And in the meantime, try out these little tools for moderating your drinking in the moment:

Remove “willpower” from the equation

Willpower has no place in drinking less—all it does is lead us to feel guilty, ashamed, and frustrated with ourselves. Instead, we focus on building up our tools and reducing our mental fatigue so that our Prefrontal Cortex can maintain its control of our behaviors.

Reduce the dopamine received from alcohol

Those light beers aren’t just helpful for our waistline—they’re also lower in alcohol, so they deliver a smaller dopamine spike to our brains. If we’re drinking the heavy stuff—the 14% ABV beer, the dark red wine, the 100-proof liquor—we’re flooding our brain with dopamine. The brain takes note and does everything in its power to repeat whatever it was that made us feel so amazing. If we drink lower ABV drinks, though, the dopamine spike is more subtle, setting off fewer alarms in the brain to repeat that behavior. Maybe even consider making your first drink completely non-alcoholic to ease yourself into an evening.

Find dopamine elsewhere

If we know that part of what makes it so difficult to just drink one is that our brain is seeking more access to dopamine, we can give it what it wants through other means. After you’ve checked off that first drink, get the next spike of dopamine through something else: a killer dessert, a dance party in the kitchen, spending time with someone you love, and so on.

Counter thinking that alcohol is required for fun

We start rewiring our brains slowly, untangling this idea that alcohol is required for fun. I’ll just make it easy for you right now: alcohol is not required for fun. The more distance we put between ourselves and that idea, the more we realize the million other ways we can trigger our pleasure response.