Sober Life Rocks

About Sober Life Rocks

The Sober Life Rocks Podcast is about more than quitting alcohol. It’s about changing the way we connect. Every week, host Margy Schaller sits down with leaders, entrepreneurs, physicians, psychologists, authors, hospitality innovators, event professionals, sober coaches, and everyday changemakers who are challenging the idea that alcohol is the price of belonging. Together, they explore alcohol-free living, sober leadership, inclusive events, workplace culture, hospitality, wellness, recovery, and authentic human connection—proving that when connection comes first, everyone belongs.

Publisher

Sober Life Rocks

Category

education · health & fitness

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

9 Jan 2024

Latest episode

22 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

117 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   22 Oct 2026

   Does Being Sober Have to Become Your Identity?

   I was looking at Jason Lyman’s Instagram before our podcast interview, trying to figure out how I wanted to introduce him. He’s a Realtor, a speaker, a father, a CrossFitter and an active member of the Sober Motivation community. Depending on which post I looked at, I could have come away with a completely different impression of what mattered most in his life. And then it occurred to me that maybe I was asking the wrong question. Why did I feel the need to figure out which part of his identity was the most important? Jason is sober, and that’s a significant part of his story. But it isn’t the only interesting thing about him, and I think there’s something worth exploring in that distinction. https://youtu.be/9yINDiNrLWs The enormous middle we don’t talk about enough For decades, we’ve had a fairly familiar cultural picture of sobriety. Someone develops a serious problem with alcohol, gets help, enters recovery and becomes a person in recovery. That identity can be an important source of support, belonging and purpose. More recently, we’ve seen another picture emerge. Someone stops drinking, discovers how much better life can be without alcohol and builds a public identity around that choice. They might start a business, create a community, write a book or devote their social media presence to helping others explore an alcohol-free life. There’s nothing wrong with either picture. Both have contributed enormously to changing the conversation about alcohol. But what about everybody in the enormous middle? The Realtors, executives, teachers, parents, artists and people in just about every other walk of life who don’t drink but haven’t made sobriety the organizing principle of their lives. They aren’t necessarily hiding their choice. They simply have other things going on. When I talked with Jason, I realized how rarely we hear from that group, even though they may represent one of the most important parts of normalizing sober choices. Jason is involved in sober communities and speaks openly about his experience, but he also spends his days selling houses, raising his daughters, exercising, building relationships and figuring out what he wants his life to look like next. He told me that sobriety had “lifted the cloud” and allowed him to fully shine. I found that fascinating because he wasn’t suggesting that getting sober had magically created a new person. It had given him more freedom to explore the person he already was, and perhaps some versions of himself he hadn’t yet discovered. When a choice becomes a label We humans do love our categories, don’t we? We want to know whether someone is a recovering alcoholic, sober curious, alcohol-free, a social drinker or something else entirely. Sometimes those labels are genuinely useful. They help people find support, communicate their choices and recognize others with shared experiences. But labels can also become expectations. If someone publicly identifies as sober, do we begin to assume that sobriety should be central to everything they do? Do we expect their friendships or professional interests to revolve around it? And if they don’t want that, does it somehow make their choice less meaningful? I don’t think it does. One of the things Jason talked about was the difference between saying “I’m not drinking right now” and “I don’t drink.” For him, that distinction matters because he isn’t treating sobriety as a temporary restriction or something he needs to negotiate every time he walks into a networking event. He simply doesn’t drink. And that made me think about how many ordinary choices we make without feeling obliged to build an identity around them. Someone might