You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 66.

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.

Alright guys, so listen, today we are going to be talking about a really challenging but such a profound concept that I teach when it comes to how to change your drinking in a sustainable way, how to take a break in a sustainable way.

But really you can apply it to how to change anything in your life and that concept is how to become an observer of your thoughts and your emotions.

And the reason why this is so profound is because if you can look at your thoughts and look at your emotions and be able to do that objectively and understand what they are creating for you, understand how you act.

And the results that you get, you can start to change them.

Now the problem is that most of us have zero practice doing this. No one ever sits us down and explains how we can become an observer of ourselves.

And on top of that, the majority of people out there, myself included for a very long time, see our thoughts, all the thinking we have in our head as just an objective understanding of the world around us.

Right? So not only that, we see those negative thoughts as just a truth, but also we see our negative emotions as feelings that we need to escape.

We don't ever learn how to parse out our thoughts about things from the facts and circumstances of what is happening around us.

So we don't see how our opinions, our judgments, the meaning that we're making things mean.

We don't understand how that's affecting us.

And we don't ever learn how to really understand our negative emotions as not these terrible things that we need to run from, but just a set of sensations that are happening in our body that's totally survivable.

But really, if you want to understand the habit of over drinking and you want to change it, you have to learn how to do both of these things. It is so key.

Okay, so I'll tell you what happens when most people start to learn about the think feel a cycle.

It makes a lot of sense. They enjoy having this framework to start to understand why they feel the way they do, why they do certain things, but they also become really good observers of other people.

And so I have clients come back to me all the time and they'll say, you know what?

I really see how the cycle is playing out with my husband. I really understand what my daughter is thinking then creates how she feels and how she acts.

And of course, the reason why this happens is because it's easier to see the cycle unfolding with other people rather than ourselves.

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