Have you ever found yourself chasing the sweet spot when you’re drinking? You know, that place where you feel relaxed and confident or pleasantly buzzed, but not too drunk, or too sloppy, or too out of control. I will tell you, it is really easy to overshoot this moment and then blame yourself for having had too much to drink. But what if the real problem is our failure to understand the transitory nature of pleasure? This is episode 477, and we’re exploring the hidden dynamics behind chasing the perfect buzz and how understanding them can completely change the way you think about drinking.

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.

Alright, today I’m talking about something that a lot of people are so familiar with: trying to find the sweet spot when you are drinking. It’s that point where you’ve consumed enough alcohol to create whatever experience you’re looking for. Maybe that’s feeling more relaxed or pleasantly buzzed or less anxious or more social and outgoing. So, finding that perfect spot without crossing over into having had too much to drink and being too drunk or too sloppy or just waking up the next day and regretting it. I will tell you, I was searching for this place forever.

Now, when I was drinking, I wasn’t always trying to find a sweet spot. I should be really clear about this because sometimes that was not my goal. Sometimes I wanted to get wasted. Sometimes I wanted to cross over into a place of oblivion because, for me, sometimes the Release archetype was activated, and that rarely is an archetype that is in this chase for the sweet spot. But when the Mask archetype was activated for me, I had a very different goal. 

When I was at a social event, when I was meeting people for the first time, when I was on a first date, I wanted to feel at ease and not anxious. I wanted to be confident and not all up in my head, but I did not want to cross over into acting stupid or getting too drunk. I really often was trying to find this Goldilocks moment where things felt just right. 

Now, this is not an episode about how to find your sweet spot. It’s really about understanding the mechanics of why you’re doing this, why you’re caught in this chase, and how and why it so often leads to overshooting. But also, it’s really an episode to help you understand what you’re trying to hold on to. Now, for so many people, the habit of drinking becomes a constant attempt to arrive somewhere. I want you to think about that, a constant attempt to arrive somewhere, and struggling with overshooting that place. So you’re trying to arrive, and then you overshoot, and then what do you do? You end up beating yourself up the next day. And that can be a loop that you can be stuck in for the longest time.

I will tell you that one of the mindset shifts that really helped me get out of this loop was understanding both that the sweet spot is a moving target, but also, even if you don’t overshoot it, it’s not a place that you can reliably stay at. And I’m going to explain that more in-depth. But before I go any further, I just want to say, there is nothing wrong with wanting or desiring the rewarding effects that you get from alcohol. The desire to change how you feel is a deeply human impulse. Seeking out pleasure, relaxation, connection, excitement, or comfort—all of this is really a universal part of the human experience.

The mistake and the chase that you can get caught up in when you are constantly trying to arrive at that sweet spot is really not understanding the nature of the experience that alcohol creates. So that’s what we’re going to dive into today.

One of the reasons people so often overshoot the experience they are actually trying to create when drinking is because we’re really impatient to get where we want to go. I know that I was. This was a big piece of it for me. I wanted to be there already. It is so common to start another drink while the previous drink is still coming online. And what I mean by that is that alcohol doesn’t work by flipping on a light switch. You don’t immediately experience the effect as soon as you start drinking.

And I think that this piece actually can be really confusing because so often, people do experience a lot of relaxation, a lot of relief at that first sip, right? You think about why that first sip feels so good, that like, “ah,” right? It’s not because alcohol has immediately transformed their conscious experience. It’s because your brain has slipped into prediction and expectation mode, and it’s like, “Oh, we’re drinking now. Relaxation is coming. Fun is coming,” right? “Stress relief is coming.” 

And when the brain predicts that what comes next is going to feel good, that itself, that prediction itself, feels good before alcohol has really done anything to your central nervous system. It’s not like nothing is changing inside of your brain. Of course, things are. Of course, often dopamine is being released even before we have that first sip. But just to really understand, it’s not like a light switch here, right? There really is so much happening where it takes time to get where we want to go.

Think about it. Alcohol has to travel through your digestive system. It has to get absorbed into your bloodstream. It has to circulate through your body to eventually reach your brain. Alcohol acts on the central nervous system, but it doesn’t reach your central nervous system instantaneously. It takes time to feel the effects, which means that there’s always going to be a delay between finishing a drink and experiencing its full effect. And this delay creates a really interesting problem, or it did for me because, like I said, I was really impatient to get where I wanted to go. I wanted to be there already. 

