You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart episode 108.

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 is your host, Rachel Hart.

Hello everybody. Today it's going to be a bit of a shorter podcast episode, but I really love this topic and there's a lot in here.

So I want to make sure that you do the exercise at the end.

I decided that I wanted to talk about what happens when you love to drink because I hear from so many of you that you are frustrated with your drinking and you're frustrated with the negative consequences, but the problem is that you just love to drink.

I will tell you that I can relate to this so much, this place of not being able to imagine life without this thing that you love because I was there to I loved to drink and it always blows my mind that here I am on the other side of it without any desire.

I really with the ability to look back and kind of cock my head and think like what was that all about because it's very hard to put myself in that place now, that place of really, really loving to drink, but I know for sure that that's where I used to be.

So here's what it was like for me. I would swear up and down that I love to drink. It was so much fun. It was the best thing, but I hated how it affected my sleep.

I hated waking up with that terrible fuzzy taste in my mouth. I hated the massive dehydration and just in general how I felt the next morning, even if it wasn't a full blown hangover,

waking up with the foggyness and the headache and the blow and then going to the bathroom and looking in the mirror and seeing the puffiness in my face, I hated the number that I saw when I stepped on the scale.

I hated all that physical effects, but I told myself over and over again, no, but seriously I love to drink.

Not only that, not only the physical recovery, I hated walking into my kitchen and seeing the empty wine bottle on the counter and the dirty dishes in the sink and the crumbs from my late night snacking or the late night delivery order, the empty boxes.

I hated the fact that I had fallen asleep on the couch again in front of the TV, not bothering to brush my teeth, not bothering to wash my face.

And I hated when I had to piece together the night before when the memories would float back unexpectedly and grimacing at the thought of what I had done or what I had said.

I hated the memory of having been too loud or too forward or too brush or too obnoxious. I hated how I would sometimes pick fights with people, how I would sometimes treat the people that I loved.

I hated the drunk dialing that I did. I hated the text messages that I sent when I was drinking or the things that I posted on social media.

I hated so much of how I behaved and wished I could take a lot of it back. But I was still really committed to the fact that I loved to drink.

And I hated looking at my bank account the next day to see how much money that I had spent at the bar or how much money I had spent at the restaurant.

I hated the times that I left my phone in a taxi or when I left my leather coat behind at a bar or the money that I spent on the pack of cigarettes that I probably would not have purchased and definitely would not have smoked as many had I not been drinking.

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