You’ve made the list. You have all the reasons why drinking less is a smart choice: better health, fewer regrets. So you know all the benefits and you really do want to change. So why isn’t that enough in the moment? Why does your motivation disappear the second a craving shows up or as soon as you’ve finished your first drink?

This is episode 430 and I’m breaking down the trap of trying to out reason your desire. Why your brain isn’t moved by long lists of health benefits or all of your regrets that you have from drinking too much and what you need to do 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.

A problem that I hear all the time from people goes something like this. “So Rachel, I plan to have just one or two drinks, and then I often want more and I just go on autopilot.” So people describe this moment to me all the time. And they describe it in a way as if almost something has gone wrong. And I understand why that is because I did the same thing for a very long time. 

We tell ourselves, “I really want to drink less. This is really an important goal to me. I want to improve my health. I want to stop waking up and worrying about what I said or did. I want to be someone who just knows when to say when. I want to maybe be a good role model for my kids.” We have lots and lots of reasons. In fact, we have no shortage of good reasons why we want to change our relationship with alcohol and why we want to drink less.

But I will tell you this, what I have found is that all of these good reasons are where we often get into trouble. It’s what got me into trouble because I spent years and years saying to myself, okay Rachel, here’s the list. We’ve got so many good reasons. I was bursting at the seams with good reasons. And because of that, because I knew all of the benefits and I had experienced so much regret around my drinking, I was in a place where I truly believed that I should just know better by now.

So I would kind of look at the weight of evidence in support of drinking less when I was going out or maybe taking the night off. And I would see that there was just so much evidence in support of this goal. And I really would believe I should know better by now. It should just be a no-brainer. When am I going to learn my lesson? But of course, I wasn’t learning my lesson and it didn’t feel like a no-brainer in the moment. I had so many good reasons and could see so many benefits and had so many regrets. And yet, I had very little follow through.

And of course, that just made me feel awful. That filled me with so much shame because it really left me in the place of not only feeling confused, but really wondering and feeling frankly quite convinced that something must be wrong with me.

But here’s what I was failing to see. All of those good reasons to drink less, to take the night off, to stop myself from having one too many, they lived in my higher brain. They lived in my prefrontal cortex, the part of me that cared about my future and my goals and who I wanted to be. But wanting to drink less in the future is not the same as having the desire to drink less in the moment when you are in the midst of a craving.

And when you tell yourself or you believe really deeply that you should know better, you are operating under the assumption that the weight of so much good evidence should just obliterate the desire that you feel in the moment. And it just does not work like that. This is not how the human brain operates. When people say to me, “My plan is to have one or two drinks and then I often want more and I go on autopilot,” my response to them is always, “Of course you want more.”

The problem is not the fact that you want more. The problem is that you expected that you wouldn’t. You told yourself that all of this evidence, all of the weight of all of the health benefits and the weight of the past regret should be enough to just obliterate your desire in the moment. But that is not how the human brain works.

The mistake that people make and the mistake that I made for so many years was telling myself and assuming that I could logic myself out of my desire, that I could just make a really, really long list of all the reasons why drinking less or not drinking was really good for me. Or I could make another long list of all of the regrets that I had or the embarrassing and shameful things that I had did when I was drinking.

I believed that I could just make this really solid argument to myself and that argument should be enough in the moment to make me not want more. So I was waiting and waiting for the not wanting more to kick in. And I had it backwards. I was waiting for the list of all my good reasons to just rewire my brain. But that’s not how you rewire your brain. That’s not how desire works. It’s not about arguing yourself out of your desire. It’s about teaching yourself how to say no even though you want the drink, even though you want to have more. That’s what reduces desire long-term.

The act of saying no, even when part of you wants it, that’s what works. Not your attempts to convince yourself that the desire shouldn’t be there, that you shouldn’t want to want it. This is what I’m always saying when people come to me when either they’re saying, I planned not to drink at all or I planned for a reasonable amount and then I didn’t stick with that reasonable amount.

I ask them, okay, but did you plan for your desire? Did you plan for it to be there? And that’s the place where everyone wants to skip over. I skipped over this too. Most people notice that what they’re doing instead is planning for a future where they don’t want it because they’ve made the list and they have the good reasons.

