You are listening to the Take a Break Podcast with Rachel Hart episode 228.

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.

Welcome back everyone. We're talking today about what to do when the urge to drink just won't go away.

So I hear this happen all the time with the people I work with. They'll say, you know, all night I had the urge to drink or I sat through dinner at a restaurant with my friends.

And the urge never left me. It was there the entire time and it's so frustrating when you're in that situation when you feel like, oh my God, this desire, it just won't go away.

It doesn't let up. What am I going to do? And I remember dealing with this myself feeling like, oh my gosh, the urge is just going to hang out with me all night long.

And that is not a very fun place to be in. So today what I want to talk to you about is how to get relief from urges that seem to go on and on and on.

It comes up for people who do the 30 day challenge, but you know what? It comes up for everyone when anyone is trying to change a habit.

And I'm not just talking about the habit of drinking when you try to change a behavior that seems like it's on autopilot. Most people will run into this problem.

It will feel like they're having the urge to drink or to eat or to procrastinate or to scroll through their phone. Like it just keeps coming back can feel like you're playing whack a mole with your urges all day long or all night long.

And the fact of the matter is you don't have to be stuck playing whack a mole. You really can teach yourself how to shorten an urge.

So what I want to do is just back up a little bit and talk about what an urge is. So maybe you call it a craving or your desire or a wanting or a longing or a hankering.

It really doesn't matter what you call it. What matters is remembering what an urge is and an urge is an emotion.

It's a state of mind that you can feel in your body. When I say an urge is an emotion. I'm saying that it's just like feeling happy or sad or angry or bored.

You feel all of these emotions in your body and you also feel desire in your body. So you can have desire for a glass of wine or chocolate or sex.

Things that we often associate with pleasure, but you can also feel desire to check your email or scroll through your phone or pick at your skin or chew your nails.

Things that we less often associate with pleasure.

Your brain's reward cycle is involved with all of these urges. Whether or not you think that activity is pleasurable or not, all of these urges are part of the reward cycle inside of your brain.

Now remember your actions don't just happen. This is really key to everything that I am trying to teach you on the podcast and everything that I drive home.

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