Renée Adams walked into 216 Coworking in downtown Cartersville barely two weeks removed from a cross-state move, boxes still half unpacked back home in Woodstock, and by the end of her conversation with host Logan Lewis it was clear she'd brought a lot more than moving stress with her. Renée is the co-founder of Nosedive, a podcast and content brand built around the idea of "numbing less and living more," and she's turned her own sober-curious journey into a career consulting with non-alcoholic beverage brands on everything from can copy to flavor formulation. What started as small talk about a chaotic house-hunt turned into a wide-ranging conversation about corporate burnout, the psychology of a glass of wine at five o'clock, and why nobody actually needs a drink in hand to be the life of the party.
A Whirlwind Move Back to North Georgia
Renée spent twelve or thirteen years in Savannah, a city she moved to when her husband was stationed there in the military. They loved it enough to stay after he got out, but a recent job opportunity pulled the couple back toward North Georgia, where they'd both grown up. The timeline still makes her laugh in disbelief: they listed the Savannah house, had one showing, and had an offer the next day. "We didn't have to have like a bunch of showings and people coming through the house," she said, crediting a realtor named Joe for finding them a home in Woodstock just as fast. They closed on the Savannah house on a Wednesday and closed on the new one two days later. "I don't know if I would have it any other way, honestly," Renée said, "the quicker you can get that shit done, the better."
Turning 30 and Learning to Say No
Renée had been thirty for about a week and a half when she sat down with Logan, and she was already feeling the shift. Looking back on her twenties, she described them as pure noise: people-pleasing, letting other people's expectations steer her choices, saying yes to everything. "I think a lot of my twenties was a lot of people pleasing, a lot of others' expectations dictating sort of how I lived my life," she said. Thirty, by contrast, felt like permission to stop bending the knee. "No is a sentence," she told Logan. "It's like super, super powerful, I think, more than people realize. And you're not hurting other people if you're like, I don't really want to do that." She connected the shift directly to cutting back on alcohol, describing it as a kind of full-circle return to who she was before she started worrying so much about what everyone else thought.
From Powerlifting to Sober Curious
The pivot away from drinking didn't start with a rock-bottom moment. It started with macros. Renée is a competitive powerlifter, and when she began tracking her nutrition seriously for a competition, she noticed she was rearranging meals around a glass of wine. "I was moving food around so that I could have a glass of wine," she said. "I was like, you know, that's probably not good." Around the same time, her close friend Mara Demaro was launching a beta program as a sober curious coach. Renée's first reaction was blunt: "What the fuck is sober curiosity? I was like, I've never heard of that before. Only heard of AA. I was like, AA is not for me." Mara's answer stuck with her — sober curiosity is simply being curious about your relationship with alcohol, nothing more clinical than that. Renée went through the program, discovered what she calls "the pink cloud" (everything heightened, the trees looking extra green), and by her second year had reduced her drinking by roughly 90 percent.
Leaving Corporate's Golden Handcuffs Behind
Before any of that, Renée spent seven years as an account manager at a promotional advertising agency, running herself into the ground in high-level sales. When she told her supervisor she didn't want to check email on vacation, she got a name for what she was living: "This is golden handcuffs. Like this is what it is." She left, tried personal training, then went back to corporate — this time in procurement at Gulfstream Aerospace, which she called "corporate corporate." The final straw wasn't one bad day; it was looking at her superiors and realizing how exhausted and miserable they looked. "I'm like, that is my future. No, no thanks," she said. "They don't give a shit about the employees. You're a number."
Building Nosedive and Making Non-Alcoholic Life Normal
Nosedive started as a workshop-based business, teaching collegiate athletes and corporate teams how to navigate social events without drinking, before it evolved into the podcast Renée now runs largely on her own after her original co-host stepped back. These days her non-alc world extends well past the mic: she consults with emerging CPG brands on how to word their cans so shoppers understand the product in the two or three seconds they have at the shelf, and she's started tasting and giving formulation feedback too — "a glorified taste tester," as she put it. Renée doesn't identify as fully alcohol-free; she calls herself "soberish," open to functional beverages, low-dose THC drinks, and adaptogens like ashwagandha, as long as people stay honest about why they're reaching for anything in the first place. Her bigger point was about the story we've all been sold. "You are who you are with or without alcohol," she said. "I think it's something that we've been sold as a society" — that you need a drink to be fun, to unwind, to be the life of the party — when really it's the opposite: you're already that person, amplified.
Listen to the Full Conversation
From a two-day house closing to golden handcuffs to the science behind a good non-alcoholic can, Renée Adams brought stories, hard-won lessons, and more than a few laughs to episode 493 of Your Morning Drive. Catch the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and follow Nosedive for more on sober curiosity and life after corporate.
Listen to Episode #493
Catch the full conversation with Renée Adams on Your Morning Drive, wherever you listen.
