YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Sarah Wakeman

lines on the record: 127
first: 2025-05-22
most recent: 2025-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yes, they can find me on LinkedIn, on Instagram. They can email me. Yeah, happy to connect and would love to come back after the book is out too.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could gasp though. It is going to be about changing the narrative around addiction and about really reframing how people think about it to see it as a treatable good prognosis illness and using some of the stories of people I've had the privilege of knowing to hopefully help people see things in a different way.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I would say, and I could think of lots of successful accomplishments I would apply this to, but I'll take the example of medical training, which is a successful accomplishment. I think I would be more present that we are always like rushing to the accomplishment, to the finish line, to sort of getting to the next goal. And I think back and wish I had realized what an amazing journey it was in that moment. And I mean, even things with medical training that I was, I was never going to be a heart surgeon. But to stand in an operating room and look inside someone's chest and watch a beating heart is an experience that I'll never get again. And I think in this journey to always achieve and move forward and get to the next exam and the next thing, we sometimes miss like the miracle that's right in front of us. And so I think I would have”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're sort of labeling them as that is the only thing that they are and that they will be that forever. And a friend of mine is a journalist who is in recovery and writes a lot about addiction Maya Sullivitz wrote this great New York Times piece that addiction doesn't always last a lifetime because I think there's this idea in our head that like you know people with addiction will always have addiction and it's this like incurable thing and that actually people have lots of different journeys and for some people you know that becomes something they deal with and then they move on their lives for other people it's something that they actively manage but this idea that you sort of boil things down to like the only thing I am in this world as a person with addiction you really limit everything else about yourself”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like defining yourself as incapable of doing something instead of being like, I'm working on organization right now. Yeah, I think it's so.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, exactly. And one thing people ask me will say, well, what if someone refers to themselves that way? Because people may do that. And that's fine. People can use whatever language they want for themselves. But I think as a healthcare professional for sure, or someone who's trying to help combat stigma, like we can choose to use different language. And I've actually had patients sort of ask me, like, well, why do you use that terminology when they use a different language? And it actually can be sort of empowering to be like, oh yeah, I'm actually a person in recovery or I'm a person with addiction. I'm not going to label myself that way anymore.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's hard to change. But, you know, like everything, you just want to be humble, curious, and keep trying. I mean, there's lots of language that we've changed. Think about so many terms we use for, you know, people who are born with different abilities or for people of different races or other identities that we're really stigmatizing. And we've learned to use different language, even if it feels a little awkward when you're first learning it.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are you really saying? So you're saying, like, if you're clean now, when you are actively struggling, what were you? You were dirty. And so I always remember an example, a friend of mine who's in recovery was interviewing for jobs in the recovery space. And so people on the interview trail would say to him, like, how long have you been cleaned for? And he would say, well, I've been bathing since I was a newborn. So I've been clean my whole life and I've been in recovery for five years or whatever. So I think these little things actually matter that we should use terminology that we'd use for another health condition if we're labeling, you know, people with active addiction as dirty or, you know, people with addiction is the same as child abusers with that sort of language. We're really sort of subtly increasing stigma. So that's a small thing that we can all do is just try to use language that's a bit more humanizing.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So words actually influence how we think, even how we make clinical decisions. They've also done this to the public. So if you describe someone as a drug addict, the public has a more negative view of them than if you describe them as a person with addiction. So there are these subtle ways, there's been this shift in addiction to really using what we call person-first language, which has been true across medicine. So like we used to use terrible words like we refer to someone as like the schizophrenic, you know, or really labeling them as their health condition. And thankfully, there's been a change from that to realize that people are people first who have an illness are not defined by it. So I would never say like I'm going to go see the lung cancer in room 204. I'd say I'm going to see Mr. Smith who has lung cancer. And so addiction too, like people are more than that. So to say, you know, person with addiction, person with alcohol use disorder rather than saying they're an addict or an alcoholic. And then even terms like clean and dirty, which are commonly used when we talk about addiction. So, you know, take the word clean. It sounds really positive. Like you're saying, oh, you're clean.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in this case, they were given an option. You read this paragraph about a fictional patient, and they don't really know what the researchers are testing. And they're given a bunch of different options for intervention. And one is this, send them to drug court or send them to jail. One is like, offer them, you know, outpatient effective treatment. There's a bunch of different choices. When they hear someone described as a substance abuser, they're actually more likely to recommend the jail-based intervention”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disorder. And the clinician was actually more likely to recommend a punitive intervention for the person described as a substance abuser.