Is it just me?
If you’re here, then I assume you’ve had this thought at midday on a Saturday morning: “Wow, my head hurts. I feel like I’m going to be sick. Is that a kebab on the floor? Ew. Why do I keep doing this?!”.
Maybe you’ve told yourself that you’re done with this; you’re going to get your shit together, stop drinking, dust off that gym membership and shift those pounds that have mysteriously crept on. But then, six days later, you’ve had a tough week at work and your friends are meeting at your local. You’ve got no plans, so you go, but only for a few. Saturday rolls around and you’re hungover in bed again. Whoops.
What I’ve come to realise is that it’s totally possible to only have a few and then stop. I’ve actually done this occasionally. However, I think it’s about as easy as stopping yourself halfway down a slide — not totally impossible, but incredibly difficult once you get started. So how about avoiding the slide altogether?
Before we get started
In this post, I’m going to tell you why I’ve decided to stop drinking alcohol for a while. I think there are some obvious and vague reasons such as improving your health or saving money, but these reasons have always been present and, for me, they’ve never been compelling enough to break the habit I’ve had since I was eighteen (give or take). It took a decade of misadventures with alcohol to see that there might be a different way for me, so I want to get more specific about why this is the right decision for me at this time to see if anything resonates with you.
Something I want to clarify before we start is that I’m not trying to get you to quit booze or make you feel bad about your drinking habits. As someone that’s hit the booze most weekends in the last 10 years, more often than not to excess, I can assure you that none of this comes from a place of superiority. I want to present the limited experience I have, and the insights that I’ve found helpful, not preach or evangelise, so let’s dive in.
Reason #1 — I don’t need alcohol to enjoy myself any more
It’s your birthday? Get him a pint! You graduated from University? Bubbles! You made it through Wednesday? What a trooper, how about a cider?
Alcohol plays a pivotal role at these occasions, but what I’ve realised from sporadic dry spells over the years is that I can now enjoy these festivities just as much sober as I do with booze. Like many people, I felt an intense need to fit in as a teenager, but I’m not as self-conscious now, so it’s easier to handle the questions and teasing that sometimes come with the territory.
I recently went to a Christmas party hosted by the coworking space I use. I wanted to build more social connections because I only knew a couple of staff members, but I knew it was going to be a boozy affair. How would these strangers react to a twenty-something-year-old guy turning down cocktails and shots and drinking non-alcoholic cider? Would I have the confidence to make new connections totally sober, or would I be shunned and considered boring, arrogant, or holier-than-thou?
My first conversation at this party was with a woman who told me that her husband was driving her home tonight, and mentioned that he’d stopped drinking in May because he’d had enough of it. Huh. Maybe I won’t seem like such a social pariah after all? I mentioned that I was cutting out alcohol for a while and she was supportive, if not a little surprised. We discussed the range of non-alcoholic options available and then went our separate ways, but that short interaction certainly eased my nerves.
Later, we were split into groups and a quiz got underway. After my team aced the ‘national football shirts’ round with a little help from Google, one of my teammates spotted my zero-alcohol cider and asked “Are you not drinking, then?”, to which I said no without much further explanation. He followed up with “Just didn’t fancy it?”, so I went on to explain that I was testing out a sober life because I no longer needed alcohol to socialise, and that drinking and hangovers had also played a key role in a rough year health-wise for me. To my surprise, what followed was a very candid conversation about mental health, our shared struggles with anxiety and a rundown of the medications we both happened to take. This outwardly confident and extroverted 28-year-old was incredibly supportive of my decision, and it turns out we both suffer from ‘hang-xiety’, an anxious feeling brought on by a hangover, which had been worsening for both of us as we got further into our twenties.
I came away from this party around 11pm when tequila rose started doing the rounds, and I woke up feeling fresh for work at 7am the next morning. In previous years, this workday would have been a write off, but that wasn’t the case this time round. The fact that I was still able to connect with people (strangers even!) and enjoy a boozy party without having to drink further bolstered my belief that I don’t need alcohol to enjoy myself.
Reason #2 — It negatively impacts my health (mainly mental)
On several of my last birthdays, I’ve been told “It’s all downhill from here, Johnny boy”, and while I’m an incurable optimist, there’s some truth in that. I’m developing abdominal padding which wasn’t there before, I’m seeing more and more grey hairs in the mirror, and my hairline is retreating like a scared army.
When it comes to alcohol, I started to notice the intensity of my hangovers increasing once I left university at the age of 22. Gone were the days of drinking for 14 nights in a row (yep, that happened). Hangovers didn’t just last for a morning anymore — the whole day was a write-off, and the nastiness started to stick around for two, or even three days. I couldn’t eat and I certainly couldn’t work. Instead of being light, gentle background music that gradually faded away, my hangovers were more like heavy, energetic trance music being blasted into my ears through headphones that I couldn’t take off. Things really do seem to be going downhill from here!
