You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 35.

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.

Hey everybody, how are you? How are you doing on this very fine day? I'm really well. I'm doing good.

And I decided that I want to spend today talking about a concept that I really only touch on in the very first episode of the podcast.

And it's a concept that I think really sets my approach apart from other people when they talk about how to change your drinking, how to take a break.

And that concept is the idea of alcohol being morally neutral. That's what we're going to be talking about today.

And this idea of being morally neutral means it's not good or bad. Drinking is not a vice, abstaining isn't a virtue.

Right, we're really stripping away all the right and wrong good and bad from alcohol.

And I'll tell you, I've heard from a lot of you about this concept and just saying that when you first heard me describe this, it was kind of like, whoa, what's this woman talking about?

What do you mean it's neutral? Alcohol is not neutral. Alcohol is causing all these problems for me. I don't like it right now.

Or alcohol is amazing. Alcohol is the best. It's not neutral. Right. And so for a lot of you, this concept kind of blew your mind, the fact that it could be neutral.

And so that's what we're going to talk about today. Now you are not alone. If you have not previously seen alcohol is morally neutral, if you've never thought about it in this way.

If you start to peer inside of your brain and start to examine what your brain thinks about alcohol, you are going to find a litany of right and wrong good and bad.

And you know what, it's not unique to booze. Our brain loves to categorize. If left unsupervised, our brain will endlessly categorize things as good or bad and just put them into buckets.

So here's the thing, you can either let this categorization happen automatically, right, or you can supervise and observe how your brain is putting things into buckets.

And from there, because you now know about the think feel act cycle, understand, okay, is this contributing to how I feel? Is this contributing to how I act? Is this contributing to the results that I'm getting? If I'm endlessly labeling this thing as good or bad.

Now, if you like your drinking, right, well, if you do, you're probably not listening to this podcast, but if you like your drinking, if you like the results that you're getting before, during and after, then what you think about alcohol isn't necessarily all that important.

But if you want to change your drinking, if you want to change the habit, you are going to run head first into all of the thoughts that you have about what it means to drink, what it means not to drink, and what your drinking signifies about you as a person.

And this is why it's really interesting to understand and apply the concept of alcohol being morally neutral. And PS, if you are one of my listeners who is also working on overeating, also working on changing that habit, and you think, huh, this sounds awfully familiar to the way that I think about food, you're totally right.

...