Episode 212: Brewing Balance: Reimagining Caffeine, Alcohol and Work
Excess: something we infuse into our lives, but rarely step back from and wonder what can I take away rather than what can I add?
In today’s episode, Erin shares about her own relationship with excess in the forms of caffeine, alcohol, and work. She'll give you her five steps for how she’s reimagined them to work for her as she is, not the version that the world has tricked into running on a hamster wheel.
If you're looking for a refresh in your habits or ideas for moderation—this is the episode for you.
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Erin Diehl is the founder and Chief “Yes, And” officer of improve it! and host of the improve it! Podcast. She’s a performer, facilitator and professional risk-taker who lives by the mantra, “get comfortable with the uncomfortable.” Through a series of unrelated dares, Erin has created improve it!, a unique professional development company that pushes others to laugh, learn and grow. Her work with clients such as United Airlines, PepsiCo, Groupon, Deloitte, Motorola, Walgreens, and The Obama Foundation earned her the 2014 Chicago RedEye Big Idea Award and has nominated her for the 2015-2019 Chicago Innovations Award.
This graduate from Clemson University is a former experiential marketing and recruiting professional as well as a veteran improviser from the top improvisational training programs in Chicago, including The Second City, i.O. Theater, and The Annoyance Theatre.
When she is not playing pretend or facilitating, she enjoys running and beach dates with her husband and son, and their eight-pound toy poodle, BIGG Diehl.
You can follow the failed it! podcast on Instagram @learntoimproveit and facebook, and you can follow Erin personally on Instagram @keepinitrealdiehl here. You can also check out improve it! and how we can help your organization at www.learntoimproveit.com. We can’t wait to connect with you online!
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Episode 212 Transcription
Erin Diehl (00:00.39)
Improve It peeps, welcome to today's show. I am Erin Deal and on paper, let me tell you who you listen to. I am the founder and CEO of Improve It. I'm an improv comedy expert. I'm a top 1% podcast host. I'm an author and I'm a keynote speaker. But on soul, my friends, I am a mother. I'm a recovering perfectionist, Turnville Fluencer.
and I'm your new director because every single day of your life, my friend, is an improv scene. If you're new here, welcome to the Improve It podcast. If you are a long time Improve It peep, welcome back to the show. I am so honored that you are back, that you're taking this time for you, for yourself, and for your growth before we dive into today's episode, because let me tell y'all something.
I got five juicy steps for you that are gonna help you create better balance in your life, no matter what it is that you're struggling with. For me, it was balancing caffeine, alcohol, and work. Whatever that balance may be for you, I've got five tangible steps, so stay tuned. Gonna walk you through those before we dive in. Let me get to the housekeeping, the honeydew list.
All right, first and foremost, I don't know if you all know this, but my new book is coming out in February of 2024. And I would love it. La la love. If you could pre order. This book for twenty four dollars, twenty three ninety five, whatever you want to call it will change your life. It is called I See You, a leader's guide to energizing your team through radical empathy.
I will tell you in a different episode how I was guided to write this book. It is literally one of the most, it is one of the things I'm most proud of because it is filled with tangibles. It's filled with anecdotal funny stories about self-love. And if you can love yourself more, you can become the selfless leader that you are meant to be. And if you can do that, you can create and magnetize the culture, the people, the life of your dreams.
Erin Diehl (02:15.554)
So check it out. You can get it on my new website, it's ErinDeal.com. The link to that is in the show notes. And because you're my peep, if you pre-order, you get a free gift with purchase, okay? So make sure you save your receipt because we want you to take that receipt number, that order number, come back to it's ErinDeal.com, put in that receipt number and receive a gift, which is a free, let me repeat.
free workshop called Radical Empathy. It's digital, it's with me. I'm gonna take you through several different exercises that are highlighted from the book and I'm gonna help you lead with more intentionality and lead in your life no matter how you lead with more empathy. So make sure you go to itsarandeal.com to get your book and get your free gift.
On top of that, while you're there, I would love for you to check out our new meditation album. It is called, I See You, the meditation album, and it lifts heavily from the book. A lot of the themes, a lot of the activities that you'll find in the book are created into meditations. We've got things to help you start your day. We've got things to help you bring more positive energy into your life. We've got things to help you.
visualize your ideal day. So check it out on that new website. It's erindeal.com. Snag yours for $11.11. 11.11 baby. All right. And then finally, if you have not listened to last week's episode with my new friend Erin Telford, run, go save it in your iTunes right now. She is a breath.
of fresh air and I mean that because she is a breath work facilitator. She is a joy and a delight and I wanted her on the show because our community manager Nicole on our team here at Improve It found Erin on Instagram and did a breath work meditation with Erin that changed her life. And so I quickly said, yes, please, let's talk to her. And it was such an inspiring story.
