Sometimes the most important thing to understand about the after-work drink is this: It works. It changes how you feel fast. That’s why the pattern can feel so hard to break out of. This is episode 457 and I’m answering a listener question about how to stop heading to the bar in the afternoon. I’ll explain why willpower keeps failing and what you actually need instead.

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.

Today’s listener question comes from Michael, who wrote, “I have a habit of going to the bar in the afternoon and I wish I would stop. Do you have any suggestions?” So part of why I love this question is because it’s so incredibly common and also so incredibly misunderstood. Now, maybe you aren’t heading to the bar in the afternoon. Maybe it’s the bottle of wine that you pick up at the grocery store on your way home or walking through the front door and immediately opening a beer. But these afternoon and evening patterns can feel almost like they’re happening to us, like we’re just on autopilot.

And if you’re like me, you probably have assumed that it’s a lack of discipline. That’s what I told myself for the longest time because the solution just seemed so obvious. Don’t go to the bar. Don’t put the bottle of wine in your grocery cart. Don’t grab the beer before sitting down on the couch. But the problem here isn’t a lack of discipline. The problem is about not having a better way to transition.

So often, especially with the Reward archetype, the daily pattern of going to the bar or picking up a six-pack on your way home is just your brain trying to solve for the problem of how do I transition out of my day? How do I decompress? How do I feel like it’s okay to stop working? How do I acknowledge everything that I did today? How do I switch from my productive self to my relaxed self? And sometimes the question might be, how do I delay all the responsibilities that are facing me at home?

Because right now, your brain’s like, “I know how we do this. We have a drink.” And that’s why the loop can feel so hard to get out of. And when I talk about this need to transition, which, by the way, sounds like it should be easy, the truth is that for most people, the process of transitioning, it’s not easy at all. We aren’t taught how to do this. We are taught how to get things done, how to be productive, how to check things off our list, but we’re not taught how to shut that part of us down, how to relax. And we’re definitely not taught how to create meaningful change in how we feel.

So it’s really easy to end up in this place where you want to relax, you want to decompress, you want to feel differently, but we don’t know how to do that without drinking or eating or turning to a screen or picking up your phone. And over time what happens is that your brain learns, okay, going to the bar, picking up a bottle of wine on my way home, opening up a beer as soon as I walk through the door, that’s the solution. That’s the fastest way to get where I want to go.

And this is why discipline and willpower so often fail to get you out of this loop because you’re not actually offering yourself an alternative. You’re just trying to interrupt an emotional shortcut that your brain has learned to rely on by gritting your teeth. This is why telling yourself, “Okay, just don’t go to the bar.” It doesn’t work that well. Or maybe it works for a little bit, but after a while, you find that you’re back in the same loop. The afternoon arrives, you want to stop being productive, you want to transition out of your day, and your brain says, “Hey, remember how we do that? Just go to the bar. Pick up a bottle on the way home. Open a beer when you walk through the door.”

So the urge appears, and what happens so often is that either you just go on autopilot or you wrestle with it. You try to just say no or talk yourself out of it instead of understanding what’s really happening, instead of getting curious about what the drink represents. And I will tell you, this is why understanding your drink archetypes is so important to creating meaningful change. Because it’s not just the drink, it’s what your brain thinks that drink represents in the moment. And I will tell you this, sometimes more than one archetype can show up at the same time.

If you’re not familiar with the archetypes, I really encourage you to take the quiz, find out your top two. You can go to FindYourDrinkType.com and take the quiz there. Because the solution here is changing how you respond in these moments, as soon as the cycle starts unfolding. And that is a lot easier when you can see the archetypes that are activated.

So in this instance, the moment that you think about going to the bar, instead of automatically acting on that desire, or instead of getting into a tug of war with yourself or trying to talk yourself out of it, you can slow down and pause and reframe what’s actually happening. Right? So you might say to yourself something like, “Oh, this is my brain looking for a way to transition from my day. This is my desire to decompress or to finally stop working or to acknowledge all of my hard work or to switch from my productive self to my relaxed self or to just take a little time out for me before I have to enter into all the responsibilities that are waiting for me at home.”

