Does saying no to a drink feel hard because you just really love the taste? I was stuck here for the longest time, mainly because it felt like I was supposed to convince myself that I actually didn’t like my favorite drink and it was really bad for me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t deny that I just really liked how it tasted.

This is episode 471, and I’m giving you three thought swaps that can help you drink less that have nothing to do with demonizing alcohol or trying to convince yourself that you shouldn’t like your favorite drink or that your future self will thank you if you say no. These swaps are all about creating more curiosity, which in turn helps create more pause.

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.

All right, we are back with another Thought Swap episode. This time with a thought, “I just really love the taste of my favorite drink.” I will tell you, this is such an easy place to get stuck because it feels like you’re just reporting a simple fact about your preference. A drink tastes good and you like things that taste good. Now, I will tell you this shows up a lot with the Upgrade archetype. So you’re not drinking because you’re stressed or you’re anxious or you’re bored. You’re drinking because you truly enjoy the taste of something and it feels like that taste elevates your experience, and it just feels hard to say no to something that you really enjoy and love.

And here’s why I want to be really careful with this thought swap in particular, because so much of what is out there about changing a behavior that you don’t like has you focus on the downsides of that behavior. So thinking about what you don’t like about it. Often with alcohol, it’s really about demonizing drinking and demonizing the object of your desire, kind of telling yourself, you shouldn’t drink that. Look what it’s doing to your body.

And this instinct to try to convince ourselves that we don’t like something, even when in the moment, we do find it enjoyable, it really shows up beyond just alcohol. We will do this with food, with screen time, with spending money. We assume for things that can feel kind of compulsive, we assume that we should try to talk ourselves out of the enjoyment that we feel in the moment.

Now, what I have learned, both in my own life and by working with so many people over the years, is that the second you start to demonize something that you genuinely enjoy, you’re going to create resistance. You’re going to put up a wall. And when part of you is being told you shouldn’t like the thing that you do like, what happens is you often cling to it tighter. You might get defensive. You might almost have kind of like a protective stance around it.

So we don’t want to do that here. I am not about trying to convince you that you don’t love the taste or that alcohol is poison or it’s bad for your health. That’s not what these thought swaps are about. They’re about giving your brain a different way to look at a story that is keeping you stuck in a relationship with alcohol that you don’t fully like. You don’t actually fully enjoy and you want to change.

This thought, “I just love the taste of my favorite drink,” it comes up a lot for people who have spent time really learning about their favorite types of wine or beer or gotten really into bourbon or craft cocktails. So you’re not just drinking whatever, willy-nilly. You probably have very strong preferences about what you like to drink. You may spend a fair amount of money on what you drink. You may have spent time educating yourself about the ins and outs of making it or become very knowledgeable about a specific type of alcohol.

And I think that this is key. And because a lot of times people will tell me, “Oh, Rachel, I would never drink just anything. I would never drink Two-Buck Chuck or Bud Light or Wild Turkey.” And if you like any of those brands, I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t. I think it’s just important to realize that our preferences can almost, in a way, be protective sometimes because we can end up in a place, and I did this myself, right, where I was just like, I don’t drink just anything. I’m not an alcoholic.

And now if you listen to the podcast, you know that I’m not about convincing you that you are an alcoholic. I have a lot of issues with that label. That’s a topic for a whole another episode. But I do want to help you poke holes in all of the thoughts that keep you stuck in a cycle where you find yourself drinking more than you want. And “I just really love the taste of my favorite drink” is one of those thoughts that can keep you really stuck.

I also want to add what I have found really mind-blowing in my own personal experience is when I first applied some of the concepts I was learning about mindful eating to my drinking. And I’m going to talk more about this when I go through the different swaps, but I will say, when I did this, it was really the first time that I started to separate out my story about certain drinks that I loved with the actual experience of truly focusing on the taste, which was not something I was used to doing because so much of my drinking really felt like it happened almost on autopilot. And again, it’s not like I suddenly discovered, “Oh, I actually hate my favorite drink,” but it really did give me a very different perspective. So we’re going to talk about that.

