Today’s episode is a conversation about the performance of drinking. The pressure to prove you can handle it and never look weak. My guest coaches men, so we’re talking about masculinity, competition, and the pressure to keep up, but honestly, this isn’t just for guys. This is episode 456 and if you’ve ever thought, “I don’t want anyone to think I have a problem,” you’re going to recognize yourself in this one.

Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit from the inside out. We’re challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink and why it can be hard to resist temptation. No labels, no judgment, just practical tools to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking. Now, here’s your host, Rachel Hart.

Rachel Hart: Hey everybody, I’m so excited to welcome Patrick Fox to the podcast. I met Patrick a little over a year ago. He is a coach based in the UK, and like me, his personal struggle with drinking is what led him to this work. He’s so passionate about helping as many men as possible rethink their relationship with alcohol. And because he focuses specifically on working with men, I wanted to bring him on the podcast to really share his insight. But I will tell you, even if you’re not a guy, I still think there’s a lot you’re going to learn from our conversation because Patrick, like me, is really focused on helping people understand why their drinking looks the way it does and how so many of us inadvertently end up using alcohol as a way to escape how we feel, which of course, is true for both men and women. So Patrick, welcome to the podcast.

Patrick Fox: Yes, thank you very much, Rachel. Awesome to be here.

Rachel Hart: So since you focus specifically on helping men with their drinking, I wanted to ask you right off the bat, what you think gets in the way? What prevents guys from just addressing their own relationship with alcohol?

Patrick Fox: I think one of the biggest things that gets in the way for a lot of guys is fear, and specifically the fear of how they’re going to be perceived. So for so many of the guys I work with, we have very common conversations about the perception of other people if they’re not drinking, or they’re not drinking at an event, for example. Like they’re so afraid of the questions that people are going to ask, the thinking that they’ve got a problem. And I think one of the biggest fears is like the idea that they’re going to be seen as weak, that they’re somehow not able to control their drinking, so they therefore have got a problem, and it just kind of lots of different variations of that really. Yes.

Rachel Hart: Yeah, so I think that’s really interesting because, you know, in my own journey, and of course, I mean, I work with both men and women, but one of the things for me that came up very much was, it wasn’t about weakness as much as being seen as something was wrong with me, or, you know, I was broken, you know, something was broken inside of me. But so I’m just wondering if you can talk a little bit more about, more about that aspect of the importance of not being weak or being seen as strong, because of course, like, you know, I’m a woman, I was socialized as a woman. That’s not something that, you know, was socialized around many different things, but the important to project strength was not one of them.

Patrick Fox: Yeah. I, you know, I think if we look at it from the role that men played for many years, right, and we’re going to generalize a little bit here, but just stick with me. But for a lot of guys, it was all about going out, working, providing, and then going down the pub. And so everything was done in that kind of way, and the women were expected to stay at home, which seems really old school and old fashioned now, but that was kind of how it was for a long time. And so for a lot of guys, drinking was part of being a man, almost. It was going down the pub, it was how you socialized with all of your mates. It’s where you let off steam. You know, that’s a phrase I hear so often, just kind of letting off steam, forget about what’s going on, switch off, like all these kinds of things.

So for guys, going down the pub is quite a macho thing to do, right? So you want to be able to drink as much as possible and to keep up with your mates and stuff. You know, my mom used to, I don’t know why this memory’s coming up for me, but my mom used to work in an IT consultancy role, and she would tell me how for her to be accepted, she would have to go out and drink a fair amount in like the sales role because that’s what all of the other guys were doing. And so she thought she had to be a guy in order to get accepted for that.

But yeah, coming back to my point is I think for guys going out drinking, how much you can drink, these are all really kind of ego ways that we can identify as a man. And so the idea that we’re not able to drink, well, that’s a bit of a threat, right? Threat to the ego for sure. And then also you think about how intertwined business has become with drinking as well, whether it’s taking your clients out to a restaurant or whether it’s going out with the board, whatever it may be. So for a lot of guys, they fear that if they’re not in those environments, if they’re not going out and drinking and being in those places, then they’re going to miss out. They’re going to lose out on promotions or business or sales, whatever it may be. So yeah, I think that’s kind of some of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Rachel Hart: Yeah, so I mean, I’m curious about this because and you know, obviously, there’s an aspect of this that comes up for women as well. Certainly for me, you know, before I became a coach, you know, I wasn’t taking clients out, but there was a very big culture, especially when I was on the road and when I was traveling a lot for work that, you know, you work really hard and then you party really hard. But I’m really interested how you, like how do you help guys when there is a strong association between the idea of like real men can hold their liquor, or that the ability to drink a lot and not be affected by it is a sign of strength or, you know, something to be celebrated rather than something to be questioned.

