Have you ever had the experience where you try to delay having a drink, and it feels like your desire just intensifies? Like the more you try to hold off, the more you want it. This is episode 458 and I’m going to explain why the intensity you feel is actually good news and what you need to do if this happens.

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.

Sometimes you try delaying a drink, and instead of watching the urge pass, you watch it get stronger. You might find yourself watching the clock or you’re counting down the minutes, or you can’t focus on anything else. And the whole time you’re thinking, “Okay fine, I will wait to have this drink, but I’m definitely going to have it when the clock strikes whatever or when my timer goes off.” If that has been your experience, I want you to hear me say this: The strategy of delaying a drink didn’t fail. In fact, something really incredible happened. Something really important, something most people never realize they’re missing when they try to cut back on their drinking or change their relationship with alcohol. Because here’s the thing, when delay feels unbearable, it’s not a sign that you need more alcohol or that you need to drink more than other people. It’s a sign that you’ve finally uncovered the job of the drink in that particular moment.

And today I want to explain exactly what’s going on when this happens and how to use this knowledge to help you instead of assuming that the increased intensity of your desire means that you have a problem or that something has gone wrong. So in episode 455, I talked about the power of delaying a drink, right? And part of the power is that you’re not deciding what you’re going to do with drinking forever. It’s not even about moderating. It’s just, can I use the strategy of delaying the start of my drinking? And for a lot of people, that experiment can be really eye-opening.

So I work with people all the time who will say, “You know what? Something amazing happened. I delayed the drink and I watched as my urge appeared, and I noticed it kind of peak, but then I watched it fade away on its own.” And people will often report, you know, if I just make it through the witching hour, that period of time in the afternoon and evening where your urges and your cravings feel most intense. If I can just make it through that period, then I’m golden. I’m good to go for the rest of the night.

But here’s the thing: watching the urge pass on its own, it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes you try delaying the drink and your desire doesn’t fade, it intensifies. So you might find yourself feeling really restless or irritated or distracted. And instead of having this moment of feeling really empowered, it can feel like torture. And when this happens, most people assume, “Oh, okay, so the strategy of delay doesn’t work for me.” But what I want to do is I want to offer you a different perspective and have you consider that the intensity that you feel when you’re delaying a drink is actually really a good thing.

When delay works easily, what’s happened is you’ve interrupted the habit loop. The habit says, “Okay, listen, when it’s 5 p.m. or when I walk through the door, or when I’m with this friend or whatever the loop looks like for you, when this happens, I pour a drink.” But when you delay, your brain’s like, “Oh okay, maybe we don’t do that.” But here’s the thing, if the delay feels excruciating, you’re just encountering a deeper layer of the habit. Right? The piece where your brain says, “Okay, alcohol has a job that it’s supposed to be doing for me right now.” And of course that job can change. It can change for different people and different situations, but it’s got a job right now. It’s supposed to help me relax or maybe smooth any tension I feel when I’m around others, or soften my anxiety, or help me have fun right now, or help me just stop thinking. But the drink has a job.

So when you delay the drink, your brain isn’t just waiting for alcohol, it’s waiting for the relief that it fully expected should have arrived by now. And when that relief doesn’t come on schedule, it’s like your system starts sounding an alarm. And that alarm can feel like urgency, it can feel like restlessness, it can feel like the inability to think about anything else. Because alcohol has reliably performed a job in the past. And so your brain kind of concludes like, “See, this is why we need it.” But what’s actually happening is something very different. You are simply feeling the state inside of you that drinking would normally hide.

And so the countdown, the watching the minutes, the waiting until you can have the drink is actually incredibly important because you’re experiencing that moment without immediately reaching for a drink to change how you feel. And what shows up in that delay? Maybe it’s the mental exhaustion that you haven’t noticed all day. Maybe it’s residual stress that’s still sitting in your body. Maybe it’s disconnection, maybe it’s anxiety, maybe it’s boredom, maybe it’s overstimulation. Drinking, it would dull whatever you are feeling pretty quickly. Delay, however, has you finally seeing it, finally being present with it.

And this is why I say that delay really has two phases. So phase one is simply interrupting the habit loop. It’s interrupting autopilot. Phase two is meeting the moment that autopilot was trying to protect you from. Now, most people give up because they assume that if they feel intensity during the delay, that means that something has gone wrong. But this moment, this intensity is actually where the real skill building begins.

So remember that so many of us carry this cultural story. We carry this story that if it’s hard to go without a drink, that must mean something is wrong with me. But difficulty that you’re experiencing here does not mean dependence in the way that people fear. It means that your nervous system has practiced receiving relief in a certain way, and it just hasn’t practiced receiving relief in a different way yet. That is a gap that’s all about a missing skill. It’s not a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s not a diagnosis that you have a problem. Your brain simply hasn’t gathered evidence that you can see yourself through this moment another way, right? You don’t yet have evidence that relief is coming without the drink.

So delaying a drink can be a really powerful strategy because it’s not about removing your desire. Yes, sometimes you might have the experience where you watch the urge appear and peak and pass, but that’s not really the goal here. It’s not about removing desire, it’s about revealing the pattern underneath. If you’re counting down the minutes, delay is working perfectly because now you can see what state you’re actually trying to avoid or change or get rid of. So instead of asking, “Okay, how long until I can drink?” What you want to do is to interrupt that moment to get curious about, “What am I trying to avoid right now?” So it’s about using the delay as a way to step into curiosity. And yes, I’m not trying to get you to convince yourself that you don’t want the drink. I’m just trying to help you see, okay, you want the drink and what else? What else are you wanting in this moment?

