Do you have a strong desire to change your drinking and yet, you’re not where you want to be? Today, I’m answering a question from a listener who’s frustrated that he’s still drinking more than he wants to, despite trying to make healthier choices. This is episode 451, and I’m talking about why habit change is often slow to catch up with shifts in your identity, how the premixed can cocktail market can make it surprisingly hard to understand what you’re actually consuming, and what to do when the thought, “I’m not where I want to be,” starts draining your momentum.

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.

Before we dive into today’s question from a listener, I’m teaching a three-day workshop starting January 21st called Reset Your Drinking. This is not a Dry January challenge. It’s a reset of the patterns that make Dry January so hard to sustain and that pull you right back into old habits once it’s over. You’ll learn about finding your off switch, making the drink feel truly optional, and how to sustain momentum even when you stumble. You can get your ticket by going to RachelHart.com/January.

Okay, so today I am answering a question that was sent in from a listener named Chris. So he wrote, “Hi Rachel, I’m 47 now and I have a huge desire to be healthier. I feel like alcohol doesn’t align with who I am anymore, but I still continue to drink daily. I was able to cut out hard liquor this year and replaced it with 12 and a half percent premixed cans and have about four to five of them daily. I’m concerned and confused about what this might be doing to my health. I have digestive issues on a regular basis, and I’m certain that these sugary drinks have a big impact. I really love your podcast and they have helped me a lot in my relationship with alcohol, but I feel like I’m not where I want to be yet.”

All right, so I chose this question because what Chris is writing about really speaks to so many things that a lot of you are thinking about in the new year. The identity shift that comes with trying to drink less or deciding that you want to remove alcohol from your life, the anxiety about how drinking may be impacting your health, and the frustration that despite so much effort on your part, you’re not where you want to be. So let’s break this down.

First, Chris wrote, “I have a huge desire to be healthier. I feel like alcohol doesn’t align with who I am anymore, but I still continue to drink daily.” Now, it’s important to remember that wanting to be healthier isn’t the same thing as knowing how to change your behavior. This is a misconception so many of us have. I had it too. You can hear it in the way that you talk to yourself. I used to think all the time, “Rachel, when are you going to learn your lesson? You should know better by now. Why are you drinking this much when you know it’s not good for you?”

Now, underneath this language is an assumption. The assumption is, if I know that I don’t like how much I’m drinking, then that information should be enough to change my behavior. But it doesn’t work this way because even though you can see that your drinking isn’t serving you, part of your brain still finds it useful.

So instead of focusing on how your drinking is harming you, I want you to flip your perspective around and think about how it’s helping you. Now, this is not a trick question. It truly is serving a helpful purpose in your life, and understanding this in my own journey was such a radical moment for me because I was very, very good at focusing on all the downsides of drinking too much, and I truly believed that if I could just remind myself how horrible it felt to have a terrible hangover or the regrets that I had or the risks associated with my drinking and the things that I was doing when I was drunk, if I could just remember all these bad things, that would compel me to change. But it didn’t. It just made me feel worse.

So Chris, what I’m most curious about for you is how is drinking every day helping you? You can start to answer this question by getting curious about your drink archetypes. Now, when I hear daily drinking, the archetypes that I look at first are the Reward, the Hourglass, or the Remedy. The Reward is all about using a drink as a treat after a long day, that moment of, this is something that I’m doing for myself when I’ve spent all day long focused on everyone else. And sometimes it can be about trying to set a boundary that you’re off the clock and you don’t need to work anymore. The Hourglass is about pouring a drink to pass the time, to deal with boredom, to make something more tolerable. While the Remedy is more about using alcohol to manage physical discomfort.

Now, listen, other archetypes may be showing up for you, but these are the three archetypes that are often a good starting point for daily drinkers. Because once you can start to name what alcohol is doing for you, the problem it is solving for you, you can start to ask yourself a much better question than, why am I still drinking when it doesn’t align with who I want to be?

You can start to ask a question like, how would my new identity handle this moment or this problem without a drink? Now, that’s true for all of you listening, regardless of whether or not you drink every day or only sporadically or you drink only Friday to Sunday. This is a great question for all archetypes.

