Have you made real progress cutting back on how much you drink, yet you keep waiting for things to feel easier? Or despite all the changes you’ve made, you find it frustrating that alcohol continues to occupy so much space in your head. This is episode 478, and I’m explaining why drinking less and changing your relationship with alcohol are not the same thing and why understanding the difference will completely change how you measure progress.

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, today’s listener question is from Annalisa. Here’s what she wrote. “I’ve been working on cutting back on alcohol for the last couple years. I’ve made some progress for sure. I was a daily drinker for a couple decades, but I still have one foot in and one foot out of this process because I just don’t have a compelling reason to quit. While I’ve never been happy about my tie to alcohol, I don’t have any major consequences. I rarely wake up with a headache or a hangover, and I can get three to four alcohol-free days in each week. My weekly drink count has also dropped at least 80%, but I still haven’t ever taken a break. I still resist the idea, and then when I try to string together even just a week, I give in because it’s the weekend or I’m meeting up with friends, etc. I guess I don’t like where I am now because I feel like I’ve been working on this for so long and it doesn’t seem to be getting easier. Alcohol still occupies a significant amount of my thoughts. I listen to podcasts constantly, probably for the last three years. Do you have any advice for being in a spot like this?”

All right, Annalisa, thank you so much for your question. First, I just want to acknowledge that you have made so much incredible progress. You went from drinking every day for a couple decades to routinely having three or four alcohol-free days a week. You also wrote that you reduced your weekly drink count by 80%. That is really remarkable, and I don’t want to gloss over this because I think sometimes when we really want to change our relationship with alcohol, we get really focused on where we want to go and how we’re not there yet, and we lose sight of how far we’ve already come.

But here’s the thing, what stood out to me in your question wasn’t actually how much you’re drinking. It was this sentence: “Alcohol still occupies a significant amount of my thoughts.” Because I actually think that’s the heart of what you’re struggling with, and I wonder if part of what’s happening is that you’re measuring your progress using the wrong yardstick. I think there are actually two different kinds of progress when it comes to your drinking. The first is drinking less. That is where most people focus their attention. So we’re asking the question, how much was I drinking before and how much am I drinking now? And the progress here matters, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Because the second type of progress is needing alcohol less. And I want to be really careful with that word need because I know it can kind of trigger something.

It certainly did for me when I would think about, well, I don’t need to drink, I just want to. People hear the word need and immediately think about addiction or physical dependence. So I would picture someone whose body had become so dependent on alcohol that they would get sick without it. That’s what I thought need meant. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking more about psychological necessity. I’m talking about all the moments when drinking feels essential or non-negotiable or like a must-have ingredient for the experience that you want to have.

For example, telling yourself that you can’t enjoy the weekend without it or dinner with friends just isn’t going to be as much fun if you’re not drinking. Or why bother even going on vacation if you’re not going to drink? Or feeling like you can’t unwind after a long day without it. That’s the kind of need that I’m talking about. And that’s exactly what the drink archetypes are really there to help us understand because each archetype teaches your brain that alcohol has a particular job and that it’s necessary for things like pleasure or connection or treating yourself after a hard day or feeling more confident in social situations or escaping from moments in your life that feel challenging or really difficult. There are so many jobs that we unintentionally teach our brain alcohol is responsible for, and the more that your brain learns that lesson, the more alcohol starts to feel less like an option and more like a requirement for certain experiences.

So when I say needing alcohol less, what I really mean by this is your brain gradually stops treating alcohol as a prerequisite for the experience that you’re after. So drinking less and needing alcohol less for the experience you crave are not the same thing. It’s entirely possible to dramatically reduce how much you drink while your brain is still spending a tremendous amount of time thinking about drinking and thinking about how certain things would feel better if you were having more of it or drinking in this situation, thinking about how it feels necessary.

I will also just add this, and I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast and in my own experience, it’s also entirely possible to not drink at all and still have part of yourself that longs for alcohol because there are certain things that just don’t feel accessible or available without it. And that second kind of progress, needing it less, is often slower because we aren’t working or we aren’t taught how to dismantle our archetypes. So much of what we are taught is just focusing on how much we are drinking rather than why it feels compelling and how to make it feel less compelling.

