406: How to Have a Successful Dry January

Take a Break from Drinking

Rachel Hart

Alcohol, Lifecoach, Alcoholicsanonymous, Self-improvement, Hungover, Society & Culture, Smartrecovery, Drinking, Cognitivebehavioraltherapy, Education, Cbt, 12steps, Sobriety, Drunk, Recovery, Personal Journals

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s almost here: Dry January. You know you want to take a break, but you’re not sure how. Even worse, maybe you’ve tried this before and either couldn’t stick with it or didn’t see any changes.

You might not realize it, but your plans to focus on not drinking may be setting you up for failure. Instead, you need to shift your thinking about the substance and focus on becoming a person of substance.

Tune in to learn how to purposefully direct your brain away from what’s easy and toward a different direction—where real change occurs. Then, find out the six things you need to focus on to have a successful Dry January and drink less this year.

Find a personalized approach that helps you change your habit in my new book, The Ultimate Guide to Drinking Less, here: https://rachelhart.com/guide/

Discover alternative approaches to drinking less inside our membership program, Take a Break: https://rachelhart.com/tab/

Get the full show notes, transcript, and more information here: https://rachelhart.com/406

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's one word that will undermine any attempts to drink less, and that word is can't. I can't drink. I can't have alcohol this month. Most people embark on dry January with a mindset of can't. But when you tell yourself that you can't have something that you want, often enough, you'll not only feel resentful,
0:23.0	you're actually going to increase your desire. This is episode 406, and I'm going to explain
0:28.5	the six things you need to focus on instead if you want to have a successful dry January
0:34.3	and drink less this year. Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit
0:42.6	from the inside out.
0:44.6	We're challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink and why it can be hard to resist
0:49.7	temptation.
0:51.1	No labels, no judgment, just practical tools to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking.
0:58.9	Now here's your host, Rachel Hart.
1:06.0	Okay, so the season of dry January is right around the corner and while taking a break from drinking can be such an amazing gift to your mind and your body, I watch so many people set themselves up for failure when they decide to take a break from alcohol. And keep in mind, I did this myself for over a decade. So I usually followed the same pattern.
1:28.8	I'd get to a point in life where I was kind of fed up with my drinking or worried about it.
1:33.6	And I'd tell myself that I wasn't allowed to drink for a certain period of time.
1:38.0	And I would then double down on things like willpower and avoidance and distraction
1:43.9	in order to make it to this goal
1:47.0	date that I had in my calendar. So here's what would happen because I did this again and again.
1:51.8	Either I would quickly fail and decide that that meant that I was just someone who couldn't change
1:56.7	or I would make it to the magical day using willpower and distraction and avoidance. I'd get to that day
2:03.6	where my break was over and then shortly thereafter, I would drink way too much. So it was like I just
2:10.2	went right back to where I had been before I started. So I decided to revisit one of my earliest
2:16.9	episodes where I explain why this happens
2:19.6	along with six things that you need to focus on if you want to have a successful dry January
2:25.1	this year, because if done right, they can be amazing. I'm also talking about one major mindset
	...

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