Embracing Mindful Drinking with Ian Andersen

In this raw and inspiring episode of Wake Up with Marci, Ian Andersen opens up about his personal journey with alcohol, the shame that held him back, and the power he found in vulnerability. He shares how hitting a low point became the catalyst for transformation—not just in his own life, but for others too.

Ian is now the co-founder of Sunnyside, a mindful drinking platform helping people develop a healthier relationship with alcohol. Tune in to hear how Ian turned pain into purpose and created a movement of healing and hope.

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Embracing Mindful drinking with Ian Andersen

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Wake Up with Marcy, a deep dive in
the self discovering. I'm your host, Marty Hopkins, and this
is the space where we get real about life transformation
and finding our true selves. Hello all, and welcome back
to Wake Up with Marcy. I'm your host, Marcy Hopkins,
and I am so grateful that you are here today.

(00:22):
This is where we dive deep into real conversations, radical healing,
and waking up to your worth. Today's guest is someone
who's changing the way we talk about alcohol. He is
the co founder of Sunnyside, an innovative app that helps
people build healthier drinking habits through mindful tracking and support.

(00:44):
We'll explore his personal journey, how his families, experience and
alcohol shaped his mission, and what it means to discover
a new path through vulnerability and habit change. Welcome to
the show, Ian.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Thanks Marcy. I'm so glad we made this connection. I
appreci that you having me here and that was a
great interest, So I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, I mean the work you're doing is fantastic. People
a lot of times are questioning their relationship with alcohol,
or sometimes they just can get in a rut and
they don't even realize that, like they're you know, going
from one glass of wine, maybe two glasses of wine,
and then it just that perpetuates the problem. So bringing

(01:28):
awareness to that is so important. But you, yourself, you
had to reevaluate your relationship with alcohol. So what happened
when that happened for you?

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah? Absolutely so. I have a family that's been deeply
impacted by alcohol, and I think it's worth starting my
story with a little bit of that because it really
is sort of the foundation of what led to my
journey with alcohol. I would say. So, I'm a twin
and identical twin, and shortly after I was born, my

(02:02):
parents both took to drinking quite heavily, i'd say, maybe
within five to six years or so. And my father
was working in construction, and his form of drinking was
to come home at night and drink three beers at night,
leading to six beers eventually, and eventually the way he
explained it was drinking a twelve pack at night, and

(02:24):
this led This was happening at a time that him
and my mom were starting to kind of separate in
their own relationship. And so my mom, who I don't
think was ever much of a drinker, became very drawn
to alcohol, and she became a much more closeted drinker
where she would drink in private in her bedroom. And

(02:46):
the long and short of it is that my dad
saw that this was becoming a real issue with the family,
that if they kept down this path, there would be
my brother and I would probably end up in foster
care just because they weren't really in a good situation
to take care of us. He quit drinking cold Turkey
with the support of AA, which is incredible. I have

(03:07):
the highest respect for AA and the millions and millions
of people that they have helped. So after that, he
didn't touch alcohol for the rest of his life until
he passed away a few years ago. So incredible influence
on me and how I kind of look at alcohol.
And then my mom she couldn't, unfortunately, stop drinking, and

(03:28):
it got to the point where we had to move
out of the house and she was on her own.
It was really what she wanted, it was what her
addiction led her to do, which was separate from the family,
and unfortunately, without you know, sort of clarity of mind,
she made that her her priority. She then, after we
moved out around the age of nine. She then passed

(03:49):
away two years later when I was eleven years old,
from liver failure. So it was this rapid decline. And
I'm not going to say that I'm positive that there
were interventions that would have helped her, but I will
say that at the time that they were both going
through this experience, the tools that were available for helping
people start making a change around their habits with alcohol

(04:14):
was the tools were much less known than they are today,
Like the options today are more widely available. They touch
on every spectrum of sort of alcohol use, whether it's
somebody that's fully addicted to alcohol or someone that's just
looking to cut back. And that's really where Sunnyside does

(04:34):
come into the system that we've built. So this created
a complicated relationship for me with alcohol. It's really hard
to explain, but I know that millions of other people
go through the same experience where when they grow up
in families that have been out impacted by alcohol, they
have this complicated relationship with like should I drink or

