Ep 123: How Big Is Your World? | Rethinking Alcohol |

About this episode

Anna Donaghey explores how alcohol can subtly shrink one's world and dull joy, while discussing the journey of cutting down on drinking.

What if alcohol isn’t just a habit, but quietly shrinking the size of your world, dulling joy, and making ordinary pleasures feel like “not enough”? In this solo episode, Anna Donaghey shares honest insights from her own journey, exploring how drinking can subtly narrow both what you do and how much you feel. She unpacks the concept of the “hedonic threshold,” showing why your favourite activities may start feeling flat, and how even small milestones (like a child’s birthday) come to feel incomplete without a drink. Anna also gets real about what happens when you start to cut down: why everything can feel dull at first, why that’s normal, and how given time, colour and excitement quietly returns to the things you love. This episode is for anyone curious about changing the way they think about alcohol. Here are the Highlights: 00:00 Intro: When the world starts to shrink 01:19 The subtle ways alcohol “shrinks” your world 04:44 When joy becomes muted and life feels flat 06:14 The hedonic threshold: Why dopamine matters 07:55 Why ordinary pleasures start feeling not enough 09:53 The key questions to ask yourself 10:15 How activities drop away when drinking more 11:46 When drinking…

People in this episode

Host: Anna Donaghey

Topics covered

• alcohol
• mental health
• joy
• hedonic threshold
• personal growth

Keywords

• alcohol
• hedonic threshold
• joy
• personal growth
• mental health

More episodes of The Big Drink Rethink

• Ep 127: Same Feeling, Different Fix: Co-dependency Explained | Rethinking Alcohol | · June 11, 2026 · 59 min
• Ep 126: BONUS EPISODE: The Version Of You On The Other Side with the Gavin Sisters | Rethinking Alcohol | · June 9, 2026 · 32 min
• Ep 125: Breaking The 'Wine O'clock' Habit | Alcohol Coaching | · June 4, 2026 · 26 min
• Ep 124: Wired, Tired, and Reaching for Wine | Rethinking Alcohol and Your Nervous System · May 28, 2026 · 49 min
• Ep 122: Building a Life You Don't Want to Escape From | Rethinking Alcohol | · May 14, 2026 · 46 min
• Ep 121: Toolkit '101' - How to Party Without Alcohol · May 7, 2026 · 29 min