For the longest time, I used to think to myself, I just want to prove that I can handle alcohol, that I can know when to stop without constantly waking up, regretting how much I drink. What I didn’t realize back then was how this desire to prove something, prove something about my drinking was actually keeping me stuck in a cycle of overdoing it. This is episode 481, and I’m gonna help you understand and explore the unseen and unspoken desire that often accompanies wanting to prove you can drink less or prove you can handle alcohol. And I’ll explain why addressing this makes it so much easier to actually reach your goal.

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.

Recently, I posed this question on a coaching call inside Take A Break. I said, why does it feel so important to prove that you can drink less? And this question might sound a little strange coming out of my mouth since I’m a coach who literally teaches people how to do just that. But if you want to drink less, if you wanna change your relationship with alcohol, if you wanna feel more in control, I think it’s really important that you stop to answer this question. Why does it feel so important to prove that you can?

People will say to me all the time, listen, Rachel, I don’t wanna quit forever. I just wanna know that I can stop after a couple drinks and not go overboard. Or they’ll tell me, I don’t wanna stop drinking. I just wanna be able to drink normally. And I will be totally honest.

I spent so much of my own journey voicing these exact same desires. And on the surface, these desires can seem like they’re really about quantity, about how much you’re drinking. So it’s the idea of I wanna still drink, but just not too much, or I wanna have alcohol in my life, but in a moderate way. But what I want all of you listening today to consider is that your desire to drink less isn’t just about alcohol. What I have found over and over again is that the desire to change your drinking is so often also about identity.

It’s about how you want to see yourself and not understanding this piece of the equation, not understanding what hides underneath so many of these statements about wanting to drink less, not understanding that it’s actually an attempt to reckon with how you see yourself, this is one of the biggest reasons why I see people getting stuck and why it can feel like you’re going in circles with your attempts at change. So maybe it feels like you’re making some progress and then you slip back into old behaviors or you feel really motivated and really determined that this time is gonna be different. But then after a while, you lose steam. Because if you don’t understand the full scope of what’s driving the desire to prove that you can drink less or prove that you can handle alcohol, you’re gonna find it harder to reach your goal.

When externally you say, listen, I just wanna drink less. But internally, you’re hoping to prove something about who you are and how you see yourself. What you will often find is that these two goals, the goals of changing how much you drink and the goal of changing how you see yourself, they actually can end up at odds with one another. Because I will tell you this, learning how to work with your urges and your cravings and your excuses, it requires things like curiosity and experimentation and a willingness to listen to what’s happening inside of you and work with what’s happening inside of you rather than clinging to the way you think things should be. Whereas proving something about who you are, it just doesn’t draw from the same skills. When we’re trying to prove something about ourselves, we are so often caught up in trying to do things right, trying not to make mistakes, and measuring ourselves against an external standard.

These are almost complete opposite mindsets. And because they are opposite mindsets, it’s really easy to find yourself going in circles, which is why answering this question is so important. Why does proving you can drink normally, whatever that means for you, or proving you can handle alcohol, Why does it feel so important?

Now, the knee jerk answer may sound something like, well, I just want to avoid the consequences. I want to be healthier. I want to feel in control and all of that makes sense. But if that’s the case, why not remove alcohol entirely? That would vastly change the playing field for you. But I will tell you from my own experience when someone would suggest that to me, when they would say, well, Rachel, why don’t you just stop drinking? I would really bristle inside.

I would get really defensive. I had a real kind of F u response on the inside even if I wasn’t saying that to them. It was uncomfortable for me to answer the question of why proving that I could drink less felt so important rather than just not drinking at all. That felt difficult and challenging for me to wrestle with. And I’ll tell you, I often didn’t wanna go there.

What I didn’t realize about that discomfort was the charge I felt inside of me when someone would say, well, why don’t you just stop drinking? That intensity, that charge was actually really important information that I kept not looking at. And you need to look at that in order to understand the full picture of what’s going on. When we don’t pause to answer this question honestly, when we ignore how drinking less is often very tied to how we see ourselves, we’re going to miss something. We’re often going to miss that we’re not actually trying to prove that we can drink less or trying to prove that we can handle alcohol. We’re actually trying to avoid what we think not being able to do these things means about who we are as a person.

So many statements around the desire to drink less carry an implied fear. So people will say, I just wanna drink normally. That’s what we’re willing to say out loud. I was willing to say that out loud. I was much less willing to say that if I couldn’t drink normally, it felt like something was wrong with me. Like part of me was different and abnormal. Or people will say, I just want the discipline to stop at two drinks. What they won’t say is the implied fear of and if I can’t, that means I’m weak or I’m broken or again, something is wrong with me.

