You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart episode 220.

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. Today we are talking about the chain of events that leads to the decision to drink.

So I talk a lot on this podcast all about the moment right before you drink.

So the moment that you come home and it's five o'clock, you walk into your house and you have that urge.

The moment that you pour a glass, the moment that you order a drink and it is really helpful to focus on that immediate moment when your desire appears.

We do a lot of work on that.

But once you start doing this work and learning about how the habit works for you and remember, your habit is unique to you.

It looks different for everyone. So you really have to start doing this work so you can map out what does my specific habit look like?

What are my triggers? What is drinking connected to for me? What thoughts, what emotions, the people, the places, the things that I'm doing?

What is it all connected to?

But once you start doing this work, you realize that the decision to drink, it often didn't start in the moment right before you had a drink.

It often started a ways back.

There was a chain of events leading up to that moment and until you can really see the path that your decision making followed until you can really understand the chain of events that led to that moment,

it's really hard to make a different decision and change the habit.

So that's what I really want to focus on with you today.

Now, what's fascinating when you start doing this work and looking at the chain of events that leads to that moment of drinking, you might discover, okay, the chain of events, it actually, yeah, it started earlier in the day, but you also might discover it started a couple days earlier or a couple weeks earlier or even a couple months earlier.

So it's really important that you start paying attention to this because if you're only looking at the immediate moment and you miss what happened yesterday or the week before or last month, you're going to miss a really important piece about how the habit works.

So remember, all of your drinking originates from your mind.

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