So I talk about this with all of the drink archetypes as a deeper desire. So every archetype has a deeper desire attached to it. For the Upgrade, it’s about engaging with the richness of life. For the Connector, it’s about belonging. For the Reward archetype, it’s about enoughness. For the Escape archetype, it’s about resilience. For the Mask, it’s self appreciation, actually not confidence, which is what most people assume. For the Hourglass, it’s about discovery. For the Release, it’s about authenticity. And for the Remedy, it’s about balance.

I’m not going to go in depth here on the deeper desires, but what I want you really to understand is that if you stay stuck in this surface level, this surface level understanding of, “I just want the drink. I just like how it feels. I just want what I want when I want it.” If you stay in this surface level, you’re going to miss this layer. You’re going to miss the complexity here. Because the delay is where your archetypes really start to show themselves in real time.

Now, if you’re not sure what I mean by that or if the archetypes are new to you, I really encourage you to go to FindYourDrinkType.com. You can take the free quiz, you can learn more about the eight archetypes there. But what I need you to remember right now is that the delay, this pause, it’s about making the pattern visible. So then the question is, okay, once the pattern becomes visible, what do I do when I notice myself engaging in this countdown until I can have the drink? This part is really important because the answer is not, “Okay, I have to exert more willpower.” And it’s not, “I just have to sit there and suffer more.” What you want to start to shift into doing is, “How do I actually help myself navigate this moment without drinking? What would that look like?”

Now, I will tell you, most people have no clue when they start out what it would look like because we are not taught how to meet the moment of whatever is bubbling up inside of us. We’re taught how to avoid whatever we’re feeling. So this is going to really vary depending on the archetype that comes up. But I will say across the board, this can look like naming and normalizing whatever feeling is coming up for you. Name and normalize is a skill that I teach all of the time. I talk about it inside the ultimate guide to drinking less. I’m constantly working on it with people inside of take a break. But simply the ability to say, “This is what I’m feeling and nothing has gone wrong.” Whatever is coming up for me right now, my body, the human body was designed to experience and process on its own. The name and normalize skill can be so, so powerful.

It might also be noticing the story that you have about your desire or the urge or the craving. So a lot of people will discover, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just my cravings are so intense. They’re so uncomfortable. I just want them to go away.” What they don’t realize is there is the experience of your brain wanting something, and then there is the story that you have about it, right? And being able to separate these two things apart is so important. When you see the story, and that can sound like, “This is too much, it’s too big, it’s too strong, it’s never going to go away.” When you start to separate out the story about your desire from the experience of your brain wanting something, you start to see how your thoughts about what is happening in the moment are actually creating all this unnecessary fear or anxiety or resentment or overwhelm or hopelessness. I mean so many different emotions can get layered into the experience of your brain wanting a drink.

It might also be practicing changing your state directly. So not about going into distraction, but how do I actually regulate myself in the moment? So for me, this can look like working with my breath or moving my body, going outside, stretching. It can be about changing your body state or changing your sensory input. So really just moving into different lighting or giving yourself silence, right? Or giving yourself fresh air or touch. There are a lot of different ways that you can start to practice just really regulating yourself without immediately trying to rush to, “What in my external environment can I put inside of me so that I won’t feel this way anymore?”

What you’re trying to do is teach your system a new way to meet the moment. And what you try, again, it’s going to depend greatly on what archetype is activated, but that’s the beauty of the delay. When you use this strategy, you will very quickly see what archetype is activated, right? But meanwhile, your brain is just like, “You know, we don’t need to do this, right? We just need to pour a drink.” And you can stay stuck in that loop for so long, but delay gives you a chance to see, “Hey, what’s happening underneath this? What else is going on here?” It gives you a chance to practice a different way.

So what I want you guys to just take away from today’s episode is if you have tried delaying a drink and you found yourself staring at the clock or wondering why it feels so hard, I want you to really hear this. Nothing has gone wrong. You’ve simply moved into the next phase of change. Delaying the drink isn’t about making your desire go away, it’s about seeing the pattern underneath. And once you can see that pattern clearly, you no longer need to just rely on willpower in that moment because now you have information for, “Hey, what do I actually need right now? What is the skill that I’m missing that would allow me to meet this moment on my own without turning to a drink?”

Learning those skills is what is so key to change, right? So I talk about this all the time with people. It’s not that willpower and distraction, it’s not that these are bad tools, but when they’re the only tools in your toolbox, that’s the problem. You want to have a whole array of tools and strategies to help you navigate these moments, not just, “Oh God, you know, I got to grit my teeth or I got to somehow get out of this situation.” Really it boils down to, how do I learn how to stop treating the experience of discomfort like an emergency? This is so key. And if you want to experiment with this, all you need to do is get curious about what is showing up for me during those moments when my brain is fixated on the drink, when it’s counting down the minutes until I can have it. That is where all of your insight lies.

So if you have questions about what you discover, if you have questions about something specific to why you are finding it hard to say no or hard to cut back, you can always send them to me at RachelHart.com/podq. That’s P O D Q. All right everybody, that’s it for today. I’ll see you next week.

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