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In my drinking days, I searched for answers to these questions for years:

How do I quit drinking for good?

What can I do to break my drinking patterns once and for all?

Today, people come to me with the same questions. Despite calling myself an empowered alcohol-free coach, the truth is I don’t have an answer to those. Because making life changes rarely lies within a single decision. It often consists of many small decisions.

In acceptance and commitment therapy, this is called a choice point, and it’s something that shows up again and again in how people relate to drinking. A choice point is simply a given moment where we have the opportunity to choose either to move towards what matters to us or away from what discomforts us. Choice points exist everywhere in our lives. They are often moments that seem small and insignificant, like whether to pick up the phone, to put on the gym shoes, or turn on Netflix, or whether or not to pour that glass of wine out of habit.

Often, we choose without even being consciously aware of the two options we face: one is to move towards the person we want to be and the life we want to build, and the other is to move away from what seems scary, challenging, or uncomfortable in the moment. In the journey of changing one’s relationship with alcohol, one can encounter these choice points many times during the day.

Before we dive further into how to make choices align with your desire to drink less, let’s examine the pull to move away.

The Pull to Move Away

Most people don’t realize that beneath every choice of picking up the bottle, there is always something very human: the pull to move away—to move away from discomfort, from difficulties, or from what feels scary or overwhelming. The pull is not a sign of weakness or a defective brain—quite the opposite. It’s our system doing what it’s supposed to do: Protecting us from perceived threats. Through our lives, each of us has learned a set of strategies that help us move away: for some, it’s avoidance; for others, it might be procrastination or people pleasing; and for many, that strategy becomes picking up a drink.

That’s why, in what I call the dependency loop, which keeps drinking in place, the first invisible force that drives our behavior is human needs.

Perhaps it’s after a long day, when things finally quiet down — and before the exhaustion or emptiness fully catches up, your hand is already reaching for the bottle. Or maybe you’re watching your partner leave the dirty dish on the table for the tenth time, and you feel the annoyance rise in your chest, and almost without thinking, you take a big gulp of wine to take the edge off.

What often seems like drinking for “no reason” is actually our system trying to move us away from something we don’t want to feel.

The Never-Ending Tug of War

Oftentimes, when we try to quit or cut down on alcohol without understanding the human need beneath our desire to drink, we make two mistakes. First, we try to fight the pull to move away — to tough it out, or push it through. It creates an internal tug of war, and we are tugged between the instinct to avoid discomfort and the conscious effort to override it with willpower. Second, we try to quit once and for all, not realizing that change is not something that can be won once and done with. Eventually, our willpower runs low, we give in, and find ourselves feeling defeated and doubting our ability to change after all.

The Choice of Move Towards

What we haven’t yet realized is that the opposite of moving away is not denying the pull, but finding something to move towards instead. That’s what acceptance and commitment therapy and the choice point teach us: Find that thing you want to move towards.

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The answer lies in our values. Instead of being driven by the pull to move away from discomfort, we allow ourselves to be guided towards who we want to become and the life we want to build. To put it simply, we move towards ourselves and what matters to us.

More importantly, we recognize that the journey towards ourselves is never a straight line. Even the most committed ones among us might sometimes find themselves opting to move away from discomfort instead of towards value; it’s human.

But the beauty of choice points is that a new opportunity lies in every new choice that arises hundreds of times a day, big or small. We get to choose that for each moment, and each moment only, whether to move towards or move away. This might mean tonight, and tonight only, instead of reaching for the bottle, you pick up a book you’ve been meaning to read. When tomorrow comes, you get to choose again.

The secret power of moving towards is that it builds. Every time we choose an action that aligns with our deep values, we tell the brain who we want to be. Over time, our confidence grows, and our self-trust deepens. That’s how real change takes root. Our goal is not to eliminate the away moves, but to increase the number of toward moves.

Your Next Choice Point

When the next choice point about drinking comes, instead of acting on it right away, pause and ask yourself: For this moment, and this moment only, what am I moving away from, and what do I want to move towards?

If this resonates, I share more insights like this in my weekly newsletter. You can learn more on my website.

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