(04:55):
should I not drink? I should probably stay away from it,
But at the same time, all of my friends starting
to dabble in in alcohol, So I decided to test
drinking around senior year of high school, and it was
very light for me. But then in college I started
to really enjoy drinking and I did it socially. I
just did the college thing and it was fine. It

(05:18):
didn't impact my life. But then when I got into
my career many years ago, I was working in marketing
tech in the Bay Area. I lived close to the
Bay Area now but not exactly in San Francisco, and
I was living the life. I was working at a
great company. We got acquired by a bigger company and

(05:39):
the job kind of got a little bit easier, and
happy hours got a lot more prominent, and I found
myself going to happy hours multiple times a week. And
I got to this point where I had gained twenty pounds.
I'm a pretty thin guy. I like being fit and
like I had this one moment where I was supposed

(06:00):
to be recording a video kind of like this, but
actually in person, and the video was shown to me afterwards.
It was like this little promotional video and I just
told them, you can't use that. Like, I don't recognize
that person in that video. That person looks bloated, they
don't look happy, They looked twenty pounds overweight, and that
was a real moment for me where I was like,

(06:22):
I think I probably need to cut back on drinking.
And it was pretty simple. It's not like I had
to go analyze it much deeper than that. I felt
like I was drinking too much because my energy was low,
the way that I felt performance wise at work was low,
and I was seeking happy hours. I found myself looking
forward to happy hours so that I could have a drink.

(06:44):
And now that was in twenty eighteen or so, and
so now many years later, with the start of Sunnyside,
I've studied alcohol and its effects, as I imagine you
have a bit with your own journey, and I feel
like there was nothing wrong with that person in twenty
eighteen necessarily. It's just that I don't feel necessarily like

(07:06):
I was doing something wrong. But I'm proud to say
that I was able to make a pretty dramatic change
in my life, and for me, that was very much
well power at the time. And I took three months
off of drinking. I just made the decision. I kind
of think in extremes like that, and those three months
were pretty transformative for me. I lost weight I felt amazing.

(07:26):
I got back in my workout routines, and I realized
that in the priority of things that I was looking
forward to in that period of my life, alcohol was
pretty high on the list. And after that three months
I had sort of reoriented it. I still I went
back to drinking in much more moderation and with much
more mindfulness, but it was much lower on the list,

(07:46):
and I had just sort of reoriented where that fit.
So that's the high level version of my experience with alcohol.
I could speak more to where it fits into my
life these days now that I'm the co founder of
an alcohol health program, happy to dive into a little
bit too.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Well, we certainly will, certainly will just laying the foundation
and for those out there listening, like, for instance, my
mother was an alcoholic, and when you are raised in
a home where there is alcohol, it has a big
impact on you. And when you were talking about that,

(08:21):
there were not a lot of options. I mean, I
stopped drinking about ten years ago, and there weren't even
at that time. It was basically AA or rehab. Thankfully,
I didn't need rehab, but a lot of people out there,
just if you're listening and you're thinking about quitting drinking,
make sure that you do talk with your doctor, because

(08:43):
if you are drinking excessively, you could potentially die from
just stopping cold turkey, because your body actually believes that
you needed so for your mother and my mother, I
used to think my mom was choosing the alcohol over me,

(09:06):
but now it's I understand it. When you have an addiction,
you feel that you can't live without it, And there
are a lot of people out there that struggle so
getting and changing life without alcohol. And so I believe
fully that if we could actually make a choice, we

(09:27):
wouldn't choose the alcohol over the love of our family.
So it just shows you the power of that alcohol
use disorder. And it is a disorder, it is a disease.
So but the fact is is that you then had
somebody that gave you a positive influence. I don't know

(09:49):
about you, but coming from that background, I questioned my
drinking all the time. I would watch how other people
were drinking. I would, you know, look to see how
much I was drinking. Once I got past those teen
years and I became more aware of it, but also
to see someone my mother, my grandfather drinking every day,