Patrick Fox: Yeah. You know, there’s a lot of banter, quote unquote, that happens when you’re out drinking with guys, right? And to be a lightweight drinker was a bit of a, what’s the word? You know, no one wanted to be labeled as that, right? So it was all about just how much could you drink. Like for me personally, as well, I really identified as someone who was a good drinker. Like I was a good drinker. I could go out, I could drink a lot, and I used to pride myself on how fast I was drinking compared to other people as well, which is funny because in my head, I think it’s all about ego, but really it was about anxiety a lot of the time, to be quite honest with you.

So yeah, I think for a lot of guys, we’re doing it because that’s what we think everyone else expects us to be doing. And the idea of being someone who isn’t able to drink a lot, that is what creates that perception of being weak, which is totally crazy, right? Because really what’s going on is that you’ve got such a high tolerance to alcohol, it’s kind of worrying really.

I think for guys, when if they’re worried about how they’re being perceived, they’re not making a decision for themselves. They’re making a decision for other people. And so we’ve got to kind of tap in and understand, right, because what’s so important to you about drinking and being able to drink in large amounts with all your mates and stuff like that. And I think once we start getting underneath the hood, we recognize that there’s a fear. There’s a fear that they’re not going to be accepted, a fear that their mates aren’t going to invite them out, fear that they will become boring. Okay? And it kind of ties back into some of the stigmas that are out there in society about alcoholics and what it means to not drink.

And some of those things may be true to a degree, right? Maybe you won’t be invited out as much. Maybe you won’t get certain roles. But there are going to be other opportunities for you out there instead. So it’s just helping them kind of navigate those thoughts, those fears of what’s going on and starting to kind of poke some holes in them for them and to show them, well, you know, what’s going to happen if you carry on living in this way?

Rachel Hart: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because especially with the idea of strength, it can be reframed in a way of, you know, the strongest position is the position that you’re just completely comfortable with the choices that you’re making, even if other people are going to have judgments about it. That really is a position of strength to be in, to have your own back. And I mean, essentially to not have this thing external to you be the arbiter of whether or not you are strong, you are normal, like whatever kind of adjectives we want to attach to it, right? But to see that is like, oh, that’s something that I actually create for myself and decide for myself rather than, you know, assigning alcohol the purpose of I can only feel X about myself, you know, if I’m able to drink and to drink in a certain way.

I think that’s that’s probably something that you and I share in common in our work, really helping people, helping people kind of see how much, essentially like how much power we give alcohol, but not in the way because like how we often talk about it, because it’s like, oh, you know, just some people, they’re different. And once they start, they can’t stop. But just like how much we’ve handed over, essentially like the alcohol or the drink or, you know, how much we are or aren’t drinking is the keeper or the decider of who I am as a person.

Patrick Fox: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it’s reframing, it takes an incredible amount of strength to be able to let go of alcohol being such a predominant force in your life, especially when you’ve got such, you know, like at the minute over Christmas period and stuff, there’s so much expectation for drinking and invitations to go out. And to have the metal to be brave enough to say that’s not what I want to do or to go out and have your own boundaries as to, I’m going to go home when I’m just not feeling it anymore or when it gets to a certain amount of time or when the environment around me changes so much that actually I think it’s better that I go, right? Because with drinking is, people drink for many reasons. But what happens is that people who are drinking when they’re out, are like, they bypass their tiredness. They don’t realize they’re tired because they’ve used the anesthetic essentially, right?

So when my guys are going out and they’re getting tired, and they’re seeing everyone else on up and they’re going down, like they judge themselves for it and think that’s a sign of weakness. But actually, no, that’s just, it’s just physiology, right? Like you’re always going to be tired at that time of day usually. And so why use it against yourself?

