Explore every episode of the podcast After Hours with Jimmy Thistle

Jonny Crawford joined the RAF at nineteen looking for discipline. What he got was twelve years of what he calls the fittest alcoholics in the world.

In this episode he pulls the curtain back on a drinking culture most people never see. The beer calls that weren't compulsory but absolutely were, because if you didn't turn up you got the worst jobs the next day. The cocaine syndicates. Lads sweating it out in the sauna on a Friday and pulling a sickie on a Monday to dodge the drugs test. Mates binning eleven-year careers over one night at a festival. And the old flight sergeants living vicariously through the young lads the morning after.

It ended on a back road in Cyprus. Jonny got behind the wheel blind drunk, two of his mates in the car, doing 80 miles an hour on his way to the next pub. The car left the road and slid between two trees that would have killed him outright, and into the bushes. All three of them walked out without a scratch. The first car down that empty road turned out to be a pal from boxing. And Jonny asked him for a lift to the pub, and the party ran until the next day.

He should have woken up destroyed. Instead he woke up loved. He calls it his first encounter with the Holy Spirit, and the 18th of September 2022 was the last time he touched a drink.

Jonny talks honestly about what came next: ordering a Bible he couldn't understand, locking his door at weekends and watching sobriety videos with headphones in while the old crowd knocked, and the people back in Scotland asking his mum whether he'd had a breakdown. As he puts it, when he was sniffing coke and wrecking his life, it was "that's just Johnny Boy." When he got sober and found faith, he'd lost the plot.

He and Jimmy get into the identity question too, and don't entirely agree. Jonny won't let the men he works with call themselves addicts. Jimmy makes the case for what the fellowship gave him and what he had to leave behind.

Plus: what men really hide from their families, why alcohol is the gateway, and the morning journal that changed everything.

One word for life now? Clarity.

You can find Jonny on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/jonnycrawfordmentor/

Project Knight:

https://jonnycrawford.unforged.me/links/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAaftTeFdIKdJC5U-Q26FI9ETXa6aDQRj84oCFfkZOPk0E6gVUQi4NfUr0YOj9w_aem_tHU4KJuvMX8EfFf1A5VkIg

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Olivia Farrelly had her last drink on 4 July 2018. It was a gin, at a wedding in Spain, and she knew before she'd finished it. She handed the glass to her husband Gary and asked him to take a photograph, because it felt that big. She still has the pictures.

Eight years on, Olivia is an alcohol-free coach and mentor, the host of No More Booze – The Podcast, and the woman her clients call "the smiling assassin".

In this episode she tells Jimmy about growing up in nineties Ireland, where the pub was where you learned to be social. About 16 nights in a row out in Sydney, and only making it to the Opera House the night before she flew home. About half a bottle of vodka, throwing it straight back up, and then drinking 16 Baileys. And about hangovers so monumental that in the end they made the decision for her.

But this is not a war stories episode. Olivia is trained in psychology, and she's spent eight years working out exactly why life on the other side is better. She talks about alcohol painting you into a corner, and how every drink you don't take lets you see more of the world. About the question that changed everything for her: how does a fish know it's wet? About emotional maturity arriving at 37, and the shame that had to be dealt with before joy could move in.

She's honest about the hard parts too. The dark night of the soul after the booze went. Redefining friendships built on drinking. Being called holier-than-thou. Going through menopause with a clear head rather than a foggy one.

And she makes the case for what she's built instead: sauna and ice on a Sunday morning, matcha with friends, a weighted blanket, a mango kombucha and a murder documentary. A life she calls beautifully ordinary, and would not trade for a cheque for a hundred million.

Jimmy and Olivia also get into gray area drinking versus the alcoholic label, why Sober October should be a count up rather than a countdown, and why twelve people in Olivia's life no longer drink.

One word for life now? Joyful.

Find Olivia on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/greyareadrinker/

No More Booze 30:

https://nomorebooze30.lovable.app/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAafqMV47f9QGRvNDTF8xByxEhaKCJSDrnUJhA5B7jb71HMs2Oxo0q6z5Xjsu3A_aem_WfMt3HpKCGZhTZllsgEGsw&utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3

Am I a Grey Area Drinker Quiz:

https://grey-area-assessment.lovable.app/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAadwbhpUxaZyvQ-8pKbMZjJ8qXC2GTd-BHbUhafHQ4U6fXiVg4xodrkwWC7Oew_aem_kLMN5fgrfbkgPfS-fEA6EA&utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3

No More Booze - The Podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/037RmUDIJ3hW44FI5YLRjN?si=QsxQaVaqRdCQNL8s-2T-dA&utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAafwG9VjlfPf_V0F_FSj0Xy68kdwFy73yU1qRVERRm9zuZ1C3A7H3F3xqp6lgA_aem_TEke57rdTZeVPCOyUOTfMw&nd=1&dlsi=796525ccc19848e3

The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Gray:

https://link.amazon/B0g5RWsby

Feel Good Podcast with Dr Rangan Chatterjee:

https://drchatterjee.com/is-it-time-for-a-tactical-break-from-alcohol-with-andy-ramage-re-release/

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 89 | Suzanne Warye — Mummy Wine Culture, the Vodka Deal & the Morning She Couldn't Remember Feeding Her Baby

Suzanne Warye grew up in Wisconsin, a state where 97 of America's 100 drunkest cities are located and the baseball team is literally called the Brewers. Drinking there didn't feel like a choice. It felt like a foregone conclusion.

Her parents divorced when she was six and her dad went hard into the party. Then, when she was nine, he sat her down and told her the doctor had said if he wanted to dance at her wedding, he had to quit. So he did. The next drink he had was at her wedding, twenty-four years later. That was the only conversation about alcohol she ever had growing up. No warning. No cautionary tale.

She had her first drink at fourteen — straight vodka, wasted, and that immediate rush of belonging. Varsity volleyball, student council, honour society by day; blackout drinker by night. College in Green Bay was booze and boys. Then Atlanta, then Chicago — single in the city, waking up in places she didn't recognise beside people she didn't remember. She calls it what it was: the walk of shame, a phrase that only ever applies to the woman.

It never occurred to her that quitting was an option. She didn't think she qualified. She just had to drink better. Be more adult about it. Find the moderation everyone else had supposedly mastered.

Then came motherhood — and one of the most extraordinary confessions on this show. Suzanne became an influencer in 2015, before the word existed. And she was paid by a vodka brand to make drinking look glamorous by the pool. She made it look beautiful. She poured every drop down the drain and never took a sip, because she was a busy mum with three kids and couldn't drink in the afternoon. Her followers didn't know that. They only saw a woman who seemed to have it all and a drink in her hand. She was, in her own words, both a perpetrator and a victim of mummy wine culture.

On the 19th of January 2020, after a champagne party, she woke at 10am and realised she'd nursed her three-month-old in the night with no memory of it at all. She spent the day on the couch, looked around at the chaos of her own home and thought: this scene needs a mum.

She got up and told her husband she was done. Six and a half years ago. Her husband quit two years later. Her book is The Sober Shift.

One word for her life now: wonderful.

Suzanne Warye is a sobriety influencer (@suzannewarye and @thesobermomlife) and the host of the popular

podcast The Sober Mom Life. Residing on the North Shore of Chicago with her husband and three kids, Suzanne

spends most of her time reheating her coffee and rocking her “whole heart, half ass” parenting philosophy.

For more visit:

https://suzannewarye.com/

https://thesobermomlife.com/

You can get the paperback copy of The Sober Shift here:

https://amzn.to/4yMk1he

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 88 | Steve Smith — Nitro, the Door Handle & the Man Who Quit on a Train Platform

Steve Smith grew up in Berkshire, the son of Glaswegian parents — his dad a police officer turned private investigator who joined the force in England because Glasgow wanted him two inches taller. There was always a party. Beers dangled over the garden fence to signal the neighbours. Eventually a bar built into the house, optics and all, pure Del Boy. Nobody got into trouble. It was just fun. That's what Steve learned alcohol was.

Then Cocktail came out. He started at the TGI Fridays in Reading, moved into the West End, and became one of the top flair bartenders in London. He went by Nitro. He competed in Dubai and Vegas. He won the World Championships. Free drinks and free entry everywhere he went, because in that world he was a rock star. Managers told the team to down a Bloody Mary before shift to sort themselves out. It wasn't a red flag. It was the job.

He drank every single day through his twenties and most of his thirties. He moved into management, then operations, then senior management for big restaurant chains — where the drinking simply changed clothes and became wine tastings and client entertaining. He ran over twenty marathons and used every one as proof he was fine. How could there be a problem? He'd just run 26 miles.

At 41, with an eleven-week-old son at home, he fell asleep on a train after a 10am wine tasting and woke up fifty miles from home on the last service with no phone, no wallet and no keys. That was the first time he really sat up. It took another five or six years.

There was the morning he woke in agony convinced he'd damaged his liver — and discovered he'd slept on a door handle in his brother's spare room. The GP said he'd strained something. Steve took it as a green light.

The end, when it came, was quiet. A night in London where he drank faster than colleagues fifteen years younger, left his glasses behind, and felt like the old boy who couldn't handle it. He woke up and thought: I'm bored of this. A few weeks later, a curry with his brother, standing on a train platform — I think that's it for me. 27th June 2021.

He signed up for an Ironman having never done a triathlon. Now he runs 200-mile ultras, coaches dads through their first 90 days, and hosts The Alcohol Free Revolution.

One word for his life now: full.

Steve is on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/sober.illiant/

His website is:

https://www.soberilliant.com

The Acohol Free Revolution Podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-alcohol-free-revolution-podcast/id1826062887

Alcohol Lied to Me - Craig Beck

https://amzn.to/4yxdB5v

The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober - Catherine Gray

https://amzn.to/3T5XtJg

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 87 | Janey Lee Grace — Wham!, Cola Boy & the Elephant in the Room Nobody Told Her About

Janey Lee Grace grew up in Nottingham, got into music in her teens, and somehow navigated the drug-soaked world of touring bands without falling too far in — largely, she thinks, out of fear. She had no safety net. Nobody was coming to pick her up if it went wrong. So it didn't go wrong. Not yet.

She toured with Mary Wilson and the Supremes, then Wham! — she's in the documentary, a young woman in her early twenties watching George Michael become a superstar from the wings. She had a top 10 hit in 1991 with Cola Boy, played a warehouse rave in Venice that felt like being Madonna for five minutes, worked with Boy George, Kim Wilde, Matt Bianco, and Chris Evans at BBC London and Virgin Radio. Then she landed at Radio 2, where she'd stay for 23 years.

In between all of it, she wrote a book called Imperfectly Natural Woman — 20 years ago — that made her the queen of holistic living. Coconut oil. Soap nuts. Natural deodorant. Organic everything. She talked about it on national radio to millions of listeners. And she stepped around the elephant in the room every single day, because alcohol was her treat. The one thing that didn't fit the brand. The one thing she couldn't touch.

She mentioned it to a GP once, on the way out the door, a classic doorknob moment. The GP looked at her, said she seemed fine, suggested an alcohol-free day and a glass of water between drinks. Janey walked out relieved. That kept her stuck for five more years.

In late 2017, a producer handed her a copy of Claire Pooley's The Sober Diaries ahead of an interview. She glanced at the back, realised Claire was just like her, and knew. She didn't read it until after Christmas — she didn't want to spoil the holidays. On the 30th of January 2018, she started the book and quit the same day.

The first two months were rough. Leg cramps, terrible sleep, emotional chaos, shame she couldn't explain. She told nobody except Claire. She navigated a Radio 2 Christmas party, awards evenings and functions without telling a soul she'd stopped drinking. At two and a half months she sat in a car park outside a Club Soda event for twenty minutes before she dared go in. At three months, on her birthday, she went to a sober rave at the Ministry of Sound at 6.30 in the morning and thought: I get it now.

At eight months she posted her coming out video on YouTube. She expected backlash. Every message said welcome to the club.

In 2019 she did a TEDx talk called Sobriety Rocks Who Knew. She'd forgotten there'd be a live audience. Five people pulled her aside at the break and said: you described me exactly. Can you help? She founded the Sober Club that September. She's now a sober coach trainer, still doing BBC local radio, still championing the imperfectly natural life — with the elephant finally out of the room.

One word for her life now: freedom.

You can find Janey on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/janeyleegrace?stkn=MXY1NTJyc3d3MTB2NQ==

The Sober Club at:

https://www.thesoberclub.com/

And Janey's books:

https://amzn.to/4qV1Kvo

https://amzn.to/4yIPIIz

https://amzn.to/4i9MicG

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 86 | Laura Van Antwerp — The Pinky Promise, the Ski Town & 172 Miles on the Tahoe Rim Trail

Laura Van Antwerp is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, public speaker, social media influencer and adventure junkie with a passion for helping people get outdoors and live their best life without booze. As featured in Backpacker magazine, Laura is the Founder and CEO of YSP Adventures, which organizes adventure retreats, courses, and workshops to help sober and sober-curious people build confidence, find connection and HAVE FUN without booze! She is the hilarious personality behind @yoursoberpal on TikTok and Instagram, and the bestselling author of “Your Sober Pal Sobriety Affirmation Deck,” which features 50 funny and motivational cards to uplift and comfort people in their sobriety journey. Additionally, Laura is a backpacking and hiking guide with the Tahoe Rim Trail Association, a regular guest speaker at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the recipient of the 2022 Windfeldt Inspire Award.

You can find Laura on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/yoursoberpal?igsi=YjA2YjB4NDBidzJy

Laura's website is at:

www.yoursoberpal.co

yspadventures.com

Laura's Linktree:

https://linktr.ee/yoursoberpal

Blackout - Sarah Hepola

https://amzn.to/4zLCFHh

Recovery Elevator

https://open.spotify.com/show/51g2uQIwCFuJ2igFSWxn0P?si=231a2d61c399410f

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 85 | Richard Chapman — £2,000 a Day, a Drug Cartel & the Finance Director Who Got Clean in the Rehab That Saved Him

Richard Chapman grew up in Bradford, the youngest of three, with a father who was an HSBC area director, a grandfather who was a West Yorkshire police superintendent, and a home where the tea had better be on the table or things would get thrown against the wall. His dad was beloved by everyone who worked for him. Richard's experience was slightly different.