And for you, Chris, what I want you to do instead of saying to yourself, “Alcohol doesn’t align with who I am anymore,” can you shift into a place of curiosity about this new identity? So that starts by asking yourself, what does this new version of me do at 6 p.m. when I’m exhausted from my day and searching for a treat? Or what does this new version of me do when I can’t shut off my mind or I can’t stop thinking about something that’s bothering me, or when I’m trying to pass the time or I’m in physical pain? And my default in the past would have been in all of these moments to pour a drink. Beyond just saying no, how are you finding new ways to handle these moments?

Now listen, when you start to get curious about how your new identity would be showing up differently, you’re probably going to get a little stumped at first. You’re not really going to be sure, and that’s a good thing because it’s asking your brain to solve a problem in a new way by doing something other than reaching for the drink. And I’ll say this is what actually creates a shift in your identity because it’s not just you declaring, “That’s not who I am.” It’s you figuring out how to show up differently instead of just falling into the habit.

Now, the second part that came up in Chris’s question was feeling worried about what his daily drinking is doing for his body. So he wrote that he cut out hard liquor last year and he replaced it with the 12 and a half percent ABV premixed cans. He also noted that he’s having four to five every day and he’s concerned and confused about what it might be doing for his health, especially because of the digestive issues that are bothering him.

So yeah, drinks with alcohol and a higher sugar content, I see them kind of as like a double whammy for your system. So if you think about it in this way, if you were having four to five sodas every day, that alone wouldn’t be great for your health, right? Because when you have all this excess sugar, it can spike your blood sugar, it can mess with your gut health. It can lead to weight gain. It can just increase overall inflammation.

And the problem is that many of these premixed cans and premixed cocktails have the sugar content of soda plus more alcohol than you probably realize. So the question is, how do we examine how your habit is impacting your health without slipping into shame or scare tactics? Because when we feel shame or scared about our behaviors, we are likely to either try to make a 180-degree change that we can’t sustain for the long term, or we’re likely to become defensive and avoidant and hope that it just kind of magically fixes itself on its own.

So instead of focusing on how much you’re drinking, I want you actually to zoom out and ask yourself more broadly, what is my body struggling with right now? You mentioned digestive issues, but I wonder if there are other things going on for you. So what is my body struggling with right now and how might my daily drinking be contributing to these problems?

Now, there’s a huge difference between these two questions. When you ask yourself, “Am I drinking too much?” it kind of puts you on trial. It has you looking to find a verdict. Is my drinking bad or is it not bad? And underneath that question, so often we’re looking for an answer of, am I doing something wrong? And once you’re in that head space of searching for a verdict, it’s very hard to be honest or curious about your behavior.

But asking yourself, what is my body struggling with right now, and how might my daily drinking be contributing to that? Well, that does something very different. It keeps the focus on your actual experience. It doesn’t ask for a verdict. It asks for information, and it doesn’t assume that alcohol is the only cause. So the other thing I want to add here is you mentioned that you feel confused about how these premixed cans are affecting your health. And listen, you have every right to be because frankly, it really is confusing. Premixed drinks and canned cocktails have really exploded in popularity over the last couple years. And I think that they’ve contributed to a lot of confusion for people.

So first, we need a quick baseline for what a standard serving of alcohol actually is. Standard servings exist because different drinks have different strengths, but your body doesn’t care what you drink. It only cares how much pure alcohol showed up. Your liver doesn’t know the difference between beer or wine or a cocktail. It just processes ethanol.

So in the US, we use standard drinks as a reference point. 12 ounces of beer at about 5% ABV or alcohol by volume, 5 ounces of wine at about 12% ABV, and 1.5 ounces of spirits and hard liquor at about 40% ABV. Those all count as one standard drink even though they look very different because each contain about 0.6 ounces of pure alcohol. And on average, and again, this is a rule of thumb, not a promise, the liver can process about one standard drink per hour. That’s where we get the one drink per hour guideline. That’s where it comes from.

