What if the pressure you’re putting on yourself to change your drinking is actually the thing keeping you stuck? In today’s episode, I’m answering a question from a listener who feels like she’s on her last chance to get her drinking under control. I want to talk about the fear-based mindset so many of us fall into when the health consequences we have from drinking feel urgent. This is episode 452, and we’re going to unpack why so many of us try to scare ourselves straight, why replacing alcohol with food doesn’t actually solve the underlying problem, and why you need to be curious about discomfort and how that’s the key to real, lasting change.

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.

Welcome back, everybody. We have a question sent in from a listener named Deb today. Here’s what she wrote: “Almost daily, I have the goal of not drinking. I’ve gained weight and I’m depressed. I just had my 65th birthday, and I’ve been thinking I need to get a handle on my drinking now or throw in the towel. It feels like my last chance. This is also, of course, tied directly to weight loss. I get stuck on a loop of, ‘I won’t drink today, but I can snack through the urges and discomfort of not drinking.’ I need focus and hope that I can have a better future. How do I get a firm footing on a healthier me?”

Well, I’ll tell you this, Deb, I can hear how frustrated you are. You are stuck in a loop that so many people find themselves in. I was in this loop too, replacing alcohol with food. I will just say this is one of the reasons why it is so important to focus on how you respond to your urges and cravings rather than just gritting your teeth and focusing on just saying no. Because you really can easily fall into the trap of saying no to a drink and then saying yes to something else that isn’t serving you. In your case, snacking, when one of your goals is trying to also lose weight.

So I want to actually start with your mindset. You talk about how it was just your 65th birthday. You feel like it’s your last chance to get a handle on your drinking. And I really do get the urgency that you feel. I know you’re looking at your situation and it’s like, okay, I’m not getting younger, and you see the consequences. You really want to change. But telling yourself, “This is my last chance,” I don’t think this is helping. My guess is it’s adding a lot of anxiety and pressure about your situation. You really have to understand the difference between language that is truly motivating and language that keeps you stuck in a cycle of fear. Because when you frame your situation right now as, “This is my last chance,” then every single day is going to carry the weight of your entire future.

And when you are in threat mode, which is what will happen, it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to be curious about the habit, about your cravings, about your drink archetypes. And that curiosity is so important. When we are in threat mode, we find ourselves doing a lot of white knuckling. We get stuck in a lot of all-or-nothing thinking, and we’re doing what you find yourself doing right here, which is substituting one coping strategy for another. And all of that leads to feeling really exhausted, really hopeless, especially when try as you might, you’re not getting the results that you want.

I’ll just say this. There’s a huge difference between being honest with yourself about your situation and trying to scare yourself straight. You can be honest and say, “Listen, there are real reasons why I really need to take my drinking seriously. It’s not helping with my weight. It’s adding to my depression. I’m 65 years old. I don’t have the luxury of ignoring the signals that my body is giving me. Maybe we can get away with that when we’re in our 20s, but not now.” I know I can’t get away with it now, and I’m in my 40s.

Notice how different that conversation is than, “Oh, this is my last shot. I have to get this right or else.” And I will just say this distinction is important for everyone, not just for Deb. Can you be honest with yourself about your situation, about the effect that your drinking is having on your body, on your well-being, on your mood, on your relationships without going into the territory of trying to scare yourself straight? Most of us can’t do that. It’s not surprising because we are taught to reach for fear in order to change a, quote, “bad behavior.” That is what we have been taught our entire lives. As a society, we don’t teach people how to feel. We don’t teach people how to sit with discomfort or ride urges or regulate stress and emotions or examine our habits, our patterns, and our behavior from a compassionate place. No, we don’t do that. We teach fear. We teach, “Just say no. Learn your lesson. Try harder.”

And all of that fear just bypasses emotional skill building entirely. For decades, the dominant model of behavior change, especially around drugs and alcohol, has been focused on warnings, worst-case scenarios, graphic consequences, and this idea of, “If you don’t stop now, here’s the list of all the bad things that are going to happen.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t find that particularly effective. It often scared me a lot. I mean, I will say when I was a teenager, it really didn’t scare me at all. I kind of rolled my eyes, right, when we were getting that in health class.

