Have you ever dreaded that one awkward moment at the party? The one where you say no to a drink and it gets weird? Or you blurt something out that you instantly want to take back. Most of us try to avoid these awkward moments, which makes sense. But how you relate to awkwardness can really impact your ability to say no to a drink. This is episode 440 and I’m sharing a simple reframe that makes socializing and saying no way easier when things get awkward.

Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit from the inside out. We’re challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink and why it can be hard to resist temptation. No labels, no judgment, just practical tools to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking. Now, here’s your host, Rachel Hart.

Okay, everybody, we are talking about awkwardness today. It’s one of my favorite topics because for a really long time, I truly believed that deep in my heart, I was just an awkward person. And I relied on alcohol so much to help me be less awkward. So, if you relate to either the Connector or the Mask archetypes, this episode is really going to help you. But it’s going to be useful for everyone because most humans don’t enjoy feeling awkward and try to find ways to avoid it. Now, if you’re not sure what your drink archetypes are, you can go to FindYourDrinkType.com, take the free quiz, and get all the information there because understanding your patterns really is the first step to changing your relationship with alcohol.

Now, for so many people, myself included for a very long time, you might find yourself getting stuck on the fact that you want to say no to a drink or you want to cut back, right? Maybe not stop drinking for the rest of your lives, but maybe you just like to be able to go out some nights and say, “You know what? I’m just skipping the drinks tonight,” and not have it be a big deal. But the problem is, it does feel like a big deal. It felt like such a big deal for me. I hear people say this all the time, and I really thought this for a very long time myself.

I believed that saying no to a drink would always be weird. People would always have questions, I didn’t want to answer questions, and it was just easier to just say yes to the drink so I could avoid any awkwardness. And now listen, awkwardness doesn’t just show up in the context of drinking. It shows up in all sorts of places in our lives. That really was kind of a first big realization for me that awkwardness is not a problem. It’s not something that I have to immediately fix. It’s a normal human emotion that everybody experiences sometimes. And so switching my frame from how do I make this go away to I need to learn how to get better at navigating this, it really helped me. It really just kind of latching onto the idea like everybody feels awkward sometimes.

Now, case in point, I live in a neighborhood in San Francisco where there are a lot of families with young kids. It’s great because we have frequent get-togethers. And the other night, I was at a barbecue and I had one of these really awkward moments. Now, keep in mind, I knew everybody there. I like everybody there. I feel comfortable with these people, but I just had a moment where I really put my foot in my mouth.

You know how sometimes you say something and as soon as you say it, you’re like, “Oh my God, can I take that back?” That is what happened to me. I just immediately fell into like, “Why did I say that? What were you thinking, Rachel?” And I couldn’t shake it. It felt so awkward. And on the way home, I was just replaying that moment in my mind over and over again and thinking like, “Oh, Rachel, what’s wrong with you? Why did you say that? Why are you so weird? Why are you so awkward?”

Which by the way, this thought, why are you so awkward? is a thought that I carried with me for a very long time, well before alcohol ever came into my life. And so it’s not surprising for me, even with all of the work that I have done, that it pops up sometimes. My brain developed a really strong groove around that thought and that question, why are you so awkward? And so that’s another thing to just keep in mind that sometimes we’re going to have these old thought patterns pop up even when we’ve done so much work on it.

So this idea that something about me was weird or different or awkward, it’s something that I believed for a really long time, and it popped up again in this moment. And we got home and we put the kids to bed, and when we finally sat down, I told my husband what happened. And he said something to me that truly blew my mind. He goes, “Yeah, I always just expect some percentage of my interactions to be awkward.” And I was like, “What? You do?” Like it so blew my mind when he said that because he wasn’t awkward about being awkward. He had just normalized it. To him, it was just a math problem. To him it was like, yeah, of course, a certain percentage of my interactions are going to be awkward because awkwardness just is a part of social interactions. So there was no personal failing. To him, it was just, I don’t know, statistics.

Now, even though I have done so much work around this feeling, you know, I have worked on normalizing it. I know that everybody experiences it. Hearing it framed as a percentage, it really shifted something inside of me. Because for so many years, I had leaned on alcohol to deal with feeling awkward. Now, drinking had never removed my fear of being awkward, but once I started drinking, I worried about it less.

Now, I did have plenty of fear about being awkward the next time that I went out. It’s not like the effect that it had on me in the moment meant that I went into future situations feeling more confident. It didn’t work like that. And I often woke up after a night of drinking, really sure that I had done something embarrassing or dumb and questioning, was I weird? Did I overshare?

So this is what really happens with the drink archetypes. Your brain starts to believe that pouring a drink will make everything better and it feels so certain about it. But when you start to really understand and unpack the archetype, what you see happening behind the scenes, it’s actually having the opposite effect. So in the case of the Connector, for example, alcohol is making it harder for you to lower your guard and open up without a drink. And in the case of the Mask, drinking is allowing your insecurities to actually fester and grow.

Again, if you want to learn more about the Connector and the Mask or the six other archetypes, take that free quiz at FindYourDrinkType.com and you’ll get a full breakdown of how each of the eight archetypes work.

So let’s just really boil this down. Awkwardness is a form of fear, but it’s not the bear is chasing me type of fear. It’s social fear. It’s the prediction, oh, I’ve done something or said something that’s going to get me rejected. I won’t belong. And of course, the brain flags this as a problem because historically, belonging to a group is essential for our survival.