Rachel Hart: Yeah, I think that’s such a fascinating piece that, you know, applies to both men and women, is just how much how much we judge ourselves for when it’s like, oh, well, I’m at the party, so I need to be like keeping up with the party and not even necessarily around drinking, but just the idea of, you know, people recognizing, having this intuition that like, I’m kind of at my max, but it’s not the right time to go home, right? Or I don’t want to be going home early.

I mean, I think about this now in retrospect with my own relationship with alcohol, I started drinking in college and I just very naturally am someone who likes to go to bed early and wake up early. And that’s just how I’ve been since I was very young. And I think about how much it’s like the weekend nights in college didn’t start until like 11 o’clock. That was really late for me. And I really just needed like, I needed something to be like, okay, like how am I actually going to function? Because my body, my circadian rhythm was like, no, like this is, you are not a night owl. You do not have energy. Like, I understand that you’re 17, Rachel, or 18, but like your body is wanting to go to bed. And it’s really just interesting to see how that shows up and that plays a role in a way that I think a lot of people don’t recognize or expect.

Patrick Fox: Yeah, absolutely. You know, life is energy, right? Like everything is energy. And so our body, our brain’s always looking for ways to create that energy. And so if you’re going out at 11 o’clock at night, then alcohol is probably the way that you’re going to be able to get that, because otherwise you’d be fast asleep by that point, you know? It’s a really good point.

Rachel Hart: Can you talk about the role of competition? Because I was really fascinated when you were first kind of explaining this to me, the idea that being very competitive and being able to drink a lot and still function, right? Like still show up to work the next day, still get the job done, that is something that you have watched how that will show up for a lot of the guys that you work with.

Patrick Fox: Yeah. It’s funny. I was one of the guys I was coaching today, like similar theme came up. I do an exercise, a values exercise with a lot of guys and for a lot of my guys, they’re really successful in what they do. And they have a lot of success in lots of different areas, but then they find that alcohol over time, they don’t feel so successful at. But for some guys, they almost use it as a way to, one of my guys said, they use it as a way to handicap himself. And what he meant by that was is that he would do really well, but then he’d go home and celebrate with whiskey. And then he would challenge himself to get up at five o’clock the next morning and do all of the things that he would normally do like going to the gym, run all of his businesses and still get home at the end of the day and just have that level of success, which is just so fascinating, isn’t it? Like, why we would want to challenge ourselves in that way, but it is, do hard things, right? But it’s just how you do them, I guess.

Rachel Hart: Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting, right? Because we very much, I think, live in a culture that celebrates doing hard things. We don’t often think about, okay, well, the hard thing that I’m doing is I’m functioning in my life, right? Like I’m I’m still going to the gym and I’m still, you know, doing my full work day and I’m still showing up in all the places that I need to be showing up and I’m doing it, you know, at like, I don’t know, 40% capacity because of what I did the night before, right? Or how much I had to drink the night before. And so it I think that isn’t that’s just like an interesting pattern for people to notice and be aware of like, you know, whether part of them is has this competition piece with themselves.

I also like, you know, I remember noticing this with a guy that I dated, you know, early on in my 20s who had that mentality of like, I’m going to party a lot and then I’m never going to miss that morning run. Right? But I would watch that because that was not me. Like, I have never had that. I have a lot of levels of competition with myself, but when I feel – in the past, when I have woken up hung over, my inclination was never like, okay, well, we’re still going to go to the gym. But as I think about it, there was a way almost where it was kind of like a competition with himself. And I think almost kind of a way of like punishing himself. And it’s like, okay, so I, you know, I overdid it the night before and so now it’s kind of like, it was like there was a punishing kind of nature to it that it’s like you’re going to do this run whether you like it or not.

Patrick Fox: Yeah, no, that’s really, you know, suffering is a sign of weakness as well, right? So if you’re feeling massively hungover and you’re not showing up or doing anything, then that fear of how other people are going to see you is going to be there. So you know, I know guys who do that as well, just the idea of someone thinking that they weren’t able to function is what gets them out of bed a lot of the time. Now, obviously that’s not sustainable. It’s going to catch up with you at some point and, you know, might take 10 years, 20 years, whatever, but it catches up with everyone eventually.

