping at you with a craving, whatever the discomfort is, we panic. And panic brings fight, flight, or freeze. 

In these moments, I need you to fight. Fight the committee, tell it to F off, tell it you’re in charge now and you are making different decisions. Or even flight, leave, go do something, go somewhere.

But for god’s sake, please don’t freeze. When you freeze in panic and discomfort, you put yourself in a position that you are spending quiet time with the irritated committee. 

The committee can be a real jerk.  I don’t want you to isolate and freeze and put yourself in a position where you can hear it better, I want you to get busy, move around, do something to distract it and give it something else to talk about. 

10 minutes at a time. 

When the committee is chirping about anything, find something to do 10 minutes at a time. 

For me, when I was at the bar, I would go wash dishes or clean out a cabinet, I would start a conversation with a guest at the bar or one of the cocktail servers, or I would play around mixing juices and sodas to find new mixtures I liked.  Anything I could do for 10 minutes. 

Then, I would check back in with my craving and see how it was. 

And my cravings weren’t cravings like I really wanted to drink, because I didn’t. It was just the craving of the ritual. We create habits and rituals because there is a sense of safety in knowing what’s to come. 

Like I have breakfast with my father every Saturday morning, I do online recovery meetings for our Inner Circle Membership members, I do Facebook live videos on certain days, my podcast comes out every Wednesday, well, Tuesday for the Inner Circle members but Wednesday for the rest of you. 

We know we have a tendency to future trip, so when we have rituals in place it takes away that sense of unknown and replaces it with a sense of safety and knowing and certainty. 

Here’s what I want you to do,  when something comes up, whether it’s a craving or an anxiety or fear when you feel it, I want you to take a second and rate it. 1,10. 1 being the most manageable, and 10 being unbearable. 

Take a second and sit with it,  ask yourself, how bad is this, really? Is it a moment that will pass quickly? Is there a fast solution? Is it something that you can take a few deep belly breaths and get through it? 

Give it a score of 1-10. 

Then, I want you to find something to do for 10 minutes. Whatever it is, I don’t care.  If you are home, I’m sure you have a hundred closets and cabinets that could use some organizing and cleaning out, or some laundry to start or laundry to fold, or something you could do outside, wash the car, take a walk, take a shower, walk the dog, walk the kids, make some sugar, free jello, sit down somewhere quiet and do some meditation, research something you are curious about on Google and YouTube, go to the gym and sit in the sauna, go online and write a review for Addiction Unlimited Podcast, or go in our FB group and write a message to support our group members and give them a nice day.

Anything you can think of to distract yourself and distract the committee for just ten minutes. 

Then I want you to pause again, and rate it.  Same scale, 1,10.  If it’s still too high, then find something to do for another 10 minutes. Then check in with yourself again. 

You know, my favorite thing to do is to figure out how to be of service to someone else. A great way to get your head in a good space and take away the power of ANY negativity is to reach out to someone else and ask them how they are doing. 

Think of someone you haven’t talked to in a while, or someone who is going through a difficult time, and reach out to them. Ask how they are doing, tell them you were thinking about them, ask if there’s anything you can do for them,  and don’t say a single word about yourself. 

If they ask how you are you say I’m doing great, thanks for asking. I’m making some changes or I’m going through some things and I’d love to catch up about that another time, but today, I was just thinking about you and wanted to check in and see how you are. 

See if someone in your family needs help with something, maybe your AA group room needs a good cleaning or vacuum. See if there is something you can do to help a neighbor, make a nice surprise breakfast for your family, or, out of the blue take your kids to the park or somewhere they love but haven’t been in awhile. 

Make your partner a cup of coffee in the morning and bring it to them in bed. Go on Facebook or Instagram and write 10 nice comments on other people’s posts. There are millions of ways to be of service to the world around you. 

The very moment some negativity or anxiety starts to creep in, go-to service. Don’t get caught up with the committee obsessing about whatever you are obsessing about,  shift your thoughts, shift your actions, distract yourself, and distract the committee. 10 minutes at a time, if necessary. 

You have heard me say this over and over, and I will continue saying it,  if you isolate yourself and you don’t find connections with other people, then the committee and your addiction have you in exactly the position they need you in, isolated and alone. 

Every predator works best when you are isolated and alone. Your first goal should be to ensure you are not those things. And if you are uncomfortable or shy or whatever you want to call it, then start small. Get in the FB group and just read through the comments and click the like button on some of them. That doesn’t challenge you at all, you are participating, you are distracting the committee, and you are being connected. 

You don’t have to go in there and write a freakin diary entry to be involved. Some of us write long posts and we love that,  it doesn’t mean you have to do that. You can start by just liking some posts. Then, when something really resonates with you, you can write a short comment like thanks for sharing this, I really needed this today, great reminder. 

Small things just to get some practice and be connected. But if you want to stay alone, not connecting, not getting support, not sharing yourself and helping others, then your addiction will win every single time. 

You can join many groups, you can join the Inner Circle Membership and get in the private chat with me and all of our other amazing members, there are so many options to be connected without having to go anywhere!

Ultimately, you have to make the decision whether or not you are willing to push yourself through some discomfort to get closer to your big picture goal of sobriety and an incredible fun life,  or if you are going to sit in your discomfort and wallow. 

A great thing you can do 10 minutes at a time is jump on YouTube and search for videos about positive thoughts.  It’s a great way to shift your mindset instantly, get you out of your own drama, and it’s a quick and easy tool you can use FOREVER. 

Of course, I have the attention span of a gnat so I love to find videos that are only a 5 or 6 minutes long. The key is, it doesn’t matter how long or short the video is, what matters is that you are committed enough to yourself and your sobriety to take the time to actually sit down and do something positive and healthy for yourself. 

