You are listening to the Take a Break Podcast with Rachel Hart, Episode 378.

All right, everybody. Welcome back. We are talking today about the excuse, “There’s no point stopping now.” I’m sure that you have had this excuse bubble up for you at times as well. Maybe you opened the beer, you poured the glass of wine, you had the first sip, and then it’s like, “There’s no point stopping now.”

Why do we insist that this is true? Because we do this with alcohol, but I think we do it with a lot of things. It’s like you unwrap the candy bar, you open the bag of chips and it’s like, “There’s no point stopping now. Might as well keep going.” We approach so much of the things that we consume with this all or nothing mindset.

I think there’s a lot of reasons why this happens. Some of it has to do with idea of the Clean Plate Club or the Clean Glass Club. This idea that we use the container, so the plate or the package or the glass or the bottle to dictate when we’re done. A lot of us, myself included, have a long pattern of doing that.

For most people, it starts well before they ever start drinking. It starts with food. That we use external objects to signal when we’ve had enough rather than tuning into ourselves. I will tell you something, when this excuse comes up for you, “There’s no point stopping now” maybe you told yourself you’re only gonna have two glasses of wine, you pour the third. You have that first sip, and it’s like, “Okay, might as well just finish it.” I think that this excuse is actually offering something to us. When our brain wants to tell us “There’s no point at stopping now,” the thing for us to remember is that stopping now is the point. If you promised yourself that you weren’t going to drink today, and then you gave into a craving, stopping now is the point.

Learning how to say no, even after you broke a commitment to yourself, that’s the whole point. That’s the work that you need to do in order to rewire your brain. If you promised yourself that you’d only have two drinks, and then you take a sip from drink number three, stopping now is the point. If you want to be someone who drinks less, then you have to know how to stop even after you’ve given in beyond your commitment.

Because every time you practice stopping, you teach your brain two things. Number one, you teach your brain, “Even when I make a misstep, I can quickly get back on track.” Think about that. That is not how I operated for the longest time. The moment that I broke a commitment, I tanked. And I did not quickly get back on track. Breaking my commitment, it would bleed into days, if not weeks afterwards. That’s the first thing that we’re teaching ourselves when we practice stopping. Every time I make a misstep, I can quickly get back on track. I don’t have to have this all or nothing mindset.

And number two, “Change isn’t created through perfection.” It’s created by taking small steps in the direction in which I want to go. This also is a huge, huge shift. Because if you think that you’re only ever going to change a habit by being perfect, you’re in for a world of hurt.

Because perfect just doesn’t really exist. You’re human. You’re going to have moments where you aren’t perfect. And if that always means, “I failed. There’s no point in stopping now,” all you are doing is strengthening the underlying habit that you’re trying to change. We have to let go of this idea that perfection is somehow the path to salvation. It is not. It is the path to keeping you stuck.

We are so caught in this idea that breaking a commitment is bad and when it happens. It’s like we mark ourselves as like, “Oh, I’m a bad person. I might as well go all in on being bad.” Do you see the problem there? When we go all in on being bad, all we are doing is strengthening the very thing that we’re trying to change.

The problem isn’t that you broke your commitment. The problem is that you’re using the moment that you broke your commitment to evaluate yourself as a person, to hand down judgment on yourself. Imagine what would be different if you just removed good and bad from the equation. Taking that sip wasn’t good or bad.

Drinking isn’t good or bad. Keeping a commitment isn’t good or bad. Imagine if we just took all of that away, then what? I think when I suggest this to a lot of people, it’s like, “What are you talking about? I have to have good and bad. I need this framework.” Without the framework of good and bad, and right and wrong, you would have to find another way to decide what to do next.

And here’s the thing, when you’re telling yourself that you were bad, it’s not like you’re then going on to make a decision that you like. If it actually worked to tell yourself that you had been bad, if it was actually creating the results and the outcome that you wanted, then okay, fine, go for it. But that’s not what’s happening.

That’s not what’s fueling an excuse like “There’s no point stopping now.” Without this good and bad framework, how do you decide what to do next? How do you decide what your next course of action will be?

