You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart episode 296.

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 my friends. Welcome back.

I decided that I wanted to do an episode today talking about urges, but not where I have talked a lot about urges on the podcast, which is about what urges are and how to reframe how you think about them.

And how to make them more manageable.

That I think is kind of the first level work of urge work.

It's really understanding your urges in a new way, reframing how you think about them, learning the ways that you can start to make them what they are, which is harmless.

And so what I want to talk about on today's episode is kind of that next level work. This is a work that people do inside the membership.

This next level work with urges is so important. It is so crucial for really creating lasting change with the habit.

And here's what I mean. When people join Take a Break and they start with the 30 day challenge and they start learning the four pillars.

One of the things that they practice, we talk about it like going to the gym. They're going to the urge gym.

And the urge gym is all about separating what's happening in your mind about the urge from what's happening in your body.

And the reason why this is so important is because what we're trying to teach the brain is that the story of the urge and the actual experience of the urge are completely different.

But that kind of blows people's minds alone when they have that discovery.

And so often what happens is that very quickly people say, well, I'm realizing the urge itself, it's really not that big of a deal.

It really doesn't feel that bad. It's a little bit of restlessness. I mean, I notice a sensation in my body.

But it's just not anywhere near the dramatic story that I had. And the dramatic story is, I hate my urges. They never go away. They're impossible to resist.

They're terrible. Of course, I don't want to experience an urge or craving. Like we have this very dramatic story.

And when you start to separate out what's happening in your mind from what's happening in your body, you start to see, oh, these two things don't line up.

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