Erin Diehl (04:36.838)
You'll find a lot of stories in there from Erin and also you can get her free 10 minute to breath work meditation when you go to those show notes. Show notes, show notes. So make sure to check that out too. Now that I have officially given you a lot of to do's and a lot of housekeeping, I just want to let you know all month long here in November of 2023, you're going to find shows all about self love.
That is a huge theme in the book, I See You. That's the very first part of the book. It's all about self-love. So we are bringing you some guests. We're bringing you some solo shows. We're bringing you some amazing content if you need to feel more confident and love yourself. And let me just say to you that loving yourself is not selfish. It's actually the best thing that you could ever give yourself. It's the best gift. So check out this month's episode.
Let's dive in because today I'm talking about self-love in the form of balance, baby. Let me ask you a question. Are you an extremist? What do I mean by that? Are you an all-in or all-out person? And when you're all in, do you do that thing to the extreme? I am an extremist, party of one, okay? Guilty, party of uno. And I have
had been this way for 40 years of my life. I was either 100% invested and going all in and I'm talking about like confetti, fireworks, polka dots, you name it, or I was 100% out and not giving a crap. I did this with everything in my life, everything, and some of the habits that I really noticed that
stick out for me with this extremity were three major things. My relationship with caffeine, my relationship with alcohol, and my relationship with work.
Erin Diehl (06:44.854)
Because when I'd start my day with a cup of coffee, I would love that feeling, that rush of like, oh yes, the coffee's kicking in, it's working. And I would want another one because I wanted to feel that rush. And then by the third one, I would grab an iTwitch and I would just be sitting there twitching at my computer, looking at my to-do list, having a heart attack because I'd had three cups of coffee. Okay? That was my typical day to day. Sometimes I'd have two, all right?
But most days it was 2 to 3.
If I was going to dinner, here's my relationship with alcohol. If I was ending my day, so coffee started my day, usually a glass of wine, ended my day. Now I have gotten much better over the course of the past few years with drinking during the week. I barely drink during the week. If I do, it was like one if I was going out to dinner, but most of the time Thursday through Saturday night, I would go to dinner.
And I was never the person who could have one glass of wine. Okay? If I'm sitting at dinner with you, we're having one to two, maybe we're finishing a bottle together. Okay? And that's just how it went. A two was like my minimum. And even then sometimes I would want a third and I would probably get the third but drink half the glass. It was just never enough. All right? So that's my caffeine. That's my relationship with alcohol. And
My relationship with work is complicated because I genuinely love what I do. I love this. Like talking to you, me and you right now, me in your headphones, in your car, you're taking a shower, I'm just sitting here on my cozy little new podcast chair talking to you, feels great. But I lacked a sense of how to turn it off.
Erin Diehl (08:36.714)
I resisted rest in every form. I thought naps were for lazy people. I thought that if I didn't wake up at 6.15 a.m., even though I probably only got like six hours of sleep, that I wasn't productive. And I allowed myself to carry this mindset through because I'm an entrepreneur. This is what entrepreneurs do. They hustle. I'm a small business owner. I have to hustle. And I lived this way.
in an extreme fashion in my 20s, in my 30s, and it took a serious whack to the head one month after my 40th birthday to realize that I was living in this land of too much and never enough.
I was having too much caffeine, I was having too much alcohol, and I was having too much anxiety about work. And too much of all of this led to too many panic attacks, led to too many sleepless nights, and left me with an endless to-do list. Now, let me just tell you. I don't want this to...
trigger you. Actually, I'm yes, I do. Because I know that some of you out there are listening. I mean that in the best way. I'm trying to trigger you in the best way. Because a lot of this are sleepwalking and we don't even realize that we're doing this to ourselves. It's just the norm. And I truly did not bear witness to my habits.
Erin Diehl (10:21.726)
Now, if you have listened to prior episodes of this show, I will fill you in if you haven't just very quickly. This summer, the summer of 2023, I got a concussion and I had what is called post-concussion syndrome, which meant that my concussion didn't knock me out. I jumped off of a 40-foot cliff. Spoiler alert, I hit my head. Didn't know I was concussed for about five weeks.
and literally lived my life like I was a zombie. I thought that I was burned out. I thought that maybe I was going through paraminopause. I didn't equate the jump in the concussion immediately, which is silly, but I didn't.
And I walked around for literally five weeks without realizing what was happening to me until I went to the ER and got a CT scan and realized what it was. During this time, I could not see very well. My vision was impacted. I had severe headaches. I was forced to close the tabs in my brain. And there were a lot of tabs open. I know y'all feel me. I want you to look at your iPhone right now.
