I Quit Drinking For 4 Months. My Life Changed in These 5 Ways.

I had lived in fear of the fabled terrifying visions that assail chronic drinkers, but which had not yet attacked me.

A life centered on the reliance of pleasure creates a life of difficult circumstances. Our brain’s ability to become attached to just about anything can be a beautiful tragedy. Some people grow fond of one another only to fall out of love. Food provides some people with comfort only to make their lives miserable. Social media can fill a person with false validity resulting in a reality of emptiness.

Any activity or substance that is a part of your life’s routine can become a crutch. The purpose of these crutches is to provide your life with meaning through pleasure. For some people, their pleasure can bring forth soothing feelings, for others, their pleasure can provide an exhilarating rush. My pleasure felt like a pulsating warmth of euphoria, where all my life’s responsibilities, pressures and anxieties would fall by the wayside. I would be taken to a place where carelessness and impulsivity were perfectly synchronized with one another. My crutch was alcohol.

For years, alcohol took me to a place where I wanted to be when I was sober. I was confident instead of reserved, outspoken and not silent, preoccupied as opposed to being bored, and relaxed rather than anxious. I felt free. I believed alcohol enhanced all my best qualities while allowing me to forget my worst attributes.

Alcohol made senior prom night a time to remember, fraternity formals bearable and many evenings out on the town remarkable. As fun as these moments were, there was a price to pay. Alcohol works a lot like a mortgage. It will provide you with a home where you’ll make the bed you will lie in. But when the time comes to pay up, you had better be ready to pay — with interest.

As time progressed, alcohol began to slowly spill into a variety of areas in my life. Drinking to make college exams bearable morphed into a new normal. Drinking to make a relationship manageable had become typical. Frequently having a drink to make sleeping tolerable became habitual. All these habits aided in my tolerance skyrocketing. So, towards the end of college during the times where I would go out and drink, I needed an exuberant amount of liquor to get drunk. And of course, drinking such a large amount often lead to a mountain of poor decisions.

Over time, people including my friends and parents began to take note. My friends and girlfriend, at the time, voiced changes in my behavior. My friends would often say I was more reserved. Little did they know I spent my alone time behind closed doors drinking until I fell asleep. Eventually, my social life completely evaporated.

I had acquaintances, but hardly anyone I wanted to open up to. For the very few people I gave a slither of a view into the window of my alcoholic life, I was met with doubt regarding the severity of my habit. “You don’t have a problem; I know people with real problems,” I was once told. Loneliness and sadness were my everyday feelings. Insecurities plagued my mind during every second of every hour.

The following year after I graduated undergrad, I decided to move to Maryland in 2020 to pursue a master’s degree in real estate development. I believed this would be a fresh start to my life where I could make new friends and develop healthy habits. But as they say, old habits die hard. I spent my first semester in a rough place reeling from the breakup of my, then-girlfriend of four years, by drinking whenever I could.

Then COVID-19 occurred which did nothing to help my life or anyone’s life for that matter. I felt more alone than ever. This resulted in me retreating to my bedroom on my weekends where I would drink all day and night. They say, “misery loves comfort” and in this case, alcohol was my comfort and my internal disappointment with who I had become up reflected my misery. Over time, the comfort became dull. The routine of drinking became a chore. That cozy feeling you get when you begin to start drinking became lukewarm. The hangovers in bed started to feel like a deathbed. Yet I continued to drink.

Months passed and the chore of drinking finally became a burden. During moments while drinking, I had many thoughts where I questioned myself. Why do I drink? Why can’t I stop? Could I ever have fun without alcohol ever again? I felt that I was robbing myself of something genuine. I didn’t know what that genuine something was, but I knew I was missing it. I could best describe it as that beautiful happiness of waking up early on Saturday morning to a bowl of cereal watching cartoons as a kid.

Or that happy feeling you get during those mornings in the middle of fall when it finally starts to feel cool and brisk. I was missing genuine happiness in the little things that life provides. Some of these things were as artificial as a bowl of Captain Crunch or as natural as the wind produced by nature — but I knew I missed the moments in life that filled me with joy, absent of alcohol and substances.

I grew envious of the people who could enjoy weekends without a single drop of alcohol. I became enraged at my lack of self-control. So desperately I wanted to change. I was tired of the headaches and the brain fog. Tired of the crippling anxiety. Tired of the nonproductivity. Tired of regretful decisions. Simply put, I was tired of being tired.

This past January of 2021, I decided to make an immediate change. No, this was not going to be some half-hearted resolution. I was legit ready to make a change in my life. I was going to start small with the intent of a larger end goal. My initial goal was to go as long as I could without alcohol. Initially, I set a benchmark of two weeks.

During this time period, I decided I would read in-depth about the effects of alcohol, clear out my cabinet and freezer, avoid nights out to the bar and anything I could do to be around alcohol. My goal was to give sobriety a shot (pun intended). I wanted to stop drinking for a two-week period and assess the results to see if I could go longer.