Because here’s the trap that this thought creates. If the reason you drink something and the reason you keep going back for more is simply that you just love the taste so much, then cutting back or not drinking or not having another, it means depriving yourself of a taste that you really enjoy for what can feel like no good reason. It often makes saying no feel a little absurd, even maybe joyless. Like, why would I deny myself something that I enjoy so much? It can really feel like pointless self-denial.

Again, the work here isn’t to make you stop loving the taste. It’s about just zooming out and giving yourself a bigger picture, more information about what is happening in the moment when that story is running. Again, this thought shows up most often with the Upgrade archetype. If you’re new to the drink archetypes, there are eight of them. They really help explain the underlying patterns behind your drinking and why it can be hard to say no.

The Upgrade is all about using alcohol to elevate an experience, to make moments feel more special. If you feel like you’re an expert in your drink of choice, you’re the guy that knows all about IPAs or specialty bourbons or a particular type of wine, the upgrade is probably showing up for you. Because the thought, “I just really love the taste,” it frames a drink as something refined, something you appreciate, something that makes the moment better.

And now, you probably have multiple archetypes showing up because that’s pretty much true for everyone across the board. We’re not going to do a deep dive into the Upgrade archetype on this episode. So if you want to learn more, or you’re just getting started learning about the archetypes, the best place to really get started is by taking the quiz at FindYourDrinkType.com. That will give you your top two archetypes and show you where you rank with all eight.

Okay, so here are the three thought swaps I want you to start playing with. As always, it’s about making them feel believable for you. So take what I’m saying as a starting point. Feel free to edit it, change the wording. Make it something that will be useful for you in the moment to help create a little pause with this particular belief.

Okay, swap number one: “Yes, I love the taste. And what else do I love about the experience of drinking?” I really love adding a “yes, and” to a thought or a belief or a story where we feel particularly stuck. Because when you add that “yes, and,” you stop arguing with yourself. You don’t need to be defensive. We’re acknowledging with this swap, yeah, you love the taste. Just tell me more about what else you love about the experience of consuming your favorite drink.

Notice, I don’t want you arguing with yourself. I don’t want you to try to convince yourself that you don’t enjoy the taste. Embrace that you love it, and then get curious about what else is there. What else do you love about this drink? What else is it giving you in the moment? What else feels more possible or accessible or available when you start drinking?

This is so much more powerful than it sounds because the moment that you stop defending how much you enjoy the taste of your favorite drink and you allow yourself to get curious, all this other stuff comes up. You might notice, well, I also really enjoy that this is, you know, one of the only chances that I get to connect with my partner and talk about our day. Or I enjoy that I have my favorite drink, and that’s the moment when I get to stop working and put my feet up and stop being productive. You might enjoy that it’s a moment for you to just forget about all the pressures of the day or forget about whatever has been nagging at you or bothering you.

When you get curious, you start to find all the other associations that your brain has connected to the taste of your favorite drink. Humans have not been drinking alcohol for thousands of years simply because it tastes good. Nobody built an entire culture around a beverage purely on the strength of the flavor. It’s not that flavor doesn’t matter, it’s just that there’s more going on here than just taste alone.

There’s always been something else that alcohol does for humans beyond just the taste that makes it appealing for our brain. So when you let yourself say, “Yes, I love the taste, and what else do I love about it?” you stop bracing against this idea that, “Oh, it’s bad for me,” and you start allowing yourself to actually explore the bigger picture, the bigger web of associations that your brain has with drinking that aren’t limited to flavor or taste.

And this is really huge, because I see so many people get tripped up here because they only want to view their relationship with alcohol as one that’s just about flavor and just about taste, which makes it harder in the long run to drink less or to say no because you just don’t have all the information of everything that is contributing to your desire. When you give yourself a window into the bigger picture, it makes it so much easier to start changing and start dismantling the habit because you simply have more information for how the habit works.

Okay, swap number two: “Taste is not a fixed experience.” When you think, “I just really love the taste of my favorite drink,” it implies that your experience of taste is fixed and stable and that you keep returning to the drink to keep re-enjoying the same thing. But you cannot step in the same river twice, because taste is not a property of the drink the way that red is a property of Merlot. A glass of Merlot is red. Each subsequent glass is also red. Every sip, every glass, every bottle, the color remains pretty much unchanged. Taste does not work like that. Taste isn’t in the glass. It’s the meeting between what’s in the glass and your nervous system. And that experience is variable both for different people, but also for the same person over time and in a sitting. Taste is not a fixed experience, even for the same person, simply because of how the human brain works.