So I wasn’t finishing a drink and waiting to see what unfolded next. I was finishing a drink and often pouring the next one. Except, I was on the next drink when the first one hadn’t finished arriving in my body. It was still coming online. And this is one of the reasons why people so often overshoot the experience they’re actually trying to create because it is a moving target, and we are in a rush to have arrived already and to have finally hit it.

But I mean, let’s just say that you do arrive, right? Like, you’re at that place exactly where you wanted to be. One of the things that I think is so fascinating, and I see this all the time when I’m working with people, people will talk about feeling good and then immediately kind of feeling a little anxious that it’s going to go away, that they’re going to lose this moment. And I think that people feel this way because, in part, we understand the transitory nature of pleasure. The sweet spot doesn’t stay still. It is not a permanent place where you can set up camp. If you stop drinking in that moment, you are eventually going to start to lose the buzz. You’re going to start to lose some of the rewarding effects because your blood alcohol concentration will begin to fall. So the feeling you were after will slowly begin to fade, and that is unavoidable.

Now think about what happens if you keep drinking because you are afraid the feeling is going to go away. Your blood alcohol concentration is going to keep rising. So you’re chasing after those rewarding effects, but you’re also heading into more impairment. So you’re also going to move away from the sweet spot. I want you to kind of think about it this way. You can move towards the sweet spot. You can move away from it in one direction. You can move away from it in the other direction, but you cannot park yourself there. You cannot be like, “Okay, I’ve arrived. Now this is a fixed state.” It is not a fixed state. Alcohol’s effect on the brain and the body are dynamic. They’re temporary, and they are constantly changing. The challenge comes when we expect it to create a feeling that stays exactly where we want it to for as long as we want it to. That is just not how things work.

And this is why so many people describe their drinking as chasing a feeling, because that’s literally what is happening. You’re trying to maintain something that, by its very nature, cannot be permanently maintained. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s bad to drink. It doesn’t mean that it’s a fool’s errand to drink, but it does mean that you have to be okay with the fact that the feeling will fade. And trying to maintain it is going to put more alcohol in your system, which is going to make it more and more likely that you tip too far into the place you didn’t want to be in the first place. Not because something is wrong with you, but because you’re putting something in your system that creates both a temporary rewarding effect and also temporary impairment the more you consume.

The mistake here isn’t wanting to feel good. I think that’s where people become really unnecessarily hard on themselves. Okay, you want to feel differently right now. How human of you. The mistake is not understanding the nature of the experience and believing that you can somehow magically hold yourself there for as long as you want to. And I will tell you this, I don’t even think that at its core, this is really a problem about alcohol. I think it is a larger discomfort that we all have with the human experience, that we are constantly imagining that we can get to a place in life where we will feel exactly the way we want to feel and then somehow magically stay there.

And I will tell you this, I am not immune to that thinking as well. I have to coach myself on this a lot. The idea that our emotional state is always changing and always transitory, it is not a static experience. It’s not supposed to be one. And also, the same is true for the things you find pleasurable. This includes the things that we consume to change how we feel. That also is not going to create and cannot create a static experience. These things too are dynamic. Everything is always changing. The idea that there is this one perfect point that we can arrive and hold on to even for a night, I think is an illusion that creates so many problems.

And once you really understand this, at least for me, understanding this, for me, something very deeply shifted inside of me because instead of asking, “Oh, why can’t I just stop when I’ve had enough?” I was able to kind of back up and see part of the flaw of that question was the assumption that I had that once I had reached enough, I could just keep that feeling for as long as I desired, that I could indefinitely hold on to it and maintain it. 

And so when you kind of let go of that way of thinking, you can start asking much different questions, questions like, “Can I be okay with the transitory nature of pleasure? That pleasure exists, but it’s always going to peak and then fade away? And the more I try to cling and control and hold on to this moment, the more pain and suffering I actually create for myself.” And questions like, “What would happen if I went into these experiences knowing that the fade was going to be part of it, and not making that mean that something had gone wrong, but also not trying to grasp on to it from a place of fear?” 

I think that those are just much more useful and also more interesting questions to ask yourself because it moves the focus away from trying to chase after the sweet spot and really hold yourself there and towards understanding the nature of the experience in a completely different way. I think sometimes the most freeing realization is that the problem in the moment is not that you don’t have enough willpower or discipline, the problem is that you’ve been trying to solve the impossible equation. You’ve been trying to freeze something into place that is designed to keep moving and changing.

Alright, that’s it for today. I will see you next week.

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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.