A lot of people are willing to say, I don’t wanna quit forever. What we won’t say is because if I had to stop drinking forever, that would mean I would have a problem. What I want you to see here is that so often the spoken goals around drinking less sound like they are just about a number or the health benefits or being disciplined or avoiding the consequences, but a lot goes unsaid.

And a big piece of this are these hidden fears about what we think it means either not to drink or what we think it means if we drink too much or what we think it means about us if we struggle to change. So often, the external goal is actually trying to escape an internal verdict that we’ve really already handed down. Proving you can drink less so often is a sneaky way to defend yourself in the courtroom of your own mind.

When your mind is really good at saying, listen, if you can’t do this, something is fundamentally wrong with you. The external goal is about lessening how much or how often you drink, but the internal goal that is just as important for so many people. And again, often unspoken is trying to prove something about who you think you are and using alcohol as the proxy to do this. And that’s really the bigger problem because when you’re trying to use how much you do or don’t drink as a proxy for your identity, the chase will never end.

Alcohol has simply become the thing that your brain has latched onto in an attempt to defend against the fears you have about your identity. But alcohol can’t answer identity questions. It can’t answer questions about who you are. It’s not capable of doing that. It’s not capable of proving whether you’re normal or unbroken. It just doesn’t have that power.

But I do think it’s really important to understand why so many of us, myself included, can spend years caught in this trap of believing that alcohol can do this for us, believing that alcohol can answer questions about our identity that it simply is not capable of doing. It’s so common. And yet when you kind of slow down and look at this kind of strange and arbitrary, like, why are we trying to use beer to prove something about who we are, but not wheat? Why are we trying to use wine, but not grapes? How is it that we turn to bourbon to prove something about ourselves but not corn? How is it that alcohol has become a referendum on who we are and how we see ourselves?

And I think the answer lies in the fact that so many of us grow up in an environment where alcohol has enormous cultural meaning. Meaning that we get from our family of origin, from our friends, from movies, from school, from music, from books, from TV shows, the list goes on. And that same meaning is just not applied to wheat or grapes or corn. Think about the messages you absorbed where you may have heard people being praised because they could really handle their liquor or celebrated because they could drink someone under the table or hearing people being teased because they were a lightweight or complaining that someone was being a buzzkill if they weren’t drinking.

I remember once hearing someone say, I just don’t trust people who don’t drink. And I remember how much that really stuck with me. That was such, in my mind, a referendum of, oh my gosh, if I can’t do this, then I’m just gonna be someone who’s not trustworthy. And then, of course, we admonish people for drinking too much or being a lush or not having enough self control. Even think about all the times you’ve heard someone say with a lot of disdain, ugh, that person is such an alcoholic.

So we’re constantly getting all these cultural messages about what it means to drink, what it means not to drink, and what it means to struggle with drinking too much. And all of that messaging informs our desire to use alcohol to try to prove something about who we are. It’s just not a very effective tool because, frankly, nothing external that we try to use to prove who we are is going to be very effective. And a lot of times people will argue with me. They’ll say, listen, Rachel, these messages are so prevalent.

Right? They’re so inescapable. Like, what do you want me to do? But just because something has been assigned cultural meaning doesn’t mean that that meaning is correct. And sometimes we have to take an example that seems kind of absurd, but I like to think about how for centuries being left handed was suspect.

Children were forced to write with their right hand. People believe that left handedness meant something was deviant or wrong with you or that even you were marked by the devil. Now, again, this seems absurd today, but it was a very pervasive message. Now that has changed, but nothing changed about left handedness. What changed was just the meaning that was assigned to it.

Culture is very good at taking a behavior or characteristic and loading it with meaning about who someone is. But just because that happens doesn’t make the meanings that have been assigned to it objectively true. Think about all the cultural beliefs you have about what it means to drink or to not drink or to drink too much. They can feel like they are the truth when really they’re just optional interpretations that not everybody subscribes to. And frankly, when did you ever sit down and decide, hey, this is what I want to make it mean?

We don’t do that. We don’t actually sit down and decide for ourselves. We just absorb these messages and then act as if they are true. So we’re constantly surrounded by messages that suggest alcohol consumption reveals something important about a person’s character. When I would argue, that’s just not the case.