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing is language. It's like the subtle thing I sort of mentioned an example where you did it really well, where instead of saying someone failed treatment, you said the treatment failed them. But a lot of the language that we use with addiction actually subtly and not so subtly worsens stigma. And sometimes it sounds like I'm being politically correct or it's like an issue of semantics, but there's actually really good data on this. So if you think about words we use for addiction, one is substance abuse, right? So the term abuse, what does abuse refer to? So it actually comes from an old English word that means like a willful act of misconduct. And it's a word that we use for child abuse, for sexual abuse, for domestic abuse. Like it's only for these terribly violent acts of commission that are very stigmatized because they're like terrible things. And yet we use it for this thing that we're saying as a health condition that you're like a substance abuser or you have substance abuse. And so there have actually been these elegant studies that took like PhD level psychologists really highly trained clinicians and they described a person as either a substance abuser or as a person with a substance use.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think a couple things. One, there are so many stories of hope that I think counterbalance that for me. So I think, you know, the other stories in my mind are, you know, I carry with me and still care for and are in touch with people who are living these amazing vibrant lives in recovery. And I mean, in the US alone, there's 24 million people living in recovery. So there are these stories of people who have overcome just trauma, tragedy, hardship, and are doing awesome. They're parenting. They're working. You probably don't even know they're around you. You know, they don't tell people necessarily that they're in recovery and getting to be sort of a part of that process with someone and watching, you know, there's nothing in medicine where I can actually see as dramatic of a change as with addiction, where someone can be, you know, at a moment where they're dealing with all of these health consequences and relationship challenges and then they get better. And it's just like the most beautiful thing to be a part of. And so I think the hope from that, the sort of positivity of it is what keeps me going every day. Obviously finding ways.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are not being able to heal it, talk about it, share it with people, I think, is just this like this well of pain that lives inside people.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I think of many patients, but one in particular who, you know, I had this, I knew that he'd experience hard things in his life. He'd been in prison, for example, which is a traumatizing experience. He'd lost his parents, another thing. I never truly understood the depth of his trauma and he had struggled this whole life with substance use disorder and using lots of things, mostly opioids, but also alcohol and cocaine and just had had a really, really hard time. And after, I mean, years of knowing him, one day he broke down my office and shared that he'd actually been molested as a young kid. And so sometimes there is that like that thing that people have never felt like they could share with anyone that really is at the root of so much of what they've been dealing with. And like the person who whispered to you, I think the pain of keeping that inside, not only the trauma of experiencing that as a child, but then holding that secret and feeling like you somehow are damaged or, you know, that this, this thing inside you is.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Food, sacks, gambling. I think there are a lot of similarities. It's not my particular area of focus, but I think there are a lot of overlaps. I mean, I think many of the things you just listed, you could talk about one dopamine, obviously. But two, this idea of needing to fill yourself with something else, either, you know, thinking about trauma, thinking about untreated mental illness, thinking about just kind of the deficit of connection and of meaning and reward and reaching to these external solutions.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not so much about personality, but we do respond differently to substances. So, you know, take alcohol or opioids, anything. People feel differently the first time they ever use it. So often if you talk to someone who then develops addiction, they tell you that first time they use the substance, it was like this amazing feeling. It felt like I've had people describe it as falling in love or, you know, a warm hug or like a relaxing bath, these like incredible, comforting experiences. Other people, they get prescribed like an opioid for a tooth extraction. They feel nauseous and kind of like not like themselves and they don't like the feeling. So how we respond to substances is definitely based on our neurobiology and is different for different people. So some people are both from a genetic reason and their own brain are just more wired to be at risk of addiction. And that's important to know about yourself because then you can make different choices. You may decide, you know, never to keep alcohol in the house or not to drink because the risk is too great.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For most people, what we find is that's actually like a series of steps. So I always like to think of progress, not perfection and not have this kind of all or nothing mindset that for many people they may early on have a month where they go without alcohol and then maybe next time it's three months and then maybe it's a year and these recurrences happen but ultimately they get to this place where they go into long-term recovery. After five years of recovery, a person's risk of subsequently developing addiction is no higher than the general public. So your brain actually does change and we see this on functional imaging. We see this in longitudinal studies that follow people over time. So you actually can overwhelm those things and get to a place where you don't have a higher risk than other people.