But in many ways, getting to a place where you don’t need it for the experience you want to have, where it truly feels like you can take it or leave it, which is what so many people say they want when I work with them, that is actually what I think most people are searching for. Because what most of us really want isn’t simply a lower drink count. It’s freedom. We want the freedom to not spend all this mental energy thinking about our drinking and looking forward to it and worrying about it. We want the freedom of not constantly negotiating with ourselves or feeling like we’re caught in this tug of war. And that freedom, the freedom where alcohol just doesn’t take up so much mental space in your brain, isn’t just about how much you do or don’t drink. It’s about your relationship with alcohol.

And I actually think part of why you’ve gotten stuck here, it isn’t because of you. It’s because when it comes to behavior change, so often we get the message of, okay, focus on the downsides. Focus on the consequences. And when it comes to our drinking, what that will sound like is, think about how crappy you’re going to feel tomorrow if you drink tonight. Think about all the ways you’re hurting or harming your health. Think about all of the problems, all of the damage that drinking is causing in your life.

And I understand why it is that society is really fixated on this, but I think it does us a disservice, especially for people like Annalisa who are in the situation where they feel like that doesn’t totally apply to their situation. You can hear that framework showing up in her own question. She wrote, “I don’t have any major consequences. I rarely wake up with a headache.” And so I don’t have a compelling reason to quit. But what if that’s because you’ve been told that the compelling reason has to come from how alcohol is bad for you? What if a compelling reason is actually just how much brain space it is taking up, how it occupies a significant amount of your attention?

We spend so much time talking about what alcohol does to the liver or to your sleep or to your physical health, and we spend far less time talking about what it does to your attention. How much of your day is spent anticipating that drink or planning your life around it or negotiating with yourself or wondering, is there going to be alcohol where I’m going? Or wondering whether you’re going to ever stop struggling with it. All of that attention matters too, because what I hear underneath this question isn’t, I’m unhappy with how much I’m drinking. What I hear is, I’m tired of alcohol taking up so much space in my life.

And then the question becomes, why is it taking up so much space? Why does it occupy so much of your mind even though you’re drinking so much less? And I think the answer is because your brain is still predicting that alcohol is incredibly important in certain situations. Again, this is where the drink archetypes show up. So she mentioned trying to string together even just a week without drinking, but then her brain would say, but it’s the weekend or I’m meeting up with my friends. Notice how in the question, she didn’t even finish those sentences. She didn’t even write out why it would be a problem not to drink on the weekend or not to drink with her friends.

But her brain was making a prediction. There was a prediction underneath both of these thoughts. So maybe that prediction sounds like, well, the weekend just won’t be enjoyable without it or I won’t be able to fully relax or dinner with friends won’t be the same if I’m not drinking. I’ll feel like I’m missing out or I’ll feel deprived. I don’t know what the prediction is, but you better believe that the brain is making a prediction. Your brain is always forecasting the future.

I was actually coaching someone on this recently inside the membership, and I was talking about this exact thing. And so I had people think about whatever their current goal is that they have with drinking, because again, I work with people who have all different types of goals. I don’t think there is one goal to have with your drinking, and for everyone, it means you should stop for the rest of your life.

For some people, it’s maybe I don’t want to drink tonight. Maybe I want to wait longer before my first pour. Maybe I want to stop after a certain number. Whatever your goal is, your brain is already making predictions about how that experience is going to feel and whether or not it will be possible. And so you might think about your goal and then immediately have the forecast or the prediction, ugh, this is going to be hard, or I’m not sure I can do this.

Your brain is always giving you a forecast of what it thinks will happen. So the question isn’t whether or not the forecast shows up. The question is whether or not you are treating the forecast like a fact. I was telling people how I like to think about the brain or my own brain is a really terrible meteorologist, right? It’s constantly predicting that there are going to be severe thunderstorms. And even after I watch my brain make these predictions over and over, and then most of the time it doesn’t pan out, it still keeps predicting thunderstorms.

Why is your brain doing this? Because your brain isn’t actually trying to predict the future accurately. It’s trying to influence your behavior. And when it comes to alcohol, negative predictions are much more likely to push you towards drinking. Now, I think that there’s another distinction that’s really helpful here. When people say alcohol takes up so much of my thinking, they can actually mean two very different things. Sometimes what we’re talking about is just anticipation, right? So thinking about the drink that you’re going to have later or the drink you’re going to have tomorrow, planning for it, negotiating, looking forward to it. And if that is what’s happening for you, then a lot of your work is really just to notice the anticipation, notice the thoughts without immediately believing that they mean something important. This is where I teach people to simply name what is happening, notice what is happening.