But even when I was in the midst of trying to figure out like, “Oh my God, I have to do something about my drinking.” When I would just go down the rabbit hole of worst-case scenario and graphic consequences and here’s all the bad things that are going to happen if I don’t change, yeah, it would scare me, but it wasn’t actually leading to change that truly mattered. It was leading to a lot of, you know, false starts, right, where I would be really motivated, I got to do something different and I got to overhaul everything. And then, you know, my motivation would just slip away, or I’d have one bad night, and I’d use it as proof that I couldn’t change.

I’ll just say, it’s really easier to try to scare people and focus on the harms than it is to teach people how to feel. But it also lets society off the hook, right? Because if we gave you all these warnings, “Hey, drinking too much is bad for you,” and we told you that, we told you about, you know, all the negative health effects, and we told you about, you know, all the bad things that could happen. And you still didn’t change? Well, I guess it’s because you didn’t care enough, right? You didn’t try hard enough. Fear-based models for behavior change let the system off the hook because they avoid having us ask the deeper questions about why people are struggling, why it’s so hard to say no. And instead frame it as, “Well, why didn’t you listen? We warned you.”

And what I want you to understand most of all is that you need curiosity to solve this issue. You need to have the ability to ask questions and wonder and be curious about what is actually happening beneath the surface when I am giving into this urge or believing this excuse or telling myself that, you know, I need to make this craving go away. And here’s the thing. A lot of people will argue, “Okay, Rachel, but eating a bag of cookies is better than polishing off a bottle of wine.” I hear that kind of argument all the time.

And yes, on paper, there is less immediate danger from overeating than from overdrinking. Cookies might be better than wine in isolation, but if you don’t have this curiosity piece, what you’re going to miss is that the underlying pattern driving both of these habits, both overeating and overdrinking for many people, that underlying pattern is going to stay intact. Because so often, and my guess is this is what’s happening with Deb as well, the underlying pattern is, “I am not equipped to handle this discomfort on my own, so I have to find something to escape it immediately.” And if I’m not going to escape it by pouring a drink, I’m going to try to escape it by eating something. This is why you notice yourself, and why so many people notice themselves, replacing drinking with snacking and then feel like they’re stuck in the same loop.

So, Deb, the bigger question is this: Why are you trying to escape discomfort? And I know this sounds like a weird question, right? Because it’s like, “Well, who wants to be uncomfortable?” Isn’t the goal in life just to be more comfortable? But this is a question that you need to explore. Frankly, it’s a question that we all need to explore. Because simply put, discomfort is a part of the human experience for everybody. There’s no two ways about it. Life is going to be uncomfortable sometimes. And we can either see these moments of discomfort as a sign that something has gone terribly wrong or as a signal that we are on the right track.

And I will tell you this, Deb, for the longest time, any discomfort to me was a sign that something had gone terribly wrong. It really was a huge shift that I had to make and that I work on with so many people to see this as, “Oh, maybe my brain is mistaken here.” When it’s always interpreting discomfort as a problem, maybe it’s not discomfort that is the problem. Maybe it’s my interpretation of what is happening.

I often think about it this way. The idea that discomfort’s coming either way. You can be uncomfortable in the moment because your lower brain is saying, “I need a drink right now,” right? “And if you’re not going to give me the drink, you have to give me food,” right? “I need something right now.” You can be uncomfortable in that moment because you choose not to believe your lower brain. You choose not to believe or answer its plea for, “Give me the alcohol, give me the food.” Or you can be uncomfortable that once again you gave in. You can be uncomfortable that you woke up again feeling disappointed about the choices that you made yesterday. You can be uncomfortable in your body because over and over again, it is being taxed.

Discomfort is coming either way. That was such a mind-blowing understanding for me. To see that it’s coming either way and understand that there is the discomfort that keeps us stuck in this cycle, the discomfort of overdrinking, the discomfort of overeating, the discomfort of feeling like we are not fully in control.

