Euphoric Alcohol-Free

Eight years in, and I've been having some of the most honest conversations with my clients lately. The kind where you realize the things that held you back the longest were the things nobody ever just said plainly at the beginning. So that's what this episode is. Six truths I learned the hard way, some in year one, some embarrassingly recently, that I'm handing to you now so you don't have to go t...

Eight years ago, two women who had just gone alcohol-free pointed themselves at opposite walls of an apartment, clipped on lapel mics they could barely hear themselves through, and recorded the first episode of Euphoric the podcast. I couldn't have told you then what this show would become. 348 episodes later, I wanted to sit down and talk about what all of these conversations have actually taught...

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? An actress? An astronaut? A teacher? As kids, we don't understand the career landscape.  We build our first sense of "what I want to be when I grow up" out of a small handful of visible or memorable options, because that's all we've ever seen. But we do subconsciously understand archetypes. When a five-year-old says she wants to be an astrona...

My mind has been completely consumed with book writing lately, and I wanted to sit down and share something I keep seeing over and over again in my community: so many women who have gone alcohol-free, suddenly feel this surge of creativity and a pull toward writing.  If that's you, this episode is for you. I'm sharing five telltale signs that you have a bestselling book inside of you, and they mig...

I submitted my second book proposal to my agent yesterday, and I am on cloud nine. This book has been living in my head for years. But the truth is, I didn't make real traction on it until this summer, which also happened to be the hardest summer I've had in a long time.  Huxley passed at the end of May. The ocean swells in Southern California were so dangerous I couldn't even get in the water, wh...

I just got back from five weeks in Europe with my parents, and I want to take you behind the scenes.  My parents are in their 80s. My dad has been through two bouts of stage four cancer and is in remission. My mom, knock on wood, is healthy. How long will that last? How much longer can I see the world with them? This trip happened in the shadow of losing Huxley, my soul dog, which meant I went int...

Peter McLaughlin was given a twin diagnosis 23 years ago: Lyme disease and leukemia on the same day. The doctors told him if he was lucky, he had 10 years. They didn't know what caused it and they didn't know how to cure it. So he went looking himself. What he found in the depths of his own psyche became the foundation of an entire life's work in hypnotherapy, past life regression, Havening, and s...

Ellie White's 40s did not go gently. A pandemic upended her life in London and moved her to the Sussex countryside. She fell in love with the idea of becoming a mother for the first time at 43, found out she was pregnant, and very sadly lost her son at 22 weeks. Less than a year later, she had a miscarriage.  She saw a photo of herself on a hiking holiday in Switzerland and didn't recognize the wo...

Michael O'Brien was 33 years old, a father of two young daughters, a lifelong cyclist, and a corporate executive chasing the next version of success when a distracted driver in a Ford Explorer crossed into his lane and hit him head-on at 40 miles per hour in New Mexico. His trauma team had no idea how he survived. His first surgery took 13 hours. He needed 36 units of blood. The doctors told his w...

JD completed the Epic Deca, which is 10 Ironman triathlons in 10 days across all six Hawaiian islands, and became one of three people in the world to ever finish it. He sold his house to fund it. He came home to a storage unit because he couldn't afford anywhere else to live. And he says the hardest part wasn't the race itself. JD is a military veteran, an engineer, a certified naturopathic practi...

Imagine going alcohol-free in a country where wine is heritage, champagne is identity, and the only framework anyone has ever offered you is either you're an alcoholic or you're fine. That's the world Lorraine was living in when she started her Dry January four years ago in Paris, and decided this time to actually ask herself why she was drinking rather than just white-knuckling a month off. What...

It's our first in-studio podcast! Be sure to watch the version on the Euphoric youtube channel.  Jessa Frances De La Rosa accidentally became one of the first alcohol-free beverage consultants in the country, helped launch one of the first non-alcoholic bottle shops in the South, and built an entire career out of weaving together things that didn't obviously belong together, until they did. She's...

