When I was in college I drank too much. Transitioning into my professional life I came face to face with as many, or more, opportunities to imbibe as I did while in college. Happy hour. The beers about the work project. The late night team building. Even though I drank a lot in college it didn’t feel like the expectations for how frequently, or how much, I drank changed much as I entered the professional ranks. I was surprised.

I traveled extensively for work, logging 1,000,000+ frequent flyer miles. When I traveled we would entertain clients. Wine and dine. Or the team traveling for work would go out for dinner. Invariably, everyone would look at the business leader, at each other, or at the client for some social indication about alcohol. Were we going to have a drink? Were we expected to have a drink?

The server comes to the table to take the order. The first guy gets a beer. The second guy gets a beer. You feel like you have to get a beer. Breaking the cycle feels like it would make you stand out, uncomfortably, when you are the new guy trying to fit in. You order a beer.

The server approaches the client, the client asks if the table would like to get a couple bottles of wine. You are here to impress these people, to win them over, it would feel rude to refuse. You want to relate. You want to connect. You indicate that you will take a glass.

In each instance, you feel it. The pressure. The weight of the expectations you perceive from others. It’s natural. This pressure. That weight. The compulsion to fit in. To be accepted. It is innate.

The feeling comes from a place in our subconscious that is connected to our survival instincts. Our ancestors needed the tribe to survive. They needed to be accepted because they could not survive the wilderness alone. Exile was death. These instinctual inclinations drive us to assign an unreasonably heavy level of expectation, and consequence, to every day decisions. Compelled over and over again to rebel against our gut. Sacrificing what we feel to be right on the altar of fitting in.

At first, the pressure was tantamount to twisting my rubber arm. More booze? Hell yeah! Party on!

The alcohol kept flowing and my more self-destructive behaviors kept rolling right along with it. Although I knew my behavior wasn’t healthy I wasn’t receiving any queues from my environment encouraging a behavioral change. Telling me now was the time for the better decisions that, deep down, I knew I should be making. Although I was frequently binge drinking, mostly the alcohol never got in the way of the objective. We created great businesses. We developed great products. We showed up in ways that significantly exceeded our customers’ expectations. In more than 4,500 days of too much, too frequently, outwardly I barely missed a beat. Professionally my binge drinking landed somewhere between acceptable and encouraged.

That is one of the weird things about alcohol, isn’t it?

It is the only drug that is so accepted, so ingrained in our culture, that we feel like we stand out in uncomfortable ways by abstaining. Everyone knows that it isn’t good for us, but we still feel compelled to participate. So here you are, reading this article, and you want to know.

How do I break the cycle? How do I comfortably navigate the social pressure to drink when, deep down, I’d really rather not?

Every change we make starts by going inward, not by looking outward. Don’t look at the circumstances. Don’t rehearse what you are going to say. Don’t carefully consider how you’re going to explain your abstention. And absolutely don’t order a nonalcoholic drink solely for the reason of appearing as though you are drinking. Do not fake it to make other people more comfortable because you are not responsible for their feelings. Most importantly, don’t use mocktails to fake it so you fit a more socially acceptable image.

The problem doesn’t live in your circumstances. It isn’t about the dinner. Or the happy hour. The problem lies in your identity. Your picture of who you are. Your confidence in who you are, as someone who isn’t drinking, needs to be stronger than your uncertainty about how other people might respond to that decision. Your inability to overcome the pressure is less a function of how large the social pressure to drink might be, and more a function of how small your confidence is in a different picture of yourself.

You are reading this because you want to make the decision that you don’t drink. Or you drink less. Otherwise you would not have invested five minutes of a busy day coming this far.

The secret is a little less sexy than you might have imagined, but a lot more powerful. Suppose you want to decide not to drink. Here is how you do it.

If you want to break the cycle, look at who you are today. Consider who you want to be tomorrow. See that better person clearly. Decide that now is the time for the old you to die. That tomorrow brings the dawn of a new day. You decide that a different person will greet it. The old you must die. A new person must rise.

Simple. Maybe it’s almost boring. But also a little scary.

Powerful things are simple. Deciding you are no longer going to be beholden to social pressures regarding alcohol isn’t the same as making a decision about what you are going to do. It isn’t about a choice you make and then make over and over again. It is a decision about who you are going to be. Once you’ve decided who you are, deep down, that is how you are unconsciously and automatically going to respond to thousands of different stimuli in your life.

At some point you decided, consciously or not, to be a person with a certain kind of integrity. Honesty. To have certain values. To uphold certain principles. These foundational truths about your identity shape hundreds of decisions every day. To hold the door for that guy. To tell that women getting up from the table that she’s left her phone behind. To flash the goofy smile at the sad kid in the deli to turn his day around. These reflective decisions are almost unconscious because they come from a deeper place. The come from your identity.

You want to change your relationship with alcohol, the truth is that alcohol isn’t going to change. Same old booze. Different day. The social situations will, largely, stay the same. The difference you want in your life is stashed right behind the change you’re afraid to make. The truth is that you’ll need to unravel the person you were, to become the person you want to be. So how you identify, as it pertains to alcohol, comes across differently.

When you see yourself, deep down, as a person who does not drink, you’ll find you don’t even think about turning down the wine. The social response to your rejected cocktail doesn’t even cross your mind. Just like you didn’t think about holding the door for that guy, or helping that women who nearly forgot her phone, or injecting a smile into a said kids’ day at the deli, you won’t even think about this either.

Who you are shapes how you react. Change the “who.” The “how” will follow.

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Originally published in Black Bear on Medium.