I’ve talked about awkwardness on the podcast before and, you know, one of the key takeaways is that awkwardness is a feeling state. It’s not an identity. Right? I believed for the longest time that I was an awkward person. So I adopted it as like, this is just who Rachel is. This is my identity. But you’re not an awkward person. You’re feeling awkward in the moment. And this distinction is so important because of course, identities feel really fixed, but feeling states, they move and change.

Awkwardness is a feeling state that shows up in your body. But now here’s the thing. The feeling state isn’t the problem. It’s your judgment about how you shouldn’t be feeling the way you feel. So you’re immediately judging your behavior as wrong, something that will get you rejected, and also immediately searching for a fix. That was such an important realization for me to see that I so often was viewing everything that I did through the lens of I’m showing up wrong. And the more that I did that and the more that I relied on alcohol to kind of fix that awkward feeling in the moment, the more I was desperate to get out of that feeling, the more my desire grew to get rid of it.

And that’s why my husband’s reframe was so powerful because if you just assume that some percentage of your interactions with other humans is going to be awkward sometimes because it’s just math, then you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just statistics. And I think that we can actually zoom this out and see that it doesn’t just apply to alcohol. I mean, we can look at all the different ways that humans try to escape feeling awkward.

So yeah, sometimes we pour a drink. Sometimes we camp out at the snack table. Sometimes we’re reaching for our phone. There are so many ways that we are trying to use things in our environment to temporarily distract us from how we feel. And that distraction can feel like a relief in the moment, but ultimately your brain still thinks the feeling itself is wrong, and it learns I can’t handle this feeling on my own, which ultimately means your fear of feeling awkward grows.

So here’s the shift I want you to practice. Borrow my husband’s math. Say to yourself before you walk in, you know, at least one moment tonight will feel awkward and that’s normal. That’s just math. And when that awkward moment happens, you can remind yourself, this was always part of the plan tonight because some percentage of human interaction just feels awkward sometimes.

So you can’t erase awkwardness, but you can learn how to manage it skillfully. And when you’re able to do that, you have less fear about the feeling. This is huge. This is such a big shift for people that I work with, realizing that they don’t have to get rid of their negative emotions, which by the way is impossible, they just need to release their fear and judgment about them. And when you release that fear and judgment, that alone can be a huge relief and make it easier when the craving appears to assess it and decide from a calmer place whether or not you want to say yes or no.

So, here are a couple of things you can do. You can chat up the barista, the cashier, the Uber driver, not because you’re trying to prove that it won’t be awkward, but because you’re building the, yeah, it can be awkward and that’s okay. You’re building that muscle. You can work on improving your cringe tolerance, right? When you’re watching TV and that scene makes you want to hide, this happens to me all the time, by the way, I do the work of like, okay, let’s just practice continuing to watch instead of hiding under the covers. Track the sensations in your body. Notice that they crest and fall. You just taught your nervous system, I can ride this out every time you work on this. 

Just naming your awkwardness can be a relief. So I talk about this a lot with cravings, naming and noticing your cravings. We can do the same thing with our emotions. So you can just say like, “Oh, I’m feeling awkward right now.” How normal. I expect some percentage of my interactions to be awkward sometimes. And when awkwardness pops up around drinking, maybe because you don’t want to drink tonight or you don’t want to have another round or you’re worried about the questions that might come up, one of the things that you can do in addition to naming and normalizing, in addition to using this reframe about some percentage of my interactions are just going to feel awkward, you can also dive into your archetypes.

See if you can figure out which one is bubbling up in the moment. And if you want to dive deeper into your archetypes and get more exercises for them, check out the ultimate guide to drinking less. I have so many exercises in there for different archetypes that help with these moments. So I have exercises that help you practice saying no, reframing people’s disappointment that you’re skipping the drinks or not joining them for another round, and challenging the kind of compare and despair and all or nothing thinking that often fuels awkwardness.

And if you want to hear me do a deep dive on unpacking the idea that awkwardness is not your identity, if you want to start to really challenge that thought, if you carry the thought, well, I’m just an awkward person, then I really encourage you to check out episode 159 of the podcast where I go into that.

Remember, when you change your relationship with awkwardness, it becomes a lot easier to keep your commitments around drinking. Nothing can erase all awkward moments from your life. So stop treating it like proof that you did something wrong. Expect a certain percentage of your moments to just be awkward and that’s okay. Ride the sensation in your body the same way that you can ride the wave of the craving. When you do that, you’ll find it easier not only to skillfully get through these moments, but to make better choices around drinking, especially for the Connector and the Mask archetypes. All right, that’s it for today. I’ll see you next week.

Hey guys, you already know that drinking less has plenty of health benefits. But did you know that the work you do to change your relationship with alcohol will help you become more of the person you want to be in every part of your life?

Learning how to manage your brain and your cravings is an investment in your physical, emotional and personal wellbeing. And that’s exactly what’s waiting for you when you join my membership Take a Break.

Whether you want to drink less, drink rarely, or not at all, we’ll help you figure out a relationship with alcohol that works for you. We’ll show you why rules, drink plans, and Dry January so often fail, and give you the tools you need to feel in control and trust yourself.

So, head on over to RachelHart.com and sign up today, because changing the habit is so much easier when you stop trying to go it alone.