Topping the list of these self-inflicted ‘symptoms’ were shame and self-loathing. Like a lot of people, I’ve struggled with my mental health in the past. I took the antidepressant ‘Prozac’ for a year in my late teens after being diagnosed with depression, and have had regular episodes ever since. In 2022, I started becoming gradually more depressed and anxious, characterised by irritability, low mood and a nagging hopelessness, and you guessed it, these feelings were all significantly amplified on a hangover.
I spent a fair amount of time and money on trying to remedy this — I saw two different therapists, tried a number of medications and eventually got signed off work for a while and started a course of medication — but I realised that by drinking every weekend, I was actively exacerbating the very problem that I was trying to solve. To me, this made about as much sense as trying to fill a bucket with water, while simultaneously chipping a hole in the bottom of it — it was totally counterproductive.
I’d wager that happiness and health are two high priorities for most people, and yet I was damaging both of these things on a weekly basis by drinking, despite investing resources in making improvements in these areas. We all understand on some level that alcohol isn’t good for you, but it took this realisation — that I was pulling in opposite directions — to trigger an epiphany about the role of alcohol in my life. I realised that it couldn’t hurt to try cutting booze out for an extended period to see if it improved things.
Reason #3 — To show my kids that sobriety is an option
‘To drink, or not to drink?’ was never a question I asked myself when I reached drinking age. In England, where I was born and raised, drinking is deeply ingrained in the culture. Alcohol played a key role at birthdays, weddings, Christmases, graduations and even Christenings. The only universally-accepted reasons that I came across for sobriety were driving, pregnancy, religion and ‘having a problem’. The first two reasons are still met with the suggestion that one or two can’t hurt.
Brits have truly earned their notoriety as heavy drinkers. In 2016, the UK population was roughly 65 million, and a study by the World Health Organization found that of those people, almost 20 million had binged on alcohol in the last 30 days, which was classed as having six or more alcoholic drinks in one session. Think about that — if you work with 100 colleagues in an office in London, it’s likely that 30 of them have been on a bender in the last month. As a result, the UK Government collected over £78 billion (yes, with a ‘b’) in alcohol tax from 2010–2022, so you can only imagine what the profits of the alcohol companies themselves looked like.
What does this have to do with my future children? Well, it’s clear that drinking is considered a normal, or even necessary thing to do in the UK, and it makes a ton of money for lots of important people, so we’re unlikely to see posters on London buses telling us to ask the bartender for a Diet Coke instead of a cocktail. So, how can I make sure my children don’t end up drinking for the sake of it, to the detriment of their physical and mental health, if they get the feeling they might not want to drink, but society tells them they should keep boozing?
One of my grandfathers is teetotal, and while he did great things and is certainly a role model to me, he didn’t have nearly as much influence on me as my parents did. As a hypothetical thought experiment, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I watched my dad enjoying a sober life when I was growing up. (To be clear, I don’t think he should have done this — as I said, this is hypothetical.) Perhaps I wouldn’t have considered it essential to start drinking as soon as I could. Perhaps sobriety wouldn’t have seemed so risky, or weird, or socially damaging. Perhaps the benefits of being able to drive to social events, or not getting hangovers, or saving money would have outweighed the obvious negatives that come with booze.
It’s impossible to say how this would have impacted me; my need to fit in would certainly have overruled any sobriety efforts in my late teens and early twenties. However, I’m certain that seeing a parent skilfully navigate a booze-centric society without drinking can only build curiosity around whether that choice suits my kid(s) when the time comes. This will surely make them consider the role of alcohol in their life a little more closely if they get the feeling it might not be for them, instead of blindly accepting the negative consequences because that’s just the way things are here in sunny old England: we eat fish and chips, read Harry Potter and get bladdered every weekend. Well, do we have to?
I’d also predict that I’m far too useless on a hangover to change nappies, play football in the garden or reliably supervise small humans, so it’s probably best I avoid testing that hypothesis for the sake of me and my family. I want my life to be a long and healthy one, filled with quality time with loved ones where I’m healthy enough to truly embrace it, and I believe that cutting alcohol out of my life will support that goal.
Conclusion
As I said earlier, I’m not here to tell you to quit booze. As someone that’s been drinking for 10 years, more often than not to excess, none of this writing comes from a moral high ground. I realised that alcohol was no longer serving me, so I’m experimenting with cutting it out, and I wanted to share the details in case you’ve had similar musings.
I embarked on this sober journey on 21st November 2022, and I write this in early 2023. So far in terms of benefits, I’ve noticed that I have SO much more time than before! I’ve started going to the gym, writing and reading a lot more, which is having knock-on effects in different areas of my health and wellbeing. Also, I can make more plans because I don’t have to budget weekend days for hangovers which feels awesome. I’m also becoming popular for being the designated driver, making transport easier to organise.
Sure, there have been times where I’ve been tempted by a nice glass of red wine, or my favourite whiskey, but I haven’t craved beer or cider because the no/low alcohol options are great and more widely available than ever. So on the whole it’s been easier, and more beneficial, than I anticipated. And so, I raise my glass of Lucky Saint to wish you a happy and healthy 2023.
