I recently had the joy of joining Dan Holcomb and Rhetta Rowland on The Mindshift Podcast, and I do mean joy. Not polite podcast joy. Real joy.
The kind where you show up to talk about sobriety, habit change, workplace drinking culture, and building a media platform, and somehow also end up discussing jelly Birkenstocks, Muppet glasses, and whether being related to Miss Piggy’s original clothing designer technically makes you a Muppet once removed.
For the record, I believe it does.
The Mindshift Podcast explores habit change through the lens of the Mindshift Method, blending neuroscience, mindfulness, and real human experience. The show is part of the Mindshift Recovery community, and the conversation felt exactly like that: curious, thoughtful, funny, human, and refreshingly not interested in pretending that personal growth is always graceful. Because it is not.
Sometimes personal growth looks like pulling over on the side of the freeway, crying and laughing because your dashboard told you to “perform service.”
Ask me how I know. Actually, don’t ask. Just listen to the episode. I tell the whole thing, and it involves God, an oil change, and the most on-the-nose metaphor my higher power has ever handed me.
The Story I Almost Didn’t Tell
It was April 2006. I was driving, emotionally exhausted, spiritually furious, and internally at the end of myself. On the outside, I looked functional enough. I had a job, a house, a child, a life that appeared to be working. On the inside, I was not okay.
I was demanding one more sign. I got one. It involved a dashboard warning light and a level of cosmic timing that made me pull over and start laughing and crying at the same time.
I share the exact moment on the episode, along with the sentence that landed in my head so clearly it might as well have come from the passenger seat. That part, I’m not giving away here. It’s worth hearing in context.
What I’ll tell you is this: I knew I was done. Not healed. Not confident. Not suddenly full of self-love. Just done. And that was enough to start.
Getting Sober Made Me Present. Then Life Asked for More.
I’ve now been sober for 20 years, with no days off. That foundation gave me my career, my creativity, my ability to tell the truth without setting the room on fire.
But on the podcast, I talk about something that took me a lot longer to learn: sobriety is not the finish line. You can remove alcohol and still avoid yourself. You can stop drinking and still numb out with work, your phone, your inbox, your need to stay busy enough that no one, including you, can ask how you really are.
I lived that one personally. After I got sober, I built a real career in media, and I also became a raging workaholic, because workaholism gets rewarded and drinking doesn’t.
There’s a story I tell on the episode about my son’s choir concert, one line he said to me afterward that I still think about. I’m not spoiling it here. It’s short, it’s brutal, and it’s the moment I understood the difference between being sober and being present.
The Small, Unglamorous Work
The early work of recovery was not drinking. The later work has been learning how to actually live with myself, including my tendency to turn “I should do one thing” into building an entire platform, launching a podcast, and forgetting to eat lunch.
Dan introduced an idea during our conversation, a “mindfulness bell,” that changed how I use the medication alarms already going off on my phone all day. I walk through exactly how I use them now, and what I actually ask myself when they go off. One of the questions involves a Canva subscription. You’ll know it when you hear it.
Why I Built The Sober Curator
We also talked about The Sober Curator, and the honest answer to “why did you start this” is more specific than most people expect.
When I got sober in 2006, the recovery media landscape was thin: a few books, a lot of stigma, and a cultural assumption that life without alcohol would be smaller and less interesting. I never believed that. By the time I launched the site in 2020, I’d spent years in lifestyle media and understood exactly what was missing.
The Sober Curator now draws over a million readers a year, has published 3,000-plus articles, and works with 38 contributors across six countries. On the episode, I talk about what almost stopped me from launching it, and the name I almost kept instead of the one you know now.
Rethinking Drinking Culture at Work
One of my favorite parts of this conversation was talking about my speaking work on workplace drinking culture, because it’s an area where I’ve watched real change happen in real time.
For years, alcohol was the default bonding mechanism at work. Happy hours, client dinners, holiday parties, all built around a drink in hand. The problem was never that people drink. The problem is that not everyone does, and no one should have to explain why.
I get into what’s actually shifting in workplaces right now, and what inclusion looks like when it finally includes what’s in the glass.
The Bigger Message
What I appreciated most about this conversation was that it held room for nuance. My path is abstinence-based sobriety. That’s what works for me. But Dan and I talk directly about harm reduction, about meeting people where they are, and about why stigma doesn’t shrink when everyone’s forced to use the same language.
We also talk about laughter as its own kind of doorway, which is a fancy way of saying yes, we absolutely did circle back to the Muppets.
Listen to the Episode
You can listen to my full conversation with Dan Holcomb and Rhetta Rowland on The Mindshift Podcast, Episode 10: Guest Alysse Bryson.
The dashboard moment. The choir concert line. The name I almost kept. The Canva question. It’s all in there, and it hits differently coming from the actual episode than it would from a recap.
Go listen. Then come back and tell me if you also believe you’re a Muppet once removed.
