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Basic Strategies for Staying Sober

How I’ve made it seven years without alcohol, and how I hope you can too!

Benya Clark
Exploring Sobriety
6 min readJan 3, 2025

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Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

This past weekend was New Year’s Eve and the seventh anniversary of the day that I quit drinking.

Every year, around this time, the recovery world swells with another huge group of alcoholics who are ready to turn their lives around. At this very moment, countless individuals around the globe are in the first few days of their sobriety, fighting as hard as they can to quit drinking.

If you’re among that crowd, let me say congratulations!

Getting sober was truly the most difficult thing that I have ever done in my life, but it was also the most rewarding. No matter how hard sobriety is for you, I hope that it will improve your life as much as it has improved mine.

In my case, the first three days without alcohol were the absolute hardest days I’ve ever gone through. That’s not to say that sobriety magically got easy on day four. It wasn’t until a couple of years without alcohol that I truly started feeling great.

However, at the very least, day four marked a turning point. That’s when the worst of the physical symptoms started to subside and also when I began to feel a little more like a functioning human being again.

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Benya Clark
Benya Clark

Written by Benya Clark

I’m a lawyer turned writer from North Carolina. I write about sobriety, mental health, and more. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter at exploringsobriety.com.

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