#191 Three Days (Instagram) Sober

On Process Addiction, Spiritual Practice and Remembering Who I Am

Sober Yoga Girl Podcast is back in Action, and today I interviewed Annie Knowles, who completed her YTT this past summer with me! She is a former NHS worker and an alcohol-free coach. Listen to the episode here.

My next Online Yoga Class -> Resting with the Sutras starts Tomorrow!

You can join here.

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Today, I am celebrating three days of Instagram sobriety.

That sentence still surprises me when I say it out loud.

At the end of an ITAA meeting this morning, when the question came: “Does anyone have any days of sobriety to share?” I heard myself answer, confidently and with a smile:

“Three days.”

I have never announced it that way before. Not about social media. Not about something that still feels so complicated.

Because process addictions are wild.

You are in an active relationship with the very thing you are trying to quit. You still need your phone. You still need the internet. You still live in a world where being “visible” is framed as necessary - especially as an entrepreneur, a teacher, a writer. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s a myth. Either way it makes sobriety blurry.

And yet: today I am three days sober.

And I feel different.

(You might still see some posts being done by Indah that I am sending to her. I am personally not on the app anymore! And it feels so good.)

Today, I reread a Substack I wrote yesterday… and it felt like a ramble. (I even wrote that in the title!) A brain dump. Stories that hadn’t fully woven themselves together yet. Half-formed reflections about God, prayer, meditation, confusion.

I thought to myself today…this seems like something that someone on their third day of sobriety would write. The brain is recalibrating, reorganizing. Things in early sobriety feel…chaotic.

What brought me back towards Instagram sobriety? It definitely wasn’t willpower. It was habit stacking.

One small practice led to another:

Oil pulling led me back to bone broth.
Bone broth led me away from coffee.
Less coffee led me back to reading before bed and falling asleep early.
Falling asleep early led me to early morning meditation.
Early meditation led me to delete Instagram.
Deleting Instagram led me back to writing.

This is what recovery actually looks like most of the time. Not dramatic moments of transformation, but quiet reorganization of life. In the Big Book of AA, it says that recovery is about “rearranging our lives.” In Buddhism, this is called Right Effort.
Small actions. Repeated daily. Becoming devotion.

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For a long time, I told myself that I stopped writing for Substack because there were things I didn’t want to share. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. I think one of the additional reasons I stopped writing for Substack was because I was in relapse with Instagram for much of the past year. Active, withdrawing, active, withdrawing. Over and over again. I was simply repeating a numbing pattern. With my brain constantly scrolling, posting, checking engagement - there was no space for me to feel emotions, to process things, and to sit down and write about them.

Today in the ITAA meeting I finally named a lot of this out loud. And that honesty, spoken, was liberating. I think this is why “three days sober” feels real now.

And as I shifted my habits over the last few days, my body responded immediately. Less coffee. More broth. More tea. More sunrise meditation. More ritual.

And also: two big breakouts on my face. One on my right cheek and one on my left temple. Every time I experience that, I know it’s just a big purge, but these two pimple locations feel too random to not be an accident. When I jokingly asked ChatGPT about the “spiritual meaning,” of where theye showed up for me, the answer surprised me with its accuracy: This looks like a body catching up to soul-level honesty. Less numbing. Less dissociation. More embodiment. Healing is messy first.

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For years, I resisted the label “alcoholic.”

It felt too narrow. Too stuck in the past. Too focused on the person and not the substance, which is addictive. (That was my constant argument against the word!)

But the longer I get into sobriety, the more that I see that my real struggle has never been just alcohol, it’s my pattern of relating to anything that gives me dopamine or can be soothing around me: alcohol, caffeine, food, people, travel, people, social media, achievement. Alcohol was just the biggest one that got me into recovery.

When someone suggested about a year ago that I identify as an addict, I hesitated. I had never used “hard drugs.” I didn’t fit the stereotype. But over the course of this year, the idea of identifying as an addict feels like a better fit for me than an alcoholic. Addiction isn’t about the object, it’s about our relationship to the object.

It is about using anything to regulate feelings instead of learning how to feel.

So the idea of saying “I am an addict” feels more honest than “I am an alcoholic.” Because it names the pattern of transfer that has caused me so much suffering over the last seven years. And it keeps me awake.

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Tonight, something small happened.

I stopped at the market to buy fried banana. Two men came out and asked me if I knew where they could buy beer.

I paused. “Doesn’t this market have it?” I asked.

And then I realized:

I don’t even know where in my neighborhood to buy alcohol.

That knowledge has left my body.

That is what grace looks like.

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In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali says that yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. When that happens, “the Seer rests in their true nature.”

I am not there.

But I am closer than I was three days ago.

Three days of choosing presence over scrolling.
Three days of choosing prayer over distraction.
Three days of choosing truth over numbness.

And today, that feels like real sobriety.

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My next Online Yoga Class -> Resting with the Sutras starts Tomorrow!

You can join here.