I think as well, if you are able to get up and go for a run at five o’clock or go to the gym before you go to work, it one makes you feel better about what you’re doing to a degree because you go, well, look, I’m still exercising and I’m still in a business. Yeah, right. And I’m drinking, like it’s not affecting me. But we know like it has to affect you eventually. Like, it probably is affecting you. You’re just not willing to see it a lot of the time.

Rachel Hart: Yeah. And I mean, I think it’s also a bigger kind of question of like, what does it even mean when we have that internal conversation of it’s not affecting me, right? And, you know, I often talk about this piece where sometimes the most painful thing that really does affect people is just the internal chatter, right? Like that internal chatter. And this was very much true for me of just wondering, why does my drinking look the way it does? Why am I so successful and I have it so together in so many areas of my life, but I’m such a mess.

And that was my perception, you know, like such a mess in this area, Rachel. The chatter of like, am I ever going to figure this out? What does this mean about me? You know, I mean, I think that, you know, hangovers, I’ve had some terrible ones, right? Like, they’re no fun, but carrying that kind of mental chatter and worry and like that piece, it’s like that was incredibly, it wasn’t, I wanted to say the word debilitating. It didn’t debilitate me in that it prevented me from living my life, but it felt kind of like emotionally debilitating and that I was just carrying around, you know, this really heavy weight with me all the time and unsure if I was ever going to be able to let it go.

Patrick Fox: Yeah, that’s what it really feels like a lot of the time. And that’s one of the benefits of sobriety or like radically changing your relationship with alcohol that doesn’t sound super sexy, but is absolutely life changing. And that’s clarity, right? Like that clarity of thought that you get once you stop drinking. But when you’re drinking, when you’re in those cycles and you’re beating yourself up for what you’re doing, you know, that’s really tough, you know, and it’s hard to get away from.

My experience was kind of mentioned it earlier is I was so wrapped up in my identity of who I was as a drinker that when you took that away, I wasn’t left with much. Like it was really like almost sad to think about, right? It was just like, well, who am I without alcohol? I just literally couldn’t even imagine what that was like. And I think this is what a lot of guys and women probably struggle with as well is just like, well, what am I going to do in XY Z situation if we’re not drinking alcohol because we’ve got no evidence of what it looks like. What the evidence we have got is being bored and frustrated because we’re not allowed to drink a lot of the time.

Rachel Hart: So one of the things you are really, I know is important in the work that you do with guys when you are working with them is really focusing on values. So can you just talk a little bit more about why, like what exactly you mean when you focus on values and why you think that’s so important and in particular important for men?

Patrick Fox: Yeah. I feel like values is what drives everything in life. So when our brain places value on something, we go and do it, or we head towards it, right? So when we want something, we value it. When we don’t want something, we don’t value it. It’s a very layman’s terms. So for me, I feel for so many of us for many years, we valued alcohol, and we valued alcohol for lots of different reasons. Some of it was really just as a coping mechanism, some of it was just because we thought we were enjoying it, whatever it may be, right? Like lots of different reasons for different people. So we place a value on why we’re drinking a lot of the time. But as we know, when we drink alcohol and the dopamine and the reward that we get with that, it then intensifies the value in it, and our brain thinks it’s even more important.

So for me, working with values with all of the guys I do is to help them understand what else is important to them in their lives. Now, I think for a lot of us, we have an idea of what’s important, right? Like, you know, common things I hear are health, family, business, career, like all of these types of things. But beyond that, there’s loads of other things in our lives that are important to us as well, but they kind of get lost because we perhaps haven’t verbalized them before or not really acknowledged it in ourselves. So for me going through that values exercise, really brings all of that to our attention because what’s, you know, what’s that expression, right? Like, you know, about the unconscious mind, like what we don’t know, we don’t know. And so we have to really be conscious about our reasons for why we’re doing something because the more we are, the more opportunities we give ourselves to change it.

So by doing the values work, we get really clear on what’s important to them, why it’s important to them, and how we can start using that as leverage to change their relationship with alcohol. Because when you start looking at all of these, like I’m using my hands here, I know it doesn’t really work for podcasts, but when you start looking at all your values like on a piece of paper in front of you, for example, and then you stick alcohol in the middle of it and you go, okay, so how does alcohol kind of impact and affect all of these values?