I’ll even take this a step further,  I made a cheatsheet for you. A daily routine you can print and use to keep you on track with your recovery. 

There are six time slots, and six action suggestions and they are laid out like a checklist. So in the morning you pick which activity you want to do from the action list and when you do it, you check off that action and check off the morning slot. Then there’s a mid, morning, lunch and so on. 

Every couple of hours throughout your day you pick one of the actions and do it, then mark off that time slot and that action. 

Big picture sober vision

AND there’s some other great things on there to track to help keep you in a healthy routine and consistently working toward your big picture sober vision. 

This is what we do to build lasting sobriety,  you create a routine of healthy actions, you get intentional about how you spend your time and the things you do, and you get intentional about molding your thoughts and the committee to be healthy and strong, and that’s how you live. 

When you create a solid routine that nourishes your little sober soul on a daily basis, you don’t have to live in fear of relapse. 

Relapse doesn’t happen “to” you,  vodka doesn’t chase you down the street and pry your mouth open and jump in there, okay? You say, I hope I don’t relapse like it’s totally out of your control. Well, you’re wrong, it’s completely in your control. 

You DECIDE not to relapse, then you create a plan, and you practice it regularly to become really good at it, you make a commitment to practice it even when you screw it up, you keep doing it. That’s how you don’t relapse. 

And if you do relapse, then your plan wasn’t working and you have to look at the things you were doing and figure out what to change or what to do differently.  You will probably have to add some things, and maybe remove some things. 

When I am really focused on keeping my thoughts strong and powerful I have certain rituals that I practice every day to make sure I am feeding a strong and powerful mindset. At some point, I catch some negative thoughts coming in, either about myself or being negative about my busy or being short and irritable with my friends or employees,  when I see that stuff happening, I have to re,evaluate my efforts. 

Have I been doing my rituals each day or have I been slacking off? Usually, I find there is something that I have started slacking on. It might be that I’ve been isolating too much and not being connected to my tribe,  if that’s the case, then I will immediately reach out to a few people in my tribe and connect or make plans to meet for coffee. 

Sometimes I get lazy with my meditation or visualization, this is probably one of my greatest struggles because the committee always wants to tell me that I am super busy and I have other things to do first that are more important and I’ll do it later, but when later comes, I’m exhausted so I’ll blow it off. 

If I am blowing it off, then I need to get my act together and get back on it. 

I don’t beat myself up because I’ve fallen off a bit, I recognize the lesson in it, that I can’t listen to the committee, or that I need to get up a little earlier to make sure I have time or I need to put it in my calendar so I know I have time because it’s important to may daily living and not having debilitating anxiety and an overwhelming desire to drink and escape my life. 

It’s kind of important. 

So if you have a plan and you are doing it, and you relapse, you have to look at your plan and re, evaluate and make some adjustments. 

This is the same thing, 10 minutes at a time.  I tell you you can change your life in 10,15 minutes a day because it’s true. 

Try to identify what is going on

98% of my YouTube videos I watch are under 10 minutes. 98% of the meditations or guided visualizations I do are under 10 minutes. Connecting with my tribe, 10 minutes. Being of service in random and thoughtful ways, 10 minutes. 

You see what I’m saying? None of this is a huge time, consuming commitment that is unreasonable. And if it feels unreasonable then you have some other issues to figure out before you get started. 

Let’s recap this if you are in some discomfort, anxiety, or a craving, I want you to stop for a second and rate it on a scale of 1,10. 

And try to put a name on the feeling if you can, are you bored, irritable, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, are you sad, did you get your feelings hurt, are you feeling like someone doesn’t like you, are you feeling left out, are you stressing about money or have some fear about your marriage or your kids, 

Try to identify what is going on, think about how bad it really is, is the world actually ending or is this solveable? And give it a rating 1,10. 

After you’ve named it and rated it, then find something to do for 10 minutes. Write in your journal, listen to a podcast or audiobook,  go through the list of a million things I mentioned earlier, for 10 minutes.  If you have a sponsor, CALL THEM!

After 10 minutes, take another second to pause and check in with yourself. How does it feel now? Is the feeling getting a little less? Does it feel more solveable? And rate it again, hopefully the number is going down. 

Then go do something else for 10 minutes. Be of service to someone else if you can, get lost in a movie or a book, whatever it takes. Then check in again, and rate it. 

You get it, keep going for however long you need to. 

Find a private space

Each time you get through a difficult moment or a craving or anxiety, each time you get through one of those moments, the next one will be less powerful. 

This goes for everything. If you are having a cigarette or drink craving, if you power through it and show it you are the boss, then the next craving will automatically be smaller. 

If you have major anxiety and feel panicky, you step out and find a private space, you do deep belly breaths, you check in with yourself and name it and rate it, then visualize yourself getting through that situation and being okay. It will be okay. 

And when you get through that moment, although it may be uncomfortable, you show yourself that you are capable and able, and you begin to trust yourself again and you know that the next anxious moment will be smaller. 

And if you want the Daily Routine cheat sheet, you can get it at www.myrecoverytoolbox.com/107 and you can sign up to get the cheat sheet. Print one for each day and get yourself some structure and a strategy and some relief! 

Okay? I love you guys, I’ll see all of you members in the Inner Circle for some extra special content this week and in the private chat for members only,  I will link that in the show notes if you want to join us, it’s pretty awesome all the tools and community and support we’ve built in such a short time. 

Join the Inner Circle:  https://www.myrecoverytoolbox.com/innercircle