Even with these guidelines, how many standard servings you’re consuming has always been a little imprecise because not all beer comes in 12-ounce cans, and a lot of beer is stronger than 5%. Most people pour more than 5 ounces of wine in a wine glass, and wine strength can also vary. And cocktails often contain multiple liquors, but you can usually see the liquor that is going into a drink. So while these guidelines aren’t exact, they do give us a sense of what a regular drink looks like versus what a stronger one would look like.

But premixed cans and premixed cocktails break all the math and remove all of our visual cues. Like you said, they’re often around 12% ABV, which is wine strength. But they’re served in a 12-ounce can, which is beer size. When you put 12% alcohol into a 12-ounce can, you’re not getting one standard drink. You’re getting closer to two and a half drinks. But your brain sees a 12-ounce can and does what it’s trained to do. It counts it as one drink. Meanwhile, your body is processing much more alcohol than that. That’s not a small mismatch. It is really a complete breakdown of the math most people have learned to drink with. 

So let me just sum this up. Canned cocktails and premixed cans are wine-strength alcohol, packaged like beer, and marketed as one drink. And that combination makes it incredibly hard for most people to tell how much they’re actually having. And this is where I think these drinks can be really misleading. Yes, the ABV is clearly listed on the can, but companies are relying on consumers to do the math that most of us were never taught to do. And they benefit from the fact that most people will count cans as drinks and not calculate standard servings.

Now, Chris, I don’t want you to hear all of this and think that you did something wrong or the change that you made didn’t matter. It does matter. Even if you now realize that four to five cans is not the same as four to five standard drinks. All of us are trying to change inside a system that is honestly pretty opaque. Most of us were never educated on what a standard drink actually is. Labels aren’t designed to make it obvious, and the guidelines are genuinely confusing.

Here’s the thing, you wanted to make a change and you did something. You switched to a drink that appeared to be a healthier choice because it had a lower ABV than hard liquor. Now, alcohol labels can’t legally claim health benefits, but they absolutely lean on health-adjacent cues, saying things like flavored with real juice or low calories or crafted with natural ingredients, or they’re packaged often to look like wellness drinks. That creates this halo effect where people feel like they’re making a healthier choice even when the actual alcohol math means they may be drinking more than they realize. So you were trying to do something good, but now you’ve got data and you’ve got feedback from your body that it’s actually not healthier. This is such a normal part of the process of change.

And I’ll tell you this, it actually reminds me a whole lot of the low-fat era in food. People were trying to take care of themselves and eat better, but a lot of low-fat products were packed with sugar. I remember choosing a lot of low-fat food and thinking, “Oh, I’m choosing this because it’s better for me, and I’m making a healthier choice,” and then realizing it didn’t feel better for my body. That wasn’t a failure on my part. It was an important learning process in my journey. It taught me to stop letting marketing language make decisions for me and start doing two things instead. Turn the label over and understand what I’m actually consuming and pay attention to the feedback my body is giving me regardless of any health halo.

Which brings me to the last point I want to make. You wrote, “I’m not where I want to be yet.” Now, just notice what happens when you tell yourself that. When I say that to myself about anything in life, I don’t feel motivated. I feel bad about myself. I feel exhausted, and that exhaustion saps momentum. It’s a very different thing to say, “This is where I am. Now what?” Not from a place of resignation, but just to orient yourself as the starting point for what is your next step. Because look at what you’re already doing. You listen to that voice inside that said, “My drinking doesn’t align with who I am anymore,” and you didn’t ignore it, you took action. You’re educating yourself. You’re asking questions. You’re paying attention to feedback that you’re getting from your body. These are not small things. These are the exact steps that you need to build on to create the change that you want. But it’s very hard to get where you want to go if the whole time you’re fighting reality.

If you’re resisting where you are and making it mean something negative about you, so the work here is to make sure that you’re not using a thought like, “I’m not where I want to be yet” as a weapon against yourself. Use it as information by switching it to, “Okay, this is where I am. Now what?” This is the change I’ve made. This is what I’ve learned from it. This is what my body is telling me. Now, what’s the next step that supports the person I am becoming and the new identity that I’m stepping into?

This is such a great question, Chris. I really thank you for sharing. And for everyone listening, don’t forget that if you want to do the Reset Your Drinking with me starting January 21st, you can get your tickets at RachelHart.com/January. All right, 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.