You are listening to the Take a Break Podcast with Rachel Hart episode 236.

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, hello, hello everyone. Now listen.

I decided today that I wanted to talk to you all about an exercise that I actually have people do inside of the 30-day challenge.

And it's one that I get a lot of pushback from people about.

And because of that, I really wanted to explore this exercise and my reasoning behind having everyone do it, no matter what your goal is on the public podcast.

And that is really about imagining your life without alcohol.

Just totally without it. Not that alcohol isn't on the planet, but just imagining your life without it. So other people are drinking.

This exercise can be so powerful to really understand and change your drinking patterns.

Everyone does it inside the 30-day challenge and everyone has a lot of thoughts about it.

And so that's what we're really going to talk about.

Now when you do this, when you allow yourself to go to this absolute extreme and you hear me talk about all the time on the podcast, we don't need to decide that you're never going to drink again for the rest of your life.

That's not what I'm talking about here. In fact, I think making that decision can be very unhelpful for some people.

When you allow yourself to go to this extreme, what happens for you is it surfaces all of your thoughts about drinking. All of the thoughts that for a lot of people are pretty unconscious, it really comes up.

Your thoughts about what it means for having fun or feeling relaxed or connecting and relating to others, your thoughts about celebrations and holidays and family get together, imagining your life without it.

Where other people are drinking, but you're not. It immediately starts to give you a lot of insight into how the habit actually operates because it's showing you a lot of the unconscious thinking that is connected to it.

Now you can do this exercise today after the podcast. All you really have to do is just write down, imagine what your life would be like without alcohol and see what thoughts come up for you.

Those thoughts are going to give you a lot of insight, but I really do want to talk today about why this is hard for so many people to do.

I want to talk about the three most common pitfalls. I see when people use this exercise and why they happen.

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