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it turns out the brain is amazingly plastic, meaning it can change. We see that over time. So the first thing is even adverse childhood experiences are not a done deal. So we talk a lot about ACEs. We don't talk a lot about pieces or PCE positive childhood experiences, but actually you can reduce the risk that someone develops addiction by increasing the number of positive childhood experiences. So take someone who's experienced some terrible adversity. Their parent has died or they have a parent who's in prison or they have addiction in their family. If that kid has one single adult figure that they believe cares about them, that reduces the risk of addiction. So there are a lot of positive ways that we can actually change the trajectory even in the midst of terrible trauma. When you think about someone who's had a substance use disorder, we actually have good data on this that after five years of recovery, and often that fits and starts. So most people think of like this is one fell swoop that you like decide to stop drinking and then success is that you never drink again.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like many things we do that are not health promoting activities, there are ways of reducing the health harms of that activity so that it's okay in small amounts in your life”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we see that all the time. So that's like replacing things. And I was reading an article. People have probably heard of dry January, this idea of not drinking for the month of January to rethink your relationship with alcohol. I was reading an article that dry January has become high January because people are just smoking a ton of weed instead of drinking. And so it's very, I think you want to be cautious that you're not just replacing the thing that you're trying to change with something that's also going to cause health problems. Now, having dessert once in a while for this, you're not getting calories from alcohol and having a nice ice cream cone once a week is a way of sort of treating yourself as healthier and maybe more aligned with your goals. That's fine. I think thinking about these things, actually thinking about alcohol the way we think about dessert, sunbathing, eating processed meats, all of these things have risk and benefit in our lives. I think where we've gone so wrong with alcohol was this idea that it's like a health promoting behavior that you shouldn't be drinking for your health. It's not going to make you healthier. And also much.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because, I mean, so our natural reward system, the thing that triggers it is exercise, foods, sex, connection. So, you know, trying to have healthy other ways of positive dopamine release. And so I think for many people, alcohol or substances can feel like a way of doing something nice for ourselves. Like I'm going to, this is going to help me reduce my stress after a bad day at work. So the goal then is not that you just like white knuckle it all night and feel really stressed after work. It's that you figure out like, what are some other things that help me reduce stress after work? Maybe it's going to a yoga class with a friend. Maybe it is, you know, spending time with my family. Maybe it's getting massaged or meditating or watching a show I like. So you want to, it's not just you're removing the thing that you're trying to change. You want to fill up the empty space with other things.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, there's a bunch. I think first any behavior change, whether it's alcohol or other, if you're feeling like depleted and tired and not your best self, it's going to be harder to make a change. So if you think about like any big decision you made to change your job, to start an exercise routine to leave your partner, you probably didn't choose like the day that you were exhausted and feeling anxious and stressed and not your best self to make that change. Like change is hard. So you want to try to boost up other things in your life, eat well, you know, get enough rest. Try to exercise. Things are that are going to help you feel healthy in your best self when you're trying to make a change.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“refreshed. Like you're reinforcing your goal right there. You're not working towards some abstract thing that doesn't really matter to you. So you want to make these like really focused personalized goals and really anchoring it on what is your why and your why may be very different than my why or someone else's why. So it may be, you know, sleep really matters to you. you know, you may have a different relationship with alcohol. So the other kind of example I'd give is people are different, right? We respond differently to things. So some people can open a bag of like potato chips and eat two and walk away. Some people like they open the bag, they're going to eat all of the chips. And so it's just easier not to open the bag. And alcohol is like that too. Some people might find if they open a bottle of wine or they have alcohol in the house, they're going to drink all of it. And the idea of like trying to keep to these small amounts of alcohol is actually really hard and it's simpler and easier to just avoid it completely or to only drink at a restaurant or something. So you do have to understand like how your goals, your why, your purpose.