Anytime I get to sit across from someone who works with energy and the spiritual world at this level, I go straight for the question I most want answered: how does alcohol affect spiritual insights? Dallisa is a psychic medium, intuition teacher, and founder of Spirit and Spark, and her answer to that question gave me chills.  Her explanation is straightforward: everything vibrates at a frequency,...

Grief is a strange thing to show up for publicly when you're still right in the middle of it, and honestly, parts of what I'm going through right now feel so private and so deep that I'm not even sure I have the language for it yet. But I felt called to share, because some of this might help someone. A few weeks ago I recorded an episode about losing Huxley unexpectedly on Memorial Day. If you hav...

Lisa Sykes calls herself the Beyonce of the birth world, and once you hear her talk, you understand exactly why. She's the number one business coach for doulas, midwives, and birth professionals worldwide, and she built that entire identity by refusing to do things the way everyone told her she had to. Lisa spent 15 years as a doula after leaving a corporate career in IT following a redundancy and...

Ashley Roberts graduated from the 5x Certification and has built something really beautiful since then, a feminine embodiment movement practice rooted in dance, somatic work, and helping women find their way back into their bodies after years of operating purely from logic and achievement. In this episode, we get into what feminine embodiment actually means, because it gets thrown around so much o...

In honor of dry July, Karolina is debunking the most common myths and objections about going alcohol-free. What if everything you believed about "normal drinking" was a lie? Society puts "normal drinking" on a pedestal: the cultured person who enjoys just one glass of wine over a nice dinner. But is this achievable or even desirable?  It turns out that 60% of regular drinkers overdrink, and it's a...

I recently lost one of the greatest loves of my life, my soul dog Huxley.  He passed really unexpectedly on Memorial Day. He was 11 and a half. He was fine that morning. He ate breakfast, he cuddled with us, he sat in the sun while we were at the pool. By that evening, he was gone. He had massive internal bleeding and we had no idea anything was wrong until his gums went pale and we were racing ac...

Is drinking really tied to our cultural roots, or is it a habit we can choose to reshape? Since 2018, Karolina's been crisscrossing the globe, proving that you can experience the vibrant charm of cities like Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo without a drop of alcohol. Imagine enjoying the same joys of a wine country weekend or a sunset dinner on the patio without the next day fog. Detaching from alcohol no...

My first book came from 15-minute morning writing sprints in a notepad before I even brushed my teeth. This second one makes me cry almost every time I open it.  That's probably the best way I can explain why writing it has been so completely different, and why I wanted to bring you into that process right now, while I'm still in it. I'm currently writing my second book. I have an agent, I have a...

Rachel McElreath is 28 years old, graduated from the 5x Certification, and has already lived more lives than most people do in a lifetime. She started drinking at 15, Halloween night in Atlanta, a bottle of Hennessy handed to her by a friend, parents in crisis at home, and spent the next decade building a life that looked fine from the outside and was quietly falling apart underneath. She held job...

This week I'm doing something a little different. Just me sharing what's been on my heart after celebrating my mom's 80th birthday. My husband spent four nights making 200 handmade pierogi from scratch to surprise her. I put together a slideshow of almost every photo that exists of her life, black and white photos of a little girl in postwar Warsaw, all the way through to the woman she is today, w...

You're ambitious and driven. You show up. And yet something feels off. Fatigue, the brain fog that won't lift, the periods that wreck you, and constant overwhelm.  Your doctor told you everything looks fine. But you know it's not.  In this episode, Karolina sits down with Leslie Jackson, functional nutritionist and founder of the Becoming Her movement, to talk about what's actually happening in th...

Are you holding back your story, your transformation, and your insights because you don't want to be too "salesy"? Premium selling is one of the most underrated and important skills you can master, ESPECIALLY if you know you're meant to build something bigger than yourself. And it doesn't have to have an ick factor or feel like bro marketing. When selling stops feeling uncomfortable, it can start...

Nervous system regulation is one of the hottest topics right now, and most successful women don't understand how it's showing up in their life. Kat Cynewski and I are talking about how your body responds to pressure, growth, and visibility, and why even the things you want can feel super uncomfortable to hold. We also get into the type of buzzy energy high performers use to show up on stages and l...