He found his outlet on a rugby field — playing for Yorkshire at fifteen, inflicting as much violence as legally permissible on anyone in front of him — and left school with two O-levels and a desire to work on a building site. His dad sent him to Midland Bank instead. In a suit from Marks & Spencer. At 18.

He turned out to be brilliant at it. Which his dad, now area director, deeply resented having to ring and confirm every Friday.

At 29, a man with tattoos on his head offered Richard a line of cocaine in a bar in Guiseley. He'd never touched it before. He bought £500 worth the next day, in a Burberry duffel coat, in a pub called the Living Rooms. The man with the tattoos became his best friend for the next seventeen years.

By the end, Richard was spending £2,000 a day on cocaine, sitting in Leeds car parks trying to run his banking team through a Blackberry, checking into hotels for the night and ordering seven more grams, laundering money for a drug cartel, defrauding his parents of £150,000, taking a £50,000 mortgage out in his wife's name and walking from his hotel in Scarborough to a drug deal with one flip-flop on and a sock.

His 11-year-old son sent him a text from the next room. He drove home. He walked into rehab on the 5th of April 2020 with three grams left and snorted the lot before he walked through the door.

Now six years clean. Finance director of Ark House — the rehab in Scarborough that got him well. Five boys. A dog. A view of the sea. One word: peaceful.

In-Recovery is on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/in_recovery_podcast

You can find them at:

https://arkhouserehab.co.uk/podcast/

The Bag Lady Doc:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596767/

Wet House Doc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF5wNsfKo84

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 84 | Sarah Rusbatch — Grey Area Drinking, Mummy Wine Culture & the Morning Her Daughter Asked What Happened to Your Face

Sarah Rusbatch grew up in Scotland in a household where alcohol was simply part of life — grandma offering sips of wine at nine, her dad's beer froth, men in kilts addressing the haggis on Burns Night. By the time she was fourteen and had moved to five schools in eight years, alcohol was the answer to a question she hadn't quite formed yet: how do I fit in?

She went to university in Hull, got deep into the nineties dance scene, moved to London, climbed the career ladder in recruitment — where in 1997 the fourth stage of every job interview was a pub session with tequila shots to see if you could handle your booze. She wore her capacity for alcohol as a badge of honour. She was lit up like a Christmas tree the moment she had a drink, and she didn't stop until the sun came up.

Then came the baby, the move to Perth with no friends and no family, the loneliness that nobody talks about when everything on paper looks perfect, and a bottle of wine a night that slowly became the only thing in her toolbox. In 2017, she fell at a party, smashed her face, and was woken the next morning by her five-year-old daughter standing beside the bed asking what had happened to her face. There was dried blood and congealed vomit around her mouth.

She did 100 days sober. She went back to drinking. She was back to exactly where she'd been within a month. She tried again. And again. Until 2019, when she finally understood it wasn't a her problem. It was alcohol.

Now seven years sober, Sarah is one of Australia's leading grey area drinking coaches, the author of Beyond Booze, and the host of Stronger Bolder Wiser. She works with women aged 40 to 65 who are ready to change their relationship with alcohol — and she does it with a directness and warmth that makes this one of the best conversations we've had on the podcast.

You can find Sarah on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/sarahrusbatch

Sarah's other links here:

https://www.instagram.com/sarahrusbatch

Sarah's 100 things to do instead of drink:

https://www.instagram.com/sarahrusbatch

Sarah Rusbatch - Beyong Booze:

https://amzn.to/3U1EHmo

Sarah's Stronger, Bolder, Wiser - Podcast

https://open.spotify.com/show/0NgeQwAek802stoj6ZfzYm

Soberful Podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/0Xll4Cyn6m18n5p24FXdhE

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 83 | Sarah Drage — The Doctor, the Car Keys & What Happens When You Finally Get Your Dad Back and then lose him again...

Sarah Drage grew up in West Yorkshire, the eldest of three daughters to a man who was, by her account, genuinely ahead of his time — forward thinking, emotionally open, taking his girls to business meetings in the nineties, teaching them to be independent and articulate and to challenge the world around them. He also drank. Not obviously at first — whiskey, a glass here and there — but enough that Sarah noticed, from a young age, that there were two versions of her dad. The one she adored. And the one she tried to avoid.

By the time she was a teenager she knew what it was. She tried everything. She poured his drinks down the sink and topped bottles up with water — not knowing that removing the alcohol from a physically dependent person could trigger a fatal seizure. She tried confrontation. She tried tough love. She tried overachieving, becoming the first in her family to go to university, as if her own success might give him a reason to stop.

In 2015, after a family holiday where he arrived drunk and volatile, she gave him an ultimatum: rehab or no contact. He agreed. He detoxed. He got sixteen months sober — the best sixteen months the family had had in years. She got her dad back. Then his father died. And within four months so did he.

Thirty hours after being admitted to A&E, at 59 years old — one week before his sixtieth birthday — Steve Drage was taken off life support. He didn't recognise Sarah in the wheelchair. He asked if she had his car keys because he wanted to check the girls were okay.

Sarah is now a NACOA ambassador, a social media manager and one of the most honest voices on what it means to grow up in the shadow of a parent's addiction. This episode ranges from the mechanics of alcohol dependency to social media addiction, emotional resilience, the manosphere, and why she now believes stigma was never really the problem.

You can find Sarah on Insta at:

https://www.instagram.com/sarah_drage

You can find Nacoa at:

https://nacoa.org.uk/

The Lancet report by Professor David Nutt (2010)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/abstract

Inside the Manosphere - Louis Theroux

https://www.netflix.com/watch/81920687

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 82 | Michael Kiernan — The Wrong Number, the Guinness World Record & the Cold Water That Changed Everything

Michael Kiernan grew up in Crosshill, a small town where everybody knew everybody and especially knew your family. Good childhood, strong women, a mum and a gran raising him — and then a stepdad who came into his life at eleven and whose surname he briefly took on. He got his first job, met the wrong crowd, had his first drink at seventeen — a bottle of Thunderbird downed at a party — and promptly fell asleep. It barely registered. What registered was the weed he was introduced to at work shortly after, and the week in Blackpool in 1991 that changed his personality permanently.

One disco biscuit on a dance floor in Sequins, every night for a week, washed down with everything else going. He came home a different person. His first full-blown panic attack sent him to bed for months, cost him his job, introduced him to beta blockers and codeine. And in codeine, he found something. An opiate that was socially acceptable, prescription-grade, and brilliant at making everything stop.

For the next thirty years, Michael was what he calls the undercover addict. Always had heavier users around him to compare himself to. Still holding down jobs, still keeping up appearances, still the driver because his substance of choice wasn't alcohol. Weed to start the day. Speed to stay up late. Valium to get to sleep. Codeine for the pain — first from arthritis in his hips, then for everything else. At his worst he was 22 stone, eating two tubs of Ben & Jerry's a night, binge eating fruit and veg to lose weight while still medicating everything with pills, not caring whether he woke up in the morning.

Then COVID. Made redundant. No pretence of going to work. Forty to fifty dihydrocodeine a day. And one afternoon outside a health centre, rattling, out of prescription, running through his options — he scrolled to H on his phone meaning to call someone he knew who used heroin. He called his mum instead by accident. And he stayed on the line.

Now in recovery. Guinness World Record holder — two hours and five minutes buried in snow in shorts at Glenshee. Founder of Flowstate Experience, a cold water and ice therapy community in Scotland. Partner, radio show host, ice bath evangelist. One wrong number from a completely different life.

You can find Michael on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/michael_flowstate_experience_

His website:

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/19YCYLESpp/?mibextid=wwXIfr

And the radio show:

https://www.instagram.com/michael_flowstate_experience_?igsh=MXZ5MXFrOG5lenB0aw==

Links to the 2 Flowstate films that inspired Michael:

https://youtu.be/dftQD_EEcgg?si=e2o95sFcmuRnHWtU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvuCViWPlZY

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

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Episode 81 | Ashley Baker — Rocket Fuel at 13, Death Metal in Dubai & 17 Years Sober His Own Way

Ashley Baker was born in the UK but never lived there. He grew up in Dubai in the late seventies and eighties — before it was trendy, when it was still mostly desert — the only child of an English mum who'd stayed after his dad left when he was four. She tried to take her life twice before he was old enough to understand why. He grew up with four languages, an Arabic school, a private English school, and by thirteen, a can of Fosters nicked from his parents and a plan to be the coolest kid on the 31st floor of the Hyatt Regency.

The plan involved rocket fuel — everything in the drinks cabinet mixed into a 1.5 litre water bottle, downed on a dare in front of his friends. He fell into the pool, woke up the next day still drunk, got on the school bus, and everyone applauded. That was it. He was the man. He never really stopped drinking after that.

At seventeen his family moved to Germany, where he discovered that you could buy alcohol in supermarkets at sixteen and that every death metal bar in Stuttgart was open until dawn. He got an apprenticeship as a chef — the one job in the world where drinking before a shift was not just accepted but culturally expected — and spent the next fifteen years being the best and worst version of himself simultaneously.

By thirty-one he was drinking two bottles of wine before he could get out of bed, going to his neighbours to ask if they had any wine left, and shaking so badly he had to medicate the withdrawals with more alcohol just to get upright. He went to rehab twice — the first time he left after two weeks and was back drinking within a week. The second time it stuck.

Seventeen years sober. Fully tattooed. Qualified addiction counsellor and sober coach in Stuttgart. Completely at peace. And still listening to death metal.

You can find Ash on instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/ashleybaker.sobercoach?igsh=dnJobnFnZXdsNHRn

and his Linktree at:

https://linktr.ee/ashleybaker.sobercoach

The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle

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Boiling Point - Stephen Graham

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My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

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https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

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Episode 80 | Scott Murdoch — Four Cans in the Fridge, the Marathon des Sables & Running to the First Minister

Scott Murdoch grew up on the schemes of Loch Lomond — grey houses, young teams, a school that got burnt down so they learned in caravans — and moved at thirteen to a nicer part of town where he suddenly realised other people's parents had Ferraris. His gran died of alcoholism at 58 looking about 80. His dad drank every day. His mum put up with it because she'd grown up in it too. As a kid, Scott knew that if his dad had four cans of beer in the fridge at home, the evening would be okay. If he went to the pub with his friends, it was best to hide under the covers and wait for it to pass.

He left school with a C in PE and a C in Music — both on performance marks alone, because he never bothered sitting the written exams. Drank in the park, caused trouble, got himself a reputation and wore it as a badge of honour. At 21, something shifted. He made two Google searches on the same day: being the child of an alcoholic, which is when NACOA appeared. And what is the toughest race on earth, which is when the Marathon des Sables appeared. Six marathons across the Sahara Desert in five days, 50 degree heat, sandstorms, a medical tent where people's feet were degloved from the sand. Scott decided he was going to do both.

It took him eight years. He went back to college, got straight A's, went to university, got straight A's again and won the court medal — the highest academic award for business at his university. Retrained, found a job he believed in, started working with NACOA, ran the Marathon des Sables in April last year for the charity, then ran 100km from Glasgow to Edinburgh through the night without sleeping to hand a letter from a grieving child to John Swinney, Scotland's First Minister.

Now 60 days out from attempting a Guinness World Record — two marathons in two time zones on the same day in Samoa — with Callum Best, Ian Stringer and Josh Connolly, all children of alcoholics, all NACOA ambassadors. The goal: to fund a national schools education programme so that children like Scott never have to count cans in silence again.

You can find Scott on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/scott1murdoch

and you can donate to his Chasing Yesterday Marathons here:

https://www.instagram.com/scott1murdoch?igsh=MWhkMG01OTltdmo4OA==

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

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Episode 79 | Paul Drayton — Ride or Die Trying: Beach Blanket Babylon, Two Brain Operations & the Love Story at the Heart of It All

Paul Drayton grew up in Sunderland — doors unlocked, family holidays, a dad who ran his own petrol station, a childhood he describes as idyllic. His first real taste of alcohol was chocolate liqueurs at his grandmother's, and he loved the feeling from the start. Not that he became a big drinker early — quite the opposite. As a teenager he was the designated driver, ferrying his friends to gay bars in his little box Astra while they drank cider and he listened to Erasure.

Then came London. Drama college. Beach Blanket Babylon, where the tips sometimes came in wraps and the shift ended at 3am and the mornings brought in with Bloody Marys to take the edge off. The trendy bars of the nineties. A life built around parties, people and performance. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, a relationship that would define the next decade of his life — with a man who became, over time, one of the most recognisable faces in Britain, while Paul quietly built everything around him and slowly stopped being Paul.

By 2015 he was at home alone with the dogs, self-medicating sciatica with alcohol, going to neighbours' houses to ask if they had any wine left. The drinking went from functioning to dependent. A drink driving incident that Paul still doesn't believe tells the full story ended up in court and in the tabloids. Two lots of brain surgery for a chronic subdural haematoma. A divorce. A month in rehab. And through all of it — all of it — he stayed sober.

The book — Ride or Die Trying — is at its heart a love story. Paul talks about the dogs who kept him honest, the 274 days that ended with champagne at a wedding, the ADHD diagnosis that finally made his whole life make sense, and what it means to finally be somebody again on your own terms.

You can find Paul on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/pauldrayton1

His website:

https://pauldrayton.co.uk

and you can buy his book, Ride or Die Trying here:

https://amzn.to/4pguaPP

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nigel Jones is the founder of the 9KM BY 9AM health and wellbeing platform, an accredited life coach, sober coach, hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner, and the author of the best selling QUIT DRINKING book Walking Back To Happiness: The Secret To Alcohol-Free Living & Well-being.