When you take away that framework, then you have to tune into yourself. You have to see what it feels like inside of you to want one thing and to do another. To want not to drink today and then do it anyway. To want to drink less and then to drink more. You have to feel the experience of what it is like to be at odds with yourself.

But most people have no idea what this feels like because we’re so quick to label our behavior as good or bad. And then we use those words to decide how we feel about our actions that we don’t actually know how we feel. We don’t actually know what the experience is like when we remove good and bad and just see what is it like to be at odds with myself?

Because I will tell you, it doesn’t feel bad when you do something at odds with a goal or something that you truly want. It doesn’t. If you can really sit there with the dissonance of, “I wanted to do X, but I did Y instead.” What you will experience when you free yourself from that quickly labeling your behavior as bad is something else entirely.

What you will experience is curiosity. You will start to wonder, “Why? Why am I at odds with myself right now? Why do I want X, but I’m doing Y?” You will recognize this tension inside of yourself and start to get curious what it’s about. Now listen, this is also a moment where you can fall into the trap of, “Because I’m bad.”

We have to remove it, we have to take it away. If we were to just get curious, “I wonder why. I wonder why right now I gave in, why I truly want this thing X, but I did Y instead. I wonder what that was about.” Being with that dissonance inside of yourself is everything.

We all have dissonance. Having it does not mean that some part of your brain is broken. The dissonance is very normal. It’s a dissonance between having a lower brain and a higher brain. That’s what it is. That’s what you’re witnessing when you see it. You will recognize this tension inside of you, and you will get curious what it’s about.

And that is the real beauty of stopping now. We’re not stopping now so we can like, “Oh, stop being the bad person and reclaim the mantle of goodness.” No, you’re not doing it because you were bad. And now it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to stop. I’m going to recommit in an attempt to be good.” No, that’s not what this is about at all. You practice stopping now because stopping now is the point. It’s how you meet yourself. It’s how you head in the direction of where you want to go. It’s how you discover the tension between who you want to be and how you’re actually showing up in the moment.

When you have the excuse, “There’s no point in stopping now”, all it does is it just sends you further into the mindset of good and bad. And the problem with good and bad, especially when it comes to drinking, and many of you have had this experience, is that you get tired of being good all the time.

It feels like, “Oh God, I’m like always being good. I’m always restricting myself. I’m always depriving myself.” You get tired of being good and you decide you want to be bad. And if you’re going to be bad, this is what I always told myself, “Rachel, you might as well be really bad.” Good and bad fuel this binge and restrict cycle with alcohol, with food, with shopping, with pretty much everything in life.

It really is part of the problem. It can be scary to move into this place where you’re committing to this idea of not labeling your desire or your actions or your drinking as good and bad. It can feel scary because we’re not used to tuning into ourselves.

We’re not used to having that conversation. We’re not used to getting curious with that dissonance inside of us. And it feels like, “If I don’t have good and bad to dictate what I do, am I just going to do all the bad things?” That’s how little we trust ourselves, which when you think about it, that’s an awful place to be in. It’s an awful place to have that lack of trust that you’re worried without these parameters, without this framework, you will, of course, do the bad, wrong thing.

But what if that’s not true? The next time when you notice yourself saying, “Well, there’s no point in stopping now”, remind yourself that stopping now is the point. Not so you can redeem yourself, but so you can go beneath the surface and discover that tension that is keeping you stuck so that you can get curious and wonder, “What’s actually going on here? How am I feeling? Why did I just give in? What’s happening around me?”

When you have all that data, that data is actually what you need to show up differently the next time. By the way, the quickest way to find out the tension below the surface, if you haven’t already done it, take The Drink Archetypes quiz. These eight Archetypes will help you understand some of that hidden tension that can be hard to spot at first. And when you have your results, when you know your top two archetypes, you are that much closer to really figuring out what do I need to focus on and practice next in order to change my relationship with alcohol. So head on over to drinktype.com and you can take the quiz and get your results.

All right, everybody, that’s it for today. I will see you next week.