“I was travelling in South America, trying to stay sober but unable to do so,” he says. “Then there was a DUI driving to work and a suicide attempt. I hit the low of all lows.”
Finally, aged 33, on September 6, 2014, while on a camping trip with friends, he took his last drink.
Paul Churchill with his 18-month-old son, Rio. Credit:
“I had a beer in hand and drank half of it,” he says. “I knew if I finished that beer I was going to be a goner. It was just a matter of time. A year, two years. Probably less.”
A few months after putting down that beer, Churchill recorded his first Recovery Elevator podcast. It’s a deceptively simple format. Churchill interviews one person each week about their journey into – and out of – alcohol addiction.
This week, he released episode 567, and Recovery Elevator has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
The podcast is why Churchill first came to my attention and why we’re chatting over Zoom as he sits in his studio/office in the small city of Bozeman, Montana, where he lives with his wife, their 18-month-old son and a growing collection of goats and pet snakes.
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I’ve played more than 80 episodes of Recovery Elevator over the past few months. Listening to the interviews with people from all walks of life and all parts of the globe has become an almost daily routine.
In an outrageous coincidence (Churchill would definitely say it’s a Universe Thing), the morning we chat marks my own 100th day of sobriety. And that’s thanks in no small part to Recovery Elevator. It’s a big deal for me after 40 years on the grog. My drinking had ramped up enormously in recent years and was only going one way.
A sudden health emergency gave me the perspective and clarity I needed to decide to put down the bottle. Podcasts like Recovery Elevator, reading mountains of “quit lit” and therapy make up the self-help plan I’ve stitched together to keep myself on the straight and narrow. So far, so good.
When Churchill recorded and uploaded that first podcast he was, as he says, “burning the ships” in the most public way possible: telling the world he had a problem and holding himself accountable to not pick up another drink.
‘Why would you want to moderately drink? Do you also want to moderately heal?’
Paul Churchill
Even at such an early stage in his own sobriety, he also wanted to extend a helping hand to anyone struggling with alcohol. And along the way, he figured he might pick up some pointers himself from other people who had successfully kicked alcohol to the kerb.
Listen to enough people talking about their alcohol problem and it becomes clear everyone’s story is unique, but at the same time, the same. One of the common factors Churchill has learnt from every one of his more than 550 interviewees is that people who have a problem with alcohol almost always try moderation (“I’ll only drink on the weekends …”) and invariably, that fails.
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“Moderate drinking doesn’t work, even though the mind can think of brilliant plans and strategies that you’re like, ‘Shit, this can’t fail’, ” he says. “In the first 50 to 100 interviews when I would ask ‘Did you moderate and did it work?’. I optimistically and honestly thought I was going to figure out one that did work. There were none at 50, none at 100, none at 200 or four or five hundred. That’s wild.
“You also need to flip the question: why would you want to moderately drink? Do you also want to moderately heal? Do you want to moderately ingest poison? Do you want to moderately drink a Class One carcinogen that is linked to all types of cancers? F, no!”
Of course, many people – so-called “normal” drinkers – can drink without issues. They can have a couple of beers and stop, sticking to the 10 standard drinks or fewer a week.
The million-dollar question, then, is: how do you know if you have a problem with alcohol?
Paul Churchill’s new book. Credit:
There are plenty of self-assessment tests to evaluate your drinking, but Churchill has a deceptively straightforward answer.
“If you have asked yourself or have wondered if you have a drinking problem, then you’ve already answered the question. And that’s it. Normal drinkers, they don’t ask that.”
But that’s not to say normal drinking can’t become problematic over time. “I think if you drink long enough, if you dance with the most addictive drug on the planet and it’s a constant in your life, the inevitable stressors happen – loss of a job, loss of a parent, whatever. When life inevitably kicks you in the groin, then eventually you will develop a dependence on alcohol.”
But what if you’re not the one with the problem? What if it’s someone you love who has an unacknowledged issue?
“The worst thing you can do is not have the conversation,” says Churchill. “Have the conversation. Have a loving and caring, open dialogue. They can no longer say, when they justify to themselves, ‘Well, no one’s ever confronted me about my alcohol consumption’. The thing that must first be overcome is denial. There are some alcoholics where everybody around them is like, that person’s an alcoholic, but they are in denial.
“Having this conversation with somebody is an arrow that slowly pierces through denial. If enough of those show up – and I’ve seen it happen – it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I am an alcoholic’. Then the healing begins.”
In the past decade, there’s been an explosion of people talking and writing about sobriety, a charge led in Australia by journalist Jill Stark with her classic and hugely entertaining 2013 book High Sobriety.
Perhaps the most striking thing about books like Catherine Gray’s The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober or We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life by Laura McKowen is that ditching the booze is not so much denying yourself or missing out, but is about (eventually) arriving at a sense of contentment and the ability to tackle life’s slings and arrows with clear-headed calmness.
It’s an ongoing theme in Dolce Vita and Churchill’s podcasts. “I asked our followers on Instagram to describe sobriety in one word,” he says. “We had a couple hundred responses and the three most popular responses were ‘presence’, ‘energy’ and ‘peace’. Billions of dollars are spent on diets and elixirs and potions and workouts to achieve those three things, and you get it by not poisoning yourself with alcohol.”
For Churchill, the first step to shaking his addiction was to confess he had a problem to his family, which he regards as essential for anyone wanting to make the leap from “sober curious” to being sober.
“It can be to anyone,” he says. “It can be a psychologist, it can be a counsellor, it can be a doctor, but it has to be an unequivocal, honest conversation how much you’re drinking, what is it doing to you physically and mentally? How do you feel afterwards? What’s the shame and guilt levels like?
“What I want people to do after reading this book is go ‘Oh my gosh, I have to come closer to the fire with my other human beings, with my brothers and sisters, come closer to the human race because alcohol wants you alone in a dark, isolated place with a bottle’.”
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Dolce Vita: Ditch The Booze and Step Into The Good Life is out now. Available on Amazon, for Kindle and in audiobook format. Find Recovery Elevator here.
