You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart episode 183.

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.

Well, hello my friends. We are going to talk about the upside of drinking today and why so many people want to deny that there's an upside to it.

Because a lot of people out there who are trying to help others stop drinking.

They will want to convince you that there are no upsides or they will just spend all of their time focusing on the downsides of drinking.

So they will talk about how bad alcohol is for you and it's bad for your liver and it makes you fat and it's bad for your heart and it's bad for your brain.

Or they'll point out how it's not attractive.

You're too loud when you're drunk, you're too sloppy, you're not nearly as profound or funny as you think you are.

They might talk a lot about the bad decisions that you make when you're drinking, when your inhibitions are lowered, you're probably less likely to keep your emotions in check.

Maybe you're more likely to pick a fight, more likely to blubber like an idiot or send that text message that you later regret or wake up the next morning thinking,

why did I do that? And listen, there's a lot of truth to this. Of course there are downsides to drinking. I'm not saying that there aren't.

I just think that it's not very helpful focusing on the downsides and not really even focusing fixating on them.

Kind of hitting you over the head with the downsides over and over again, because if feeling bad about something was the key to change, then we would all be experts at change.

I can promise you if you drink or eat or spend more than you want to, you're probably pretty good at beating yourself up.

You know all about the downsides. You have no shortage of bad feelings about the habit.

We do not live in a world with a shortage of people feeling bad about themselves. That is not the problem.

We don't need to induce more of it. In fact, what we need is the exact opposite.

Most people, when they look at any habit they're trying to change, not just drinking, they feel plenty terrible about the fact that they have the habit in the first place and why haven't they been able to figure it out yet.

This fixation I'm needing to focus on the downsides and feel really bad about our habits is so ingrained when it's actually the opposite of what you need.

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