From alcohol addiction to wellbeing advocate: my journey to sobriety

This article was first published in the NZ Herald on 6 July 2024.

Whilst Philly Powell is now a self-described wellbeing junkie, she spent much of her life with a problematic relationship with alcohol. She started a nine-month period of sobriety on 14 April 2023... and is still going. As Dry July continues, Philly shares her story of being addicted to alcohol, and the life-changing benefits of becoming sober.

The first time I remember getting drunk, I was about 13, with family at Christmas, sitting on the deck with a glass of bubbles and a strawberry and having no idea what was going to happen. As I started to feel these feelings of being tipsy, I really loved it. I was like, “whoa, this is so cool”.

My whole family are not big drinkers. Mum loves a wine or two, but nothing crazy. Growing up, there was probably Miami Wine Cooler in the fridge, but it was always celebratory: birthdays, occasions. I’ve never really seen my mum drunk, or my dad for that matter, just tipsy and having fun.

But my drinking really started when I was 14 and at college. I went to a private girls’ school and we were the worst. We literally had parties every weekend at someone’s parents’ house. By the time I was 16, it was every Friday and Saturday night. If there was even a sniff of a party, my friends and I were there.

To be fair, I probably got more hammered than most of my friends — binge drinking, spewing, to the point of excess and doing stupid things. I never had an off switch. I was a bit of a tomboy. I had older brothers. I was quite staunch. I thought I can handle it, and probably thought I was cool. And others were doing it too, right? Nearly all my friends were drinking at these parties.

I liked drinking because it meant hanging out with your friends, being stupid, dancing, hooking up with boys, or girls. I took it to the next level, though — how could I be the craziest, do the craziest things? The alcohol gave me that courage to push the boundary and do stupid shit.

In my 20s, I was at university, and it was work and study hard during the week, and then party all weekend.

After graduating, I started working in HR. One time I went out for work drinks on a Thursday night, met a guy then didn’t go home. I went straight to work the next morning, hadn’t showered or anything, drank a blue Powerade thinking “I’m sweet”, when probably I was still drunk. And then an hour or two later I was in the toilets, spewing up then fell asleep at my desk. I had to slip out at some point in the afternoon because I was so sick. When I was at work, I was high performing, but there were definitely a lot of Mondays where I called in sick, when I think about it, related to my partying.

That was the culture

I worked for a bank and the culture was all about Friday-night drinks. They were all provided free, as much as you wanted. So we’d just preload, then go into the city. I remember going out with my team at a bar on Wellington’s waterfront, and we were dancing on tables on the balcony, getting those drink trays and using them as frisbees and throwing them into the harbour. My boss was there, team members were hooking up, all sorts of shit going on. It was crazy.

I can’t even imagine doing that in my professional realm these days. But that’s what we did. That was the culture.

Then I went overseas on my OE, and, you know, you go overseas and there’s all sorts of new things to try and dabble with, and so I just kept taking it to the next level. I lived in Canada for three winters to snowboard. And if anyone knows that scene, it’s snowboard hard all day and then party hard all night. Rinse, repeat.

There were so many moments when I started to think my drinking was out of control, I can’t even begin to add them up. There were so many terrible, crippling hangovers, combined with alcohol, drugs, herbal highs, to the point where some of my hangovers were starting to morph into panic attacks because of how terrible I felt physically and mentally. Back then, I guess I didn’t know a lot about mental health. I didn’t recognise that what I was experiencing was what these days I would call anxiety or hangxiety.

Philly Powell chose a nine-month sobriety challenge, which she later extended to a year.

Being in a foreign country, it probably was amplified. Prior to my last winter season in Canada, I’d been living in Perth where I’d discovered CrossFit, health and nutrition. I was really starting to go, “oh, hang on a minute, there’s got to be a better way to live”. I was quite fit, ran my first 10km and started to get quite interested in fitness. But then I went back to Canada and undid it all. I wasn’t working. I was literally partying and snowboarding, on repeat.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no regrets. Those days were so much fun, but eventually, they weren’t fun because the hangovers were just so horrific.

I came back to New Zealand and things started changing when I joined the CrossFit “cult”. As much as people might like to give it shit, it’s one of the best and most healthy cults I’ve ever been part of. And because I became addicted to this pursuit of fitness and strength, I didn’t have a lot of room for hangovers. If you were competing on a Saturday, there’s absolutely no way you could be hungover.

Sober, so good!

After the first lockdown in 2020, I went on a silent meditation retreat with Claire Robbie, former TV presenter, now yoga teacher and founder of the School of Modern Meditation. She was sober. When she told her story, I was like, “oh my God, that sounds like me”. Prior to getting sober, she’d been living the high life in Hollywood at all these rock’n’roll parties.

