You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart episode 103.

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.

Hey everybody, so listen yesterday was a bit of a milestone for me because I wrote my final entry in my very first five-year diary.

So if you're not familiar with the concept of a five-year diary, let me explain.

It's basically a diary where you are writing short entries for every day over five years.

And the really great part about it is how it's structured.

So each page is devoted to one day of the year.

And that page is then subdivided into five sections.

So it looks like this.

If you turn to the page for January 1st, you'll have five spaces for five entries.

And in the diary that I just completed, I have entries for what happened every day in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

That was the last entry that I did for December 31st, 2018.

And why I think it's so great is because as time goes by, once you have a full year of entries,

you're able to read about what was happening in your life each time you turn to a new page and write down basically kind of the cliff notes of what happened.

Now this was the first time I'd ever kept a diary like this, but really it was the first time I'd ever been this consistent with a diary.

Because in the past, I would start diaries or journals and I would write for a couple days or a couple weeks, maybe even a couple months.

And then I would forget about it and then what would my brain do?

Oh, well, you haven't written for a week or you haven't written for two weeks.

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