Like, it’s very rare that there’s ever a positive way that it supports what’s most important to you in life. So that becomes really kind of disruptive in your thinking in terms of your value system as well. So you can start looking at it differently because as we know, right, think-feel-act. Like when you start thinking and feeling different, you’ll do something different. So it’s really bringing those things to the forefront, but without beating yourself up or making yourself bad or feel guilty about them. It’s just redefining what’s important to you in life. We need to value not drinking more than drinking.

Rachel Hart: One of the things I really love about that is that, you know, we do, whether or not we are fully aware of it, we are socialized to think that certain ways of, you know, this is who I’m supposed to be, or this is what it means to be a woman, or this is what it means to be a man. And so the thing that I love about the values exercise is that it’s a very kind of affirmative act of saying, okay, you know, I may have been led to believe that like if you’re a guy, you don’t want to be a lightweight, you know, and it’s important to never be perceived as weak.

And, you know, if the idea that, you know, not being able to handle your liquor is a weakness and uh oh, I got to make sure that I’m, you know, on top of that. But what you’re saying with this values exercise is that it’s a really kind of affirmative way to just decide and declare for yourself, these are the values that are important for me. Like I’m going to stop and consciously think about what is important to me and which ones I want to choose and why, and they might be different from the next person.

Patrick Fox: 100%, right? Like you, you’re giving yourself different decisions to make. You’re not just going off the autopilot like, well, you drink because that’s what lads do or whatever. Like, you’re literally, when you go to drink the next time, if that’s what you’re going to do, you can, yeah, okay, so how’s that going to impact family? How’s that going to impact integrity? How’s that going to impact finance? And all of a sudden, you’ve got something to make a different decision with.

And like that’s what the power of values could do. And of course, values change over time, right? Like what’s important to us when we’re in our 20s, probably not the same as when we’re 30 and 40, for example. So it’s an exercise that we can constantly update and kind of look at from different lenses. As you were sharing that as well, one of these beliefs came up for me, I remembered is that the idea that people, you can’t trust people who don’t drink as well, right? tying into the being seen as weak, but also you can’t be trusted if you’re not drinking. It’s madness.

Rachel Hart: Yeah, it’s really, I mean, I think it’s really fascinating just when you as an exercise to ask yourself all of the ideas and beliefs that we all pick up, right? We just kind of pick up along the way because it’s just in the air that we breathe about what it means to drink, what it means not to drink, what it means if you struggle with your drinking. And to, you know, it was very helpful for me at some point in my journey to recognize like, wait, these are things that I have just been essentially unconsciously adopted to believe.

Like, do I want to keep believing this? Like, do I want to like continue to hold on to a belief like that? And I love your piece about, you know, values can change, right? And they should change. And I think looking at what your values are when you’re in your 20s or when you’re in your 50s, right? Like it should be an ongoing conversation that we are all having with ourselves. So I love that you, you take this approach in your work. If people want to find out more about your work, if guys want to, you know, find out how they can work with you, I know you do one on one coaching with men, where can they learn more about you?

Patrick Fox: Best place for any guys you want to learn more about what I do is visit my website, which is PatrickJFox.com, or they can find me on Instagram, which is The Alcohol Rethink podcast, as well as listen to my podcast, The Alcohol Rethink podcast.

Rachel Hart: Great.

Patrick Fox: We talk about these things. Yeah.

Rachel Hart: Patrick, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate sharing this perspective and sharing the work that you do.

Patrick Fox: Oh, my absolute pleasure. I love having these conversations. I think it’s so valuable for people to learn and think about things in a different way.

Rachel Hart: All right, that’s it for today. I will see you all next week.

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Hey guys, you already know that drinking less has plenty of health benefits. But did you know that the work you do to change your relationship with alcohol will help you become more of the person you want to be in every part of your life?

Learning how to manage your brain and your cravings is an investment in your physical, emotional and personal wellbeing. And that’s exactly what’s waiting for you when you join my membership Take a Break.

Whether you want to drink less, drink rarely, or not at all, we’ll help you figure out a relationship with alcohol that works for you. We’ll show you why rules, drink plans, and Dry January so often fail, and give you the tools you need to feel in control and trust yourself.

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