At the retreat I learned to meditate and started this journey of doing the inner work. Following that I did a three-month programme with Claire to address my relationship with alcohol. At this point I didn’t want to be sober. I wanted to be able to moderate. So I took a three-month break. It was so hard.

The first weekend, I was going to a concert with my friends. In the lead-up to the concert, the whole week before, the thought of not drinking was taking up all my mental headspace. How am I going to navigate it? What am I going to drink? How’s this going to work? It’s going to be so awkward. What am I even doing? It felt like I’d put myself into a jail, and taken all the fun away from my life. It literally felt like doomsday. But I went to the concert, and it was awkward for the first hour or two. But then I got right up to the front and just danced, then got in my car with my mates, went and got some pizza, and drove home. I felt so proud of myself the next morning, like, OMG you went to that concert sober! You had such an awesome time. You danced your ass off to the music. You remember all the songs, and what the band members said. I never used to remember much.

I’d started this Reset programme in early December. Somehow I got through Christmas but it was pretty hard. And then I went on holiday with my family, and whatever was going on for me in this journey, without the numbing of alcohol, it was a very triggering time. I had a couple of drinks because I just literally couldn’t handle it. My family didn’t get why this was important for me not to be drinking. Then a couple of days later, I met a good friend and just decided I couldn’t resist having a prosecco on New Year’s Day.

Afterwards I talked to Claire, and she said, you do realise you’ve got to start three months again? My heart sank slightly, but I worked through that. It was a very emotional three or four months of digging deep into all that was going on for me without the substances. After the programme I thought sweet, I’ll go back to drinking in moderation. But the pattern came back, I had no off switch. I couldn’t moderate.

I’d started my business Wellbeing Tick in 2021, and I just started to feel like I couldn’t handle running a business, having to show up in front of executive teams, speaking about wellbeing when I had done that in the weekend. My anxiety was through the roof.

I went away in April 2023 to a friend’s wedding and had a friend back from overseas. I went hard — six out of seven days drinking. And all the feelings of loneliness around being a single female at a wedding hit me. All the challenges that I was experiencing were heightened. Being at this wedding and being hung over, it just didn’t feel good.

The best decision of my life

Afterwards I went to stay with a friend. I picked up a self-help book off her bookshelf and was drawn to the chapter on addiction, it really resonated. I was like, fuck, I’ve got to take a break. So I committed to nine months because I don’t have any children, and I thought, all my friends have had babies by now, so I’m going to have my own pregnancy and not drink.

But then, coincidentally through my work, I met author and journalist Lotta Dann, who became sober at 39 and founded the online community Living Sober, and I told her “I’m taking a year off”. I couldn’t be bothered explaining the nine months to her. So it became a year and it was the best decision of my life.

It was relatively easy this time around because I had done the coaching, read all the books, listened to all the podcasts. When I decided to give up, I went and did the Milford Track. I was in nature doing what I love, and I read Hayley Holt’s book, Second Chances, and her book held the mirror up to me. She was a snowboarder with the party lifestyle. I was like, “far out — she’s writing about me”. I was so inspired and thought, “she’s still cool sober and she’s embracing it, I want to be like her. I want to be cool and sober”.

A new type of fun

Now I go to concerts and all sorts of things, and I dance and I stay up. But I pick and choose what I want to do. It used to be about where can I go and get drunk. Now I am choosing to go where I’m really going to have these great connections with people that I love, doing things that make me feel good, and I leave feeling better than when I arrived, as opposed to feeling shit and paying for it later.

As I said earlier, I have no regrets. I had fun, but I’m so happy to be here sober at 42. I’ve done my time, I’ve had my fun partying, and now I like a new type of fun, and I just love my lifestyle without it.

For anyone who wants to make the change for themselves, I would advise getting an accountability buddy or a coach, even to the point of paying someone. I haven’t joined Alcoholics Anonymous, but from a lot of the books and podcasts, it sounds like an incredible option.

Another tip is to replace your drinking with something else. If 5pm is your usual wine time, then do something else. Go to yoga, walk your dog. Those key trigger moments of when you drink, replace it with something else. Try all the amazing kombuchas, herbal teas and NoLo (no to low alcohol) drinks because they taste really good. I drink my kombucha in a wine glass to keep the ritual. Who cares what’s in your drink? If you’re drinking ginger beer and not beer, who cares?

Just believe that something better will come from giving up. And be willing to confront your emotions. It’s not an easy path, but it’s so bloody worth it!

Are you wanting to address your relationship with alcohol? Philly now offers 1:1 coaching to help people get unhooked from the lure of booze to experience a much happier and healthier way of living - free of hangovers, anxiety and nausea!

Click here for info on Coaching with Philly