And then there’s a discomfort that helps us learn and grow and teaches us that we are more capable than we realize. But discomfort is coming either way. So which one are we going to choose, right? It’s not about erasing discomfort. It’s about choosing the type of discomfort that is more productive to who we want to be. And when you start to reframe it that way, when you understand that it’s coming either way, you can get really curious about, okay, so why am I dead set on trying to avoid it? Right? This isn’t a moment for you to start shaming yourself or say like, “Oh, now I’m doing another thing wrong. Now I’m, you know, I shouldn’t be avoiding the discomfort and I’m I’m avoiding it, so that’s another problem.” No, no, no. I don’t want this to be about shame. I want this to be for you and for everyone to see if we can use it as a moment of true curiosity. Oh, I wonder why. I wonder why I’m so dead set on not feeling uncomfortable. I wonder why the discomfort I feel at the end of day connected to drinking or snacking. I wonder why it feels so intense that I’m telling myself that I have to give in.

And when you are truly curious, it’s not about labeling yourself as a problem. It’s not about defaulting to, “Well, I’ve just always been this way. I’ve just always been someone who’s never liked feeling uncomfortable.” No, it’s about going into places of, huh, I wonder maybe if it’s because I spend all day saying yes to everybody’s needs and trying to make sure that everyone is taken care of. And I do that all day long, and it’s uncomfortable all day long to ignore myself in that way. And I, my reserves for being able to tolerate discomfort, when I’ve been doing that all day, they’re just tapped out.

Maybe it’s because I’m constantly saying yes to things when deep down, I really want to say no, but I feel uncomfortable saying no, so I say yes to things that I don’t want. Maybe it’s because I believe I have no reason or right to feel the way that I do. That I look at my life and I tell myself, you know what, I should be happier, I should be more grateful, I should feel more content. Look at all that I have. I have nothing to complain about. And when that happens, which so many people do, by the way, we think that we’re doing it in service of ourselves. We think that it’s about, oh, I just need to be more grateful. But we end up creating this kind of constant underlying discomfort with any negative emotion when it appears because we think, “Oh, I don’t have the justification for why it’s here. It shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be feeling this way. Look how good my life is.”

Maybe you don’t have that tolerance for discomfort at the end of the day because you spend so much of your day ruminating or catastrophizing, and that feels uncomfortable. And then you don’t want the added discomfort at 5:00 or 6:00 or 8:00 of saying no to an urge. Maybe you feel like you’ve had enough discomfort already in your life and you don’t deserve more. I don’t know what your answer is going to be, but the point is for you to get curious.

This is a question that you really need to sit down and ask yourself. Write down your answers, spend some time with it. Why am I trying so hard to avoid the discomfort of saying no to an urge? And try as much as possible to answer that question from a place of curiosity rather than, “This is just who I am,” or, “I don’t know.” Why am I treating it like something has gone wrong rather than a normal part of the human experience? Where did I learn that discomfort was a sign that something had gone wrong instead of a normal part of everyone’s experience?

Sometimes we want things in the moment that we must say no to because either they’re not aligned with who we want to be or how we want to feel tomorrow or long-term, and that is normal. It happens with alcohol, it’s going to happen with food, it’s going to happen with relationships, it’s going to happen with stuff and money. Like, that is a very normal process to want something in the moment that we must learn how to say no to.

So I really encourage you to sit down for Deb and for all of you guys, sit down and spend 10, 15 minutes just writing and seeing what comes up when you ask yourself this question. And when you do this, what you’re going to start to find in your answers are the patterns that connect to different archetypes. It might be the reward archetype, it might be the escape or the hourglass or the remedy, but you’re going to start to see what is showing up uniquely for you. Because again, so many of us have this underlying pattern of trying to avoid any and all discomfort, but that doesn’t mean that we’re dealing with the exact same archetype. It really is always going to be very unique. So you can get really curious about what exactly avoiding discomfort is really about for you.