After recently reaching 2,000 alcohol-free days, Nigel has become known for his practical, no-nonsense approach to personal transformation and identity change. In this episode, he shares how stopping drinking wasn't the biggest challenge - rebuilding himself was. We explore why alcohol promises what sobriety delivers, the power of small habits, how to break free from old versions of yourself, and why lasting change happens when you stop focusing on willpower and start changing your identity.

Drawing on his own journey and his work with thousands of people looking to improve their wellbeing, Nigel explains why becoming alcohol-free is about far more than removing alcohol. It's about creating a healthier, calmer, more authentic version of yourself and building a life you no longer want to escape from.

LINKS

Website - https://www.9kmby9am.com/

My Book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DLPH36R3/ 

Alcohol Free Coaching Programmes - https://www.9kmby9am.com/coaching/alcohol-free-coaching/

Coaching Testimonials - https://www.9kmby9am.com/coaching/coaching-testimonials/

Newsletter - https://www.9kmby9am.com/latest-news/newsletter/ 

Professional Bodies https://general-hypnotherapy-register.com/nigel-jones/ 

Professional Bodies - https://anlp.org/members/nigel-jones 

Feel Good Hour  - https://www.feelgoodhour.com 

Podcasts - https://www.9kmby9am.com/about-nigel/podcasts/ 

TRY MY AI LIFE COACH

https://www.9kmby9am.com/about-nigel/ai-coach/ 

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 77 | Dan Sheridan — Big Dan Stella in a Straight Glass: Cirrhosis, a 20% Chance & the Liver That Changed Everything

Dan Sheridan grew up in Harwell, Oxfordshire — a village with five pubs and a club, a dad who was his hero, and a first attempt on his own life at 22 that he talked his way out of in front of a psychiatrist and never went back to. He became a dad at 19 to a woman sixteen years his senior, never found his footing, and spent the better part of two decades hiding behind a personality so large that the people who loved him genuinely couldn't believe he was suffering. Big Dan. Stella in a straight glass. Never drunk in public — just absolutely hammered at home at two in the morning, singing Adele, dancing to Happy Hardcore and hoping his eyes wouldn't open again.

When his liver finally gave out the signs were there for years — size fourteen shoes on a size twelve man, legs that were just blocks of water, blood in places blood shouldn't be. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis in 2019 and that night went on Facebook Live to announce he was going to be the first person to cure the condition. Then bought 18 tins of Stella.

In 2020, during COVID, he had a catastrophic GI bleed and decorated his house in blood. He was given a 50% chance of surviving the night. He was thinking about the lager in the fridge. The next morning a doctor told him he had a 20% chance of making it through the next hour — then the ward doors burst open and he went down fast. He woke up in ICU unable to remember his address.

What followed was three years of transplant lists, stomach drains, weekly breathalyser tests, encephalopathy so severe he rang friends to tell them he was playing Ronnie O'Sullivan at Twickenham while using a fork to call Domino's. Then a TikTok video. Then a comment. Then a message. Then a phone call. Then Claire.

On 1,111 days sober, he got a call on a Saturday — we don't normally ring patients on a Saturday, Dan, but we've got a liver for you. Three years ago on the 4th of June. He thanks that man every single day.

You can find Dan on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/danman147

On TikTok at:

https://www.tiktok.com/@mrssheridanshusband

Mum, can you Lend me Twenty Quid - Elizabeth Burton-Phillips MBE

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Basketball Diaries

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My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

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Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 76 | Brad McLeod — The Million Dollar Man: Running from everything, Drug Trafficking & the Moment Everything Shifted

Brad McLeod was born in Canada, one of twins, to a sixteen-year-old mother still living with her own parents. By the time he was six the family had relocated to Waco, Texas, and the stability he'd known at his grandparents' hands had gone. The anxiety started early. The ADHD diagnosis followed. The suspensions. The arrests. The psychiatrists, the counsellors, the pharmaceuticals — Prozac, Wellbutrin, Adderall, all of it. By sixteen he was in a lockdown treatment unit in Knoxville, Tennessee — transported there by a private security company after refusing to go voluntarily, running through a beehive and a barbed wire fence at a highway rest stop on the way.

He did a year in that program, came out the other side with a college acceptance and a car his parents had scraped together to buy him. Six months later he was sitting at a poker table when someone pulled out a pain pill and asked if he wanted to try it. He didn't know what an opiate was. He found out fast. The pills ran dry and the heroin came. He got robbed at gunpoint. He lost the apartment, the car, the college place. He got arrested again — drug trafficking charges — and when he stepped off a plane to visit his family, the police were waiting. A year in jail. Deportation. A lifetime ban from the United States.

He came back to Canada with a suitcase on his brother's floor, walking two hours each day to collect his methadone prescription, earning ten dollars an hour cash doing yard work for his parents just to cover the script. It was watching a girl's face light up to see him as he sat handcuffed in the back of a police car that finally made something shift — not the arrests, not the jail, not the deportation. Just one face in a car park.

Now sober, Brad runs the Sober Motivation Instagram, hosts his own podcast and has built one of the most active recovery communities online. His grandfather used to call him the million dollar man — for all the money spent trying to fix him. These days Brad's spending it differently.

You can find Brad on Insta at: https://www.instagram.com/sobermotivation

Brad's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/Sobermotivation

The Podcast: https://shows.acast.com/sobermotivation

The Website: https://www.sobermotivation.com

and the App! https://www.sobermotivation.com/?fbclid=PAVERFWAShEIpleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xMjQwMjQ1NzQyODc0MTQAAaeM4yWqIsLZX4WK2KIXxKLT_V16Zhy9KUX7HmMZpj2VYfL9IZKO_NUeosKkGw_aem_uLKEHdE2U-8PLJXYvYoGeQ

Dreamseller - Brandon Novak - https://amzn.to/4guPmz3

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 75 | William Porter — Alcohol Explained: Iraq, Cointreau at Dawn & 12 Years on the Other Side

William Porter grew up in Raynes Park, South West London — fine childhood, nothing dramatic — started drinking at 14 in a park with a friend and a bottle from the off-licence. It was a non-event. But the culture of the 90s, the lads, the music, Oasis, TFI Friday, all of it normalised getting absolutely hammered as a personality trait. By the time he’d done university in Cardiff, law school in Guildford and landed a paralegal job in London, drinking was simply what you did.

Then at 26, half drunk on the sofa watching TV, an advert for the Territorial Army came on. He joined the Parachute Regiment reserve, quit drinking for three months to get through P Company selection, and passed. Then in 2005 he got mobilised and deployed to Iraq. In the build-up training, wracked with anxiety about what was ahead, he found the one thing that made the terror go away — a half cup of coffee filled up with Cointreau each morning, then drinking steadily through the day whenever he wasn’t training. Iraq itself was completely dry for six months. He came back thinking the enforced detox had fixed it. It hadn’t.

By his early thirties — married, two young sons — the pattern was drinking heavily from Friday lunchtime through the weekend, waking at 3am to drink himself back to sleep, dragging himself into work Monday and doing nothing, then cramming the week’s work into three days. In February 2014 he crawled out of five days of constant drinking and made the decision to stop. Cold turkey, three days of hell, and then — slowly — the realisation that what he’d thought was him at 100% was actually him at 60%.

He wrote Alcohol Explained in 2015, one of the most widely read and recommended books in the sobriety space, explaining the science, psychology and mechanics of alcohol addiction in plain language. Now 12 years sober, running three miles every morning, and navigating a difficult divorce without reaching for a bottle.

You can find William on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/alcoholexplained?igsh=MXU1NGk1bGdhMW9sZw==

Check out his website at:

https://alcoholexplained.com

Demon Coperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

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The Outrun - Amy Liptrot

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The Outrun - Film

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

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Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

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https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 74 | April (Sally Sober) — From Whistler Snowboarder to 42 Days in Hospital: The Full Story

April grew up in London, Ontario — good grades, scholarship to university, full of creative ambition. She was the weird middle kid who painted her nails black and hung out with the art kids, and found her first real confidence at 19 when she discovered alcohol above the campus pub. What followed was a decade that looked brilliant from the outside: five years in Whistler snowboarding six days a week, a ska band in Vancouver, a career in travel sales, nightclub promoting. Work hard, play hard — always in balance, always functioning. Then COVID happened.

Locked down with a partner who also drank heavily, no job, liquor stores open from 7am, the balance tipped. By the time things opened up and the relationship ended, April was drinking alone to fall asleep and waking up at 2am to do it again. Loneliness was the trigger — it always has been. When a family member flew out and saw what her life had actually become, that was the moment things had to change.

What followed was a two-year cycle of getting sober, hitting a milestone, telling herself she’d been sober long enough to have just one — and relapsing. Four times. Each time the withdrawal was harder because she knew what was coming. Then this February: almost five months sober, Valentine’s Day, her friend cancelled at the last minute, a bottle of wine at home, a long weekend, the old crowd, and eventually — through a chain of events she can’t fully discuss for legal reasons — 42 days in hospital with emergency surgery. She lost her job. She couldn’t eat or drink anything for two weeks. A nurse left a bottle of water on the counter and she lay there staring at it, lips cracked, not allowed to touch it.

Now two months back and 111 days sober, April — who started her account as Sally Sober before going by her real name — talks about finally knowing who she is without a drink, the opposite of addiction being connection, and why this time genuinely feels different.

You can find April on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/sobergalproblems?igsh=MTY1OHRtaW04ZmR3MA==

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 73 | Ross Powell — Jersey, Ketamine & Running Ultras: How £100K, a Van Crash & 18 Hours in a Cell Finally Broke Through

Ross grew up on Jersey — nine miles by five — in a house where his dad drank heavily from Friday to Sunday and family life happened around arguing and alcohol. There was no one kicking a ball about with him, no male figure showing up for things. So Ross found his people outside, got easily led, got into trouble at school, and by 13 was paralytic at a New Year’s Eve party wondering why people kept telling him the next day about a version of himself he didn’t recognise. That version, he’d eventually realise, was his dad.

Through his twenties he worked as a maintenance carpenter, drank every weekend to blackout, and smoked weed daily. Then after COVID he inherited £100,000. Within 16 months it was gone — all of it snorted or drunk, surrounded by people who appeared when the money did and vanished when it didn’t. He had over 30 Monday no-shows at work in a single year. Ketamine became his midweek go-to. He crashed a van while on it with friends in the back, tried to do a runner, got caught, and spent 18 hours crying in a cell. The fine cleared his bank account. He was close to prison.

What pulled him back was running. He went from never running in his life to a sub-four-hour marathon in four months — then an ultra of 100K in Austria. Each time he cleaned up something would bring him back: a funeral wake, a friend saying you’ve done so well, the cogs of the old life turning again. Three pints at a pub and he felt nothing but shame. He left with his mum.

Now approaching a year sober on Jersey, training for ultras, in a relationship with a woman who used to take drugs just to try and fit in around him, Ross talks about what sobriety actually is: not becoming a better person, but stripping back to your raw, honest self with nowhere left to hide. His word for life now: magical.

Ross is on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/rosspowell__?igsh=MWliZHk0aDd5M2N4Mw==

The Daily Stoic - Ryan Holiday

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Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins

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TOMU - The Open Mic Unfiltered Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tomu-the-open-mic-unfiltered/id1822149303

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

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Episode 72 | Jessica White — Sexier Sober: The San Diego Coach Who Quit Without Trying & Never Looked Back

In this bright, sharp and genuinely thought-provoking episode, Jimmy sits down with Jessica White — sober coach, host of the Sexier Sober podcast, and professional organiser based in Carlsbad, California — whose story of growing up in a high-functioning drinking household, nine years of blackout drinking, and a moment of quiet moral clarity that ended it all without drama or rehab is one of the most distinctive the podcast has featured.

Jess grew up in San Diego in a well-meaning, loving family where both parents had substance issues — managed, high-functioning, never chaotic — but emotionally distant. She absorbed drinking as the normal currency of connection: football parties, family gatherings, the way adults loosened up and let go. A sensitive, neurodivergent kid who felt something was always slightly wrong with her, she couldn’t wait to find what would finally make her feel okay. At 14, she found it — blacked out the first time, threw up, and couldn’t wait for the next one.

For nine years, Jess drank hard and largely had fun — social, energetic, the life of every party. She chose UC San Diego deliberately, a school full of serious students, because some part of her knew she needed that counterweight. She graduated with good grades. But outside the library, Thursday through Sunday, she was blacking out consistently, waking up with no memory of whole nights, doing things she’d never do sober, saying things she’d never say, sleeping with people she’d never have chosen — and rationalising every single time that next time she’d moderate.

The moment that broke it wasn’t dramatic. It was a Tuesday night, Taco Tuesday, with a younger colleague who looked up to her as a role model. Jess had two or three drinks, remembered nothing, lost her phone, was driven home drunk by the person who called her a mentor. The shame wasn’t about the hangover. It was about the profound split between who she was performing herself to be and who she was actually showing up as. Out of alignment. Out of integrity. Done.

That was July 8th 2020 — two weeks before Jimmy’s own sober date. She never craved it again.

What makes Jess’s story distinctive is the path she took before that date. Three years of internal work — meditation, journaling, visualisation, studying how she worked. Six months of treatment at Rogers Behavioral Health for depression and anxiety — not for alcohol. A growing circle of people who were living differently and reflecting back to her what was possible. By the time she put down the drink, the work was already done. The alcohol just stopped fitting the life she was building.

Now nearly five years sober, Jess runs Sexier Sober — one-to-one coaching, a podcast, and a community membership — built around the radical idea that sobriety isn’t the goal. The goal is becoming so clear on who you are and who you want to be that alcohol simply stops making sense. Effortless sobriety, she calls it. Not easy. Just inevitable.