be vegetarian without making vegetarianism the subject of every conversation. Another person might be devoted to fitness without wanting to be known primarily as an athlete. We can make decisions that profoundly influence how we live without expecting those decisions to explain everything about us. Of course, alcohol is different in one important respect. Drinking has become so embedded in our social and professional culture that choosing not to participate can still invite questions, assumptions and occasionally uncomfortable conversations. That is precisely why I think the enormous middle matters. What would normalization actually look like? At Sober Life Rocks, Laura and I talk constantly about normalizing sober choices. It’s been our mission from the beginning, but conversations like the one I had with Jason keep challenging me to think more carefully about what that really means. Because normalization isn’t necessarily about getting more people to identify as sober. And it certainly isn’t about suggesting that people who drink are making the wrong choice. It’s about creating a culture where the choice itself becomes unremarkable. Imagine attending a professional networking event where nobody thinks twice about whether you’re holding a glass of wine, sparkling water or a beautifully made alcohol-free cocktail. You don’t have to explain yourself, reassure anyone that you’re still fun, or answer questions about whether something terrible happened to make you stop drinking. You can simply be there for the reason you came: to meet people, build relationships, learn something or enjoy yourself. That may sound like a small change, but I think it represents something much bigger. For years, alcohol has been treated as a standard ingredient in connection. It’s part of how we celebrate, network, entertain clients, relax after work and mark important occasions. When someone opts out, we sometimes treat the choice as though it requires an explanation. What if it didn’t? Jason’s experience offers an interesting glimpse of that possibility. He works in real estate, an industry where happy hours and networking events frequently involve alcohol. He doesn’t avoid those spaces, and he doesn’t feel that his decision not to drink needs to become the central topic when he’s there. That doesn’t mean the journey to that point was simple. In fact, the more we talked, the more interested I became in what he had to let go of beyond alcohol, including some of the assumptions he’d carried about who he was supposed to be. And that’s where I want to leave his story for now, because I think it’s worth hearing him tell it. Making room for the whole person There’s another reason this conversation matters to me. When I finally began talking publicly about my own sobriety after keeping it private for more than eighteen years, I was making a deliberate choice. I wanted to use my experience to help normalize sober choices and make it easier for other people to talk about theirs. But I’ve also spent decades as a speaker coach, business owner, wife, mother and someone who is still figuring out what she wants to do when she grows up. I don’t want any one of those identities to erase the others. And I wouldn’t want that for Jason, either. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether the future of sober inclusion has less to do with creating a bigger category of sober people and more to do with making room for people to be exactly who they are. Some will find tremendous purpose in making sobriety their life’s work. Others will find community in recovery programs. And many will simply get on with their lives, making choices that work for them without feeling any particular need to explain those choices to the rest of us. All of those possibilities deserve room. I asked Jason what he hoped would become completely unremarkable about sobriety five years from now. His answer, and the conversation that followed, brought us right back to the assumptions people make about drinking, identity and what it means to change. We also explored a question that I think reaches far beyond alcohol: once you’ve made a big change in your life, how do you decide which parts of your old identity to keep and which ones you’re ready to leave behind? That’s a much more complicated conversation, and one I hope you’ll hear for yourself. Listen to my full conversation with Jason Lyman on Sober Life Rocks → [EPISODE LINK] The post Does Being Sober Have to Become Your Identity? (https://soberliferocks.com/does-being-sober-have-to-become-your-identity/) first appeared on Sober Life Rocks (https://soberliferocks.com).