But most of us walk around with this unspoken assumption that taste is constant. If something tastes good now, it’s going to be equally tasty the whole way through as we consume it, bite after bite, sip after sip. But that’s not how the brain works. When you take that first sip of your favorite drink, the taste in that moment, it’s a novel sensation for your brain. The flavor is new, the aroma is new, it’s fresh stimulation for your brain, and that’s part of what makes the taste so enjoyable.

But there’s a catch. Novelty wears off fast for the brain, and it wears off especially quickly with taste. Our taste buds tire very quickly. So the first sip and the fifth sip and the tenth sip are not the same experience at all. That first one is so much more vivid. And as you go on, the taste is going to get flatter. It’s going to change even though it is the exact same drink.

Think about anyone who works with their senses for a living. A perfumer can only smell so many scents before their nose is spent. A professional doing a wine tasting can only taste so many wines before their palate is done. You can’t evaluate and taste the fifth glass the way you tasted the first. That’s just how our perception works.

And there’s an extra irony with alcohol specifically, which is that alcohol actually dulls your taste buds. So even if you love the flavor, it’s very unlikely that you’re enjoying each sip equally as you keep going. The pleasure of the taste is fading the whole time because our taste buds are being dulled, not because alcohol is bad, but because taste is not a fixed experience. It is always changing, even for things that we love.

Now, here’s the part that I really want you to notice because it’s pretty counterintuitive. When you love a certain drink, you may actually be less likely to tune into the full experience of actually tasting what you’re consuming. “I love the taste of this” becomes a really strong story that your brain is defaulting to. And the more you tell yourself, “I love the taste,” often the less you’re actually tuning in to what is happening in your mouth. The story can replace the experience of fully tasting because your brain is like, “Well, I already know that I like this.”

That’s exactly what happened to me when I applied the concepts that I was learning around mindful eating to my drinking. So I remember the first time that I tried to drink something mindfully. Not to just go slow, but to be fully present, right, to give the drink my full, undivided attention. I did it with a glass of rosé. And for me, I loved rosé. I had loved it for years. But when I slowed down and I was really present with the experience, with the taste, I realized that it’s not that my story was wrong, it was that my story wasn’t consistently true the more I continued to drink.

When I exclusively focused on taste, I noticed that the taste of the rosé changed the more that I consumed it. And for me, it did become a little less enjoyable. Slowly, the rosé that I was drinking, it almost started to taste a little like too sour or too acidic in my mouth. And it was really wild to me because that did not fit at all with my story about how much I love to drink rosé. So it’s really easy to paper over your experience with a thought about how much you love something.

So again, this swap is not about saying that you’re wrong. It’s not about trying to convince you that you don’t love the taste. It’s just trying to build your own curiosity that taste is never a fixed experience. It’s an invitation to slow down and actually watch how the experience of taste and flavor change as you continue to drink. I have people I work with all the time do a mindful drink exercise. And I will say it is pretty consistently mind-blowing across the board because so often people come back with this revelatory experience of watching how their story of a drink and their experience of taste, it did not match the entire time. Their taste was not fixed. It changed the more they consumed.

All right, swap number three: “Loving the taste always comes second.” Now, this doesn’t mean that you don’t love the taste of your favorite drink right now. It’s simply a reminder that for everyone, alcohol is an acquired taste. You have to learn to like it. There’s a real difference between acquired and innate taste. Some tastes, innate tastes, are hardwired into us. So we like sweetness from the moment we’re born. Breast milk is sweet because sweetness signals energy and survival for the brain. Now, people like sugar to different degrees, but you don’t have to learn how to like sugar. Babies don’t wrinkle their nose in disgust the first time they try something sweet. Alcohol is not like that. Alcohol is something you have to learn to enjoy the taste of through repeated exposure.