Okay, I want you to do the little swipe up and I want you to see how many tabs you got open in the phone. Don't even go check your computer because I know you got like five open right now on the computer, but I want you to look at the tabs on your phone and think about how metaphorical it is that all those tabs are opening and running in the background because that was literally my brain.
200 tabs were open at all times. And I was forced to close the tabs.
Erin Diehl (12:19.474)
I was forced to be cognizant of my relationship with screens because when you're concussed, you can't really view screens, you're not supposed to. I was forced to be mindful of how I spent my time because I got tired really easily. I was forced to realize who I spent my time with because certain people drained me.
and I really didn't have the energy to not be drained. I was already drained. I couldn't go down the drain. And I was forced to actually learn to rest.
Erin Diehl (13:04.65)
Essentially during this time, which I will, you know, I feel like telling you this story in like five minutes isn't enough because it was a very dark period of my life. I don't want to sugarcoat that. I was definitely depressed for the first time in my life. I felt what depressed felt like. I didn't feel like I was a good mom.
I didn't feel like I was a good leader. I didn't feel like I was giving my audiences and my keynotes what they deserved. I felt really low and I felt really, really down and I felt like there was no way out.
Erin Diehl (13:49.838)
somehow.
it actually rewired my brain and it made me stronger than I've ever been and it forced me to examine the things in my life. What I was putting into my body, what I was putting into my brain, who I was putting and allowing into my brain.
and the results were shocking.
They were shocking.
Erin Diehl (14:23.454)
I was allowing these things to take over my mind. And I've said this before on this show, but our mind is not our brain. Our mind is every single cell in our body. So when our mind is feeling depressed, when our body feels that depression, that low, that darkness,
Every cell in our body feels it. And that's what we radiate out. So how am I supposed to stand or sit here on this show and tell you what to do when I was at this low? How am I supposed to be a mom and parent my son and tell him right from wrong? How was I supposed to show up for people in my life when I was not showing up for myself?
So my hope is today that through my own journey of self exploration, you can examine your life. And maybe it's not alcohol, maybe it's not caffeine, maybe it's not work that you need more balance and maybe it's something else. Maybe for you, you need to balance your social life. Maybe you want more social life. Maybe you're ostracizing yourself. Maybe you want to balance the amount of activities that your children have.
Maybe you want to balance the boundaries that you set with your team at work. Everybody has something in their life that needs examining, right? So I've created five steps that are here to help you examine those. I want you to listen to these five steps, apply them, and then give yourself the aha moment because I tell you this.
If you can take these steps and apply them, you are gonna figure out something that probably months of therapy would take you in literally these five steps. Because if you take it seriously, I promise you, you will have epiphany after epiphany. And all it takes is an inward look in. I'm not gonna hate on therapy, because let me tell you, for free, your girl's in it, she loves it, and we'll go forever. So.
Erin Diehl (16:45.834)
Here we go, let's start with step one. Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna take a step back and look at your life. Here's how you're gonna do that. You're gonna grab a sheet of paper, and I want you to draw a line down the center of that paper to create two columns. And in the left-hand column, I want you to write the word more. And in the right-hand column, I want you to write the word less.
and do that at the top of your page. So you have two columns, one says more, one says less. Here's step two. In column one, the column that you have now labeled more, I want you to write down what it is that you want more of in your life. Maybe it's more sleep, maybe it's more self-care, maybe it's more balance, maybe it's more healthy foods, maybe it's more workouts. I want you to set a timer for three minutes.
and then I want you to not judge yourself and allow anything to come through on that page.
Here's step three. In the right hand column, you're gonna do it again, except this time you are going to brainstorm what you want less of. Set your timer for three minutes, allow yourself to just write down everything that comes to mind when you think of, what do I want less of in my life? Now it can be a correlation with column one. So for example, it could be in column one, you wrote, I want more sleep.
and column two you could say I want less time scrolling social media because that's the thing that keeps you up at night. You don't have to do it that way but you can if that's easier for you. So write out all the things in column two that you want less of. All right now here is step four. You're gonna take a step back and actually examine this.
Erin Diehl (18:52.274)
list. I want you to start with one thing that you want more of and one thing that you want less of. And then I want you to brainstorm ways you can get more of what you want and get rid of what you want less of. So for me, okay, in my column one, my more column, I knew I wanted more balance.