But what I want you to do instead is to start from the place of, of course I’m going to want that drink. Of course I’m going to want more. And when you do that, when you plan for your desire, you stop being surprised by what is happening. You stop expecting because you have this long list of reasons why you really shouldn’t want to want what your brain wants, that you’re going to get to 5 p.m. and you’re just not going to have any cravings. Or you’re going to finish that first beer and you’re going to be like, nope, I’m good.

What you’re forgetting is that you have a lower brain that was designed to seek out and remember rewards in the environment. And by the way, it’s not persnickety. It’s not assessing whether a particular reward is good or bad for your long-term goals. The lower brain doesn’t care about your long-term goals. It’s operating under a very simple formula, find and remember rewards in the environment. And the bigger the reward that something produces in the brain, the more important it must be for survival.

So yeah, of course, your desire is still going to be there. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. It just means that you have a fully functioning lower brain. You have to stop being surprised by your desire because when you are surprised by it, you add in all this unnecessary negative emotion because now you feel annoyed that it’s there or embarrassed because you’re wanting the thing that you told yourself you shouldn’t want anymore or defeated because you feel like, well, if it’s always going to be here, then I’m never going to get a handle on my drinking. And all of these emotions, whether it’s annoyance or embarrassment or feeling defeated, they all make it harder to say no.

So you have to stop being surprised by your desire. You stop telling yourself that you should magically not want to drink or not want to have another because of some list that you made. You recognize that’s not how the brain works. And instead, you expect your desire.

So you can practice the skill of expecting the cravings and expecting the urge to have more and allowing yourself to feel the want and still saying no. Rather than, well, I’ll say no, but only if the desire to drink or the desire to drink more isn’t there.

So I do a deep dive into all of this in The Ultimate Guide to Drinking Less. If you own the book, you know that there are three foundational exercises: Name and Notice, Ask and Listen, and Strategic Willpower and Distraction. And all three of these exercises are helping you develop the skill of how do I allow the desire without acting on it. Because that’s the problem that you have when you’re stuck in this loop of saying yes to the craving and saying yes to the urge. You don’t know how to just let the desire be without saying yes.

Or if you do know how to say no, what you know is and what your brain understands is, I can say no, but I’m always in this place of feeling like I’m missing out, not enjoying myself, not being able to relax, not being able to shut off my brain, not really feeling like I can enjoy the moment. So instead of having you make all these long lists for why you shouldn’t want to drink or why you shouldn’t want to drink too much and kind of hoping that changes your desire, these exercises ask you to acknowledge that part of your brain is not moved at all by your good reasons.

It is not persuaded by long lists of regrets. It wants what it wants when it wants it. And you know what? That’s okay. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with your brain. There’s nothing wrong with your brain. You can have a part of you that wants what it wants when it wants it and not be ruled by that part of you.

But you will be ruled by it when you fear your cravings, when you fear your urges. And that’s really why surprise is a problem here. Right? That surprise of, why am I wanting this drink when I have this goal? Or why am I wanting to have more when I told myself I was going to stop at this number? That surprise really is a manifestation of the fear that you are telling yourself you can only say no to something that you don’t want. And if any part of you wants it, then well, there’s nothing you can do.

Honestly, think about this for a second. What would be different if you stopped being surprised by your desire to drink or your desire to have another glass? If instead you were like, yeah, of course I’m going to have a craving to drink tonight or when I go out with these friends, or of course I’m going to have the urge to get up and grab another beer or order another round. What would happen if you prepared that way?

I’ll tell you this, one thing that would be different is you would stop feeling shame. You would stop telling yourself that logic should just prevail. You would stop treating this like an exercise and just tallying up all your regrets and hoping that they stave off any future desire. 

Because I can tell you from experience, no matter how many regrets I had, it did not matter. All of my good reasons, it did not matter. In the moment, they all felt as if they no longer applied to me because my good reasons and all of my regrets, they were just meaningless to the lower brain. And that didn’t mean that something was wrong with me. It meant that I needed a different skill. It wasn’t about talking myself out of it. It was, how do I exist with it?