Now, Deb also wrote, “How can I have a better future and get on firm footing to be a healthier me?” A huge part of this is just going to start with reframing discomfort, normalizing it, seeing it as a universal experience, realizing that growth and evolving, it only happens when we are willing to embrace discomfort. Right? Learning something new, the process of learning feels uncomfortable, not because you’re doing something wrong, because your brain is trying to lay down new neural pathways. And so when something feels hard or awkward, or you’re quick to kind of slip into the story of, “Oh, I’m just not good at this,” you can remind yourself, “Right, I’m not good at this yet. This friction, this discomfort, you know, this effort that I’m feeling, this is my brain putting in the work trying to lay down that new neural pathway to start to make this skill come more easily for me.” So it’s hugely, hugely transformative to be able to label discomfort in that moment as something helpful rather than a problem.

And then on a very practical level, right? Let’s stock up on things that are going to help you drink less. Right? So we want to make these decisions ahead of time. Know what your go-to non-alcoholic drinks are. Right? Know what the ones are that aren’t going to be adding a ton of sugar and a ton of calories since that’s something that you also want to avoid. Make sure that you aren’t ending the day dehydrated and hungry.

I cannot tell you how often this comes up for people that I’m working with, that they just don’t realize that they are thirsty and they are hungry, and they have unconsciously trained their brain to crave alcohol in these moments. Right? So if you spend your day not hydrating, not eating, you essentially can kind of get these physical needs mixed up with the craving for a drink. And so often, just starting to do the check-ins with, “When’s the last time I had a glass of water? When’s the last time I ate something?” and tending to those needs first can make such a huge difference.

Otherwise, so many people feel like, “Oh God, yeah, I’m ending the day and I have these like huge cravings for a drink,” and don’t recognize that what is woven in, a lot of what’s going on there is actually needing food and needing water, right? And it’s so challenging not to make an immediate beeline to like, well, let’s just have that drink when you don’t recognize those underlying needs are being unmet as well.

And remember, cravings and urges always subside. They’re never going to last forever. Even though we will often have a very different story, we will have a very different belief, right, that it’s never going to go away. What makes them truly uncomfortable is not that our lower brain wants something that it’s not getting, right? What makes it truly uncomfortable is the belief that it’s too strong, it’s too overwhelming, that it’s never going to leave us alone, that something has gone wrong, that the intensity of our cravings mean that we have a serious problem. If you were to strip all of that story out of there, you would see that alone would make these moments so much more manageable for you.

So much of the discomfort, I will tell you, and this always really blows people’s minds, but so much of the discomfort is created by the unconscious story that we have attached to our urges and cravings. If you want more help because I gave you a lot of pieces here, I really encourage you to check out The Ultimate Guide to Drinking Less. It has so many exercises and resources that I don’t have time to go into on this episode. So that can be an amazing resource for you. But know this. Just you asking this question, right? Seeking out help and support, this is you on the path to a better future. This is you getting on firmer footing to a healthier you. I know it feels like that isn’t happening right now, but I want you to just challenge that. I want you to challenge the assumption of like, how do I get, right? How do I get on this path and not acknowledge, “Oh, wait, maybe I’m actually already on it.” Maybe what I’m doing right now is part of this journey. It’s not, you know, this far off place that I’m trying to reach. It’s already underway. It’s happening right now.

We have to stop treating our future like it’s this far away point that we either reach or we don’t. Right? You’re not waiting to arrive at a better future. You’re creating a better future right now. The moment that you notice the habit cycle, the moment that you’re able to change your relationship with discomfort, talk about it differently with yourself, the moment that you’re able to ask for help, the moment that you practice responding differently to an urge, even the planning that you do to say, “Hey, you know what, let’s line up, you know, what the non-alcoholic drinks are going to be for me ahead of time. Let’s not leave it to my brain at 6 p.m., right, that’s maybe dehydrated and hungry and dealing with the craving and frustrated that I’ve been, you know, saying yes to everyone all day long and just saying no to me.” Let’s plan ahead. That is the future you taking shape. It’s not someday. It’s underway right now.

And for Deb and for all of you who are looking for more help, my reset your drinking challenge starts January 21st. It’s a great opportunity to get out of this fear-based mindset around your drinking and start shifting away from this kind of last-chance pressure to a calmer place that you can really follow through on in a sustainable way. So if you’re interested in that, go to RachelHart.com/January. We get started on the 21st. I’m so excited for that. It’s going to be an amazing three-day workshop.

All right, Deb, thank you so much for your question. That is all for today. I will 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.