And right now, my brain thinks the only way that I can do that is by heading to the bar and having a drink or by opening up the bottle of wine. And you know what? That makes sense. Right? You can remind yourself that this isn’t wrong or bad or irresponsible or stupid. It’s actually really normal. It’s a pattern that you unconsciously reinforced again and again. And it served a purpose. But now you can start to see that maybe it’s doing more harm than good. And we don’t have to go into a place of shame or blame or beating yourself up. We can just say, “Hey, listen, my brain is confused when it thinks that the only way I can get to where I want to go is by heading to the bar or by opening the bottle of wine. I can start trying out new strategies. I can teach my brain new ways.”

So reframing this moment is really key, but so too are practical strategies. The first one is just to find a way to interrupt the pattern. So I will tell you, when I lived in New York, I used to go to this little wine shop near my apartment and I would stop by on my way home from work. I would get out of the subway and I would just walk right by it on my way home. And one of the things I started doing was just to use a different exit at the subway station, an exit that didn’t take me right by that little shop. So I was interrupting the pattern.

Now, of course, that didn’t solve everything, but that interruption created enough pause. It took me off autopilot and it gave me enough space for me to make a different decision. So maybe you take a different route home that doesn’t have you go past the bar. Think about what does autopilot look like for me in that situation, and how can I interrupt the normal path that leads me right to the place that I’d rather avoid?

The second thing you can do is build in end-of-the-day strategies that you have to complete before going to the bar. So I talked about this on a recent episode of the podcast about the power of delaying a drink. So you don’t have to tell yourself, “Okay, I’m not going to the bar ever again.” You don’t even have to say, “I’m not going to the bar today.” You can just tell yourself, “Listen, before I go, I have to do these things.” Maybe I have to take a quick shower and change my clothes, or I have to take a 15-minute walk with my dog, or I got to do a quick workout, or even I just have to have a healthy snack and hydrate myself. I cannot tell you how many people I work with are actually hungry and dehydrated at the end of the day, and they have unknowingly gotten into the habit of pouring a drink in response to thirst and hunger. Sometimes all you need is a little food and a little water to take the edge off the intensity of that urge. Or maybe it’s reading something or listening to music or listening to a podcast, just giving yourself time to do something before you head to the bar.

And I will just say, I really think everyone needs this. We all need transition time. I was talking about this with my husband recently and I was telling him, “Listen, honey, don’t come straight home after work,” because he has a really long commute every day and going from that commute to walking into a house with two crazy kids, it’s just a lot. And so I said, “Pull over somewhere when you’re close to home and just go for a five or 10-minute walk. Get outside, move your body, have a little time to yourself.”

I’ll say I need to do this too. It’s really hard for me on the days when I go straight from work to my two boys walking through the door. And guys, it’s hard even if you don’t have kids. I remember how hard it was for me to transition from being at work all day and being on all day and then walking into an empty apartment. Everybody needs transition time. And when you get in the habit of teaching your brain that transition time equals drinking, and alcohol is the reliable way that you change how you feel, you have to start finding new ways. And that will take experimenting and trying out new things. And one of those things can just be telling yourself, “I have to do XYZ before I drink, before I go to the bar.”

Finally, it’s just important to acknowledge to yourself the underlying need before you make a decision. When you have the urge to go to the bar or to pick up wine at the grocery store, just pause and ask yourself one question: What am I actually needing right now? On the surface, it might seem like, “I just need a drink.” But get curious. What else might be under that need? Your answer can change depending on the day. Maybe you need quiet. Maybe you need connection. Maybe you need acknowledgment. Maybe you need movement. Just take the time to pause and get curious. Because once you have an answer, now you have a new direction to head in. Instead of just trying to use discipline and willpower, you can start experimenting with, “Okay, how do I actually meet this need without defaulting to a drink to take care of everything?” And by the way, is defaulting to a drink even working that well?

The habit of going to the bar every afternoon is not about you being undisciplined. The pattern took root because in a way, it worked. Your brain thought it had found a reliable way to transition, a reliable way to shift states and change how you feel. But just because something works in the moment doesn’t mean that it’s working for the life that you actually want.

So again, we don’t need to approach this with, “I need more discipline. I need more willpower.” We need to approach this with the mentality of let’s expand what this moment means. Let’s expand my options. Let’s expand my strategies here and acknowledge that there is a real need underneath here that right now isn’t being met. When you understand what the trip to the bar every afternoon is doing for you, what the bar has come to represent, what the drink has come to represent, how it’s trying to meet an important need, you can stop fighting with yourself and start finding better ways to transition at the end of the day.

All right, that’s it for today. And if you want to learn more about your archetypes, head on over to FindYourDrinkType.com and you can take the quiz there. I’ll see you guys 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?

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