When you expect your desire, when you plan for the cravings to drink or the urge to have another, when you aren’t surprised that they’re still showing up, when you don’t feel annoyed or ashamed or defeated by them, guess what happens? You stop being afraid of them.

I think a lot about the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends go to visit the great and powerful Oz so that they can go home and he does appear to be great and powerful and fearsome in this magical being and only he can grant their wish. But then her dog Toto pulls the curtain back and you see this little old man behind the curtain who is not powerful or fearsome or magical. He’s just operating the machinery that creates the illusion.

And I think of the lower brain a bit like the man behind the curtain. It wants me to believe that it is fearsome and great and powerful. My lower brain wants me to be afraid. It wants me to fear that if I don’t obey my impulses and my cravings and my urges, that something terrible is going to happen because the more I fear these things, the more powerful my lower brain becomes in my life. I start to live a life that is in accordance with my lower brain’s desires, even though that is not aligned with what I truly want. And the only reason why this happens is because at my core, I was so afraid of what would happen if I had to say no. So I just wanted my desire not to be there and I kept trying to logic myself out of it.

But what I want you to really understand is that the lower brain is depending on you believing the illusion, the illusion that the drink is necessary, the illusion that you cannot relax without it, the illusion that things are not as fun or special if you are not drinking, or the illusion that more is better. And this is where the drink archetypes come in. 

When you stop being surprised by your desire, when you start just naming what is happening, you open the door to get curious about what your brain has learned from drinking. You start to understand why in this moment, obeying the desire feels so necessary when in fact, it’s not necessary at all. Drinking is not necessary at all for our lives. You could go your whole life without a drop of alcohol and lead an amazing life. It does not threaten your survival, although your lower brain would have you believe otherwise. 

And please hear me say this, and understand that I’m not here to say that not drinking is somehow better or more virtuous, or that drinking alcohol is somehow bad or sinful. It’s not about that. What I just want you to start to get curious about and see is the story you’ve unconsciously adopted around why it’s so important in the moment that you say yes.

And perhaps the story is just that. It’s a story. It’s not the truth. Because when you approach it as if it is the truth, saying no is a heck of a lot harder. But naming and noticing what is going on instead of resisting and fighting or wishing it wasn’t there, naming and noticing immediately takes you to the heart of what is driving the habit. You are able to see what your brain has learned from drinking and why it thinks that answering this craving is essential when indeed it is not.

And maybe that might sound like, if I don’t have it, I won’t be able to relax or I’ll feel bored or I’ll feel like I’m missing out or I won’t feel part of the group or I just won’t have a very good time. Whatever it sounds like for you, you need that information because that’s going to help you address the specific archetype and the associated beliefs. And that is how you change the habit at the deepest level. That’s how you go to a place where you can feel at ease saying no. It’s not all about, oh, I can, but I don’t really enjoy it. I can put a limit on myself, but I just feel like I’m missing out.

The work that you do with the archetypes is what allows you to stop gritting your teeth. Because success is not about getting really, really good at gritting your teeth. It’s about defanging the part of the habit that has you in its grips. And when you can do that, that is real freedom. When you’re not afraid of your cravings or your urges or your desire, then it’s so much easier for you to make choices from a place where you can consider what’s actually right for you in that moment, rather than making choices out of fear or scarcity or lack.

So I want you to try this out maybe tonight or in a couple days or this weekend, whenever really. But instead of waiting to see if you’re going to want to drink or you’re going to want to have another, instead of focusing on making a list of reasons on why you shouldn’t drink or why you should only stick to a certain amount, I want you instead to expect that you are going to want to drink and you are going to want to have more because when you expect that, then it opens you up to actually have a plan for how to meet that desire instead of constantly fighting what is happening in the moment and then shaming yourself and believing that you’re doing something wrong.

If you want more ideas for how to make a plan to meet that desire, you can get a copy of The Ultimate Guide to Drinking Less at RachelHart.com/guide, where I break down how to use the three foundational techniques and skills for all of the archetypes. And if you want to learn more about your specific pattern of drink archetypes, you can take the free quiz at FindYourDrinkType.com.

All right, that’s it for today. I will see you all 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.