It has no relevance beyond the relevance that you choose to give it. But the question is, did you actually ever choose to give it this relevance, or did you just accept it as the truth? Because of this, when you really understand what’s going on here, it makes a lot of sense that our brain is making the leap to, well, okay, if I can prove that I can drink the right amount, then that’s going to prove something about me. That’s gonna say something important about me. But I want you to consider, does it really?

And then think about what happens when you use alcohol as a proxy for what you think about yourself. Every single drink becomes a test. Every dinner out with friends, every vacation, every Friday night, every holiday, they all become these pass fail tests. Not just how much you do or don’t drink, but who you are and what drinking or not drinking or drinking too much says about you. And I will promise you this, when your identity is on the line, those will feel like incredibly high stakes.

And when the stakes feel really high, it is almost impossible to learn from your cravings and urges, which is the exact practice that you need. Because the moment that your identity gets wrapped up in your drinking, you stop being able to look at your behavior objectively. So let’s say maybe you plan to have a couple of drinks and you ended up finishing the bottle. If your identity isn’t attached to that outcome, it’s a lot easier to ask questions like, okay, what happened there? What was I feeling beforehand during my day in the moment? What thoughts or excuses or justifications that I believe? What archetype showed up for me in the moment? What can I learn from this? What can I do differently next time? What would I need to practice to create a different result?

Those questions are the basis of curiosity, and curiosity is always a precursor to change. But if your identity is wrapped up in what happened, it’s gonna be very hard for you to ask those kinds of questions because instead, your brain is going to launch into, oh, something is wrong with you. You’re never gonna figure this out. Or you’re immediately gonna rush to promise to like, oh, I’m gonna be good next time without actually understanding why this time happened. Or maybe you’ll swing in the opposite direction and start defending what happened and telling yourself it wasn’t really that bad and everybody was having a lot to drink.

Notice how no matter what direction your responses go in, they all lack curiosity. They’re all just wrapped up in your identity. And when your energy is spent trying to use how much you do or don’t drink to prove something about who you are, you lose the ability to actually learn what was happening in the moment, what led to the outcome that I’m trying to change. This is why I think so many people end up spinning their wheels. Because remember, learning how to work with your urges and your cravings and excuses requires things like curiosity, experimentation.

You got to be willing to work with what’s actually unfolding inside of you in the moment rather than telling yourself this shouldn’t be happening. Proving something about who you are, it just doesn’t draw on the same skills. When we’re trying to prove something about ourselves, we are more often trying to do things right. We’re trying to not make mistakes. We’re trying to measure ourselves against an external standard.

So when you fixate just on the number, just on how much, And when you focus all your energy on counting, that might offer useful data, but it will only take you so far when underneath you’re trying to answer a question about how you see yourself. So I want you to really sit with this question. What am I hoping drinking less will prove about me? Are you chasing after a belief that you’ll finally feel like you’re normal or that nothing is wrong with you? Are you trying to use alcohol to settle a question about who you are in your mind?

Because remember, alcohol just can’t answer that question. Otherwise, everyone who didn’t struggle with their drinking would feel totally at peace with themselves. But, of course, we know that’s not the case because everybody struggles with something. And you can keep trying to use how much you drink or how much you weigh or how much money is in your bank account or how big your house is or the kind of car that you drive. You can keep trying to use all these external things as proxies for identity, but it’s never actually going to get you to a settled comfortable place with your identity.

And you start to realize that using external markers like this, it’s always gonna be a losing battle because external things can’t solve internal questions. So instead of asking, can I drink normally? Ask yourself, why does it feel so important to prove that I can? Or even what am I afraid it would mean about me if I couldn’t? Now, again, those questions can be uncomfortable to really look at the answers to, but these answers are so important.

Because when you see that you’ve assigned how much you drink this role of trying to prove something about who you are, when you really understand that something remarkable happens, something internally really shifts because you see that you’re actually free to decide for yourself what you’re going to make it mean. Instead of just accepting all of the messages that you have absorbed over your lifetime, you get to actually choose for yourself. Well, what do I think it means? What do I wanna make it mean? What do I think it means if someone drinks or if they don’t or if they struggle or if they stop?

And you might end up to a place where I ended up as well, which is I think it means very little about someone. Because when you stop using alcohol to answer identity questions, it’s just a million times easier to figure out how you want alcohol in your life, the role you want it to play, the relationship you want to have with it. And with that information, without it trying to prove something larger about who you are as a person, just that true information of what feels right for you, then you can go about creating that and creating that with curiosity rather than trying to use alcohol to measure something about you that it just can’t. Alright. That’s it 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.