261. Let's Talk Urges261. Let's Talk Urges
The Alcohol ReThink Podcast
Patrick Fox talks about urges to drink as echoes of past habits and shares a simple out-loud self-talk tool to interrupt them. The focus stays on helping men change their mental relationship with alcohol by changing how they respond to their own thoughts.
24:05•9 Oct 2026
Let’s Talk Urges: Breaking the Internal Battle with Alcohol
Episode Overview
- Urges to drink are often just learned patterns in the brain, an ‘echo of your past’ rather than a true reflection of what you want now.
- Naming the habitual drinking voice as a separate part of you helps you see that it is not your whole identity.
- Speaking out loud to yourself during an urge can interrupt the mental spiral and reconnect you with your real goals and values.
- Strong urges occur in high emotional states, where clear thinking is harder, so simple pattern-breakers are especially useful.
- Changing your relationship with alcohol starts with changing your relationship with your own thoughts, not with sheer willpower alone.
“That habitual voice, Dave, the addicted mind, whatever name you want to give it, that is an echo of your past.”
Curious about how others handle that inner back-and-forth about drinking? This episode of The Alcohol ReThink Podcast zooms in on urges and the constant mental wrangling many men face around alcohol. Men’s life and sober coach Patrick Fox talks directly to guys who are “ready to rethink the role of alcohol in their lives for good”, using a mix of humour, honesty and straight-talking coaching.
He paints a familiar picture: it’s Friday at five, you’ve promised yourself a dry weekend, and suddenly that voice pipes up, “Come on, just have a beer, it’s been a long week.” Before you know it, you’re in a full negotiation with an “internal barman”. Patrick introduces a simple but surprisingly powerful tool: talking to yourself out loud.
Instead of silently wrestling in your head, he suggests giving a clear voice to the part of you that has already decided not to drink. He frames urges as an “echo of your past” rather than your true self, explaining how the brain links finishing work or feeling stressed with drinking, and how those automatic thoughts are “not facts, not instructions”.
He draws on ideas from internal family systems, encouraging you to name that habitual drinking voice (even “Dave”) so you can see it as just one part of you, not the whole story. Patrick shares his own experiments with out-loud self-talk around food cravings, noticing that saying things like “That’s not what I actually want” breaks the spell of the urge much quicker.
The tone stays light, practical and very guy-focused, yet it keeps circling back to the bigger point: this isn’t just about alcohol, it’s about changing your relationship with your own mind. If you’ve spent years having the same argument with yourself about drinking, could a few spoken sentences be the pattern-breaker you’ve been waiting for?
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