In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, host Cheryl McColgan interviews Ian Anderson, founder of the Sunnyside app, which focuses on alcohol moderation and mindfulness. Ian shares his personal journey, including his family’s struggles with alcohol, and discusses the impact of the pandemic on drinking habits.

The conversation highlights the importance of harm reduction and the shift in understanding alcohol use and recovery. Ian explains how Sunnyside works as a tool for individuals looking to build healthier relationships with alcohol. Ian discusses the evolution of Sunnyside, an app designed to help users moderate their alcohol consumption. He emphasizes the importance of personalization, gradual change, and the power of tracking drinking habits.

The discussion also covers the upcoming Dry January initiative, which aims to provide inclusive challenges for users looking to cut back on alcohol. Ian highlights the benefits of using Sunnyside, including improved mental health, better sleep, and financial savings, while encouraging listeners to join the community for support and guidance.

Go to HealNourishGrow.com/sunnyside to join the free Dryish/Dry January Challenge. You can choose to go fully dry, dry on weekdays or any number of other custom options! Follow Sunnyside on Instagram here.

Takeaways

• The pandemic increased awareness of alcohol health issues.


• Harm reduction is a crucial approach to alcohol use.


• AA has a low success rate for long-term recovery.


• The definition of recovery has evolved to include moderation.


• Many people want to drink less but don’t know how.


• Tracking alcohol consumption can lead to healthier habits.


• Sunnyside aims to be a supportive tool for change.


• Understanding alcohol’s health effects can empower better choices.


• Personalization is key; users set their own goals and track progress.


• Gradual reduction in alcohol consumption is more effective than immediate cessation.


• Tracking drinks helps create conscious interference and awareness.


• Dry January offers various challenges to accommodate different user preferences.


• Community support enhances the experience of moderating alcohol consumption.


• Sunnyside provides a safe, anonymous space for users to seek help.


• The app encourages users to reflect on their drinking patterns and triggers.


• Sunnyside aims to create lasting behavior change, not just temporary fixes.

Watch on YouTube:

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Episode Transcript:

Cheryl McColgan (00:00 .814)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Ian Anderson and this conversation has been a long time coming. He is the founder of Sunnyside, which is a really awesome app that I’ve been checking out for the last couple of years, because you know I like to bring you guys all the things that will help you in your health and wellness journey. But we’re going to save that for little while because Ian has a really interesting backstory and an interesting, I think, perspective on how he created this product to really help people.

And so Ian, I’d love for you to share some of that now, maybe first talk a little bit about your professional background and then like what led you to create this product.

Ian Andersen (00:37 .766)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Cheryl, thanks for having me on the podcast. Like you said, it’s been a long time coming. I’m glad we finally got to make this happen. And it’s always a pleasure just to be able to meet new audiences and offer, you know, my personal story and whatever wisdom I can offer around alcohol health. It’s something that’s really important to me. So.

The product is Sunnyside and it’s an alcohol moderation and mindfulness app. So we will get to that, but I’ll tell you a little bit about my story and how it led me to create this product that tens of thousands of people are using. So professional background, I was born and raised in California.

And I went to school at UC Santa Cruz and studied sort of information systems management. So like kind of the blend of technology and business. I started my career out in web development, which isn’t that exciting. This was many years ago, but I was having a blast at the time. And I kind of weaseled my way into marketing and learned how to help position products to help keep consumers find what they needed.

Fast forward many years later, I started working, I had the opportunity to work at a mobile app company called Mile IQ, which did mileage tracking for people that drove for work, which was pretty neat because we were helping people get their biggest tax deductions. I met some people there that were really instrumental in helping me kind of navigate the business world at that point. They were startup founders and that sort of gave me some of the early.

skills or at least confidence that I needed to branch out and start Sunnyside. So I call myself a sort of marketing generalist by trade and at Sunnyside I lead marketing and growth along with many other things. We wear a lot of hats because we’re still a small company where I call us like a medium-sized startup at this point. We’re based in California technically but we have employees all over the world.

Cheryl McColgan (02:45 .166)
Yeah, and it’s such a, you’ve done a great job with the marketing part because I’ll just share, I came across this. I think during, I think it might’ve been my first thought during the pandemic. I don’t know what year you started, but I think there was a little push during that time because especially in my health and wellness space, you know, it really started to blow up on social media, how much additional trouble people were having with their drinking habits during the pandemic and how that really increased during that time. And then fast forward kind of to today.

Ian Andersen (02:49 .127)
Thank you.

Cheryl McColgan (03:14 .882)
the last year or two years, mean, Andrew Huberman, he’s a huge podcast and a lot of other people have really been bringing this idea about alcohol health to the forefront. And I think it’s caused a lot of people to really start looking at their behaviors and just noticing, you know, if it’s really serving them and kind of looking for tools to help them along, to make them either more mindful, which is, think is one of the great things about your app. It’s not necessarily like quit it all together.

But it might just be like, hey, you’re going out for the night and normally you might go a little crazy with your friends and have five or six drinks, but it’s kind of just touching base with you to remind you to just be more mindful and be in the moment and make good choices. So I think it’s a very interesting product in that regard and really useful for this new push into the wellness space about alcohol is a poison. The previous episode I had on alcohol, we mentioned that it’s a neurotoxin. There’s really

Ian Andersen (03:46 .609)
Yeah.

Cheryl McColgan (04:10 .87)
not a lot going for it other than the social aspects that a lot of people do find relaxation in those things in it. But I do think it’s just great that you’re bringing this idea to be more mindful about it to the forefront and just offering more education in the space about drinking habits. Just so if you make the you know what you’re getting into, I guess, is kind of part of the point.

Ian Andersen (04:31 .632)
Yeah, absolutely. You said a lot of great stuff there. I first want to recognize that the Andrew Huberman podcast on alcohol was, I had already been digging into alcohol for two years before that came out and I was still blown away. So I think I like to think of Sunnyside as an essential tool in your toolkit for building healthier habits around alcohol. But I think it’s best when used in a combination with something else in your life, whether it’s an additional

piece of education, like a really great podcast or a therapist, or maybe even just connecting with a friend on the idea. Because alcohol is the way that it integrates into our lives is very personal and sometimes feels complex. So Sunnyside, we like to think of ourselves as the front door for anyone looking to make a change when it comes to alcohol, whether they plan to eventually quit, or maybe just try to find

moderation with alcohol in their lives. We want to be the place where tens of thousands and eventually millions of people start making that change on their alcohol health journey. And we will provide all the tools and sort of programming to help you build that healthy relationship. I’d love to get into more detail when the time is right, but we can talk about like how we actually make that happen.

Yeah, I just wanted to recognize Huberman was a great podcast for me as well. I was pretty blown away and I would I’m still a mindful drinker myself Or rather a drink I still drink alcohol way less now especially since starting Sunnyside and one of the main things for me aside from all the things that we built within Sunnyside is Simply educating myself more about how alcohol actually works. You mentioned that it’s a poison, but it’s also true that it has these sort of

tendencies and addictive qualities that make you seek out more after you start. And one of the biggest learnings for me was to understa