You are listening to the Take a Break Podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 210.

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 everyone. We are going to talk about dreams today, specifically dreams where you've been drinking.

And what most people make these types of dreams mean and why I think they're wrong and why I think this can get in the way of changing the habit.

Now I've never talked about this on the podcast before, but I watch it come up with my clients and take a break all the time.

So they start taking a break from drinking in order to learn about the habit so that they can change it and change their desire and they're doing really well for some of them.

It's the first time that they can remember having two days or maybe two weeks without a drink.

And then bam, all of a sudden they have a dream one night about drinking in the middle of their break and it really freaks them out and they start to question, hey, why am I dreaming about wanting to drink or getting drunk or hiding from people that I've been drinking or embarrassing myself when drunk?

What is going on here in my dream life?

Now the good news is that because they're doing this work with us in the challenge, we can help them address this right away.

It doesn't derail their progress because we can show them, hey, these dreams that you're having about drinking and about the habit, they may be unsettling or upsetting for you, but they can actually be quite helpful as long as you don't make it mean that dreaming about drinking is a sign that you have a serious problem.

If you're trying to change the habit or a sign that your desire is never going to subside or and I think this piece is really important, it's not a sign that you're about to relapse and just as a side note, I do want to explain that I really don't like the word relapse.

I don't think it's helpful. You have heard me talk on the podcast before about a lot of words in this space that I don't like and I don't use like abstinence and sobriety.

Relapse is one of them and I think that this idea of relapse is why we're so confused about the habit and how it works and how to change it because if you just look at the word itself, relapse suggests a deterioration in health.

So what it means is, okay, so you were doing well and then you had this setback and in some cases, I think the word is really appropriate, especially in the disease context, but you probably know by now if you're listening to me, that I don't think that drinking too much is a disease.

So for example, if someone is getting cancer treatment and their scans show that they are doing well month after month and then suddenly the cancer spreads to another part of their body, well then I think that makes sense to call it a relapse because your health was improving and then your health deteriorated.

But let me be clear, this is not how a habit works, but despite that people use the word relapse all the time with alcohol and drugs and what they mean by relapse in that context is, okay, so I was saying no to alcohol, I was saying no to drugs and then I relapsed by saying yes.

And I want you to think about these two different scenarios because it's not like you say no to cancer and then you relapse because you suddenly said yes to cancer, whether or not a disease comes back as nothing to do with choice.

And this is really the problem of putting addiction in the domain of disease because I think it's like trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

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