Joe Carr grew up in Wigan, worked in pubs and clubs, and drank in the way most people did in the late 90s and early noughties - constantly, and without much question. At 21, absolutely hammered and on her way out for the night, she got off a bus outside a local college where an open day was happening. A lecturer called Alan wouldn't let her walk past. She ended up on a business course, came out with a first class honours, became an accountant, met her husband at work, had two kids, and built a life that looked, by every external measure, like everything was fine.

It wasn't fine.

After having kids, Joe tried to get back to who she was before. But the version of herself before kids drank. A lot. Lockdown made it worse. And then she found running - which she threw herself into with exactly the same all-or-nothing energy she'd always brought to everything. By 2022 she was getting up at 3am to eat, running 20 miles at 4:30am before school drop-off and a full day of work, fuelling marathon training on 1200 to 1500 calories a day, and keeping all her race medals in a drawer because she was never happy with the times. She wasn't running towards anything. She was running away.

Her last drink was the 6th of April 2024 - the night before her wedding anniversary. She doesn't remember getting home. When she woke up, she decided she wasn't going to drink. Again. Like she'd decided hundreds of times before.

Then, at exactly 30 days sober, she got a phone call. Her best friend from school was in hospital with alcohol-related illness. She didn't survive. Joe went to the funeral and realised she wasn't just grieving her friend. She was grieving a life she thought she was supposed to live - all the things she'd never had the courage to do, the version of herself she'd never let exist.

She's now two years sober and has built Find Your Mojo, a fitness and wellbeing space built around one core belief: nourishment, not punishment. Her classes are built around a hexagon of healthy habits - movement, nourishment, rest, connection, mindfulness and purpose - with trauma-sensitive language and the radical idea that rest never has to be earned.

This week, Joe joins Rich and Andy for one of the most honest conversations they've had all year about the relationship between alcohol, exercise, perfectionism and self-worth. And the line that sits at the heart of it all - the one she arrived at two years on the other side: I thought sobriety would teach me how to live without alcohol. It taught me how to build a life I no longer wanted to escape from.

Find Joe on Instagram @findyourmojomindandbody and @findingmymojo2024

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James Lloyd spent 8 years trying to get back to four months of clarity he accidentally stumbled into at 38. He'd read Alan Carr's book on holiday in Abu Dhabi - picked it up because it was called How to Control Alcohol, not how to quit - and by the end of it, floating in a swimming pool, he thought: I don't think I'm going to drink again. He stopped for four months. Then started a new job at Nintendo, convinced himself he could turn it on and off for client events at Christmas. The toothpaste was out of the tube. It didn't work twice.

He finally stopped for good the day his mum died. He had a drink with his dad, went to bed, and woke up knowing that was it. A month later, at her funeral, he stood up to give the eulogy and spontaneously told the entire congregation he was never going to drink alcohol again. He put it out there in front of everyone. He wasn't going back on that.

Two and a half years into sobriety, he was given two separate cancer diagnoses in the space of a month. He processed it in about a week. He credits the emotional resilience that comes from proper sleep - and proper sleep that comes from not drinking - for the fact that it didn't put him in a hole for months.

James now coaches grey area drinkers through 100 days alcohol-free. Not Dry January - 100 days, because you can white-knuckle a month, but you can't white-knuckle 100 days. You have to go to the wedding, the stag do, the birthday party, and find out whether the things you believe about alcohol are actually true. Nine out of ten of his clients come in wanting to get control back. Nine out of ten end up staying alcohol-free.

This week, James, Rich and Andy get into why stopping drinking is probably not as hard as you think - and why the real work, the identity shift, the limiting beliefs, the blank canvas of what comes next - starts after the first month, not before.

Plus: the selective attention experiment that explains exactly why people stay stuck, why the summer is actually the best time to take a break, and the line that stopped the room - it's only ethanol in a glass bottle with a nice label on it. Everything else is a belief.

Find James at AlcoholFreeCoach.com or on Instagram @AlcoholFreeCoach_. His podcast, the Alcohol-Free Revolution, features both Rich and Andy in back episodes.

This week coincides with Alcohol Awareness Week, and this year's theme is Alcohol and Me - an invitation for people to reflect on their own relationship with alcohol and what, if anything, they'd like to do about it.

Rich and Andy use it as a springboard for one of the most honest conversations they've had in a while. Rich reads out real, verbatim messages from people in their community - runners, parents, professionals - describing what their relationship with alcohol actually looks like. Not the sharp end. Not people who'd describe themselves as alcoholics. Just people caught somewhere in the middle, aware that something's not quite right, but not sure what to do about it.

There's the person drinking daily since PTSD and a late ADHD diagnosis. The one who's stopped plenty of times but always comes back because the boredom gets too loud. The one with two drink-driving charges who knows, sober, they'd never get behind the wheel. And the one who just said: nothing good ever comes from it, does it?

Rich also gets into why he now sees the alcohol industry as legal drug cartels - how alcohol got a green pass that no other substance would ever receive today, and how the industry's message of drink responsibly quietly places the blame on you while maximizing their profits.

Andy brings in the ADHD connection - why alcohol is cheap dopamine for a loud brain, and why the single best piece of advice one prominent ADHD expert gives to anyone newly diagnosed is simply: take a break from alcohol.

And underneath it all, there's this: you can't read the label from inside the jar. Most people don't see the full picture until they've stepped outside of it.

Also in this episode: Andy's week of genuine chaos, Rich's take on the Eisenhower Matrix, and why surrendering isn't the same as giving up.

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