So that might sound like saying to yourself, oh, my brain is anticipating a reward right now. How normal. Because the anticipation itself isn’t actually the problem. The problem comes from wanting the anticipation to disappear or judging ourselves for having it or trying to push it away. The problem is when we get in this tug of war with our own mind. Sometimes the most powerful thing that you can do is just simply drop the rope. You just name and notice what’s happening and you move on. Now, other times when people say that alcohol occupies a lot of their thinking, what they’re talking about isn’t anticipation, it’s actually worry.

And that worry might sound like, what if I’m always like this? What if it never gets easier? What if I never figure this out? What if this is my struggle for the rest of my life? That’s a completely different prediction, but it’s still a prediction. Again, your brain doesn’t have a crystal ball. It’s just making another forecast. And I have to remind myself all the time in so many areas of my life when my brain is making a prediction, and it’s always predicting for cloudy, stormy days. I have to remind myself, you know what, Rachel, you’re so much more capable than your brain would have you believe. And I think all of you can start to adopt this thought because every single one of us has countless examples of things that our brain once insisted we would never be able to do. We would never be able to figure out. It was impossible. It was going to be too hard. And yet somehow, we figured it out. We are so much more capable than our brain would have us believe.

Annalisa’s question contains evidence of that because she talks about going from drinking every day to cutting it by 80% and having three to four days a week without alcohol. That tells me that you are capable of change. Your brain just simply hasn’t updated all of its predictions yet, which brings me back to something else. So she wrote, “I don’t have a compelling reason to quit.” I wonder if that’s the wrong question. What if the question isn’t, do I have a compelling reason enough to quit? What if the question is, is this where I want my attention to live?

So what if we took quitting off the table entirely and focused instead on attention? Because ultimately, I think that’s probably going to feel a lot more compelling for you. I think it’s about recognizing that your attention is one of the most valuable resources that all of us have. And right now, alcohol is simply claiming more of it than you’d like. There’s a great passage from Oliver Burkeman’s book called Meditations for Mortals where he talks about how we get confused when we think that the point of life is about eliminating all of our problems. And so he instead talks about how it’s not about elimination of problems, it’s about choosing more interesting and absorbing problems. And I really love that idea and it’s really stayed with me because if we’re always going to be grappling with something, then maybe the question becomes, what do I actually want to devote my attention to?

What problems do I want my mind to be occupied by? Now, I also want to be really clear because I actually believe that the problem of my drinking, one that occupied a lot of my mind for a very long time, I think it actually turned out to be one of the most interesting problems I’ve ever worked on because it really wasn’t just about my drinking. It was about understanding myself better. It was about understanding why I wanted more and what I was actually seeking and searching after and why my brain kept making the same predictions that it wouldn’t be possible without drinking and why I wasn’t learning my lesson even though I thought I should have learned it by now.

That work, grappling with those questions, fundamentally changed how I understand myself and my brain and the think feel act cycle and my emotions and how I related to urges and cravings, not just around alcohol, but in all areas of my life. And the outcome wasn’t just drinking less and changing my relationship with alcohol. It was reclaiming my attention for other interesting and absorbing problems. I will say I’d much rather have the problem of how can I write this book or how can I distill my ideas into a program that works for people rather than how can I fix my drinking? But again, I don’t regret the time spent on changing my relationship with alcohol because it was so transformative in so many areas of my life.

So maybe that’s the question for you to consider. If you could use your mental energy for anything, what would you want to use it for? What would you want to build or create or explore? And how is drinking diverting your energy away from those things? I’d also have you consider maybe how the work you are doing to make alcohol feel less necessary in certain areas of your life, how that might actually help you in the areas that you want to build and create and explore.

So if I’m going to leave you all with one thing today, it would be this. Don’t only measure your progress by how much less you are drinking. Also pay attention to making alcohol feel less necessary. Because those are two very different kinds of progress. And if you’d like me to answer your question on the podcast, you can submit it at RachelHart.com/podq. That’s P O D Q. And if you’d like to learn more about the drink archetypes, the best place to get started is with the quiz. You can take that at FindYourDrinkType.com. All right, I’ll see you next week.

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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.