2. 

   15 Oct 2026

   Sobriety vs. Healing: Why Getting Sober Is Only the Beginning

   I was talking with a girlfriend recently about how it seems like almost everyone we know is just hanging on right now. Not necessarily falling apart or in crisis, but doing what needs to be done, getting through the day and keeping things moving. It got me thinking about the difference between surviving and healing. Most of us know how to survive. We push through, compartmentalize, tell ourselves we’re fine and get really good at functioning while carrying things we haven’t actually dealt with. Healing asks something different of us. It asks us to slow down long enough to notice what’s still there. For those of us who have stopped drinking, that raises an interesting question: What’s the difference between getting sober and actually healing? That question became the heart of my conversation with Wendy Grijalva, a fitness instructor and yoga, meditation and tai chi teacher who works both in recovery and in the broader community. Before we ever recorded, Wendy said something that stopped me: “Sobriety gave me the opportunity to heal. Sobriety didn’t heal me.” There’s a lot packed into that distinction. https://youtu.be/mpsWX0Mvsto When getting sober doesn’t fix everything I understood immediately what Wendy meant because I remember being terrified of this very thing when I got sober. My parents had gifted me with what I sometimes jokingly call a kinder, gentler intervention, and at one point the man I was talking with asked me what I was so afraid of. My answer was essentially: You don’t understand what’s in there. I imagined everything I had pushed down over the years sitting inside some enormous Pandora’s box. Alcohol helped me keep the lid on it. If we took alcohol away and opened the box, I genuinely wasn’t sure I would ever be able to put myself back together again. Wendy knew that fear too. She described a therapist noticing how quickly she could shut down her emotions when she started to cry. Wendy believed there was so much broken inside her that if she allowed all of it to come out, she might shatter completely. She told me she was almost willing to stay miserable rather than find out what was really in there. I wonder how often we do some version of that. Not necessarily with alcohol. Maybe it’s work, food, busyness, perfectionism, taking care of everyone else or staying in a situation that doesn’t work anymore. We can become remarkably attached to the coping mechanisms we know, even when they’re hurting us, because at least we understand how they work. For Wendy, sobriety was essential. But it wasn’t the end of the work. Some of what she needed to heal from had happened long before alcohol entered the picture. Removing alcohol didn’t erase childhood trauma, grief, fear or the ways she had learned to protect herself. It simply gave her the opportunity—and eventually the willingness—to look at them. Maybe sobriety doesn’t owe us a life without pain. Maybe what it gives us is the chance to experience our lives without continually running from the pain that’s already there. If I heal from this, who am I without it? There was another part of our conversation that I didn’t expect to find quite so interesting. Years ago, in early sobriety, I was in a group counseling session where we were asked to write down the thing we most didn’t want anyone to know—the demon we most didn’t want to face. We folded the papers, put them into a hat and then each pulled out someone else’s. The counselor asked us whether we’d rather have the problem we’d just pulled out or have our own back. Most of us wanted ours back. It sounds ridiculous until you think about it. We knew our own demons. We knew how to live with them. We’d built behaviors around them and explanations for ourselves because of them. In some cases, they’d even become part of our identities. Wendy and I started talking about something I don’t hear discussed very often: If I really do heal from this, who am I without it? Wendy has had to ask that question in profound ways. She has experienced childhood trauma, struggled with eating disorders and self-harm, once weighed 350 pounds, and lost her husband to suicide. Some of those experiences still travel with her even though she has done tremendous work to heal. She isn’t pretending they didn’t happen. She also isn’t willing to let them define the boundaries of the life she gets to have now. And that led to the line from our conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about. “I’m managing more than I’m suffering.” Wendy still experiences anxiety. Depression can still sneak up on her. A smell can suddenly transport her back to a memory of her marriage or her husband. Getting sober, becoming physically healthier and learning mindfulness didn’t magically erase trauma and grief. But when she described her life today, she said: “I’m managing more than I’m suffering.” That may be one of the most useful definitions of healing I’ve heard. It doesn’t mean it never hurts anymore. It doesn’t mean I’ve fixed myself or I’ve moved on. It means the pain can still show up without running the whole show. Wendy has another way of saying it: she’s healing more than she’s struggling. I like the room those ideas leave for us to be human. We can be healing and happy. Healing and successful. Healing and helping other people. Healing and building something new. We don’t have to wait until every scar disappears before we’re allowed to have a big, beautiful life. And maybe that was the flaw in the fear Wendy and I both had all those years ago. We were terrified that if everything came out, we wouldn’t be able to put ourselves back together. But back to what? The person who had learned to push everything down? The person who needed alcohol to cope? The person who became so practiced at functioning that nobody could tell how much was happening underneath? Maybe healing isn’t about getting back to who we were at all. Wendy’s story certainly isn’t about eliminating pain from her life. It’s about learning what to do when that pain still shows up—and discovering that some of the very experiences she once thought might shatter her have become part of how she connects with and helps other people. That’s the part I don’t want to tell for her. In our full Sober Life Rocks conversation, Wendy and I talk about what she’s still healing from today, what losing more than 220 pounds did and didn’t change, how movement unexpectedly became part of her life, what she does when trauma still shows up in her body, and why she brings all of it—not some polished, finished version of herself—into the people and communities she serves. If you’ve ever accomplished the thing you thought was going to fix everything only to discover there was still more underneath it, I think you’ll find something in Wendy’s story. Getting sober may open the door. Healing is what we get to do once we walk through it. Stay connected with Wendy: Instagram: @breezywend Facebook: Wendy Grijalva TikTok: @wendy.grijalva5 The post Sobriety vs. Healing: Why Getting Sober Is Only the Beginning (https://soberliferocks.com/sobriety-vs-healing-why-getting-sober-is-only-the-beginning/) first appeared on Sober Life Rocks (https://soberliferocks.com).

