You can know that alcohol is hurting you.

You can want to quit.

You can be exhausted by the consequences and then continue on drinking.

In this episode, we're talking about ambivalence.

What it actually is in the brain, why negative consequences don't always make us change,

and how drinking shifts decision making from intentional to

automatic. I'll also discuss how ambivalence can creep back in long after you've made the decision

and result in the slow drift back to drinking. And before we dig in, I'd like to take a moment to

thank my sponsors who made this

episode possible.

One of the most frustrating places to be in is wanting to be sober, but then continuing to drink.

Wanting things to be different, but then still going back to alcohol.

This is where a lot of people get stuck and stay stuck.

You listen to podcasts and read books, you take breaks, you reset in the

morning, and then you undo it at night. And after a while, it starts to feel confusing and

personal. Like, if I really want this, why am I still doing it? A lot of people assume it means

that they're a loser or that they don't want sobriety

badly enough or that they're not trying hard enough. But what's actually happening is ambivalence.

It's about wanting two incompatible things at the same time. You can want sobriety because you're

tired of the consequences, the anxiety, the mental noise, the way the alcohol is shrinking your life.

But then at the same time, part of you still wants alcohol because it's familiar, relieving, predictable, and it works, at least temporarily.

That internal contradiction is one of the hardest parts of

...