You can find Jess on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/jessmariewhite?igsh=MTdhMnJpeTE2cWdmbA==

And her Linktree:

https://linktr.ee/jess

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Episode 71 - Simon

In this episode, Jimmy sits down with Simon, a 36-year-old Glaswegian stonemason and business owner who grew up in the drinking culture of the West of Scotland. Simon shares his honest journey from teenage blackouts and festival benders, to using alcohol as a stress coping mechanism when launching his own business — and how his wife Katie’s gentle nudge finally pushed him toward lasting sobriety. Now 10 months in and doing the inner work through therapy, Simon’s story is a powerful reminder that sobriety isn’t about white-knuckling it — it’s about understanding yourself.

Simon is a stonemason living in Glasgow.

For most of his adult life, he found himself drifting into moments where he’d imagine a sober life. He always wanted to get there, but never quite knew how. How would he fit in? How would he function without a drink?

In 2020, he started his own business. That became the final straw that broke the camel’s back. His drinking had been creeping up for years, and things were starting to unravel. Work, relationships, life, all of it felt heavier.

In July 2023, at the end of a music festival, he told his wife he’d had enough.

Since then, he’s had periods of sobriety, some longer than others. But now, 8 months in, something feels different. Alongside therapy and a deeper understanding of himself, this time feels real.

You can find Simon on Instrgram at:

https://www.instagram.com/simon.is.sober?igsh=MThzNml6NjJ3N3Judw==

Simon’s Just Giving Page:

https://www.justgiving.com/page/katie-simon-arran?utm_medium=FR&utm_source=WA&fbclid=PAVERFWARixVhleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xMjQwMjQ1NzQyODc0MTQAAaceN9IlkXqO6zmeAbDJlraesiRvBGZeXdBDA45sp5-SC65n0lD-tw2x2aHh3Q_aem_zA-QpmtZqZzd2eVvYm5G8A

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Episode 70 - Abi King

In this powerful episode of After Hours Guys, Jimmy sits down with Abi King, a sober coach and host of the Sober Connection Podcast, now based in New Zealand. Abi opens up about her journey from teenage binge drinking in 1990s England to four years of hard-won sobriety — and everything in between.

Abi is originally from the UK, but now lives in New Zealand. Mum to 3 teenage girls, she spent most of their childhood buying into the 'mummy wine' culture, rushing bedtime so she could get to the couch and her bottle of wine (or 2). After one of her daughters told her they didn't like the sound of her voice when she was drinking, Abi decided to quit, thinking it would be easy. It took 4 years of constant stop-starting but she got there in the end. Now over 4 years sober, she's finally become the mum she always knew she should be. She now educates people on alcohol-related issues through her 1:1 coaching and her own podcast, The Sober Connection. 

You can find Abi on instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/levelup.withabi?igsh=MTdmbTBlN3k0NzM1bA==

30 Days to Freedom by Abi King

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https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-sober-connection/id1809595582

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Episode 69 - Emma Newman

In this deeply honest episode, Jimmy sits down with Emma Newman, a 10-year sobriety veteran who got sober in 2015 — before sober coaching existed, before quit-lit flooded the shelves, before Instagram accounts made recovery feel possible. Emma’s story is one of the most relatable on the podcast precisely because there was no dramatic rock bottom. No intervention. No ultimatum. Just a quiet, growing certainty that alcohol wasn’t serving her anymore.

Emma quit drinking over ten years ago, long before sobriety became a trend or a wellness choice. Back then, choosing not to drink often raised eyebrows, and the only visible routes were AA or rehab. Emma chose neither, instead carving out her own path—without quit lit, podcasts, or a sober community to lean on.

By day, she’s a mum to two teenagers (and two cats) and works for a disability charity. In her spare time, she’s become a passionate advocate for alcohol-free drinks, supporting the category from its earliest days. Today, Emma is a regular judge of alcohol-free categories and writes about non-alcoholic drinks, bringing both lived experience and a sharp critical palate to a category that’s come a long way since she started.

You can find Emma on instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/emma_sobersonic?igsh=MXVhY2JraXdodWhzbw==

And Emma’s linktree at:

https://linktr.ee/emma_sobersonic

Love Sober Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/love-sober-podcast/id1379018341

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Episode 68 - Adam Burg

In this compelling episode, Jimmy sits down with Adam Berg, a government affairs lobbyist and mayoral appointee from Denver, Colorado, whose polished professional exterior hid nearly a decade of secret, escalating alcohol abuse. Adam’s story is a masterclass in high-functioning denial — working with US senators, building a career in law and policy, all while hiding bottles in his car, refilling them so nobody would notice, and drinking every single night.

Adam Burg lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife and their dog, Ruby. 

His sobriety date (May 20, 2022) marks a turning point that came after more than a decade spent cycling through alcoholism, stuck in the all-too-familiar limbo between wanting change and not knowing how to reach it. 

Eventually, something shifted. Adam made the decision to confront his illness head-on. He asked for help, committed to recovery, and began the hard, daily work of rebuilding his life with honesty and intention. 

Today, that same journey has become a source of purpose. What once held him back now fuels his ability to connect with and support others facing similar struggles. His story is one of resilience, accountability, and the belief that change is possible for anyone, one day at a time.

You can find Adam on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/sober__traveler?igsh=MW41bjFvczd2cnBlaA==

Unexpected joy of being sober - Catherine Grey

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Recovery Elevator - Podcast

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Episode 67 - Laura McKowen

In this landmark episode, Jimmy sits down with Laura McKowen — bestselling author of We Are the Luckiest and Push Off From Here, co-founder of one of sobriety’s earliest podcasts, and one of the most important voices in the modern recovery movement. With nearly 11 years of sobriety, Laura’s story is equal parts raw, literary, and profoundly hopeful.

Laura is the author of the bestselling memoir We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off From Here: Nine Essential Truths to Get You Through Life (and Everything Else).

Her work explores the intersection of addiction, recovery, emotional sobriety, and the complexities of relationships. She has written for The New York Times and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The TODAY Show, and more.

In 2020, she founded The Luckiest Club, a global sobriety support community, and she writes Love Story, a popular Substack newsletter about sobriety, relationships, and writing. She is currently working on her third book.

Laura lives with her daughter on the North Shore of Boston.

You can find Laura on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/laura_mckowen?igsh=MjBnbDE5eHExbjY2

And all Laura’s other links on Linktree:

https://linktr.ee/laura_mckowen

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Push off From Here - Laura McKowen

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John O’Donohue - The Inner Landscape of Beauty

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Sentimental Value

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Episode 66 | Nikki Pears — 5 Years Sober, One Drink, and Back to Square One: Why Putting Down the Bottle Is Just the Beginning

In this raw and deeply honest episode, Jimmy sits down with Nikki Pears — South African-born sober coach, nervous system specialist, and founder of Mommy Is Sober — whose journey through addiction, relapse, rehab, and ultimately real recovery is one of the most layered and instructive stories the podcast has ever featured.

Nikki grew up in Johannesburg feeling lost, socially anxious, and like everyone else had been given a manual for life that she never received. Her first drink at 17 — sneaked in the bushes outside an Italian club — felt like the solution she’d been searching for. The anxiety melted away. She became the life of the party. She finally felt like she belonged. That feeling became the compass she chased for the next two decades.

Through veterinary nursing school in South Africa, where she became the first woman accepted into the Vets’ drinking club and students hooked each other up to saline drips to cure hangovers before morning lectures, to falling in love in Mozambique and building a successful scuba diving centre on the beach — Nikki’s life looked extraordinary from the outside. Beautiful home. Thriving business. A loving husband who knew when to stop. Three kids. And inside, a hole in her soul that no amount of alcohol, success, or sunshine could fill.

The drinking got worse. The rules — only wine, only after six, only on Fridays — never lasted. She missed her flight to rehab three times because she needed one last party first. She eventually checked herself in for what she thought would be four weeks. She stayed for six. And it worked — for two years. Then she stopped going to meetings, decided she’d cracked it, and white-knuckled the next three years in a state of furious, emotionally volatile, exhausting dry sobriety — still carrying every unprocessed feeling, just without the numbing agent. After five years, she picked up a drink. Within weeks it was worse than before rehab.

What finally worked — and what makes Nikki’s story genuinely different — was going inward. Nervous system regulation. Learning that she’d spent her entire life in fight-or-flight mode, suppressing every emotion since childhood, and that sobriety without inner healing is just white-knuckling in slow motion. Now four years into what she calls her real recovery, Nikki coaches women online through @mommyissober, helping them regulate their nervous systems so alcohol loses its grip — not through willpower, but through genuine inner peace.

You can find Nikki on instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/mommyissober?igsh=MWh1Zno3ZXUyc2hlOA==

And Nikki's website is here:

https://mommyissober.live/

The Surrender Experiment - Michael A. Singer

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Episode 65 | Ashley Howard — The Secret Drinker Nobody Suspected: A Straight A Student, a Fitness Coach & 3 Years Sober

In this compelling episode, Jimmy sits down with Ashley Howard — certified recovery coach, life coach, and health and fitness entrepreneur from South Carolina — whose story of secret, private drinking behind the perfect public image is one of the most quietly relatable the podcast has ever featured.

Ashley grew up in Pennsylvania as the daughter of a hard-working single mum who was rarely home. A straight A student, a sports star, always ticking the boxes — and from age 14, secretly drinking at parties on weekends, then going home and sliding back into her model student life as if nothing had happened. Nobody suspected a thing. That pattern — performing perfectly in public while crossing lines in private — would define the next two decades.

By 19 she was arrested for underage possession of alcohol. By 21 she had a DUI. Both were brushed under the carpet. She got the job anyway, met her husband on a work trip, built a thriving fitness coaching business, had two children — and quietly, steadily, shifted from social weekend binge drinking to something far more private and deliberate. Her happiest time of day became when her whole family was asleep and she could finally drink the way she actually wanted to drink. Two, three, four drinks every night, alone on the couch, protecting the image of the health and fitness coach who had it all together.

Then in one year, Ashley lost her brother to drug complications and her father to lung cancer from 40 years of smoking. Two deaths from preventable causes. And still she didn’t connect it to her own relationship with alcohol, because she told herself: I don’t do drugs. I don’t smoke. It took nine more years.

The turning point came on a trip to Scotland for a wedding — watching a friend who’d always been a big drinker thriving without alcohol and still being the life of the party. The voice in her head got loud. She came home, got through Christmas with family, and on January 8th 2023, sat down on the couch, turned to her husband, and said the words she’d been terrified to say out loud: I want to be done with alcohol forever. I’d like your help. They cleared the house that night.

She used the 75 Hard fitness challenge as her public cover story while she quietly did the inner work. Six weeks later she posted her story on Instagram. Then a few reels went viral — five million views — and her inbox was flooded with people saying this is my story too. She got certified as a recovery coach, built a free online community, and now helps women who look exactly like she did: healthy, driven, successful on the outside — and secretly dependent on alcohol to get through the night.

You can find Ashley on Instagram at:

https://amzn.eu/d/074zO5jE

And her website at:

https://www.ashleyhowardcoaching.com

Sober Motivation with Brad McLeod

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sober-motivation-sharing-sobriety-stories/id1650658049

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Buy me a coffee…

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Episode 64 | Dawn — Soberfish: The Pioneer Who Changed What Sobriety Looked Like Online

In this warm and wide-ranging episode, Jimmy sits down with Dawn, the woman behind Soberfish — one of the earliest and most influential sobriety communities on the internet. Now approaching a decade sober and working remotely from a beach in Thailand, Dawn’s story is a masterclass in what happens when you finally put down the bottle and let your real life begin.

Dawn grew up in North London before her family relocated to Poole, Dorset when she was 16 — uprooting her from everything she knew at exactly the wrong age. That need to fit in, to be accepted, to belong, became the engine that drove her drinking from her teens through her 20s and 30s. She was always the one who got the sickest, always the last one standing, always the one with no off switch — drinking a bottle of wine a night from her early 20s, celebrating weight loss with a Chinese takeaway and more wine, and letting generous friends with deeper pockets fund nights that went far longer than they should have.

What made Dawn’s story different from many was the absence of the traditional rock bottom. She never got married, never had kids — and while her friends naturally slowed down when life took over, Dawn had nothing to pull her back. She drank through her 30s feeling like a failure for not meeting someone, not realising that the drinking itself was why people kept drifting away. By her early 40s she was overweight, a heavy smoker, and exhausted.

Then in summer 2016 a before-and-after photo of people who’d quit drinking appeared in her Facebook feed. She hadn’t searched for it. She just saw it, looked in the mirror, and decided to give herself a year off — mainly to lose weight and quit smoking, fully intending to drink again. She got ill in November, accidentally got a head start on sobriety, and by six months in, knew she was never going back.

With almost no sober content online at the time — just a handful of Facebook groups and Becks Blue — Dawn started sharing her story publicly to lighten the load of her “boring” new life. What she got back changed everything: thousands of messages from people saying I’m just like you — people who didn’t identify as alcoholics, who’d never googled sobriety, but who saw themselves completely in her words. Gray area drinking before anyone called it that.

Now nearly 10 years sober, six stone lighter, non-smoking, running a membership community and coaching practice, and living her dream of working from the sunshine, Dawn is living proof that sobriety isn’t the grey, boring compromise society told us it was. It’s everything else.

Catch Dawn on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/soberfishie?igsh=ZjVwbjJqaDJmczR3

or on Facebook at:

https://www.facebook.com/share/18vvijBris/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Dawn's Linktree:

https://linktr.ee/Soberfish?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAdGRleAQqhjhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xMjQwMjQ1NzQyODc0MTQAAadjo2U7bFrRAONzzbycrGG000G7TntaAHX6KJAa7Y141EdsrbGnDAFn3jmhLw_aem_NIEBd5DpI53j1Sa6L4HNPQ

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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Glorious Rock Bottom - Bryony Gordon

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Episode 63 | Mikey Banks — From Cocaine Debt, Violence & Planning His Own Death to 4 Years Clean

⚠️ Content warning: This episode contains discussion of addiction, violence, debt and suicide.

