I was 33 when I quit drinking. It was 2013, which feels like yesterday, but so much has changed in that time span, and I’ve learnt so much, that it’s also an age.
I quit because of a raging addiction to alcohol, my intake having ratcheted up to seven or eight bottles of wine a week over five or six nights. I wrote a Sunday Times Bestseller about the experience of learning how to be an alcohol-free human, The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober.
Writing this book, plus two more, about alcohol and life beyond it, means I’ve interviewed dozens of experts, have spent hundreds of hours digging through research, and have received letters from tens of thousands of readers.
Here’s what I now know, that I didn’t back then.
1. As an anxiety-reducer, alcohol works
I’m not a denier of the desirable effect of alcohol. As an anaesthetic for social anxiety, it works. As an inhibition dismantler, it works. As a fun-lubricant, it also works, because of the unclench provided by its other two functions.
If you’re one of those mystifying drinkers who can literally stick to one or two then these are the rewards of alcohol – probably rarely, if ever, outweighed by the price tag. If that’s you, congratulations.
2. There’s a cost / rewards seesaw
If drinking is not negatively affecting you, why quit, even for a month? Because there’s a seesaw that drives a sober mini-break. You might think it’s because “I want to save money” or “I want to feel healthier” but the real reasons are usually the opposite: you’re dipping into your overdraft to feed your Riesling habit; you feel like a rhino’s behind on a Sunday morning. We wouldn’t need to save money or feel healthier if we weren’t experiencing the opposite.
3. The science that shows it’s impossible to just have one
One of the reasons moderation is tricky is because of a catch-22 built into the alcohol itself. As we’ve covered, alcohol is a dis-inhibitor which makes us more risky, impulsive and devil-may-care. That’s one of the reasons we like it. It’s also the reason why, two drinks in, we are more likely to say ‘what the hell, OK’ to a third pint on a Tuesday night. If you hoovered all of the alcohol out of your system, you wouldn’t say yes to that third. The very nature of alcohol, the existence of it zipping around your bloodstream makes it difficult to say no to more of it.
4. Try Dry December, not Sober October
I take my hat off to you if you’re a regular on Sober October or Dry January – I attempted them many times and was always drinking again by the 7th – but if you spend your sober month staying home, regarding your healthy bank balance, eyeing the lashing rain and clicking ‘next episode’, then what has changed about your social relationship with alcohol?
October and January are nothing sorts of months – only psychopaths have a packed social calendar then. The rest of us hibernate, eat snacks and batten down the hatches. In order to really examine the unexamined – alcohol as the centrepiece of our social lives – we need to either not drink and push ourselves out there, or try staying sober at a more traditionally social time of year.
5. It takes half an hour to relax at a party without a drink
We no longer have that 7pm segue, that bubbly slipstream that gets us there quickly (alcohol reaches our brain within a few minutes). Alcohol is to social relaxation what vibrators are to sexual satisfaction. It takes longer to settle into a social situation without alcohol. We therefore tell ourselves that parties and dinners are “more fun” with alcohol, because they do indeed feel that way, given we don’t experience that awkward where-do-I-put-my-hands prologue, until we finally naturally relax.
In my experience, this takes half an hour. There is no shortcut, and you just have to push through it. But once you re-learn how to socialise without it, you feel slightly invincible.
6. It’s easier to not drink when you feel watched
If you’ve told everyone that you’re doing Sober October, you’ve harnessed something called The Hawthorne Effect. This is a psychological bias whereby we behave differently – better, usually – when we feel watched, either literally or figuratively. It’s when we’re then unwatched (like in November) that it can all go to hell in a handcart.
If you want to try for longer than 30 days alcohol-free (which I recommend), this bias means that telling people about your six months, or year, or whatever, will greatly enhance your chances of it happening.
7. There’s usually an urge beneath the urge
Members of AA use the acronym HALT when heading into a boozy situation. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired? is the meaning. It nails a basic biological truth.
We often mistake ancient hardwired urges for a craving. Low-level hunger causes anxiety, which we often slake with a drink when we’re all chasing the same canapes. It feels lonely, not being in the mostly-still-drinking tribe (tribe approval was life or death, back in the day). If we’re angry, we’ll tend to drink “at” people after a bad day at work. Tired is why I will usually have a disco nap before a party – the alternative is trying to drink through it. (I also find it imperative to leave parties early-ish, at around 11pm, before entering what I like to call ‘danger hour’).
8. Automatic drinking is no longer the norm
Most Boomers, Gen X or Millennials begin drinking in their teens without it being a conscious decision. I was given alcopops at family parties, under the reasoning that this would teach me how to moderate my alcohol intake (never did a plan backfire more). Our friends expected us to drink, our parents did, society did. Even newborns were expected to grow up to be drinkers; it used to be seen as cute to gift babies with babygros saying “Daddy’s future drinking buddy.” But this is changing.
We’re now living in an upside-down world where your average 59 year-old drinks more than 19 year-olds, and the gastro-pubs of Middle England are boozier than your average student union. A third of Gen Z don’t drink at all, said a recent poll of 2000 adults. They’re rejecting the rites of passage we have traditionally danced, staggered and groaned our way through.
9. We give alcohol too much credit
When I quit drinking, I genuinely thought I would never dance in public again, let alone feel truly relaxed dating or socialising. I thought alcohol was the gateway I needed to walk through, to get to those things. I was wrong. I thought alcohol’s pairing with my roast-and-papers Sunday in the pub was essential. I was wrong.
See also: gigs, dinner parties, festivals, dancing to bad music at a wedding, romance, holidays. Alcohol is almost always in the picture when we do something enjoyable, and thus we give it too much credit. We see it as the fun-giver, the relaxation-accessor. But that thing is still fun or relaxing once you get used to having cropped it out. We don’t need a specific thing in our glass to access it.
The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober (Aster, £9.99)
