You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 274.

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. I'm going to talk about a question today that I hear a lot from people.

Is it actually possible to drink less? I don't want to stop forever. I just want to stop overdoing it.

I want to be able to enjoy a drink from time to time. But is that actually possible if I'm someone who has had trouble saying no, who has gotten into the pattern of overdoing it?

This is what we're going to talk about today. Now I'm just going to preface this by saying a lot of people out in the world will say no, no, it is not possible.

If you in the past have struggled to rain yourself in drinking less is not something that you can do. You just need to accept that it's not going to work.

You need to say no for the rest of your life. That's what you should do. And I'm going to tell you something. I don't agree.

I do think it's possible to learn how to drink less. I do think that people's drinking can change and evolve over time.

Now I will tell you this. Most of the time we see this happen very unconsciously. I saw this happen very unconsciously with a lot of my friends.

So some of them were really big partiers in college and their 20s. And then as they got older and they got into more serious relationships and they moved into a different stage of their life, maybe they were getting married and having kids.

And notice that their drinking would start to change. But it felt like a very unconscious progression. No one was saying, hey, I'm setting out to do this. It just appeared to me like it was happening.

So I think that this can happen unconsciously. I think the problem is that we don't know how to teach people to have this happen consciously.

Because people need to be able to do the work on purpose to change their relationship with alcohol. The response to urges and all of the thoughts that are fueling their desire and giving you permission to say yes.

And when you do that work on purpose, then yes, you can learn how to drink less than a sitting. You can learn how to drink rarely.

And you can also learn how to be like, you know what? Maybe I don't really want to drink at all. It's possible for you. But there are a couple of reasons why I think people struggle to do this.

Why I think people struggle to actually learn how to drink less learn how to say no when they've had the habit of saying yes and saying more is better and sure I'll have another. And that's what I really want to dive in with you today.

Number one, what I see happen all too often is that people will fixate on changing how much they are drinking. So let's say I just want to drink less. I just want to not overdo it.

So they will fixate on how much without understanding why why they are overdoing it why they are saying yes to another round why they are pouring another glass. And a lot of times people want to bypass the why they don't want to spend a lot of time there.

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