You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart episode 112.

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.

Hello everybody, we're talking about catastrophizing.

Doesn't that sound amazing?

Listen, it is actually a really, really important topic and something that I work on with my clients all the time

and I had to do a ton of work on this myself because if you have gotten in the habit of going to a drink,

turning to a drink at the end of the day to take the edge off, you have to start looking, you have to start noticing what you are taking the edge off of.

And for a lot of you, it is the negative emotion that you are kind of feeling low level all day long, the low level annoyance or anxiety or worry.

And so much of that has to do with catastrophizing.

So listen, it may not sound like a very fun topic, but I promise if you start to make headway on this, it can be life changing.

It really can transform everything in your life, including the habit of drinking.

So here's the thing, catastrophizing is all about your brain going to worst case scenario over and over and over again.

When we catastrophize all day long, we are left feeling this low level anxiety.

And I say low level because for so many people that I work with, they don't even know that they're feeling anxious all day long until we start really taking a close look.

And that's how it was for me. I would not have identified myself as feeling a lot of anxiety all day long because anxiety was just my normal state.

So I didn't really even understand for a long time that it was there and how present it was in my life.

If you don't start intervening with catastrophizing and your brain's habit of doing this and the pattern of how your brain thinks and how it looks at the world when it catastrophizes, it really won't matter.

And I hate to say this, but it won't matter if you say no to a drink at the end of the day.

If you are catastrophizing, if you are having this low level anxiety, even if you say no to a drink, you're going to hunt for something else.

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