The single biggest reason that your attempts to drink less have failed

The single biggest reason that your attempts to drink less have failed in the past is because your focus was in the wrong place. You were focused too much on the actions and didn't put enough time into planning for mistakes. And specifically planning for the thought work required to navigate them.

If you are anything like I was 5 years ago, which I assume you are since you are reading this email, then your past attempts have looked something like this:

You start with the self imposed rules- only have 3 when you are out with your friends, or no drinking during the week or only drink beer or if you are a wine drinker, only drink scotch because it is not your favorite. Regardless, of the rule, because you still have an underlying thought that drinking is fun, you revert back to your prior drinking habits.

This cycle repeats itself for a couple of rounds.

Then you sit in indecision for a long time. You feel stuck because you don't want to try again. You have failed in the past and don't want to fail again.

Then you have a particularly bad night and tell yourself, "THIS IS IT!"

You decide that this time it will be different. You spend a lot of time psyching yourself up for it. Maybe you buy a new book or enroll in a new program. This has to work. You get a little dopamine hit from the excitement that this is going to work and some relief from the feeling that you are stuck. This is great.

What is missing? You spend zero time or energy thinking about and planning for what you will do when you trip up. What kept you stuck in indecision for so long was that fear of failing ... again. But if we peal it back a little bit, what you really don't want is the self beat down that you give yourself when you fail. That is the part that really sucks.

Did you know that that self judgement and beating yourself up is optional? 100%. No one can tell you what to think- ever. You always get to decide.

Failing, tripping up, making mistakes, drinking off plan will happen. Not having a plan for how you will deal with them is like going into the state finals thinking that the opposing team isn't going to have a goalie. That is never going to happen.

Your primitive brain is that goalie. It doesn't want you to change. It doesn't matter that the familiar isn't serving you. Same = Good. So you need to plan for your primitive brain to fight back and not make the resulting mistakes mean that anything has gone wrong.

And it definitely doesn't mean that anything is wrong with you. This means that your brain is working exactly the way that it is supposed to be working. You can outsmart it by being prepared and leveraging your pre-frontal cortex as much as possible.

Ready to figure this out once and for all? Do it differently by planning holistically. Plan for the goalie. Commit to handle mistakes with curiosity not with self judgement. Be prepared to learn from everything and you will get stronger.

Take care,