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Quick Sobriety Tip #3: Go Outside

Staring at the wall is a quick path to a relapse.

Benya Clark
Exploring Sobriety
2 min readJan 6, 2025

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Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

I made a mistake during my first weekend sober: I stayed inside my apartment and stared at the wall. I was so miserable and out of it that I couldn’t convince myself to go outside and some of air. I just sat alone going out of my mind as I tried to resist my cravings.

Fortunately, this mistake didn’t cause a relapse. However, if I had continued like that for much longer, I’m sure it would have.

Sobriety became noticeably easier after I started forcing myself to go outside. It sounds laughably unimportant to take a walk, run, or bike ride through the park, but this small task had a profound effect on my mood and cravings.

For the newly sober, going outside is like magic. It interrupts your negative thoughts, reduces the urges for alcohol, and can leave you happier for the rest of the day. I’m not saying that a short walk will suddenly make sobriety easy, but it will almost certainly help.

This post is part of a series of quick sobriety tips that I’m publishing throughout January. The goal is to help people who have quit drinking by providing easy, actionable advice. For more sobriety tips, check out my recently released ebook and my weekly newsletter.

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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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