(10:13):
that was like the norm. So for me to come
home from work and have a couple of glasses of wine,
Like I didn't see anything wrong with it because I
didn't know any different. But of course I questioned it
during my lifetime of drinking, but I looked forward to
that happy hour like it was like I got to

(10:33):
get through my day just so I can get to
my happy hour, right, So absolutely totally relate to that.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
With alcoholic and with other habits and substances, there's this
dopamine rush that we get just with anticipating the happy hour.
So if you're listening to this and you're relating to this,
and you know around one pm, you get this excitement
in your body because you're thinking about the happy hour.
I just want people to know that, like that, there's
nothing wrong with you. That is your dopamine. That's your

(11:02):
brain the way that it's wired, and those things can
be unwired and they can be untrained over time. There
are programs for this. The stack of those programs looks
there's a lot. There's a lot of options. There's behavior
change programs like Sunnyside, there's therapy, there's retraining with like
non alcoholic beverages, there's so many options out there these days,

(11:26):
just to start taking that first step, Marjie, I want
to just there's something really interesting that I want to
just tap tap into really quick. This is sounds a
little well, I was gonna say, kind of dark, But
you were talking about growing up in a household and
how it really changes how you think about alcohol. I
always question my relationship with alcohol. From the time that
I took my first drink senior year of high school,

(11:48):
I was wondering, is this it, like, well, first of all,
like this feels great, how come my parents can't have
this anymore? But one thing that really struck me that
my twin brother said at one point as we were
talking about alcohol. He said, the complicated thing that he
had formed in his mind was as long as I
don't die from alcohol, I'm doing better than my parents.

(12:09):
That's such a dangerous high bar for us to set
as children, and I hadn't really thought about it that way,
and it's always stuck with me. But something probably deep
deep inside of me probably has always told me like,
as long as you don't do what your parents did,
you're probably okay. And I had to completely reset that.

(12:30):
One of the things that really.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, towards the end of my drinking, I'm like, well,
I'm not my mom totally, but it wasn't affecting my life.
But you know, you just sharing about what's available today.
I mean, there are so many ways that you can
shift the way that you do think and your relationship

(12:54):
with alcohol. So let's talk about Sunnyside. I mean, this
is incredible, this app that you have created, co created,
So let's talk about what inspired you to build it
and what does it offer to its users.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, thank you for letting me talk about Sunnyside. It's
been an amazing journey and something that I hope if
we could help one person listening with our program, then
we've won. What inspired Sunnyside? So obviously well okay, actually,
coming out of my break from drinking, I actually started.
I decided to start tracking some of my habits in

(13:29):
a spreadsheet, just as a you know, there's people that
we call it a quantified self, Like I have a
whoop for tracking my biomarkers on a daily basis, and
it's been really helpful for me to make correlations with
my health. Health. But back in twenty eighteen, I started
in a spreadsheet I would track my I would track
my workouts. I did a little bit of calorie tracking

(13:50):
just because I wanted to maintain my health. The one
new thing that I did is I started tracking the
drinks that I had every day that I drank, I
wrote how many that I had, and it really helped
me start to nderstand these patterns with my drinking. So
it's it's really big. We've learned that it's an incredibly
powerful and sort of scientifically proven tactic to track your drinks,

(14:10):
and that became a fundamental aspect of the sunny Side program.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
Like the awareness, like you're seeing it right instead of just.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, there's an awareness. There's an awareness component. So we
find that most people that start, we really encourage people like,
don't boil the ocean in your first thirty days with Sunnyside.
You're here not to quit. Most most people don't come
to Sunnyside to quit. They come to make fundamental change
with the way that they think about alcohol, to like
rethink how it fits into their lives. Tracking your drinks

(14:39):
for thirty days and then beyond helps you just gain
a realistic perspective of how much you're drinking and for
a lot of people. That's really powerful. The other thing
that tracking does, though, is it creates what we call
a little moment of conscious interference. So if you're tracking
your drinks in real time, which you can do in
the Sunnyside app, you're giving yourself a little pause. And
it's not rocket science. Pause gives you a moment to