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In your life. So if you're just like, I should stop drinking because drinking is bad for me. That's like a relatively vague goal, right? It's not really about anything that matters specifically to you. And it's going to be hard to stick to that. If instead you think, okay, I've started to realize that when I drink every single night, I don't get the work done that I want to get done because I'm too tired and I fall asleep. I don't feel refreshed in the morning, so I'm not sleeping very well. I'm not getting up early to exercise, and that's something that really matters to me. I'm not like as present with my family as I wanted to be. Then it's all these little micro goals that make it much easier to make a change. So you may decide, you know, I'm not going to drink. I'm only going to drink two days out of the week. And when I do drink, I'm going to keep it to this amount. But the reason why is not some vague recommendation from some doctor is because you're working really hard at work and it feels good to be productive after dinner and you're training for a race and you want to get up in the morning and run. And so you actually notice those little steps like, wow, it feels great. I woke up this morning and I feel”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why I say all the time, what's your why? I think that's so exciting. Like we all want to live our best lives, whatever that means to us. And so having a purpose, having a goal is probably the most important thing. Motivation is important. We talk a lot about motivation, but motivation is fleeting. It can slip and slide over the course of one day. So you may, you know, take kind of a mundane example. You want to get in shape and you're feeling super motivated one day. And then the next morning, your alarm clock goes off at like five in the morning and you're tired and it's cozy in your bed and maybe you stayed up a little too late. Your motivation's going to be flagging, right? So if you don't have a goal or a reason or a why or a purpose, it's going to be really hard to actually get up the energy to get up. And so figuring out what that purpose is and then trying to find ways to enjoy the process because if you're always working towards a future goal, some people are very goal-oriented and that works for them. But finding joy in the process will help you. So I'll take alcohol, for example, like non-addiction issues, just like making changes to your dream.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other key is that if you meet a point of resistance, you want to pivot because once you start arguing, whether it's about politics or anything, people dig in. So if you start arguing with someone, you got to find another way. You just got to pivot and roll to a different tactic because the more you argue, the more people dig in on their point of view. And it's more about like winning the argument than it is about moving forward.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's like a little bit of a Jedi mind trick thing where you're essentially it's actually really it's a little tricky when you're first learning how to do it because what I'm trying to do is I'm listening for what's called change talk so any little nugget you're giving me about making a change so you're saying like oh I'm starting to get this misconduct I'm worried about this thing with safety at work I want to partner those are like it's a gold mine of little kernels of change and I'm ignoring all of your sustained talk So anything where you're arguing.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it sounds like you're really committed to thinking about making a change to your drinking and that you're looking forward to finding a partner and family and you're worried that alcohol might get in the way of that.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it sounds like that's really scary that you're really worried your alcohol use could cause even like a serious or life-threatening accident at work.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sounds like you're worried about your safety at work and also how your drinking is starting to affect your job and your relationships.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, very different. So in kind of like medical speak and therapy speak, we talked about something called motivational interviewing, which is it becomes almost like a mind trick, but it is basically a way of trying to identify from the person their reasons for change and reflecting it back to them. And so it's not you telling them you think they should change, but you are trying to elicit their motivation and amplify it. And then at the end of the day, you're turning over the power back to them. So that might look like something someone says, you know.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brilliant doctor advice. And this can be like telling someone, don't you see what you're doing is causing harm. You should make changes. It can also be subtler. It can be like lecturing someone or trying to educate them. But when someone shoves something down your throat, your instinct is to resist. It's just like natural human behavior, even if it's a great idea. If someone's like shoving an ice cream comb in your face and like, eat it. Even if you like ice cream, you might be like, wait, wait, I don't know if I want this ice cream. And so the key then is not to sort of tell someone what to do, it's to understand why might they want to make changes. And so once you do that, then you all of a sudden realize like, it just feels better. You're not trying to drag someone towards something. It doesn't, you don't have like personal skin in the game about what choice they make, but you're really a partner with them and figuring out how is this thing causing problems to you and why might your life get better if you were to make changes to your alcohol use or your drinking or your substance use?”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truly be unconditional. So I'm going to be someone's doctor whether they continue to use heroin or continue to drink or don't. And there's something really beautiful in that. Like my engagement with someone is not premised on whether they make changes or not. As a family member, that's harder, especially if you're a kid dependent on someone or you're in a marriage or a relationship. So you may have to make different choices. But I think at the end of the day, people don't change because of why we think they should change. They change because they think their life is going to get better in some way. So the key then becomes figuring out like, why might this person's life get better if they were to make changes to their alcohol or drug use? So it's a shift where you become sort of on their team instead of trying to drag them towards water, you know, drag the horse towards water. And there's this fascinating kind of human instinct that none of us like being told what to do. So there's something called the writing reflex, which is it's really hard for caregivers. It's hard for parents because we love to tell people like our great advice and why what they're doing is wrong and they should take our like.