In this searingly honest and deeply moving episode, Jimmy sits down with Mikey Banks — Aberdeen joiner turned recovery advocate and founder of the Better Together Ball — whose story goes further into the darkness than almost any guest the podcast has featured.

Mikey grew up on a council estate in Aberdeen, loved and cared for by his parents, causing mischief, playing out late, and finding alcohol at 12 or 13 — not because he loved it at first, but because he needed to belong. By the time he started his joinery apprenticeship at 16 he was drinking with men twice his age. Then cocaine arrived, and everything changed. Unlike alcohol, the first line of coke told him: this is it.

Through his early 20s, Mikey held it together. Working, paying bills, holidays, cars — the facade of a functioning life. But the cocaine use grew, the money ran out, and his bright idea to start dealing to fund his habit quickly spiralled into thousands of pounds of debt to dangerous people. By 26 the wheels had come off completely. He was using several grams a day, stealing from everyone he loved including his father’s treasured £9,000 watch which he sold for £400, manipulating his parents, lying to his wife, and driving to his dealer’s house before work each morning just to be able to function.

The violence came next. Drug dealers gave him a choice: take a beating or watch them do his house. He took the beating. Four men stamped on his head, kicked out five of his teeth, spat on him and laughed. His first thought when it was over? I need to get drugs. He walked to a shop, cleaned his face, and went to score.

By March 2022, aged 32, Mikey had had enough. He wrote individual letters to his wife, his children, and his parents, left them neatly on the bedside table, left his phone behind, and walked out with a pocket full of drugs and a pocket full of drink — heading for a bridge over the River Don. Nineteen hours later, five minutes from the bridge, police found him. A female officer put her arms around him and said thank God we found you. It was the first act of pure kindness he’d felt in years. That moment cracked something open.

Recovery wasn’t linear. Relapses at 11 days, then 54 days. But on 15 June 2022, he used for the last time. Nearly four years later, Mikey is clean, sober, rebuilding his marriage, present for his three children — and carrying the ashes of his best friend Blaine, who died by suicide 54 days into his own recovery, around his neck as a daily reminder of why he does what he does.

Now building the I Am Movement and organising the Better Together Ball charity event for suicide prevention, Mikey is one of the most powerful voices in the recovery community — not because he has a certificate, but because he’s lived every word of it.

Find Mikey on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/mikeybanksrr?igsh=cjdqbGVwcTY1YW0x

Mikey’s I AM movement:

https://ko-fi.com/s/08ce0f2ede?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAVERFWAQfukxleHRuA2

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://a.co/d/0gy6mT9Z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Episode 62 | Rachel Sereni — From Watching Her Mum Die of an Overdose at 16 to Co-Hosting a Recovery Podcast: The Ratchet Rachel Story

In this raw, emotional and ultimately triumphant episode, Jimmy sits down with Rachel Sereni — co-host of the Rock Bottom with Ryan podcast — whose story of generational addiction, childhood trauma, and hard-won sobriety is one of the most layered the show has ever featured.

Rachel grew up in South Florida watching her mother — addicted to opioids and benzos — nod out on the sofa with lit cigarettes in her hand. As a five-year-old, Rachel was taking her baby sister’s dirty nappies off because nobody else was. Walking across roads alone to get cookies from the clubhouse because she was hungry. Her father eventually fought for custody — no small feat for a man in Florida in the mid-90s — and won. But Rachel’s mother kept coming back into her life, erratic and unreliable, until the day before her death when she offered Rachel a handful of coloured pills from her pocket at a shopping mall. Rachel was 16. The next day was the last time she saw her mum alive. That night, she got the call to go to the hospital. The nurses hadn’t cleaned her up. Rachel collapsed.

Grief, abandonment and the search for belonging set Rachel on a path of drinking, benzos and ecstasy through her late teens, surrounded by people far older than her who should have known better. By 19 she was stealing and watering down her dad’s alcohol. By 21 — legally able to drink for the first time — she’d just given birth to her son Gabriel. He went to the NICU for ten days. Her first thought? We’ve got a free babysitter. Let’s go play beer pong.

What followed was years of blackout drinking, getting barred from bars, fighting strangers and — as her alter ego Ratchet Rachel — becoming physically abusive to her partner Carlos. A DUI ended that relationship. A new one with John, who moved in fast and tried to keep up, slowly watching Rachel deteriorate: 221 pounds, sleeping all day, no job, their home a mess. On their seven-year anniversary she promised him a nice dinner and drank herself unconscious instead.

His ultimatum came the next morning. Ten days later, Rachel drove to a parking lot with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, two shots of banana liqueur, and a tube of toothpaste as her alibi. She got halfway through the bottle, threw it across a field, collapsed on the tarmac screaming, and that was it. Her surrender moment. She went home, got on the scales (221 lbs), started a new job, and got sober — all on the same day.

Now approaching two years sober, Rachel has lost 80 pounds, is present in her son’s life, co-hosts one of recovery’s fastest-growing podcasts, and is getting married on her exact two-year sobriety anniversary. On her future mother-in-law’s deathbed, she made a promise to stay sober. She’s keeping it.

Catch Rachel on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/realtalkwithrachie

Rock Bottom with Ryan Podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rock-bottom-with-ryan/id1827151504

Mel Robbins - Let Them

https://amzn.to/4wYTrBq

Dr. Anna Lembke - Dopamine Nation

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My Instagram is:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://a.co/d/0854fIb6

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://a.co/d/0gy6mT9Z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://a.co/d/0jdcIjGb

Donate:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Episode 61 | Natalie — From Brooklyn Moonshine & Croatian Moonshine to Cocaine, Custody Battles & 3 Years Sober: A Story of Synchronicity

In this extraordinary episode, Jimmy sits down with Natalie — a first-generation Croatian American from Brooklyn, New York, whose recovery story is unlike any other on the podcast. It spans moonshine at age seven, a supernatural premonition that saved her life at ten, ecstasy, cocaine, a toxic divorce, a restraining order served on her last day of rehab, and a grandmother who died at 5:55pm on 11/11 — and whose passing became Natalie’s rebirth.

Growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, alcohol was never a problem in Natalie’s family — it was a ritual. Every September her Croatian family would make wine and Rakija, a 150-proof moonshine so powerful you’d feel it in your chest from a single piece of fruit soaked in it. Her first sip of Hennessy and Coke came at age seven from a great-uncle who loved her. She climbed a ladder to the roof singing. She was hooked on the feeling long before she knew what that meant.

At ten, a force she still can’t explain physically held her down in the back seat of her brother’s car — preventing her from climbing to the front passenger seat moments before another vehicle’s grill came crashing through exactly that spot. Her brother pulled glass from his hands, crying. “How did you know?” She didn’t. She just knew.

Diagnosed with depression, anxiety and rage at 12, Natalie witnessed a murder on her corner at nine, grew up without a woman figure to guide her, and found alcohol, ecstasy, pills, quaaludes, acid, ketamine and eventually cocaine in quick succession through her teens and twenties. She crashed her car outside a police precinct in Coney Island at 20, stone drunk, and charmed her way out of an arrest. She was always the ringleader. Always the one who didn’t know when to stop.

A nine-year relationship and brief marriage brought a period of relative calm — until it fell apart. Then a second marriage, two daughters, a COVID baby born mid-pandemic and sent home from a C-section in 24 hours, postpartum depression, and a marriage imploding around her. Natalie found herself waiting every night for her children to fall asleep so she could drink herself into a stupor, cut lines of cocaine, and clean the house alone in the dark. She was self-harming. She was having heart palpitations. The alcohol stopped working. No matter how much she drank she couldn’t feel anything — so she’d add more cocaine, and feel her heart racing towards a heart attack instead.

Then her grandmother — who had helped raise her — died on All Saints’ Day at exactly 5:55pm. 11/11. The angel number for divine guidance. 5:55 — the number for change. Natalie didn’t grieve. She collapsed. And then she surrendered.

She checked into rehab on November 28th 2022, excelled — they called her Little Miss Sunshine, she organised karaoke every day — and on her final day before discharge, was handed a restraining order from her ex-husband. She went to jail in February for sending a text. She lost her job of 11 years. Her ex lived in her father’s house for 17 months while she fought for custody from her childhood bedroom in Brooklyn.

And through all of it — sh

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Episode 60 | Ash Shepherd — 5 Months Sober, a River at 3am & Why the Mummy Wine Culture Needs to Stop

In this warm, honest and deeply relatable episode, Jimmy sits down with Ash Shepherd — 34-year-old project manager, young mum and founder of the Booze Free Sparkle Instagram — whose story of grey area drinking, a 10-month sobriety attempt, relapse and finally finding her day one over a roast dinner she couldn’t eat is one of the most universally recognisable on the podcast.

Ash grew up in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire — quiet, bookish, nervous — and discovered alcohol at 15 outside Tesco with her friends, waiting for strangers to buy them Lambrini. She felt confidence for the first time. She also felt shame for the first time, dreading school on the Monday morning. Both feelings kept coming back for the next 18 years.

From 17 to 19, living in a little cottage in Tewkesbury with a flatmate who matched her drink for drink, Ash’s party house became the social hub for everyone who hadn’t gone to uni, had no real goals, and was just plodding along drinking. Vodka after work became normal. So did walking home alone at 3am — including the night she fell down a riverbank in her going-out clothes, clawed her way back up through nettles, soaking wet and freezing cold, and carried on to her boyfriend’s house.

Through her 20s, Ash settled into a pattern: Thursday night wine on the sofa, Friday hangover at her desk, Saturday binge, Sunday dying in bed. Her husband — sensible, moderate, with an off switch she never had — watched her consistently push past her limits every single time. When he went to bed, she’d stay up drinking alone. The hangovers started lasting a week. The shame never really left.

At 25, a colleague recommended The Rise of the Sober Istas by Lucy Rocca. Ash read it, felt something shift, joined an early online sobriety community and started blogging. That was the first seed. It took another eight years to fully germinate.

She did nearly 10 months sober in 2020 — set up a page, posted daily, was genuinely proud. Then the 30th birthdays started. She had one drink at a party, decided she was cured, deleted the sober page, and was back to square one within days. The lesson that stayed: never delete the page.

A pregnancy gave her nine months of enforced sobriety she secretly loved. Then eight weeks after her daughter arrived, a hen party. Then Cheltenham Races — out from 9am, paralytic by afternoon, a blackout argument with a friend she can’t remember, a mortifying apology the next morning. Then a Mexican night out with margaritas that ended in the worst argument she and her husband had ever had — over nothing that would have mattered sober.

Her actual day one came on a beautiful sunny Sunday, throwing up in the toilet, sat at a pub table in front of a roast dinner she couldn’t touch, and thinking quietly: what am I doing to myself? That was it. 137 days later, she was on the podcast. She’s now adopted rescue chickens, taken up running and joined a running group — and is posting daily on @BoozeFreeSparkle about why mummy wine culture isn’t cute, it’s damaging.

You can find Ash on Insta at:

https://www.instagram.com/boozefreesparkle

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://a.co/d/0854fIb6

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://a.co/d/0gy6mT9Z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://a.co/d/0jdcIjGb

Donate:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

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Episode 59 | Alex Leigh — From 90s Supermodel to Hiding Wine Bottles in Greece: A Story of Glamour, Grief & Getting Sober

In this dazzling and deeply human episode, Jimmy sits down with Alex Leigh — one of Britain’s top lingerie models of the 1990s, FHM’s top 100 sexiest women, a fixture at the most exclusive parties in London, and the woman who was secretly counting down to 6pm every night to open her first bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

Alex’s story starts with loss. A perfect childhood ended at seven when her father died of pancreatic cancer aged just 43. Her mother relocated the family to Mallorca, where Alex endured relentless bullying, had to translate her homework through three languages every night until 1am, and protected her grieving mother from the truth by pretending she loved every minute of it. When they moved back to Manchester, she channelled all that bottled-up pain into becoming a rebel — bunking off school, smoking behind the church, and getting into the Hacienda at 14 because she was already six foot two and blonde.

At 16, a brother’s friend suggested modelling. Within months she was in London — a 16-year-old girl placed by her agency into a flat with a male photographer in his late 40s, with no chaperone, no advice about taxes, no instructions of any kind. Just dropped into the deep end of an industry where cocaine wasn’t offered, it was simply assumed. Bowl full of it at every party. Everyone doing it. No other way to be.

The money came fast and hard — lingerie campaigns, FHM, travelling the world. And so did the chaos. Alex went from photo shoot to after party to plane to next city, frequently still drunk from the night before, stinking of fags and booze, wondering how she was getting away with it. She had a penthouse in Kensington, a driver, a Bulgari perfume box permanently stuffed with cocaine, and absolutely no idea how to manage money. Then the 2008 credit crunch arrived and she and her then-husband lost nine properties overnight.

The second chapter brought Greece, a new relationship, two daughters — and a slow, secret slide into nightly bottle-of-wine drinking that became two bottles minimum, buying from different shops so nobody noticed the volume, padding her shopping so the bottles wouldn’t clink, hiding extras around the apartment. Until St. Patrick’s Day three years ago, when her mother took her daughter away and called her a disgrace. Alex woke up the next morning, hungover, sobbing, about to reach for a glass of wine to feel better — and in that moment thought: that’s it. I need help.

She called AA in Greece. A kind man answered. She sobbed. He told her she wasn’t alone. She went religiously for a year. And then she moved on — because the best thing about recovery, she says, is that you finally get to live forward instead of back.