(15:01):
decide in a smarter way do I want to have
a drink? Do I want to have water? Do I
want to have a non alcoholic beverage? And that's been
really powerful for people. So these are incredibly simple tactics
that we employ in the Sunnyside program. There's a lot
more to it, but just getting back to sort of
the inspiration piece. My co founder came to me a
couple of years. He came to me in twenty twenty
and said that he wanted to He had this idea

(15:23):
for an app that would help the millions of people
that are looking to drink less but not necessarily quit,
to help them on that journey. Because these I still
think these days, if you ask someone on someone that
you've just met, like, hey, hypothetically, if you wanted to
cut back on your drinking, what would you do? I
think most people would generally say, well, I guess i'd

(15:44):
go to AA, but I don't want to quit, so
I want to go to AA, and AA's for people
that need to like that have hit rock bottom, and
so it creates this cognitive dissonance. I'm not going to stop.
I'm not going to start drinking less because I'm not
going to go to AA, and AA not for me.
The truth is AA is a great program for a
small percentage of people. There are millions and millions of

(16:07):
people that drink alcohol, and in studies, fifty percent have
said that they want to drink less, but only like
ten percent actually do something about it. This is an
awareness problem, this is a conversational problem within how we
look at alcohol. And so he had this idea for
this program. He didn't find anything else online. So we
set out to build it. And our approach is whether

(16:31):
you can join Sunnyside, whether you want to cut back
or quit. Marcia, You're totally right. If somebody is a
certain type of drinker, they might want to seek medical
attention or talk to a doctor first, and those are
people that are most likely going to need a little
more help than Sunnyside can offer. But there are tens
of millions of people that fit the criteria for Sunnyside,

(16:53):
which is, I know I'm drinking too much, it's impacting
my life. I'm not having withdrawal symptoms, for example, but
I need support to cut back because this is really
this is about the brain, it's about behavior change, it's
about habit change. And yeah, we set out to build
that program. Something that I'm really proud of though, which
I just want to make sure people understand, is about

(17:15):
fifteen percent of people that join Studieside do end up quitting.
So we're not a sobriety program. But as you enter
the Sunnyside experience, you're taking a moderation based approach to
your alcohol. You're learning about alcohol, you're learning how to
cut down, and then just sort of gain clarity around
where alcohol sits in your life. And for a lot

(17:35):
of people, about fifteen percent of our members, that clarity
leads them to make the decision to go sober, which
is an amazing outcome. But for about eighty five percent
of our members, they keep drinking, but they do so
at reduced rates and they're now empowered to maintain those
habits over time. So there are details of the program

(17:57):
that I can get into, but that's the general gist
of it.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
Well, I'm gonna guess that a lot of them do
stop drinking completely. Because when you quit drinking and you
have the mindfulness, the behavior changes. And were we talk
about that more but and the impact of that. But
when you take alcohol out of your life or reduce

(18:20):
the alcohol, you start to evolve as a person. You
reconnect with yourself. And like for me, when I quit drinking,
it allowed me to become curious in life, and it
allowed me to not prioritize alcohol. It was more about
prioritizing myself, prioritizing the things that made me happy and

(18:40):
finding those things that actually made me happy. So that's
why I'm going to guess that. You know, like you
wake up in the morning, you've got a clear head,
you feel good, you're ready to go, You're shifting your
mindset to a gratitude mindset, you're working out, like you said,
you're looking better, your self confidence is lifted. Like there's
so many benefits to it. But you know, there's nothing

(19:04):
wrong with drinking. It's just acknowledging the relationship and maybe
cutting back, like you said, So let's talk about some
of the practices that you offer through Sunnyside that create
the change with the habits, with the mindset.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
Absolutely, I'd be happy to dig into that. I just
want to touch on this idea of brighter mornings because
it's literally why we named our company Sunnyside. It's we
wanted to just feel like a destination, something you could
get to, and we tell people Sunnyside is all about
brighter mornings, that it's about clearer minds that lead to
better decision making, better relationships, and just the way you

(19:43):
put it. Yeah, So there are people that have joined.
I'll get into the mechanics, but I just want to
share there's different types of people that join Sunnyside, and
I just want to talk about two common types. One
of them is the daily wine drinker. So if somebody's
been drinking wine two to three glasses of wine every