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well first, like, it is just so hard to be there as a family member or friend. So for anyone listening, I've been there, it's incredibly impossible. So have grace with yourself. I think that's a different decision. You're talking about is at some point do you have to make a decision to protect yourself. So let's say you have someone in your home who's dealing with addiction, who, you know, gets aggressive or is stealing money or causing trauma to the people living in the house. At some point, you may need to decide that for my well-being, for the rest of the family's well-being, I can't have this in my life right now. That's very different than saying kicking them out is going to make them better. So the distinction there is that it's okay to protect ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that. And sometimes there's only so much you can do, but to not sort of fool yourself into thinking that the action is to help the other person, and that's okay. I think the other piece is, you know, at the end of the day, first of all, it's easier to be a treater. So I've been a family member. I've been a clinician. As a clinician, I can”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change, the kind of hope and belief that your life could be better somehow, as opposed to this idea of increasing someone's pain and suffering. And that plays out in different ways. So in families, one of the most effective tools we teach people is something called craft, which stands for community reinforcement and family training.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is this concept of like enabling, which I think is nuanced. I would say at its core, it's really deeply problematic that for the most part love and support are never going to be harmful. And when I talk to patients, often the thing that caused them to ultimately engage in treatment was not some terrible consequence. It was the idea that someone cared enough about them in a moment where they didn't love themselves very much and felt hopeless, that someone was willing to sort of lift them up and believe in them. And it's these small moments of kindness. I'll tell you a story of a patient that we took care of in the hospital who was there for a really life-threatening infection related to their drug use. And a year to the date after he was hospitalized, he wrote a letter to our team and he said, you know, I'll never forget the moments you guys came in and just sat with me and talked to me. And he now sends an email every single year on the anniversary of when he got out of the hospital. And it's those moments of humanity, of connection. Again, that connection idea that often are the catalyst.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I think empathy is really powerful, those kind of things that we think of as soft skills actually matter tremendously.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is so interesting because we often think you've probably heard someone say, I don't really like my therapist. And I think sometimes reaction to that is like, oh, like you're not that into therapy, but they've actually done a lot of studies showing that a therapist who is less empathetic, their client is more likely to use more substances at the end of that course of treatment. So actually having a really well-trained, compassionate evidence-based workforce is hugely important too.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think one of the problems is that too often therapy has been like forced on people. I think that I'm much more of the approach of like we need to make treatment available and welcoming and high quality so that people get value out of it. And therapy is a huge part of that. You know, it's about a lot of things. It's about connection. It's about figuring out those reasons why people are using in the first place, addressing and healing those traumas. It also matters that we have good, well-trained, empathetic therapists. So there's been a lot of interesting studies looking at actually how empathetic your therapist is is probably the strongest predictor of whether you stop, make changes to your alcohol or drug use.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think human beings were meant to live this way, and it's a relatively new thing, right? We often lived in a village or a community. We lived in these multi-generational households. I mean, I have little kids and I think having kids was such an eye-opener of that, of like, well, that makes sense why people live with their parents and their grandparents and have these big families to create, you know, community and a sort of extended family around you. And we have lost that in a lot of ways. And I think the ways that we used to get that like religion, maybe not, maybe that still resonates for some people, but for others it may not. And so finding other ways of engagement, of meaning, a purpose, that can be through lots of different things. You know, I think people are finding creative ways of doing that. It can be through like, you know, finding a volunteer activity, finding some other type of social group. Some people do it through sports. They find connection and engagement with people they don't really know over the shared love around activity or a team, but really sort of seeing that as a priority the same way you'd prioritize other things in your life.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Restoring sort of the world around us, the community, the interrelatedness that we all have, the opportunities and purpose and meaning and hope. So I think that's the real prevention. And then there's how do we actually address folks who are having a problem? And I think what I would do there is first make addiction treatment widely available immediately when people need it. So the minute you walk into your general practitioner's office or an emergency room, you get treated with compassion, with science, with people asking you, what can they do to help and offering you effective care the same way they would if you had a new cancer diagnosis or a new diagnosis of a heart problem? And that we really reframe treatment entirely to look like the way it looks for any other health condition and that we stop punishing people who use substances where a lot of times people are still sent to jail for substance use, which, you know, is a confusing mixed message if we're saying this is a health problem on the one hand, but we're going to put you in prison or jail at the same time.