The Hidden Time Cost of Drinking and How Much You're Really Losing

In this episode of The Pink Cloud Frequency, we explore one of the most overlooked costs of drinking: time. 

This episode dives into the psychology of temporal landmarks: life events that make us pause and reevaluate who we are becoming. From birthdays to major transitions, these moments often reveal behaviors and areas of life that are taking our time, energy, and connection- namely, alcohol.

Alcohol acts as a time compression mechanism, consuming not only the hours spent drinking, but the recovery time, brain fog, exhaustion, and emotional disconnection that follow. Even moderate drinking can amount to months off your years between drinking and recovery.

You’ll discover how an alcohol-free lifestyle can create a profound sense of time expansion: clearer mornings, greater emotional presence, increased energy, and the ability to fully participate in your own life. 

This conversation is a powerful reminder that the real question isn’t “Where did the time go?” but “Were you truly there for it?”

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Pink Cloud Frequency. I am your host, Brianna Wynne. And today's episode is all about the amount of time that we allocate to drinking. My son turned 16 in March. And he got his permit that same week. And now here we are in April. He's taking his driver's ed lessons. And now he's driving my car. And I'm sure you've experienced this as a parent, or you've watched someone else in your life grow in some capacity. It doesn't necessarily have to be your child, but those milestones, they do something to you. And they sort of stop you right in your tracks and they make you ask yourself, where did the time go? And how much time do I really have left? Psychologists actually have a name for moments like this, and they refer to them as temporal landmarks, which are moments that psychologically separate who you are from who you're becoming. So whether it's my son getting his permit or it's a birthday, a divorce, maybe losing someone that you love. It could be moving into a new home, changing careers, a child turning 18, 21. When those significant moments in time occur, they're causes for deeper reflection. There are points in time that feel like you're turning a new chapter, or at least you have the opportunity to turn a new chapter because you realize you can no longer avoid time and growth. So you start to question what areas of your life need to be improved and which behaviors may need to change. Because now mortality becomes part of the equation. But what's fascinating about human behavior in time is that we tend to prioritize what feels good right now over what benefits us long term. And this is exactly why people will say things like, life is short. I deserve this. We're all gonna die anyway, right? Because people would rather justify harmful short-term behaviors, whether it's alcohol or smoking or an unhealthy diet. People would rather justify those behaviors than think about long-term benefits of change. And I don't want you to be one of those people who get stuck in that present bias because that's exactly where alcohol thrives. One drink promises you immediate relief, relaxation, escape, reward, numbness. Meanwhile, the cost of drinking feels so far away, right? Lost time, lost energy, memory loss, missed moments. You don't comprehend that in the present moment. But those consequences aren't as far away as they seem. And little by little that future cost becomes your present reality if you don't take time to reflect and improve. An alcohol-free lifestyle helps reverse that short-sighted thinking. You stop asking yourself what feels good tonight, and you start asking yourself what kind of life you're building for yourself, for your children, for the people that you love. You want to have enough time for what truly matters to you. But alcohol keeps you stuck living in the moment, and you constantly feel behind. You always feel rushed. You always feel exhausted. You feel emotionally unavailable. And it's not because there's not enough time. It's not because 24 hours isn't long enough. People always say that, right? There's not enough hours in the day. No, there's plenty of hours in your day. It's because alcohol quietly consumes so much of your day, you don't even realize it. Now, according to the CDC, the average US female life expectancy is between 81.1 and 81.4 years. So if you're 35 years old, you've got about 46 years left. If you're 45, 36 years left. And if you're 55, you've got about 26 years left. But not all of those years are fully lived, right? You're not awake, you're not fully present for all of those years. If you sleep eight hours a night, now you can cut those numbers by a third. So if you're 35, the number's more like 30 more waking years left if you slept eight hours a night. Now consider how much time alcohol takes from your lifespan. Three drinking nights a week may not sound extreme, but let's calculate it. Let's say you drink Sunday, Thursday, and Friday. And let's say your average drinking session is maybe two to four hours, right? You pour your first glass of wine at 7 p.m. And then maybe you go on until 11 p.m. Now, if you do that three nights every week, that's six to 12 hours per week. So let's just call it nine. But nine hours per week at 52 weeks per year is 468 hours. And that's 19 and a half full days every single year. Now, on top of that, you have recovery hours. And this isn't necessarily sick or you know, vomiting or headache, but it's those days after you drank that you have low energy, you have brain fog. Every single thing you try to do feels so much harder. So you're trudging through your day, and then you don't even feel normal again until 6 p.m. That can be six to 10 hours of your day where you have reduced function and diminished mental capacity. And so again, let's say you're doing that three times a week. That's 18 to 30 hours a week, which is a thousand to 1,500 hours per