You can get Alex on her Insta at:

https://www.instagram.com/alex.leigh2.0?igsh=MW5lNDRycGg3NjgxbQ==

And the rest of her links on linktree:

https://linktr.ee/alexleigh2.0?utm_source=linktree_profile_share&ltsid=17960b0f-56c9-4594-8528-f694d5c11340

Veronica Valli - Soberful 

https://amzn.to/4dD5Nrs

Russell Brand - Recovery

https://amzn.to/433YuTy

My Instagram is:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://a.co/d/0gy6mT9Z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Episode 58 | Kaitlin Reeve — From Sitting on a Window Ledge at Nine to Nearly Three Years Clean: A Story of Escapism, Danger & Recovery

In this searingly honest episode — released on Kaitlin’s birthday — Jimmy sits down with Kaitlin Reeve, founder of the Sober as a Mother Focused Instagram and one of the most unflinching voices in the UK recovery community. Kaitlin’s story spans childhood trauma, drug-induced psychosis, kidnapping, and the quiet moment in her garden that finally changed everything.

Kaitlin grew up unhappy — a child who never felt okay, who escaped into fantasy, books, films and food before she had words for why. She was drinking at nine, allowed to get drunk at 13, and watched the adults around her become happier, calmer and less shouty when they used drugs and alcohol. The message she took from that? When I’m a grown-up, that’s what will make me happy.

At 16 she had her first line of cocaine in a penthouse on High Street Kensington, surrounded by people she’d only ever seen in magazines. A girl from nothing, suddenly rubbing shoulders with Hollywood. She associated cocaine with glamour, freedom and escape — the antidote to every moment she’d spent feeling less than. She embraced it completely.

What followed was years of escalating use: being locked in trap houses, kidnapped, nearly raped twice, and finding herself in the home of an international sex trafficking gang — all of which she shrugged off because the good still outweighed the bad. A controlling, abusive relationship followed. Then a period of sobriety, then relapse triggered by her body going into fight-or-flight shutdown so severe she couldn’t go to the toilet without cocaine. Then drug-induced psychosis — hearing things, seeing things, a size 4-6 frame barely eating or sleeping.

The end came not with a dramatic rock bottom but with a quiet moment of exhaustion in her garden in late August 2022. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. She Googled 12-step fellowships, put on full makeup and her best outfit so nobody would think she was that bad, walked in — and by the end of the meeting said: Hi, I’m Kaitlin, I’m an addict. Her clean date is 6th September 2022.

Nearly three and a half years on, Kaitlin sponsors other women, maintains her daily prayer and meditation, and uses Sober as a Mother Focused — a beautifully named Instagram — to share the reality of recovery for mothers without tips or preaching. Just her story, honestly told.

You can find Kaitlin on instagram at

https://www.instagram.com/soberasamotherfocused

and on Tik Tok

https://www.tiktok.com/@soberasamotherfocused

Addicted to Recovery Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/addicted-to-recovery/id1727956037

Rachel’s Holiday - Marian Keyes 

https://amzn.to/4dJD2rG

Again Rachel - Marian Keyes

https://amzn.to/431tjbB

One Day 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16283804/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

Thirteen

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328538/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

Tobacco, Alcohol and Drug stats

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/substances-risk-factor-vs-direct-deaths

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://a.co/d/0gy6mT9Z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://a.co/d/0jdcIjGb

Donate:

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My Instagram is:

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Buy me a coffee…

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Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Episode 57 | Cameron Kidd — From Waking Up in a Jungle Tuk-Tuk to 14 Months Sober in Copenhagen: Jersey Boy Finally Finds Himself

In this warm, funny and deeply honest episode, Jimmy sits down with Cameron Kidd — Jersey-born, Copenhagen-based podcaster and host of TOMU: The Open Mic Unfiltered — whose story of binge drinking, blackouts, ADHD and finally getting sober at 34 is one of the most relatable the show has featured.

Cameron had a decent childhood — loving parents, good school — but his parents’ move to France at 16 without really consulting him sent him into a spiral of resentment and freedom. Spat on and called an English pig at the French college, he was back on Jersey within days, living between his auntie’s house and a mate’s farmhouse with a bar downstairs, huge fields and summer bonfires. His own mini festival, every weekend. Ecstasy, weed, alcohol — and none of it feeling like a problem because everyone around him was doing the same.

Through his twenties Cameron moved around constantly — Jersey, Glasgow, Thailand, back to Jersey, Copenhagen — chasing fresh starts that always ended the same way. In Thailand he woke up alone in a tuk-tuk in the middle of dense jungle on New Year’s Day with no memory of how he got there. He checked himself over, found his way back, and went out the following night. In Glasgow he woke up with the top of his ear hanging off and no idea how. He came home from a beach party with his hand badly burnt — found by friends trying to cool it in the sea, then wandering off, ending up at a corner shop where a stranger looked through his phone and called his dad. He had his jaw broken and didn’t go to hospital for two days because everyone told him he was fine.

The blackouts became total. Every single time he drank, he remembered nothing — just fragments. He’d wake up and scan the room, reading the energy to figure out what he needed to apologise for. Until a night out in Copenhagen when a stranger approached him in a pub: “You don’t remember me, do you? You took me and the boys around the whole city, showed us an incredible night.” Cameron had no recollection of any of it. That was the moment that really scared him.

The end came after a big night last October. He turned up at his girlfriend’s door wrecked, broke down completely — I’ve had enough, I don’t want to be here anymore, I’m tired — and she gave him an ultimatum. He went to KKUC, a Danish substance abuse programme, and it was there they asked: “Have you ever been tested for ADHD?” He hadn’t. He got the best grade of his life. The relief — and the grief — of finally understanding why he’d always been this way was overwhelming.

Now 14 months clean, medicated for ADHD, living in Copenhagen with his girlfriend and hosting his own podcast, Cameron is slowly learning who he is without alcohol. The hardest part? Someone once asked him what he enjoys — and he had no answer. But he’s finding his way back to the curious, excited boy he once was. One day at a time.

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Episode 56 | Anna Donaghey — The Advertising Insider Who Sold Alcohol to a Nation, Drank Herself Sober & Wrote the Book on Rethinking Drinking

In this sharp, revealing and genuinely thought-provoking episode, Jimmy sits down with Anna Donaghey — sober coach, podcast host of The Big Drink Rethink, author of What Are You Thirsty For?, and former senior advertising executive who spent 25 years helping the alcohol industry grow.

Anna’s story begins unremarkably — a good childhood near Bristol, parents divorced at 16, first drink at 14 through a slightly older boyfriend, the usual combination of rebellion, escapism and enjoying the feeling. Brighton University, a course that took her to Turin, a taste of Italian wine culture, and a graduate scheme at Rover that would set the trajectory of everything that followed.

It was on the factory floor at Rover in Birmingham that Anna first understood what her drinking was really about — fitting in. Shoulder to shoulder with brilliant, salt-of-the-earth workmates who poured out of the production lines at noon on Fridays and drank until they couldn’t stand. A home counties girl who could sink eight pints and still win at darts. They loved her for it. She loved them for accepting her. It felt like belonging.

That need for belonging followed her to London, to advertising agencies in Soho, to client lunches that turned into client evenings, to fridges full of Stella Artois that opened at 6pm, to airport lounges and expense accounts and the seamless social world of agency life where work and drinking were completely indistinguishable. For over a decade, she was one of the best in the business — and she sat in boardrooms with the biggest alcohol companies in the world, helping them figure out how to create new drinkers, convert existing ones, and — most sinisterly — draw in younger audiences without technically breaking the rules.

She would never have worked on a cigarette account. She’d have stood up and said no. But she worked on alcohol. She just didn’t know the difference yet.

Six years ago, with no dramatic rock bottom and no catastrophic crisis, Anna simply looked at her life and saw two futures. One where she carried on and didn’t reach old age. One where she stopped. She stopped. And discovered that sobriety isn’t a destination — it’s a gateway.

Now a sober coach, author and podcaster, Anna has flipped the question the recovery community usually asks. Not “how bad is your drinking?” but “is your life good enough?” Because if you’re a heavy drinker and your life isn’t where you wanted it to be, the chances are alcohol has far more to do with that than you realise.

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Episode 55 | Emily Chadbourne — 7 Years Sober in Melbourne: The Woman Who Stopped Before Rock Bottom & Wrote Down Every Win

In this warm, honest and deeply insightful episode, Jimmy sits down with Emily Chadbourne — personal development coach, sober advocate and Melbourne-based expat from the South West of England — whose story of grey area drinking, isolation in outback Australia and a meditation that changed everything is one of the most uniquely told recovery stories the podcast has featured.

Emily grew up near Glastonbury with parents who modelled a healthy relationship with alcohol — sherry on Sundays, gin at Christmas, nothing more. There was no trauma, no family history of alcoholism, and no obvious reason. Just a classic 1990s teenage girl sneaking cider in Somerset parks, a university degree she could have aced but didn’t bother to, and a hospitality career in London that put her shoulder-deep in a world where every meeting, every celebration, every Tuesday was a drinking occasion. She was fun, efficient, capable — and always the last one standing.

At thirty, she moved to Airlie Beach in Queensland with her boyfriend, and everything fell apart. Not dramatically, but quietly. The scaffolding of identity — her career, her friendships, her sense of significance — was removed, and she discovered she had no idea who she was without it. She drank every night. Alone. In the heat. In a town that closed at 8pm.

Melbourne was better, but the drinking didn’t stop. Working for herself as a coach, with no office hours and no colleagues to moderate around, she started buying two-for-twenty at the bottle shop after lunch meetings. Half a bottle by 7pm. A bottle with dinner. That unopened second bottle waiting when she got home. Three and a half bottles between lunch and bedtime, and never visibly drunk. Hiding empties from her housemates. Telling herself it was fine.

Then 2017 arrived like a wrecking ball. Her mum died of cancer. Her business collapsed. Her boyfriend left — and was in a new relationship with one of her best friends within weeks. She drank from coffee cups so her housemates wouldn’t see. She drank in the morning. She drank at her dad’s house by sneaking to his spirits cabinet between toilet trips.

The Sri Lanka trip was the turning point. On holiday in paradise, Emily couldn’t be present for a single moment — every thought consumed by when the next drink was coming, how to get someone else to suggest it, how to engineer the beer before the train without being seen as the one who needed it. She came home, went back to the UK, and did the same thing with her sisters. On the flight back to Melbourne she decided: when this plane lands, that’s it.

A business mentor asked her to identify one thing holding her back. She begged internally for it not to be alcohol. Of course it was alcohol. That night she went out, got blackout drunk, and remembers nothing of her last ever drink. The following Sunday she walked into her first AA meeting.

What happened next was remarkable. Emily told everyone immediately — using the label of alcoholic not out of shame but as a strategic firewall so she could never quietly slip back. She wrote down every single good thing that happened as

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Episode 54 | Adrian Cox — Clarinet, Bad Manners & 12 Years Sober: The Jazz Musician Who Left Home at 15 and Didn’t Stop Until His Hip Crumbled

In this extraordinary, funny and deeply moving episode, Jimmy sits down with Adrian Cox — jazz clarinettist, Bad Manners veteran, sober advocate, and one of the most uniquely entertaining recovery stories in the podcast’s history.

Adrian’s story begins at 15 in Burgess Hill, near Brighton — already playing the clarinet professionally at gigs since he was 12, already smoking and drinking in parks, already the kid who brought a bottle of whiskey to every party. At a festival in Butlins, Bognor Regis, a trombone player spotted him and sent a postcard to his sons: met a lad, got no brain, but by chance plays the clarinet, call him. Within weeks, Adrian was on tour, dropped back for his English GCSE, and then called up to join the band full time. He left home at 15, moved to Totnes, Devon — and never really stopped moving for the next two decades.

Living with musicians twice and three times his age, with no parents, no bank account and no instruction manual for adulthood, Adrian fell into a world where cooking sherry by the river at midnight was completely normal. In the first month in their flat, he and his bandmate Russell cleared 80 litres of sherry. By 18, he was getting kidney pains. By 21, a swollen liver — and a doctor telling him to stop. He did, for seven months. On the way home from his follow-up appointment, he stopped at a pub. Within weeks he was back on three bottles of wine and ten pints of Guinness a day.

Then came London, a heavier drinking band, a marriage, a divorce, and in 2007: cocaine. Which led, inevitably, to Bad Manners — the UK’s most legendary party band, where waking up on the American tour bus at 3am to drink a bottle of tequila before going back to sleep was just what Tuesday looked like.

The reckoning came on 27th March 2014. The night before his hospital appointment — where a doctor would tell him he had avascular necrosis caused by alcohol, where the blood had thinned so much it had stopped feeding his bones and the ball of his hip had partially crumbled away — he had the biggest drinking night of his entire life. A box of wine, ten pints of Guinness, three bottles of champagne, five grams of cocaine. He’d had so many near-misses he’d developed a special outfit to wear drinking near hospitals: a Ben Sherman poppered shirt (easy to open for an ECG) and slip-on shoes. He’d been admitted multiple times. This time the doctor told him: stop, or lose your legs.

He stopped. A Swedish concert-goer paid for a private hip replacement. And then cocaine took over completely — until he gambled his way to £138,000 in online winnings, spent it all within weeks chasing the same feeling, and ended up £87,000 in debt to Buster Bloodvessel of Bad Manners, spending months living a double life before a breakdown in Edinburgh and his girlfriend’s phone call ended it.

Cocaine stopped in 2016. MDMA in 2018. But it wasn’t until February this year — now 12 years alcohol-free, living in rural Sweden with his girlfriend and her two boys, with a driving licence, a residency permit, a limited company and a meditation book — that Adrian

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Episode 53 | Amy Devine — From Newbury Council Estates to Peru: 3 Years Sober, Ayahuasca & the Serbian Housemate Who Changed Everything

In this warm, wide-ranging and genuinely one-of-a-kind episode, Jimmy sits down with Amy Devine — sobriety mentor, breathwork facilitator, founder of Numb No More and the Sober Sisterhood Breathwork Circle — speaking from her home in Pisac, Peru, surrounded by mountains. Her story spans council estates in Berkshire, 11 years teaching in Beijing, a broken elbow on a COVID flight she can’t remember, and an ayahuasca ceremony that finally showed her why she’d been drinking in the first place.