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, a rat park was a series of experiments that were done where essentially they took, they're trying to understand kind of drivers of addiction using rat models. And so they took rats and they had one model where rats were isolated in their own cage with nothing to do and no human connection. And they had access to a substance like morphine or cocaine where they could push a lever and get more of it. And those animals, when they were deprived of connection and isolation, anything to do used more of the drug. It gave them relief, gave them pleasure. They took those same animals and they put them in this amazing cage with, you know, areas to play and like wheels to climb on and lots of friends and other rats. And all of a sudden they saw the same animals were no longer kind of pushing the lever and trying to get more of the drug. And so, you know, it's a somewhat simplified model that there's lots of, it's probably oversimplified, but it demonstrates that so much of addiction really is around this idea of connection.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean starting upstream, the biggest thing would be building resilience and building connection early on. So, you know, I think these things that feel so not related to addiction per se are.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, the cascading effects that, you know, that it didn't have to be that way, and I think there are so many deaths like that where I just think it doesn't have to be like this, you know, really no one should die like this. And there's so many things that, you know, in the moment feel so out of our control. And I think that's part of what generates my passion for this work is I can't always save the person in front of me or change issues around homelessness or housing policy, but I can try to work on a broader scale to make things different for the next person. And I think that kind of, that for me counteracts some of the distress of losing people that I care about.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh goodness so many So one gentleman in particular, he struggled with heroin addiction for a long time and had been, like we talked about, had been kind of a chronic illness for him. He'd had periods where he'd done really well. He'd had periods where he had struggled and had always stayed safe through all of that. And he actually, his one really meaningful relationship in his life that kind of kept him together was a relationship with his mom and he lived with her. And they lived in public housing. They were dealing with economic insecurity like many people. And someone found out that he was staying with her and it would have put her at risk for her housing. And so he didn't want her to lose her housing. So he laughed, but he was newly homeless. And all of a sudden, because of just social barriers was dealing with the stress of homelessness and being alone. And even with kind of all of the connection he'd had with his mom and with treatment, he was found dead between two parked cars and overdosed alone in the street.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrible things could happen to you. You might get your children taken away by child welfare. You could lose your housing or lose your job. And so that stigma has played into this terrible cycle where people have to whisper it to someone. It shows how much he trusted you to even be able to say honestly what he was going through because there's so much stigma about the condition itself”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you said something really important that was a slight shift in words. You didn't say he failed treatment. You said the treatment failed him. And that matters so much because I think too often we've made it seem as if people are failing. Like if they go to rehab and they don't get well, their problem, you know. And actually, the treatment wasn't right for them. If someone had cancer and their cancer came back or didn't get treated by chemotherapy, we wouldn't say like, oh, they failed. You know, we would say, well, what's the next treatment? How do we get them to the right doctor? And so there is this like personal blaming. And that gets its stigma, which is one of the main reasons that people don't share that they're struggling with substances, that they don't seek treatment. And so we have tremendous stigma towards drug and alcohol addiction. It's one of the most stigmatized kind of social conditions globally. And so, of course, then if you're a person who starts to think like, oh, maybe I do have a problem. Like maybe my alcohol use is getting in the way of things. It's really hard to then say anything because you worry that you're going to be judged. You're going to be labeled. You're going to be misunderstood in some cases.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of how the mismatch is between what we do around addiction and what science says is actually helpful. I think, you know, when I see someone who actively is showing signs, like it's just sad to see that happen so publicly without people being able to support that person. And it's not a magic fix. It's not going to be like, you know, you have an intervention, the person goes to treatment, gets better forever, that I think is often in people's minds. It is a process, a journey, like any change. And so really it is around where we began, that idea of how do you begin to understand what this person, how is their substance use getting in the way of what they want for themselves and how might their life be better for them based on whatever they believe better is if they were to make changes to their substance use?”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. When I read the headlines of someone dying, I mean, to me, it's gutting and heartbreaking. One, because obviously it's a human life that was someone's mother and sister or brother and people cared about a public figure that people looked up to and cared about, but mostly that it was a totally preventable death. Like really no one should die from a substance-related death. We have tools to treat addiction. We know how to prevent the harms of drug overdose, for example. And so the fact that someone can die, especially someone that everyone has watched for so long is, I think, just like a tragic example.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT