Here’s a tug of war you might find yourself in with drinking. You get to a point where part of you doesn’t like how it makes you feel. Or maybe you start to realize that third glass just doesn’t taste as good. And yet, another very vocal part of you wants to drink and wants to keep going back for more.

This is episode 443, and if you feel caught in this frustrating cycle, I’ll explain why you shouldn’t use this internal tension as proof of a bigger problem, but rather see it as the normal push and pull inside your brain and explain how you can use it to discover the deeper desires motivating the habit.

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.

Hey everybody, welcome back. I am here again with Adriana Cloud who coaches with me inside of Take a Break. So, we wanted to talk about something that I know has come up for me, I think it’s come up for you as well. We hear members talking about this and it can be a very frustrating part of trying to break out of the habit and the loop that you can feel in with your drinking. And that so often is the sense of, “I don’t really even like it. I don’t really like how it makes me feel and yet I keep feeling drawn to it.”

And it creates, actually, I think this very confusing situation inside of yourself because many times people will feel, “Well, why am I even doing this thing that I’m not even really enjoying?” And this, I just want to say, this can show up in a lot of different ways. It can show up in, “I’m not really even getting the effect or the feeling that I want from it.” So sometimes it’s, “I’m drinking in the moment and it doesn’t really feel that good.” Sometimes it’s how you feel the next day. Sometimes it is actually noticing, a lot of people when they do the work of the mindful drink, sometimes it is actually noticing, “I am now at the point where drinking more is having diminishing returns. It’s not even tasting that good anymore. It’s not even feeling that good in my body, but I just watch my arm reach out, go back for more and more.”

And so it can show up in a lot of different ways, but I think it’s important to talk about why this happens and what to do about it because it can be a very frustrating part. Adriana, what do you want to share about your experience with this? 

Adriana Cloud: Yes, I want to share that I definitely can see myself in this question because I had those moments too when I was working on changing my drinking. I had those moments where I would still order a drink and then recognize that this doesn’t taste so good and the effect is sort of strange, and I don’t like that I’m losing control a little bit if I had a few drinks. And yet I still was ordering it and I would still not only order the first glass, but then order a second one too.

And so it was actually really puzzling. Well, wasn’t this the most amazing thing ever? Because there was definitely a time when I did enjoy it or at least I believed I enjoyed it. And so at some point that changed, and even though I was no longer truly enjoying it and I didn’t, maybe I was more aware of the effects it was having on me physically or how it was altering my mind. But there was definitely that period of limbo, for lack of a better word, where I still wanted it. I still felt deprived if I wasn’t having it. But then I had to really face up to the reality that the actual experience of it was not so pleasant.

And so then, why was I still drinking? So I just want to validate that this is actually quite a common experience where we don’t love the actual reality, and yet we still keep repeating the same pattern and wanting it more.

Rachel Hart: Yeah, I remember this in particular with day drinking. I lived in New York City for a long time and Saturday morning, Sunday morning, you’d go out for brunch with your girlfriends and we’d start drinking at 10 or 11. And it was always this really fascinating thing to watch how when the effect of it would start to wear off, right? I would have that initial giddy buzz and it would feel good, and then around 2:00, I was not feeling so great.

And I remember having this realization of, “Okay, well, if I’m not going to keep drinking throughout the day, it actually kind of sucks. It doesn’t really feel that good.” And I think a lot of times we miss that. Certainly I missed that when I first started drinking because I first started drinking at night. I first started drinking going to parties, college parties, starting at 10 or 11:00. And so, I wasn’t having the experience of really experiencing the comedown because I was asleep for it.

And so that’s always kind of an interesting thing that I work with a lot of people on when it’s, “Oh, yeah, I’m not even really sure I enjoy day drinking that much because you are kind of face-to-face with what the comedown feels like.” So there’s that piece. When I did the work for the very first time, I can still so vividly remember this moment of doing the practice of trying to mindfully consume a glass of rosé. And I had done a lot of work with mindful eating. And even though I had done that work with mindful eating, I was not expecting to have such a similar experience, which was to have this drink in front of me that my brain was saying, “We love this. This is amazing. Rosé all day.” And then to notice how quickly there was just a drop in my enjoyment of it.

First sip for me was, “Yes, love it, great.” And as I started to really go slow and just mindfully sip this glass of rosé, I got to a point, I remember, where it was my tongue felt fuzzy and it felt more acidic than anything. And again, I know I’m really talking about the taste here and a lot of you are listening probably thinking, “It’s not just all about the taste.” But I think one of the reasons why this was so mind-blowing for me is because I was thinking, “No, rosé is the best. I love it. I love how it tastes.” And so, yes, I love how it makes me feel, but it really was jarring in that moment to recognize that some part of me is not actually enjoying it.

It’s funny because I had years earlier very similar experiences doing work around mindful eating with some of my favorite foods, and I remember feeling so truly upset when I was working my way through my all-time favorite sandwich and I was thinking, “I don’t think I really like this.” Or I did enjoy it at first and now the sensation of eating it, I’m not getting that much pleasure.

So it can be just this very – it’s almost you feel off-balance because your story about the thing that you’re consuming and then your experience of the thing that you’re consuming doesn’t line up. And I think it’s important what you said also is my story, that story that I adapted when I was 17 and I was like, “Oh, this is what we do. This is how we get rid of all our social anxiety. This is how you’re all of a sudden feeling confident and outgoing.” To me, I was like, “This is amazing. Alcohol is amazing.” And my brain really latched on to that story. And certainly, the more that I was starting to in that moment really have my experience of it, it’s not like I was like, “Oh, it’s awful, it’s horrible.” It’s just it wasn’t, there was a disconnect there, right? There was a part of me that was like, “I know I think I told myself that I love it,” but I was getting information from my body saying, “I don’t know how much we’re loving this right now.”

Adriana Cloud: Yeah, as you were saying this, I actually am remembering a different experience I was having when doing this work and how I first started to recognize that it was more than what was in my glass, but what I thought it was doing for me. So, for example, remembering going out with friends and thinking, “Well, if everyone else is drinking, I want to fit in.” So I will order a drink, and then actually recognizing, even though I also had an alcoholic drink in my glass, I still did not feel like I fit in because then I was so self-conscious around how much I was drinking and, “Oh, I should drink faster to feel the effects quicker.” And, “Oh, I’m still feeling a little bit external to this conversation.”

And so I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but it was so clear that I was expecting the drink to do something for me. So it wasn’t just what was in the glass, but what I thought it was helping me to feel or helping me to not feel. And so I didn’t love the actual experience of drinking it and having to consume it what I thought I had to do. I had to consume it in order to fit in, but I wanted it because I thought, “Oh, this is my ticket. This is how I get to belong is if I have this.” But then it didn’t. It actually did not help me to feel any more I belonged.

Rachel Hart: So I think what’s important here is first just normalizing that this is a very common experience. And again, it can look very different for people. You might be like, “No, no, I’m totally enjoying it. I just hate how I feel the next day.” Right? I hate that there is a part of me that is drawn to something that I have all of this evidence for it’s not serving me. Right? It’s not serving me physically, it’s not serving me emotionally. I’m waking up the next day feeling regretful. So it can look a lot of different ways.

But the first thing is that it’s very normal. The second thing is that it doesn’t mean that anything has gone wrong. I think that is the place where people get very stuck is the sense of, “Okay, if I’m not liking this thing in the moment, why am I drinking more? If I’m waking up the next day and I’m feeling all of the downside of my consumption from last night, why on earth would I repeat the behavior?” And that conflict that is so incredibly normal, we immediately kind of twist it into, “Okay, so here’s proof that something is wrong with me, that I shouldn’t be acting in this quote illogical way. And if I am, then what does that mean about me?”

So that I think is almost the bigger problem is how we use this tension that starts to surface as proof. “Oh, see, there’s something I’m doing wrong or something wrong about me or something messed up in my particular relationship with drinking.” Rather than stepping back and understanding, “Yeah, this actually makes a lot of sense,” because even if you take it out of the realm of alcohol, which I think is often really important to do when you guys are doing this work, to just look at how many things for humans in general we feel conflicted about. Right? We, part of us likes something and part of us doesn’t like that same thing. We have this tension. We so often look at our behavior and our actions and think, “Oh, that didn’t really serve me,” or, “I don’t really like how I showed up there,” and yet we continue to choose the thing that doesn’t serve us or continue to show up in the way that we’re like, “I can see how this isn’t helpful.”

So I think it’s important to kind of zoom out and see that this is a commonality that all humans share. Not everybody struggles with drinking, right? But all of us struggle with looking at some of our behaviors and being like, “Oh, they either don’t make sense, I don’t like that I keep doing it.” But yet here I am engaging in the same behavior.

Adriana Cloud: Yes, and the other thing I think it’s important to point out is that sometimes it’s not even a situation where I used to like it and now I don’t like it but I still want it. But maybe what you thought was liking it in the past actually was not liking it at all, but it was just it was familiar. And our brains tend to associate familiarity with comfort and, “Oh yeah, that’s easy. That’s a known thing.” And therefore we mistake that for, “Oh, it means I like it. If it’s familiar, it means I like it,” just because it’s easy and it feels the way that I remember it feeling last time.

And so I think it’s worth to question, am I actually liking it? If you right now are having an experience where you think you do still like wine or gin and tonic or whatever your drink is, is it really that you like it? And can you get more specific about what you like about it? And can you be more mindful to start to question, “Do I really like it? Or is it just that’s what I’m used to having at 6:00 p.m. every Thursday and Friday?”

Rachel Hart: Right. Like this is just the thing that feels familiar. And again, I want to be cautious with everyone listening that when you’re asking the question, “Do I really like this?” It’s not because, wink, we’re trying to get you to see that actually you hate it and actually it doesn’t taste good. It’s just to kind of pause and I often phrase this as using a “yes, and” technique. “Yes, I like the taste, and what else do I like about it? Yes, I like the buzz, and what else?” It’s essentially stepping back to really examine more fully your experience of it.

And it’s fascinating because I mean I think about what I was drinking in college. I mean, there was nothing about trying to like the taste of it. It was grain alcohol and Hawaiian punch. You know, it’s like let me put the absolute sweetest things together to mask such an unpleasant taste. And so that is also just a fascinating thing to watch as well is that many people who do have the experience of starting to experiment with alcohol and drink in their teenage years or their early 20s, they’re often doing it, right? With cheap alcohol, with things that are like hard liquor that is just meant to get you drunk.

And so it is this kind of fascinating, if I look at my own journey to be like, “Oh yeah, there’s no part of me that was like, this tastes good.” It was all, “This is just, it feels good.” But then it did kind of move into this place of, “No, no, but now see like I’m becoming more adult and I’m more sophisticated and now I’m not in college and I live in this city and I go to fancy dinners and like, and now I’m developing a taste for it,” right? And then to kind of keep following the arc that I, the arc that I was on, it was like, “No, it’s not just about how it feels, it’s about appreciating, right? Like appreciating the flavor.” Not that isn’t true, but then as I watched my own journey to kind of see like, “Okay, so there is this part of me that is being very selective and choosy about what I drink, and I’m not really tasting it at some point.” Right? Like to slow down and do, for me to slow down and do that exercise for the first time, it was so eye-opening because it really was like, “Oh, I can see that I am getting feedback that part of me is, part of me is like, this does not taste the way.” After a certain amount, it was like, “This does not taste so great, it does not feel so great for me.” And yet there was still that desire.

And so again, it’s really just that kind of pulling back to see what else is there. And if I’m to follow my own journey, you can see the ways in which alcohol has served different purposes and played different roles and how it has also been connected to very different stories about, you said, belonging and sophistication and it’s like all of these unspoken stories are also in the glass. They’re also part of what we are consuming and they will impact our consumption as well.

Adriana Cloud: Yes, and this is why it’s so important to question what is the desire really about and what are we desiring? Because as you said, there is maybe a tendency to notice that, “Oh, if I don’t like it, therefore it should be easy for me to stop consuming it and therefore I should not ever want it.” But instead of judging yourself for still wanting it, what a great opportunity to then really pause and get curious about, “Well, what do I want about it? What parts still seems attractive or what do I think it will give me? So where is that want coming from?” which is difficult to get curious if you’re judging yourself and telling yourself, “Oh, I didn’t like the experience and therefore something is wrong with me for still wanting it.”

But what is it that you want exactly? Is it that if you have the fancy bottle of wine, then you can believe that, “Oh, I have great taste in wine,” and you feel proud of that? Or is it that you do feel you’re part of the group because everyone else is drinking and so can you? Or what else is it giving you that you don’t think you could get without it, even if the taste isn’t exactly what you like? That’s the key is to understand what do you want about it.

Rachel Hart: Yeah. And I mean, that’s where the drink archetypes come in. And one of the things that I see so often come up for so many people is when we start to explore, “What do I like about it?” Right? So we’re not doubling down and, “Yeah, you don’t actually like it,” right? “It doesn’t actually feel good. So why are you doing this thing that doesn’t feel good? Why are you doing this thing that’s creating all these negative impacts?” Right? We’re not doubling down there. We’re doing exactly what you’re suggesting, which is, “Okay, so what do you like about it?”

And that can be so transformative just that shift alone because we’re so conditioned to believe if we want to change a behavior, if we see that something is creating negative results in our life, that we need to just focus on the negative. Right? And so to make the shift and say, “No, okay, but what do I like about it?” And so many people will say, “This is the one place where I don’t have to say no to myself.” Right? Pouring the drink at the end of the day is the one place where I get to say yes to my desire. Now, again, this is not true for everyone, but so many people, especially with the reward archetype, fall into these patterns of spending their day essentially telling their needs and their desires that they have to wait and just give and give and give to everyone else.

And so when we start to unpack what’s going on there, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to say no here because I’m saying no to myself all day long.” And so that is insight, that is information that you are not going to get just by doubling down on, “Yeah, it’s bad for you and you don’t actually really like it.” To see, “Oh, there’s a part of me that likes this thing because I get to say yes to myself.” And if this is one of the rare places where I get to say yes to myself, then yeah, maybe I, even when I get information from my body that this is no longer feeling so good, I maybe don’t want to say no to myself.

And so again, that’s the reward archetype. It will show up differently for different archetypes, but to just bring not only normalizing what’s going on, to see how it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong. It simply can be a moment of understanding that this story that you have about drinking and what you like about it, that there’s some tension between, right? The story and the reality. To get curious about like, “Okay, so what do you? Like, what are you enjoying? Like we know what you’re not enjoying, what are you enjoying and why? And can you dig a little deeper adding that yes and to say, ‘Yes, you like the taste, and what else? Yes, you like the buzz, and what else?’ to dig a little deeper there.”

But really just to, I think also to see that many times this is just watching your brain at work. It was so powerful for me to just understand that my brain wasn’t one big lump. I know it sounds so crazy, but we really aren’t taught anything about the brain and how it functions. And to see, there’s a higher brain and there’s a lower brain and they have different motivations and they are focused on different things. And sometimes some of the tension that you’re really feeling is we’re just not used to, and certainly no one teaches us how to intervene with the desires of the lower brain and that motivation for reward is the most important thing, and the bigger the reward, the better, and the easier to get, the better, and I just want to keep getting more of this reward because the lower brain is operating on this very archaic sense of this is what helps survival.

And so again, I always say to people, there are so many structures in the brain, so many. If we can just boil it down to like lower brain, higher brain, right? To just understand that you have, we all have this kind of internal tension between, “I want what I want when I want it right now and I want it to be easy and I want it to be rewarding,” and the part of you that has dreams and goals and can weigh the pros and cons and wants things that are bigger than just immediate gratification, and that those two parts of you are going to be in tension with each other and it’s not about eradicating the lower brain, which by the way we can’t do. We’re not, even if we could give ourselves a lobotomy, we wouldn’t function anymore. We wouldn’t be able to survive without it, but learning like, “How do I work with this tension instead of how do I get rid of it?”

Adriana Cloud: Yes and I love when you talk about the lower brain like it’s a little child because then it gives us more compassion to work with and then we know, okay, the toddler wants chocolate for dinner and we as the adult can acknowledge that’s what the child wants, and still choose not to give it to the child, right? We can still say no, we’re not having chocolate for dinner.

And so in these situations where we notice, okay, I don’t actually love the experience of drinking, some part of me still wants it, okay, why is that a problem? Did you still want it? What if you could just acknowledge the want, remind yourself, “This is just my lower brain asking for what it has learned to ask for, and I can still be in charge and use my higher brain to decide whether I give in to this want or sit with it, or how I respond to it.”

So wanting it is not a problem. And I love thinking about it as, if a child came to me with this suggestion, would I just say yes to everything the child wants? Probably not. Probably I would employ some rational thinking and then make a choice. So to not make the want itself mean that we have to give in to it.

Rachel Hart: Yeah. I just want to say for everyone out there, as a mom who has a three and a half year old at home right now, listen, I know that that can also be hard. That there is the rational part of us that we understand, that when our lower brain is having a tantrum that we understand we shouldn’t always give in. And sitting with a tantrum can be really hard. Sitting with your lower brain freaking out can be hard. And to know that part of it really is building the muscle of this part of me can be freaking out on the inside and I can sit with it, I can allow it, I don’t have to freak out in response. I don’t have to meet the freakout with freakout, and seeing that really as a skill.

No joke. It is a challenging skill, whether you are learning how to deal with the tantrum in your own mind or learning how to deal with the tantrum of a child, which we are having many at my house right now.

Adriana Cloud: And I don’t have children, so I can’t relate to that firsthand, but I do want to say that yes, this is a skill that we can get stronger at and keep practicing, but I like thinking of it as a practice. I’m practicing and it’s never going to be something that I fully master. I will continue to work at it and some days it will be easier to respond with grace to the desires of my lower brain. And some days it will be harder and that’s okay too. That too is part of being human and I still can be compassionate with myself even when I didn’t have the patience to sit with an urge and talk myself through it and respond the way that maybe I would have wanted to respond.

Rachel Hart: Yeah. Well, I just want to add on this final note. One of the big things that the two of us are always teaching is that no matter what happens, whether you gave in, whether that kind of internal freak out was too much, there’s always so much that you can learn from and grow from in that moment. And so one of the pieces that I think applies with parenting, I think that it applies in our own self-growth is we don’t need to do it perfectly in order for us to start to show up and become more of who we want to be.

And a lot of it is going to be trial and error. A lot of it is going to be testing something out and seeing how it works and recognizing that if it doesn’t work the way that you anticipated or the way that you hoped, that it’s time to go back to the drawing board and figure out why and figure out what do I need to do next. And that I, just in my own, in my own journey with so much in life, that really has been the tremendous shift is to not approach the things I want to change with this gripping and this tension of, “Okay, this is a solution and so it’s got to unfold exactly like this,” but to really see, to really see all of these moments as there’s always something to understand and to learn and to gain here and just letting go of the idea that the only way for me to have success is for me to be perfect.

I think that’s honestly a huge thing of what you and I do with members. It’s just a space for them finally to see, “Oh, I wasn’t perfect. I can still show up here and I can still learn from it and I can still grow from it.” It doesn’t mean like, it’s not just another instance of what our tendency is, which is, “Oh, I screwed up again. Like more proof I’m a screw up.”

Adriana Cloud: Yeah, and I love thinking about it as learning to develop an attitude of fascination with our brains like, “Oh, how interesting my brain did this. Oh, how curious,” no matter what the thing is that my brain did. And to be completely open, I do this too. I have to work at it to this day, who doesn’t? And I am certain this will continue for as long as I live. I will have to work at it, but I love whenever I can get there to offer myself this moment of fascination with like, “Oh, I wonder why my brain did that. I wonder why that came up. I wonder why I responded this way. Let’s get curious,” instead of jumping to what my previous default would have been, which is, “Oh, you did something bad. You clearly messed up here. However you reacted was the wrong way to react and something is wrong with you and fundamentally broken.” So the more fascination and curiosity you can bring, the better and the easier it will be to really untangle these patterns and be able to choose intentionally who you want to be.

Rachel Hart: Love it. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Adriana Cloud: Thank you for having me.

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.