Amy grew up in Newbury — Irish parents, violence, dysfunction, and alcohol as the central currency of family life. Her parents split when she was six. Summers in Ireland, school in England, a house fire that moved the family to a council estate a week before Christmas with nothing. She was 11 when she had her worst drunk — stolen South African port with a girl her mum had banned her from seeing, found lost on a roundabout by her little brother’s teacher. By 14, drinking four or five cans a night was simply what she did.

Through college and a sociology/criminology degree at Chester — chosen almost by accident when her insurance pick got in and her first choice didn’t — Amy somehow held it together academically while drinking daily. After graduating with a 2:1 she neither expected nor remembers quite earning, she moved to Beijing to teach English, intending to stay a year. She stayed eleven.

Beijing was electric, chaotic and — for foreigners — consequence-free. Drink for free in bars, ride your scooter drunk through traffic, no rules and always someone to go out with. Through Beijing, Vietnam and back to Beijing, Amy’s drinking escalated through her twenties and early thirties. She developed a pattern: hold it together just enough for work, drink the rest of the time.

The nadir came on a COVID-era flight back to China. She’d been on a 10-week binge in India, drinking to manage withdrawal in the mornings, bribing strangers to get alcohol through quarantine. She drank most of a box of wine in duty-free before boarding, mixed it with Valium, and woke up in Beijing with a sore elbow and no memory. Strangers told her she’d been dragged to the back of the plane for refusing to wear a mask. The bruise turned black all the way down her arm. She’d broken her elbow. She didn’t stop drinking.

Back in Beijing, a Serbian housemate sat her down: “You’ve got a drink problem and you need to sort it out.” It was the first time anyone had ever said it directly to her face. That led to AA in Beijing — a warm, safe expat meeting full of people who’d been sober 16, 20 years — and six months of genuine recovery. Then Christmas came, and she thought she’d learned enough to moderate. She relapsed for a year and a half.

The second attempt was different. A dry November led by a therapist friend inspired by This Naked Mind. Then January 1st, 2022 — online AA, a new sponsor, and at six months sober: ayahuasca. The plant medicine took her back through her childhood, showed her exactly why she’d been drinking, and removed any remaining desire for alcohol. She told her AA sponsor. She was

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Episode 52 | Alicia Butler — 173 Days Sober, a Viral Day One & Why ‘You Don’t Have a Problem’ Are the Most Dangerous Words in Recovery

In this warm, funny and deeply honest episode, Jimmy sits down with Alicia Butler — the woman whose raw, tearful Day One Instagram video went viral and has been inspiring people to get sober ever since — for a conversation about grey area drinking, gym culture, champagne budgets and the slow creep of something that nearly cost her everything.

Alicia grew up in Darlington, County Durham — a good childhood, loving family, no obvious trauma. Her uncle was an alcoholic, and she wonders now about addictive genetics, but at the time she just thought she liked champagne. What began as an after-work culture in London — where even people who lived an hour away never went home, they just stayed in the pub — slowly became a bottle of wine a night at home. Then two bottles. Then champagne instead, because she preferred it. Then Aldi started selling Prosecco for £9.99 a bottle, and that was that.

The creeping nature of Alicia’s drinking is what makes her story so relatable. She was still going to the gym. Still working. Still functioning. Her nutritionist kept telling her to cut down on alcohol and she kept refusing — so instead she worked out a calorie budget that excluded food so she could keep her bottle of wine a night. She’d hide bottles in the boot of her car at parties so nobody else could drink them. She’d sometimes finish the last inch of last night’s bottle in the morning. And still, somewhere in her head, she didn’t think she had a problem.

Then she went to an alcohol support group. She told them she was drinking a bottle of wine a night, sometimes two. They laughed. “That’s nothing,” they said. “You don’t have a problem.” She walked out thinking she had a green light.

The piece of paper she found during a clear-out said it all: written in 2017, it was a mood board with a list of goals, and at the top: Avoid booze. She’d known for seven years. Her mum had asked her to stop drinking on her deathbed fourteen years ago. She still couldn’t manage two days.

The suicidal episodes — leaving the house with a knife, lying by the canal, smashing a picture frame over her husband’s head — she hadn’t connected to the alcohol. It was just her emotions. Just her anxiety. Just a bad night. Until she did.

What finally worked was Instagram. Day One. She sat in her bedroom, pressed record, cried, and uploaded it. It went viral. Suddenly there were thousands of people saying me too. She couldn’t go back — not just because she didn’t want to, but because she’d told everyone, and the accountability was the lock on the door.

Now approaching 200 days sober, Alicia is a different person: sleeping well, managing stress, driving herself home from parties at midnight with a cup of tea in mind, and posting every day for the people who are still on Day One wondering if it’s worth it.

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Episode 51 | Jimmy Thistle — The Host’s Full Story: From Vodka at Dawn to 5 Years Sober on the Isle of Man

After 50 episodes of interviewing others, Jimmy Thistle finally sits in the guest chair — interviewed by his wife Jen — and tells his full story for the first time on his own podcast.

Jimmy grew up in Eaglesham, a village outside Glasgow, in a mostly happy childhood with an older brother, a mum who worked hard, and a dad who left when he was six. No major trauma. No clear reason. Just a 14-year-old who had his first proper drink with his brother one night and loved it immediately — the confidence, the escapism, the feeling. From there it was Diamond White in the woods, vodka and iron bru, and a creeping realisation that while his friends had an off switch, he simply didn’t.

Through Aberdeen, London, Cambridge, York and the Isle of Man, Jimmy’s story is a masterclass in what the recovery community calls geographicals — the belief that moving somewhere new will fix what follows you everywhere. Bar work, bank jobs, photography, sales roles. A DUI. A photography course where he got triple distinction. A pub he took over near Sheffield that ended with the police, a friend crashing his car, the owners taking his laptop as collateral, and him driving home without a back windscreen. A codependent relationship where they were both drinking a bottle of whiskey each per night. A spontaneous midnight drive to Stansted, a drunk flight to Mallorca, a mugging that cost him his laptop and camera, and a rescue by his brother.

The final stretch was the darkest. Drinking vodka before he’d opened his eyes in the morning. Sitting under the Humber Bridge in his car, telling his partner he was going to work. Losing job after job. An intervention by his family. Twenty-eight days in rehab — three days before COVID lockdown. Fifty-five days sober. Then back on it with a vengeance. His friend locked him in the house and he found a hidden door behind a bookcase. He bought alcohol-free beer as a cover story in case someone knocked. His mum measured 40ml of vodka eight times a day on doctor’s orders while he slipped out between doses to top up from the shop.

Finally, a hospital detox on the Isle of Man with Librium. Then 100 meetings in 100 days. Then a cottage in the hills, a gardening business, a photography revival, a podcast, peer mentoring, sober coaching training — and Jen.

This is Jimmy’s story. And now, nearly six years on, he’s never felt more certain of one thing: he’s done.

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Episode 50 | Will Gordon — Two Transplants, a Perforated Stomach & a 4% Survival Rate: The Season Finale That Will Stay With You

In this staggering, life-affirming season finale, Jimmy sits down with Will Gordon — host of the Will Power Podcast, former teacher, liver and kidney transplant recipient, and one of the most remarkable recovery stories in the English-speaking world.

Will grew up the youngest of four brothers in a high-achieving Irish Catholic family near Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a Hall of Fame hockey coach whose name carried serious weight in the community. Expectations were sky-high, failure was not an option, and Will — who secretly wanted to do stand-up comedy and be in plays — became a teacher instead, because that’s what Gordons did. He taught for 14 years.

It was teaching that broke him. Not the good teaching — the Montessori years he loved, the alternative high school kids who had reasons for being difficult. It was a Catholic middle school in the north end of Boston, crammed with behaviour kids, no staff rotation, no structure. By 2018 Will was racing to his car at 2:30pm every afternoon to chug straight vodka from a sports bottle just to stop the withdrawal shakes — not to get drunk, just to function. By the time COVID hit and he was teaching remotely from home, the drinking start time crept earlier and earlier until it was 11am.

His wife noticed first. In 2020, she took one look at his yellowing skin and eyes and made him see a doctor. Hepatitis of the liver. He was 32. The doctor told him: “You are either going to be back here or in a grave.” He got sober for 125 days — white-knuckling it, no support, no programme. Then a radio ad for pink lemonade vodka. A huge fight with his wife about money. A bottle hidden in a pile of clean laundry for four days. And then one day he opened it, and the second the alcohol touched his tongue he knew he’d just erased 125 days. He kept going.

By 2022 he had ballooned to 265 pounds — almost entirely from ascites, the fluid build-up caused by a failing liver. His skin was paper-yellow. His eyes were dark yellow. His feet were so swollen he needed specialist wide-fit shoes. He was filling giant 1.75-litre vodka handles into pre-prepared Gatorade bottles, hiding them around the apartment, behind cereal boxes, in his car. His wife had learned to smell every water bottle in the house. He was leaving for “work” every morning, driving 50 feet around the corner, parking on a side street, drinking alone until he passed out in the back seat, then driving back to the parking spot nine hours later.

Easter 2022. His wife took one look at him and drove him to hospital. His bilirubin was 32 — it should be 1. His MELD score was 40 out of 40 — the maximum. He was told he had two weeks to live. The hospital refused to transplant him: policy required six months of sobriety, and he was at four. Hospice was brought into the room. His father — who had never looked at Will with anything but expectation — couldn’t look at him at all.

Then a doctor who had told him there was nothing she could do made one call to a former colleague. At 6am the next morning, Will’s phone rang. He went in. He made his case — openly, honestly, weeping,

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Episode 49 | Beth — 4 Years Sober, the Book She Bought at 23 & Why She Built a Free Community for Women Who Can’t Afford Help

In this warm, funny and deeply relatable episode, Jimmy sits down with Beth — co-founder of the SOS Collective (Sober Online Sisters), TikTok sober advocate and four-years-sober mother of three from County Durham, now living on the edge of the New Forest in Southampton.

Beth grew up in a typical northeastern family where her dad went to the working men’s club on Sundays, came home half-cut, and that was simply how life was. As a child she hated the smell of alcohol so much it was a family joke. By 15 she was drinking Diamond White in the park and having the worst night of her life on New Year’s Eve — sick everywhere, white as a sheet, forced by her dad to sit up and suffer through midnight as punishment. It took years to actually get into drinking. Then it took over.

The tools were all there from an early age. At 23, still early in her Southampton life, lonely after university and dealing with the grief of losing her mum at 17, Beth walked into a bookshop and bought Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. She filled in the addiction questionnaire at the front. She circled every single answer. She still has that same copy — the one with all the circles from 23, plus the ones from every time she went back to check again over the next two decades. Each time the score got worse.

She also went to AA at 23. Found it kind, welcoming — and immediately felt she didn’t belong because the woman sharing was drinking cough medicine, and Beth hadn’t got there yet. She left and didn’t go back for years. That one visit became her excuse: I went to AA and they basically said I was fine.

Through a high-powered BT career, a loneliness that drove her to drink alone every night in her smart Southampton flat, a marriage that bonded around drinking, a difficult divorce, an ADHD diagnosis that explained the dopamine-chasing and the boredom-drinking and the impulsivity — through all of it, Beth kept finding ways to pause and restart. She got pregnant twice partly because pregnancy was a built-in reason to stop. She got sober for ten months, genuinely proud of herself. Then her husband took her out for her birthday, ordered champagne, she had a glass, and within days she was back to two and a half bottles of wine a day.

COVID was the tipping point. Furloughed, in the inflatable hot tub, starting at 12 because it felt like a holiday, drinking through pub quiz Zooms while the influencers made 4pm wine feel glamorous. She was drinking amounts she’d never drunk before, hiding bottles, doing bin runs to Asda so the neighbours wouldn’t see the recycling.

Then a dinner party where nobody appreciated the meal she’d worked so hard on. She got drunk. Woke up the next day and thought: you can’t do that every single time someone upsets you. Found an online community of women by accident. Met Linda from Ireland, who became her unofficial sponsor and best friend. Started going to every online meeting available. The days added up.

Now four years sober, Beth has co-founded the SOS Collective — completely free, because the reason she nearly didn’t get help was that she wouldn’t spend mon

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Episode 48 | Kim (Sober Kimbo) — From Blackout at 14 to a Year Sober: The Canadian Dental Hygienist Who Lost Two Phones in Europe & Found AA in Nova Scotia

In this warm, funny and genuinely relatable episode, Jimmy sits down with Kim — aka Sober Kimbo on Instagram — a dental hygienist from Nova Scotia, Canada, who got her one-year anniversary just weeks before this episode aired. Her story spans blackout drinking at 14, a solo Europe trip that imploded spectacularly, a devastating breakup, a DUI, a coworker finding her drunk in bed, and finally walking into her first AA meeting brought by a man she didn’t know was sober — who turned out to be the same stranger who’d let her into an apartment building three in the morning months earlier.

Kim had her first drink at 14 — a water bottle full of vodka in a park — and immediately blacked out. She discovered two things that night: she didn’t react normally to alcohol, and she didn’t care. She and her sister both joked they were “allergic” to alcohol — it turned out Kim actually was. Neither the blackouts, nor the shame, nor the concern of everyone around her was ever enough to make her stop.

Through high school and then dental hygiene college in Montreal — where the drinking age is 18 and the bars were open to her from day one — Kim kept drinking every weekend, always more than anyone around her, always the one people assumed had been spiked. On her very first night at college, with her mum still in the room, she went out with strangers and came back so drunk that two concerned students knocked on her door the next morning to check she hadn’t been drugged. She told them that’s just what alcohol does to her.

The real crisis point came at 22 after a brutal breakup — her boyfriend told her not to come back to the condo they shared while she was home for a weekend visit. She spiralled hard: a week in bed with a box of wine, then a solo trip to Europe that fell apart almost immediately. She lost her phone in Berlin, bought a new one, lost that one the same night. She ended up stranded in Munich airport for two days without a phone, and flew home early through Iceland with a pint of vodka and an accidental business class upgrade. She landed with no memory of the flight, her ID cards mailed back to her by the airport weeks later.