And in my column two, I knew I wanted less anxiety. Now, in order to create more balance, I needed to brainstorm things that would give me that balance. So my examples included taking more breaks during the day, having a day off once a week, so a four-day work week, so I could actually run my errands and practice self-care. And then in column two,
I knew I wanted less anxiety, so I had to examine what gave me anxiety so I could do less. Now, I knew I felt anxiety when I drank more than one cup of coffee. Literally I would get the shakes and I would get that pounding heart sensation that some of us love. I loved it. Okay, I did love it, but not anymore. I knew I felt anxiety when I was hungover. Being hungover?
is the worst. Like my anxiety, his name is Gus, creeps up. He's like, haha, she's down. What else can I give her? And literally, the days that I am hungover is like, it's called anxiety. Like I would literally have the worst, most crippling anxiety of my life. So I knew that less booze, less caffeine would allow me to have more balance because they were giving me anxiety.
So here's step five, and this is the most important step, my friends. For one month, for 30 days, I want you to practice giving yourself more of what you want more of and one thing that you want less of. So one thing from column one, one thing from column two. Now for me, I focused my first 30 days on taking more intentional breaks throughout the day.
Erin Diehl (21:19.67)
This meant I gave myself a 15 minute break in the morning. I gave myself a 15 minute break in the afternoon. And I gave myself an actual lunch break away from my desk. And I knew I wanted less anxiety that was in my column two. So I started drinking one cup of coffee a day, not three cups of coffee in the day. And I only did this in the morning, okay? Now, I also, you as you know,
needed help in the alcohol department. But when I started this step five, I was concussed. And truly during that time, I felt perpetually hungover. So drinking was not even high on my priority list. So just know, I'm gonna get to that in a minute, how you can get to the rest of your list. So for those first 30 days, I drank one cup of coffee every day, and I took the breaks that I assigned myself. And you know what?
I felt balanced as hell and my anxiety went way down. 30 days creates a habit. So you have to start small, then build up to habit stack. Now, once you have officially mastered what you want more of and what you want less of for 30 days. So let's say you mess up, your 30 day starts again on that day. Once you've mastered that,
you can add in an additional thing from each list. So the next thing on my balance was I knew I wanted a four-day work week. So I got to work researching how to move our team to a four-day work week. I read the book shorter and I actually created an entire podcast episode about how we did this, how we're doing, and you can hear this in episode 2.10 of this show where I talk about this four-day work week practice.
Now we've only been doing this for 30 plus days as of this recording, but I stacked that habit on top of what was already there, which were scheduled breaks. And I then knew in my last column, my second habit I stacked was less alcohol. So I gave myself a limit over the next 30 days. I would only drink the recommended seven drinks a week.
Erin Diehl (23:45.998)
which sounds like a lot, but if you think about it, if you have a drink on Friday, three drinks on Saturday, maybe three drinks during the week, you're at seven, right? And so I knew that most of my drinking was happening over the weekend. I cut it down to seven drinks over the course of the week and no more than two drinks at a time. Because being hungover is not worth it for me because I want to be present for my work and for my family. And it also hits different at 40. Let me tell you that for free.
So having this limit and a goal really helped me when I wanted to reach for another drink on a Saturday night and I was like, oh, nope, I'm at six, this is seven, I'm done. I really enjoy great glasses of wine. I really like the taste of wine. I like going to dinner and having a martini with my friends. I didn't wanna give it up completely. I just wanted to limit myself because
less to me now is actually more.
So to round this out, my friends, this more less list is going to help you if you feel like you're out of balance, or if you're like me and you are the extra, extra, extra-est person you know. You just have to start small by implementing one habit you want more of, one habit you want less of, and then every 30 days when you've mastered those two things, you can add to the list.
And I don't want you to beat yourself up if you go back to old patterns. They are very hard to break. All right? Do not beat yourself up. You are trying and failing is a part of life. So just give yourself that credit for trying. The more balanced you are, the more balanced you have of a life. The more balanced your nervous system is, the more easier life feels. It is that simple.
Erin Diehl (25:50.478)
My concussion taught me, if anything, that you have to do less to do more.
So those are my five steps. Go back, listen to this episode. As you know, please share this episode with anyone who it could benefit. Listen to last week's episode with Erin Telford and please share this message because I know so many people out there right now who are struggling, who feel overwhelmed, and I know that this method could help them.
Please check out all the links in the show notes too, and I hope you check out and pre-order my new book, I See You, because it gives you even more tangible practices on implementing self-care. Reminder, you can find all of that at itsirendeal.com. My improve it peeps, my new friends, thank you so much for joining us on this show. I am so grateful that I am here and you have chosen me to help guide you on your journey.
I want you to keep failing and keep improving because this world needs that very special it that only you can bring. I'll see you next week.