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

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.

Hi everybody, welcome back.

Today we are talking about confidence.

I'm going to be talking to you about what confidence is, why it's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we need a drink in order to feel more self assured and at ease in social situations.

I'm going to talk about some of the pitfalls of liquid courage and then go over three things that really sap our confidence.

In the last episode, I talked about how common it is to use a drink at the end of the day to unwind and the pitfalls of trying to pour a glass of wine in order to cope with end of the day stress and anxiety.

Confidence is another really common reason why so many people drink just like wanting to take the edge off, wanting to feel at ease in social situations, wanting to loosen up, feeling less awkward, more social, more outgoing.

It's something that a lot of people deal with and it's a topic for me that I particularly relate to because it was feeling confident while drinking was such a reason why it felt really hard for me to change this habit.

So I really started drinking in college.

I didn't really drink much before then but college was when drinking kind of became a pastime for me.

And I think looking back the reason why it did is because when I first started drinking, I realized how it transformed me into feeling attractive, feeling funny, feeling outgoing and it felt a little bit like a magic elixir.

So I had all this insecurity that nodded me before going out. I had all these hang-ups all the time that were whispering in my ear and when I started drinking all of that just dissolved.

And so I learned that when I was pretty young, I learned that at 17 and I just kept repeating that pattern as a way to feel more confident especially when I was socializing.

I talk about this a lot in the book that I wrote, why can't I drink like everyone else but that very first college party that I went to, I got way too drunk at that party.

But still I saw a huge upside and the upside was that I felt comfortable when I had a buzz when I started getting drunk.

I felt like I fit in, I felt like all my worries went away and I felt like I was finally able to have fun.

And so even though there were a lot of negatives attached to it, I still saw a big benefit.

I was really for so long at the mercy of all this constant negative chatter in my mind.

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