(20:04):
night for the last couple of years according to the CDC,
those are within the guidelines. But as you get older,
or your doctor talks to you, or you realize that
hangovers are starting to get to you, you make a
decision that you want to drink less. But it becomes
really hard because the habit that's been ingrained in your
mind is very deeply in there and can be hard
to break. So a daily wine drinker is a very

(20:26):
common persona that comes and joined Sunnyside. And then also
like a weekend binge drinker, So somebody that doesn't drink
at all during the weekdays, but then as soon as
they start having a drink on Fridays, they have a
really hard time stopping. The reason I want to highlight
this is there are different types of drinkers that can
benefit from a program like Sunnyside that builds awareness and

(20:48):
behavior change around your habits. So if you're listening to
this and you're not sure if you fit the criteria,
trust me you do. We've had over four hundred thousand
people start Sunnyside. We've seen every pattern, type of drinker,
and we've helped every type of persona. So how Sunnyside works,
I'll go through this pretty quickly. You start by signing
up and giving us some of your personal information privately

(21:10):
anonymously so that we can understand your drinking patterns and behaviors.
And we start right away by offering you a plan
for your week ahead. We recommend drinks for your week ahead,
but we never promote drinking. I just want to be
clear about that. That should be pretty obvious. We don't
promote drinking. But what we do is we promote that
you drink less than you did the week before. And

(21:30):
for most people, we're going to do just a haircut
on their first week, and if they hit those targets,
we will continue to haircut a little bit more every week.
Our general goal is to try to get you down
to the CDC recommended guidelines of fourteen drinks per week
for men seven drinks per week for women. I believe
I'm getting that right. I might be one or two off.
We also want to help you avoid binge drinking behavior,

(21:51):
which is four or more drinks in one sitting. So
our program where we recommend drinks for you is going
to help you gradually, very very gradually get down to
the CDC recommended guidelines. If you do hit those goals,
we'll continue helping you decrease. If you're not hitting the
plan that we give you, we're going to check in
with you. Our coaching team will check in with you,
and we're going to help help you kind of adjust

(22:12):
your plan to be more realistic for you, so you
can always adjust your targets. We're trying to get dry
days into the week for you, which are incredibly important.
A lot of people that join Sunnyside haven't had dry
days for a while, and they haven't had a long
string of dry days for a while. So we're going
to really try to get a couple days of dry
days for you within the first couple of months, and

(22:35):
you're going to feel how that improves your mental and
physical well being so that you can have clarity of
mind to start making healthier decisions for yourself. So there's
this tracking component. We encourage you to track your drinks.
We encourage you to take the planning experience very seriously,
and then we have coaching from real humans that are
accessible through our text message program that's available for everybody,

(22:57):
and we have this really cool mindful drinking coaches. Okay, yeah, yeah,
So we can support people on their sober journeys. Absolutely,
there are people that use Sunnyside to track their sober streaks.
We've actually recently made improved that side of the experience
because we know that more and more people are joining
Sunnyside to maintain their sobriety. Like I said, about eighty

(23:19):
five percent of people that are using Sunnyside are mindful drinkers.
They're trying, they're working on moderation and reduction. Yeah, we
have a really great progress and analytics tools, we have
resources and education, and we also have challenges. So if
this whole idea of us making recommendations to you on
a weekly basis isn't really working, you can just join
these thirty day challenges that are geared around quantified goals

(23:42):
like cutting your drinking by fifty percent or not drinking
for thirty days.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
Just want to change how they're looking at it and
need the support around changing their drinking habits. So I
just want to thank you for sharing your journey and
the support again helping to break down the stigma, offer
real solutions and just being vulnerable. And like you said,
community is so so important. So if you're out there

(24:10):
or even just questioning your habit, you're not alone. I
mean so many millions and millions of us do. So
whether it's tracking your drinks or starting a conversation, every
step counts. And don't forget to subscribe and share. Wake
up with Marcy for more powerful stories and healing and transformation,

(24:30):
so you are not alone on this journey. There is
so much support out there, and you are worthy