The scrapes kept coming — more situations involving police, a DUI driving to her parents’ house after a bottle of wine on a night she was supposed to be working the next day. None of it was enough.

The end came last summer. A Friday night date — she drank a full mini vodka before he even picked her up, remembered nothing, didn’t show up for work on the Saturday. Her coworker came to her house, found her key in the unlocked car, let herself in and found Kim drunk in bed. She went back to work and told everyone. Kim kept drinking for two more days — cycling to the liquor store after her parents took her car keys, crashing her bike into the woods. When she finally woke up and looked at her phone she thought it was Monday. It was Tuesday.

She went to AA — brought by a man her friend had suggested, who turned out to be the same stranger who’d silently let her into an apartment building at 3am months earlier. She walke

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Episode 47 | Will Edwards — 1,360 Days Sober: The NHS Cardiac Instructor Who Quit Before It Became a Problem & Journals Everything

In this refreshingly different and genuinely thought-provoking episode, Jimmy sits down with Will Edwards — NHS cardiac exercise instructor, cold water therapy advocate, obsessive journaler and one of the most proactively sober people the podcast has ever featured. Will didn’t have a rock bottom. He didn’t lose a job, a relationship or a licence. He reached into his fridge for a beer after a stressful day, caught himself thinking I need this, and that single moment of clarity changed everything.

Will grew up on a council estate as the youngest child, his father gone before he could walk. His mum raised him alone, and by his early teens he was effectively the man of the house, growing up fast while his much older siblings had long since moved on. He started drinking in the fields after school like everyone else — the mate from the year above who looked old enough to get served, the 50p bottles of cider from the co-op — and drank through his twenties with a pattern that many would recognise: sporadic, rarely in the house, but when he went out, no off switch. He’d leave a club and wake up on a park bench four hours later. He’d walk home through rough parts of town without a thought. He’d have a few drinks a couple of times a year and end up not remembering getting home, regretting it for days.

It wasn’t daily. It wasn’t vodka at breakfast. But it was enough, once he started tracking it, to see a clear pattern: whenever he drank, his cold water therapy slipped. His journaling stopped. His reading dried up. His habits collapsed. And he knew exactly what those habits meant to him — because he’d spent the COVID lockdowns deliberately building them, one by one, as a scaffold for the life he wanted. He’d started cold water therapy after his friend Sam Phillips (Dare to Dip on Instagram) had been doing it. He’d started journaling. He’d started tracking everything. And every time he had a drink, the chart showed the same thing.

Then came the fridge moment. Stressed after kids’ bedtime hadn’t gone well, rubbish day at a rubbish job, hand reaching for a beer — and a thought: that’s probably not a healthy coping mechanism. Not a crisis. Just a question. And then, playing the tape forward: how arrogant to think this couldn’t happen to me. If there’s any chance it could, why run that gauntlet? He set himself a goal to do a year without alcohol. Christmas Day 2021 was his last drink. He never went back.

Now 1,360+ days sober, Will does a 5am ice bath every morning, runs half marathons, works with cardiac rehab patients in the NHS, and journals every single day across what must be his seventh or eighth volume. He tracks gratitude, goals, hydration, steps, cold plunge, exercise — in a system so simple it takes less than ten minutes but has changed everything. He is, in his own words, someone who felt like an imposter in the recovery space for a long time — because he wasn’t an addict. But he’s come to understand that that’s exactly why his voice matters.

You can find Will on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/willedwardswellness

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Episode 46 | Jen Hirst — 12.5 Years Sober: The Minnesota Coach Who Drank Mouthwash, Hid in the Sober Closet for Four Years & Built Lighthouse Sobriety

In this warm, searingly honest and deeply relatable episode, Jimmy sits down with Jen Hirst — founder of Lighthouse Sobriety, sober coach, and one of the most open voices in the US recovery community — whose story spans a perfectionist childhood, a devastating breakup that planted the seed, a wedding morning she drank through just to survive, and years of mouthwash, rotating liquor stores and hidden bottles before April 24th 2013 changed everything.

Jen grew up in Minnesota in a loving, high-achieving family where her grandfather was an alcoholic but her parents rarely drank. The pressure she put on herself — to get the grades, win the awards, earn love through achievement — created an anxiety she had no tools to manage. Drinking, when it arrived at 15, didn’t ignite anything immediately. It was a breakup at college — her second boyfriend wanting to go on a break — that planted the real seed. A housemate offered her Adderall to take the pain away. It worked instantly. She thought: if that works, so will alcohol. And from that moment, she was using it as medicine.

What followed was a ten-year progression — social drinking that became secret drinking, that became solo drinking, that became hiding bottles in her closet after her fiancé went to bed, that became rotating liquor stores with sunglasses and a hat, that became drinking before dates, drinking before going out, drinking at her dad’s office while hiding vodka in her desk. Through it all she maintained enough of a veneer — the job, the relationship, the functioning surface — that nobody quite believed it. A month before her wedding she told her fiancé she thought she was an alcoholic. He said: “No you’re not.” She said okay.

On the morning of her wedding she was drinking vodka to manage the anxiety. She blacked out the night before. She doesn’t remember the evening. Two days after the wedding she stopped hiding it — just collapsed, stopped going to work, stopped pretending. Her husband looked at her and thought: what did I marry?

Then began a year and a half of attempts: AA drunk, then outpatient, then inpatient at Hazelden, then relapse, then a second DUI on Valentine’s Day 2013, then a breathalyser fitted in her home, then being kicked out, then drinking mouthwash — because it was cheaper, because there was no shame buying it in Target, because her family had started hiding or replacing the real stuff. She blew a 0.34 at detox. She was alone, $200 to her name, no job, no car, no home to go back to.

On April 24th 2013 she just knew. No fanfare. Just done.

Now 12 and a half years sober, Jen coaches women through the first weeks of sobriety with six daily habits and a 10-minute walk, and lives by a simple truth: you will not die from feelings.

Jen’s website is here:

https://www.joinlighthousesobriety.com

You can find Jen on Instagram at:

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Beyond the Booze by Sarah Rusbatch:

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Episode 45 | Ryan Kennedy — Rock Bottom With Ryan: Airlifted, Arrested & Almost Out of Time in Washington State

In this raw, funny and deeply honest episode, Jimmy sits down with Ryan Kennedy — host of the Rock Bottom With Ryan podcast — whose story spans a chaotic childhood in Seattle, fraternity drinking, a toxic marriage to a bartender, an abusive relationship, a DUI he drove away from to get a drink, and a face-plant fall down brick stairs at 4am that ended with a helicopter airlift to Spokane. All before his rock bottom.

Ryan grew up in Seattle with parents who split when he was seven. His mother moved him constantly through her relationships, changing schools every year until Ryan found himself living in a basement, not welcome upstairs, developing the social anxiety that would dog him through high school. At 12 he started smoking weed; he barely drank in high school, partly because his first ever drinking experience ended with someone elbowing a bottle into his mouth and knocking his teeth out. He drove people home instead.

College was different. Freed from his dad’s strict household and arriving at Washington State University at 18, Ryan was invited into a fraternity on his first week. Day one in the frat house: the older members got him hammered. He went to class still buzzing the next morning, thought it was brilliant, went back and did it again. For the next five and a half years he was rarely fully sober.

After college the drinking escalated from social to solo — beer runs to the minimart, then bars alone, then hard alcohol, then waking up with uncontrollable shakes he didn’t understand were withdrawal. He started work at a cell phone company, sought out the colleagues who wanted to party, added cocaine to the mix, and began a life of cycling through drinking, relationships, and fresh starts that never quite reset anything.

Then the fall. At 4am, still drunk, deciding to go for a run as part of his commitment to stop drinking, Ryan face-planted down brick stairs — broke his teeth, gashed his eye, split his lip, head injury. He finished the run. Went to bed. Woke up to find blood everywhere. Was airlifted to Spokane with injuries the local hospital couldn’t handle. His mum stayed in a hotel for a week just to be near him.

He got 90 days in AA. Felt good. Slowed down. Relapsed for six weeks. Hospital again. A nun he’d known from childhood walked into his room and asked what he was going to do this time. He said he was going to go to rehab. He did 60 days. He has not had a drink since.

Now approaching one year sober, hosting his own podcast, Ryan is finally learning who he is — and his story is just getting started.

You can find Ryan on his Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/rockbottomwithryan

His Podcast Rock Bottom with Ryan is here:

https://linktr.ee/rockbottomwithryan?fbclid=PAdGRleAMzt3pleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABpypULW2wRB_bI7XHJouwmcYM7SfS7kSRM1v62P9OcuN_DpqcHoRXn7zvcqCO_aem_JviN1OhOYAaC6zErHq85vw

Forged in Silence Podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/5Z8hxu2cDovocvyJUzqaAA?si=14859864934b426b

Leaving Las Vegas with Nic Cage:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113627/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

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Episode 44 | Oli Stringer — 1,000 Days Sober: The Bedford Carpenter Who Stood on a Cliff in Cyprus, Saw His Kids & Chose to Come Home

In this raw, warm and deeply spiritual episode, Jimmy sits down with Olly Stringer — carpenter, hiker, father and Bedford-based sober advocate just days from his 1,000-day milestone — whose story spans a construction apprenticeship drinking culture, a horrific witnessed accident, PTSD he never properly dealt with, a near-fatal organ shutdown, and a wagtail bird in a Yorkshire valley that sent him to a reiki healer who told him about a man in a flat cap.

Oli grew up in Bedford, parents separating at seven, life revolving around football, pubs and the normal rhythms of a British working-class childhood where the pub was just where adults went. His first drink came at 13 or 14 — park tinnies, fitting in, nothing deeper than that. At 16 he went straight from school into a carpentry apprenticeship, walking directly into one of the most entrenched drinking cultures there is: finish time equals pub time, your mentors are buying, and turning it down means you can’t handle yourself.

Through his twenties Oli drank heavily but functionally — working away, football weekends, binge drinking that came round on a Thursday and didn’t stop until Sunday. He met his now-wife at 19 on a night out. She moderated; he didn’t. But it was manageable — until the morning he was working outside a pub and heard a scream.

A lorry had reversed into a 17-year-old girl on her bike. Her shoulder was almost completely severed. Oli helped get her inside, where pub staff reconnected the arm just before the ambulance arrived. He never found out if she kept it. The next day he nearly passed out driving on the motorway — the delayed shock hitting him at 70mph. He had weeks off. Then COVID arrived, and what had been an unaddressed trauma became a free-floating anxiety with no outlet and no distraction.

He started drinking at home more, developing the social anxiety that meant he needed drinks before leaving the house — before the local pub, before a concert, before the school play. He blacked out regularly, came home and cracked open a bottle of wine when he didn’t need it. He face-planted a fence post in a blackout and had seizures for three months. He fell down the full length of his staircase drunk, foaming at the mouth. He worked in Cyprus, treated it like a holiday, took whatever was on offer, and one afternoon after a day-long bender on alcohol and speed found himself on the edge of a cliff, looking down.

He came round lying at the top. He put music on. He looked out and had what he describes as an out-of-body experience — seeing himself from above, and then seeing his kids standing there. He came down. He didn’t tell anyone.

Now approaching 1,000 days, Oli goes to work in Scotland and stays in the mountains while his colleagues hit Wetherspoons. His ten-year-old daughter tells him he’s not drinking. The universe, he says, is looking after him now.

You can find Oli on Insta at:

https://www.instagram.com/levellinguponlife

You can find the Dryy app at:

https://www.instagram.com/dryyapp?

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

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Buy me a coffee…

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And you can find all my other links at:

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Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://a.co/d/0854fIb6

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://a.co/d/0gy6mT9Z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://a.co/d/0jdcIjGb

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 43 | Tom McLeod — 3 Years Sober: The Toronto Filmmaker Who Almost Partied Himself to Death & Found Out Rooms Full of People Who Did the Same Are Actually Pretty Entertaining

Tom McLeod grew up in Calgary — an unpopular kid who had his first drink at 14 at a cool party and immediately chose it. Within weeks he was the guy who could out-drink everybody. Skateboarding made him popular; alcohol made him feel like a superpower. By his apartment years he was drinking every day, adding cocaine, becoming a bike messenger in Vancouver and making documentaries while running on fumes.

At 28 he tried sobriety — made it a few weeks, relapsed at his brother’s wedding where he deleted all the footage, ended up doing drugs with homeless people on the streets of Ottawa and punched his dad. He knew it was wrong every single time for the next 11 years and kept going anyway. COVID finished the relationship, finished the work and nearly finished him — sleeping less and less, more and more drugs, a last bender of nearly two weeks without sleep, liver damage, a heart he thought was about to give out.

He spotted a sober friend on Instagram from his eyes alone. Messaged him at 2am. Went to a men’s AA meeting. Heard a guy talk about robbing a bank in the 70s and thought: why didn’t anyone tell me this is where the answers were? Went out for one more bender. Then walked back in. Three years later he’s directing again, dating someone healthy, making a content series called Practically Sober, and learning that rooms full of people who almost partied themselves to death are actually pretty entertaining.

Follow Tom on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/practically.sober

TikTok is here:

https://www.tiktok.com/@practically_

sober

Augustan burrows - Dry

https://amzn.to/4a5LJM3

Recovering out loud - Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/recovering-out-loud/id1804098190

28 Days - Sandra Bullock film

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0191754/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

Practically Sober - Youtube

https://youtube.com/@practicallysober?si=p6Z9ou3UFYtVthbW

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Support the show

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://a.co/d/0854fIb6

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://a.co/d/0gy6mT9Z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://a.co/d/0jdcIjGb

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

https://amzn.to/4uMmkyB

This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

https://amzn.to/4eC6L6z

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

https://amzn.to/44jOV3i

Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.