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Sobriety Fatigue
Tired of being sober or just plain tired?
This essay originally appeared in the Exploring Sobriety newsletter.
The other day, I was trying to better understand how new readers discover this newsletter. One of the things that I checked was which search terms bring people here from Google.
The very top result — the most frequent search term that eventually leads people here — was “sobriety fatigue.” This surprised me because I don’t often write about the topic. In fact, I’m not even exactly sure what these potential readers are searching for. To me, the phrase is a little ambiguous. It could mean:
- The feelings of sleepiness, brain fog, and exhaustion that accompany getting sober.
- Or, the feeling of being tired of sobriety itself — when the sober days start to run together and you worry that the rest of your life will be miserable.
Although these topics are distinct, they’re both important, and they’re both sets of feelings that I struggled with when getting sober. So, in today’s newsletter, I figured, why not write a bit about each of them? Hopefully, the next time that somebody lands here from searching “sobriety fatigue,” they’ll find what they’re looking for regardless of which meaning they intended.