And if you think back to the very first time you tried alcohol, for most of us, it was not love at first sip. Maybe it was a little burning sensation as you watched it go down. Maybe you wrinkled up your nose a little bit. Maybe you gagged a little or coughed a little. Your body gave you some clear feedback saying, “Hey, this does not taste so good. I’m not so sure about this substance.”

So the question that I think really kind of cracks the whole thing open is, “Okay, if I didn’t like the taste at first, why did I keep going back?” Why do we acquire a taste for something that initially the body kind of actively flinches at? And again, I’m not saying this to mean that alcohol is therefore bad and we shouldn’t consume it. We acquire tastes for lots of things that are not immediately enjoyable. I really like broccoli rabe, which is pretty bitter. I really like jalapeños, which are really spicy. These were not things that I enjoyed the taste of the first time I had them.

The reason why I like this swap is because it reminds you that your brain was going back for more for a reason other than taste. Your brain was drawn to something else. It was learning that the drink came maybe with a feeling. Maybe you felt more relaxed or more outgoing or less anxious. Maybe it came with a belief that you wanted to have about yourself, believing at the time that drinking was adult or rebellious or fancy, or maybe even this is just what everyone does and I want to belong. I want to be part of the group.

Taste, at first, was something that we tolerated and then eventually enjoyed. That’s the actual order of operations. Our brain acquired a taste because it believed there was another benefit beyond the flavor. So loving the taste was always secondary. And I think this is reflected in how most people start drinking. Most of us did not begin drinking scotch or bitter IPA. We started probably on something sweet, something that leaned on a taste we already innately liked to cover up the part that we didn’t. You know, for me, in college, I started drinking wine coolers and really sugary stuff in a red cup and Mike’s Hard Lemonade and hard cider. I was using an innate taste, the taste I had for sweetness, to smuggle in an acquired one. And only later, once my brain had thoroughly learned the upside of drinking, did I graduate to the quote-unquote good stuff and start having what I believed was a much more refined palette.

And again, I’m not saying that you can’t have a refined palette. Flavor profiles still do matter. It’s just always been secondary for your brain. And I think that it can be helpful to remember the order that our enjoyment happened, because we tend to talk about acquiring a taste as if it is something sophisticated and mature and something to be proud of. But when you really look at it, acquiring a taste means that your body didn’t really like the taste of something at first, but you had a good enough reason to keep overriding that and going back. Again, that doesn’t make it bad. We can acquire tastes for all sorts of things that we don’t initially like. It just helps us get clear on why we kept going back. We kept going back because of a feeling, maybe because of a story, maybe because of a belief. Right, we kept going back for things other than taste and flavor.

And if you keep telling yourself that your desire is only about taste, it’s only about flavor, you’re only going to see a small sliver of how the habit operates in your brain, which is going to make it harder for you in the long run to change your relationship with alcohol and learn how to drink less and learn how to say no.

Okay, so these are your three swaps for “I just really love the taste of my favorite drink.” Swap number one: “Yes, I love the taste, and what else do I love about it?” Just allow yourself here to get curious about what else is going on. Swap number two: “Taste is not a fixed experience.” It changes over time. Realizing that, realizing that you are going back for more, even when the taste has maybe flattened, can be very revealing. And finally, swap number three: “Loving the taste always comes second.” You acquired that taste for a reason other than flavor, and that reason is part of what is making it hard for you to say no to more. Inside that reason, I guarantee, you’re going to start to find some of your drink archetypes.

So again, notice what we did not do here. We’re not making alcohol a villain. We’re not trying to shame ourselves out of enjoying something that you enjoy. We’re not trying to convince ourselves that we don’t like the taste. We’re just starting to poke holes in the idea that I just really love the taste is the beginning and end of the conversation. We’re using it as a jumping off point to understand our patterns on a deeper level. Because in that little bit of curiosity that you can create here, in that moment of questioning, “Hey, wait, is loving the taste, is it really the whole story of my drinking?” That moment of curiosity that you create is where things start to shift.

Now, if you really want to understand more about how the Upgrade archetype works, I encourage you to take the quiz at FindYourDrinkType.com or check out The Ultimate Guide to Drinking Less, where I talk about all sorts of exercises that you can use with all eight archetypes, including ones that help you really explore this piece around loving the taste. All right, that’s it for today. I will see you next week.

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