3. 

   8 Oct 2026

   When the Life You Worked So Hard to Save No Longer Fits

   When Sarah Treacy stopped drinking in 2020, she wasn’t trying to reinvent her entire life. In many ways, she was trying to preserve it. She had spent years building a successful corporate career, and when she got sober, she largely kept that part of her story private. She returned to work, kept moving forward and built the stability she had been looking for. From the outside, things were working exactly as they were supposed to. The problem was that, after a while, the life she had worked so hard to save didn’t feel quite like the life she wanted anymore. When Sarah and I recently sat down for the Sober Life Rocks podcast, that part of her story immediately caught my attention. We hear so much about what happens when someone realizes alcohol isn’t working for them anymore. We hear about the decision to stop, the early days without it and the process of learning how to navigate life differently. What we don’t hear nearly as much about is what happens several years later, when not drinking is no longer the central challenge. Sarah had reached a place where sobriety was working. Her career was successful. Nothing was falling apart. And yet a question had begun quietly following her around: Is this it? https://youtu.be/mMfuPVMtpXI Sarah has a name for that period now. She calls it the “sobriety plateau,” and the phrase captures something I suspect many people experience without knowing how to describe it. There can come a point when the life you were so grateful to reclaim starts asking something new of you. The question is no longer simply how to stay sober. It becomes what you actually want to do with the life sobriety gave you. For Sarah, the answer didn’t arrive all at once. One of the turning points came when she traveled to Zion for an adventure recovery retreat. She hadn’t been looking for a life that revolved around sobriety, and she certainly wasn’t interested in making “sober” her entire identity. Her assumptions about sober community weren’t particularly appealing to her either. She imagined people sitting around talking about drinking, recovery and everything they had left behind. What she found in Zion was something entirely different. She found women hiking together, exploring together, laughing together and challenging themselves. Sobriety was something they shared, but it wasn’t the only thing happening in the room—or on the trail. They were building friendships while doing something with their lives, and Sarah began to experience the kind of connection she hadn’t realized she was missing. Walking alongside people opened conversations differently. The usual walls seemed to come down. She began to see that sober community didn’t have to mean building a life around the fact that you no longer drink. It could mean having the freedom to build a life around everything you now have the ability to do. That experience didn’t send Sarah home with a perfectly mapped-out new life. If anything, it left her with bigger questions. She had spent two decades building her career, and admitting that she might want something else meant confronting the possibility of leaving something that wasn’t actually broken. There was no dramatic collapse forcing her hand. She would have to choose change simply because the life she had built no longer fit the person she was becoming. That can be much harder than walking away from something obviously bad. When everything looks fine from the outside, deciding you want something different requires trusting yourself without having a crisis to justify it. As Sarah began working through those questions, she also started looking differently at the role alcohol had once played in her life. What she had previously thought of as simply being social, having fun or keeping the party going had also been connected to something deeper—a desire to belong and to be accepted. Without alcohol in the picture, she had an opportunity to examine who she was when she wasn’t constructing herself around what she thought other people wanted from her. The more she accepted her own history, imperfections and choices, the less interested she became in asking the room for permission to be herself. Eventually, Sarah began sharing pieces of her story publicly. She didn’t wake up one morning and decide sobriety would become her entire identity. She simply stopped working quite so hard to keep that part of herself hidden. As she became more comfortable letting people see the whole person rather than the carefully separated pieces, another possibility began to emerge. Maybe the thing she had once preferred nobody knew about her could actually become part of how she connected with and helped other people. That evolution eventually became (https://soberadventurecollective.com/)Sobriety Is the New Epic (https://soberadventurecollective.com/), a series Sarah created around a conversation that goes beyond getting sober and asks what people can build, experience and become afterward. I’m especially excited about what she is creating