You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 79.

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, today we are talking about your emotional health.

This topic is so important.

If you listen to me, if you listen to this podcast, you know that I say all the time,

changing the habit of drinking more than you want is so much bigger.

It is so much bigger than just, oh did I say yes or did I say no to a drink?

You have to understand your emotions, you have to understand what you are feeling because the action of drinking does not appear out of the clear blue sky.

It is always fueled by a feeling and not just that immediate feeling of desire, but it can also be fueled by the feeling of stress or anxiety, loneliness, boredom, awkwardness, whatever it is.

So you really have to understand your overall emotional health.

Alcohol is a quick and easy way to temporarily mask how you are feeling, but the problem is that it does nothing to change that underlying emotion.

So for example, if you have a drink at a party because you are feeling awkward and you are hoping that that drink is going to temporarily cover up the feeling of awkwardness, it may.

But guess what, the next time you go to a party, you are going to have that same feeling.

If you are drinking because you are stressed out, having something to drink will potentially temporarily mask that stress, but you are probably going to be stressed out about that thing tomorrow.

That is why I talk about alcohol as being a problem-staller, not a problem-solver.

It is not solving the problem. It is not doing anything to change the underlying emotion. It is just masking it and covering it up.

So today we are going to talk about your emotional health. It is such an important topic.

We are going to talk about why it matters, what does good emotional health look like, and this one may surprise you, what gets in the way of your emotional health, how do you invest in it, and what does investing in it look like?

Now these last two pieces, I think, for a lot of you, is going to be something really new because so many people are not used to thinking of, oh, I should invest in my emotional health.

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