You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart episode 64.

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 guys, we are talking about urges today.

Now listen, I've already done an entire podcast episode.

It was episode number eight on managing urges.

It was one of the first podcasts that I did because of course, how you manage an urge,

what you do with an urge makes a ton of difference when you're trying to take a break or change your drinking.

So what I want to do today is dig in a little bit deeper.

So in addition to understanding how to manage your urges, I want to give you a new way to think about them,

a new framework to think about the urge itself that I think will be very helpful as you're doing this work.

So the urge to drink and frankly the urge to do anything is just desire that has been habituated.

Right?

Desire that your brain has learned to expect at certain times, certain places, certain events, certain activities.

When you are doing certain things, when you are feeling certain emotions, that's what the urge is all about.

And you can feel urges around lots of things, not just drinking.

So in episode eight, where I'm talking about managing urges, I go into the four things you can do when the urge to drink appears.

And again, this applies to all urges.

You can react, you can resist, you can distract, and you can observe.

These are the four things you can do when the urge to drink appears.

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