because I’ll be joining the series as a speaker. The reason I said yes is closely connected to what we are building at Sober Life Rocks. I’m interested in the moment when not drinking stops being the entire conversation and becomes one choice within a much larger life. Sarah initially wanted to highlight people doing extraordinary things in sobriety, but along the way she began noticing that the visible accomplishments were only part of the story. Behind the adventures, businesses, communities and big changes were much quieter things: learning to regulate emotions, building confidence, developing self-trust, changing habits and becoming willing to be uncomfortable long enough to discover what might be on the other side. Inspiration can show us what is possible, but eventually we have to stop watching other people change their lives and decide what we want to do with our own. That is where Sarah’s story became particularly interesting to me, because the question underneath our conversation wasn’t really about sobriety at all. It was about what happens when an identity, career, relationship, habit or version of yourself has done its job and you realize you’re ready for something different. We often assume we need a dramatic reason to change. Something needs to fail. Something needs to hurt badly enough. Something needs to prove that staying where we are is no longer an option. Sarah’s experience suggests there may be another way. Sometimes a life can be perfectly good and still no longer be yours. The reason Sarah originally stopped drinking doesn’t have to be the same reason she continues choosing this life years later. That “why” has been allowed to grow with her. Today the conversation is less about what she removed and much more about what became possible once she did. Maybe that is one of the places our larger conversation about sobriety is headed too. We don’t have to spend the rest of our lives standing at the moment we decided to stop drinking. We can keep walking. We can become professionals, parents, adventurers, creators, leaders, friends and people who happen not to drink. We can build communities where alcohol isn’t the price of admission without making sobriety the only thing everyone has in common. We can appreciate what sobriety changed without allowing it to define the boundaries of everything that comes next. My conversation with Sarah went into places I haven’t tried to unpack completely here, because they are worth hearing from her. We talked about what it felt like to consider walking away from a career she had spent twenty years building, what happened when she began sharing her sobriety more openly, the shame that stayed with her longer than she expected, and the difference between consuming inspiration and actually taking action. Those parts of Sarah’s story are where the conversation becomes much more personal, and they are also where I think many listeners will recognize pieces of themselves. I’ll also be continuing this conversation with Sarah through Sobriety Is the New Epic, where I’m honored to be joining her as a speaker. It feels like a natural extension of what Sarah and I explored on the podcast and of what we talk about so often at Sober Life Rocks: sober choices can open doors, but each of us still gets to decide where we want those doors to lead. Sarah went into sobriety focused on what she needed to leave behind. Several years later, she found herself standing in a good life and realizing she was allowed to want more from it. That led her to a question that has stayed with me since our conversation, and I think it’s worth sitting with whether you’ve been sober for twenty years, twenty days or have never considered yourself sober at all. Instead of only asking what you want to stop doing, maybe it’s worth asking what you want to become available for. For Sarah, that question became: What am I sober for? The answer is still unfolding. Maybe that’s the point. Stay Connected to Sarah: https://soberadventurecollective.com The post When the Life You Worked So Hard to Save No Longer Fits (https://soberliferocks.com/when-the-life-you-worked-so-hard-to-save-no-longer-fits/) first appeared on Sober Life Rocks (https://soberliferocks.com).

Who has been a guest on Sober Life Rocks

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Jake Jones
• Todd Crandell
• Morris Mugo
• Kate Bee
• Saul Malek

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

132,779

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

3.7 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 56 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

67

Social presence

0

YouTube

82

Engagement

32

Contact Sober Life Rocks

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Shows with a similar audience

• 

  SOBER AS F*CK

• 

  Tribe Sober - inspiring an alcohol free life!

• 

  The Hello Someday Podcast For Sober Curious Women

• 

  Through The Glass Recovery Podcast

• 

  Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories

• 

  Sober Powered

Questions about Sober Life Rocks