year. And that's anywhere from 41 to 62 days of recovery. So cumulative loss is going to be your 19 days plus your 41 to 62 days, and the total annual impact is 60 to 80 days per year lost to drinking. And even if we're generous and we just call it 60 days, that's two months of your life every single year lost to drinking. In over 10 years, that's two years of your life lost to alcohol. That's 20% of your years. So 20% of them is on alcohol, and then you've got 30% for sleeping, that leaves you 50%, 50% of your time to do everything else that you want to do. And I don't know about you, but for me, 50% that's that's not a lot, right? That's not enough to capitalize on your days. So when you stop viewing alcohol as relaxation, as a reward, as fun, you can start to view alcohol for what it actually is. And it's nothing more than time compression. Alcohol compresses time because it steals your evenings, your mornings, your presence, your energy, your follow-through. One drink isn't just one drink. It's not just one hour or three hours. One drink translates to the next 24 hours, 48 hours, even 72. I was being very generous in those estimates. But the beautiful thing about sobriety is the 24 hours that you get back, that starts to feel like a 36-hour day, because now you have your full 24-hour day. Yes, you're still gonna sleep, of course, but now your day that used to feel like, oh my God, there's not enough hours a day. Not only do you feel like you have your full 24, but now it feels like you have a 36-hour day. Because you're not just getting the time not spent drinking, but now you're getting the cognitive clarity. When you wake up clear every single morning, you're gaining usable hours in your day because you're not recovering, because you don't have brain fog. So now your brain is fully available to you. Your intellect is 100% tapped in. So your decisions feel easier. You remember things more clearly, you follow through on what you said you were going to do in that to-do list that you have for yourself, it becomes a whole lot easier. You're not pushing anything off until tomorrow because you can do it today. So imagine the difference of, let's say, waking up hungover on a Sunday, right? And now you're dragging yourself through your morning and through your day. But when you're alcohol free, you wake up Sunday morning, you wake up early, you're well rested, everyone else in your home is still asleep. So you're able to drink your coffee slowly. Maybe you walk or you meditate or you stretch, but you do that while it's still quiet. So you're able to breathe. You feel rejuvenated because you've gotten that quiet time for yourself, that solitude. So now you've started your day that way. And then now you continue going on. You prepare your dinner. Let's say you've got dinner in the crock pot by 10 a.m. And suddenly your entire day, it feels different because you're not rushed, you're not depleted, you feel capable. So when you remove alcohol from your life, you become someone who expands time. And that time expansion allows you to focus on your career, your caregiving, your parenting, your relationships, and your household responsibilities, and you can do all that without feeling drained or exhausted. As moms, we often time chalk up our exhaustion to all of our responsibilities, right? We just said it's like, oh, we're so busy, we're so busy, we're going here, we're going there, we're doing this, we're doing that. And what what we don't realize is we actually have within us all of the energy that we need to get through a full day balanced. When you remove alcohol, you realize that your energy doesn't just crash at 12 p.m. or 5 p.m. We're not seeking anything outside of us to maintain our energy levels. Like we don't need two or three coffees, we don't need energy drinks. You know, it's like we are able to sustain in our natural state. And that's something you don't realize when you're still in the thick of drinking alcohol. And if I were still drinking and my son asked me to drive the car or go next door in the parking lot and uh, you know, drive a little bit, take some lessons, I would most likely create all these little excuses for why we should wait until tomorrow. Or I would agree to it and say, okay, yeah, but then I would be exhausted and I wouldn't be fully present. And I wouldn't be able to fully experience that joy with him. And that realization, whenever I have those realizations, they encourage me. Those temporal landmarks, they reinforce why you make this decision in the first place. And for me, alcohol used to consume my life in measurable amounts of time. And now I've gotten that all back and more. One day my son isn't going to need my car. He's not going to need me in the same ways that he does now. But for now, I can truly experience those moments with him, life with him, fully present, fully clear and fully energized, ready to do whatever he wants to do at any given point in the day. I don't have to create excuses about why not. So the real question isn't, you know, where did the time go? The real question you should be asking yourself is, were you truly there for it? So I encourage you to reflect on the temporal landmarks in your life and try to use them as an opportunity and a gift to become a different version of yourself because you can't avoid time passing, but you can choose what you do with your time. There's a quote that says it's not about adding years to your life, it's about putting life back into your years. And that's exactly what an alcohol-free life gives you. So for your reflection, I encourage you to calculate your reclaim time. What have you gained from those extra hours in your day? And if you haven't fully quit drinking yet, what would you do with that two months of life every year that you'll get back? Who could you become inside of that time? So thank you so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a five star written review and supporting the show. I will talk to you guys next Wednesday.