Ever feel like your “off switch” is busted? Like once you start drinking, there’s no stopping until the bottle is empty or the credit card is maxed out? It’s usually a rare occasion that we go into an evening saying “I’m going to binge drink tonight!” More likely, we go into an evening with the intent to drink moderately, have a good time, and make it home safely. But so often, we find it’s hard to stop drinking after just one or two drinks.

Now that we’ve taken some time to peek into the science of how alcohol impacts our brains, this is a great time to dive into why this phenomenon happens, and what you might be able to do about it to begin changing your drinking habits.

While we know our physical threshold for alcohol increases the more we use, we also know there’s a subtle shift that happens right away in our bodies between zero drinks and, say, one or two. As we recall what happens in our brain when we take a sip of alcohol, we come back to this idea of dopamine: it triggers a pleasure response in our bodies when we drink alcohol, and our brain is trained to seek that feeling out at all costs.

Before we start drinking, we think “I’m just going to have two glasses of wine tonight.” Our Prefrontal Cortex—where our decision making, impulse control, values, and personality live—has full control of our behavior. But the minute we begin drinking, different gears start turning in our brains; those that are seeking pleasure, that mis-identify alcohol as something helpful to survival, that hijack our rational thinking in the Prefrontal Cortex and move into the impulsive structures in our lower brain. Your “off switch” really does get broken, or at least a little sticky, once you begin drinking.

So as we move forward and begin changing the way alcohol is showing up in our life, we keep the mechanics at work in our brain top of mind. We work to strengthen our Prefrontal Cortex and the neural pathways associated with drinking differently, we change our habits outside of alcohol use so they support our wellness, we reduce our stress, and we do a million other little things that add up to a satisfying relationship with alcohol.