But to my surprise, two weeks became four weeks, which snowballed into months. My experience changed my personal perception of drinking. Abstaining from alcohol was hard, but provided me with many benefits that some would say are obvious and many would find surprising. Without further ado, I will discuss the five ways that abstaining from alcohol for four months changed my life.

Social Life

Conventional wisdom would tell you that a reduction in drinking would lead to a reduction in social life. In this case, conventional wisdom would be correct — in the short term. Initially, I avoided many nights out, went m.i.a in several people’s lives and skipped out on a variety of after-work functions.

As time progressed, I began to miss socializing, therefore I decided to hang out with some of the new friends I made in graduate school. My intent to refrain from drinking remained. The first few evenings out were uncomfortable. Some people were startled. Some people tried pressuring me. Others were supportive.

As I became more comfortable with going out and not drinking, something interesting began to happen. After about two months of abstaining from alcohol, I noticed how much easier it became to simply conversate with new people without alcohol. Throughout my life, I found it difficult to approach new people upon meeting them — primarily in socializing situations. Conversations lacked a natural fluidity. Stammering words were very occasional. Continuous breaks in eye contact were a given.

But going out, sober, over the course of a few months gave me an opportunity to practice people skills in a socialized setting. This observation caused me to realize how much of a social crutch we allow alcohol to be. Refraining from drinking had another significant impact on my social life. I began to separate out my drinking buddies from my actual friends. The lines of a friendship can become blurred when most of your free time is spent drinking with people who party every weekend.

On the surface, you constantly have friends who include you in activities. Seemingly, you have fun together. But intuitively, there is a depth to the friendship that lacks. These kinds of people know you, but they don’t know you. I wanted genuine friendships where some days we could go on hiking instead of bar hopping, or running instead of clubbing. I have since differentiated acquaintances and drinking buddies from my genuine friends.

Mental Health

I took note of a constant cycle I would see in my life when I drank a lot. I spent a good portion of my time complaining about life during the weekdays, often stating to friends how depressed I felt. The weekdays were spent feeling mentally fatigued, usually accompanied by a lot of brain fog. The irony was that I was filling myself with copious amounts of a depressant which more than likely exacerbated my depression and anxiety.

One of the first things I noticed when I quit drinking alcohol was a major reduction in brain fog. My memory was noticeably sharper. The next thing I took note of was an increase in my overall mental energy. I was able to focus for longer periods of time during work and devote more attention towards school and personal projects.

One of my favorite mental health benefits was an increase in my desire to do new and different activities. When I would drink, my motivation was close to none. My weekends included waking up around 11 AM, lounging in bed and watching TV. I would do nothing productive all day until it was time to drink.

Cutting out alcohol forced me to find a variety of new activities to do — all of which benefited my mental health. Some of these activities were mountain hiking, exploring various coffee shops in downtown D.C., participating in adult soccer leagues, hitting the gym and boxing. These were just a few of the many things I decided to do. Overall, I have noticed a reduction in my anxiety, anger and depression. My memory and brain function has been sharper. In addition, I have observed an increase in my own personal growth and motivation towards my goals.

Physical Health

My physical health was the most noticeable change that I had experienced throughout my decision to stop drinking. Right before I made the decision to cut out alcohol, I weighed 191 lbs. at a height of 5'8". This was the heaviest I had ever been.

As I am writing this article, I currently weigh 163 lbs. I attribute much of this weight loss due to abstaining from alcohol. When I was heavily drinking, I was also working out a lot, primarily to compensate for the amount of calories I was going to consume on a day I knew I was going to drink. If I knew I was going to go out drinking during the evening, I would spend mornings running on the treadmill for an hour or two — often burning anywhere between 1,000–1,500 calories.

Yet, while doing all this exercise, I was not losing any weight. Looking back during this time of my life, I now know that alcohol was a major inhibitor. Alcohol packs a lot of empty calories and carbs that can easily be turned into fat, resulting in additional weight gain. But what I failed to realize is the amount of additional food I would eat while drunk. People tend to focus on the effect of hunger caused by marijuana, which we call the “munchies.”

But let me tell you, the “drunkies” are a totally different monster. I would typically end a night of binge drinking with 15 dollars worth of food from 7-Eleven, Taco Bell, or McDonald’s. Combined with drinking, this could amount to an additional 2,500 calories on top of what I ate throughout the day. This was a weekly occurrence, so over the course of a year, I was consuming an additional 130,000 calories. That is roughly eating 54 days’ worth of extra food. So, when I quit drinking, all those extra meals and DoorDash orders subsided.

Weight wasn’t the only physical attribute that was reduced. My mid-day crashes began to subside. I am not entirely sure of the science behind this, but I love the result. Prior to my drinking hiatus, whenever 1–2 PM rolled around, I noticed this strong urge to sleep. This made work and school a nightmare.

Playing that game of “pretending to be alert and productive so your boss doesn’t catch you sleeping” was awful. I often thought that I had some light form of narcolepsy. However, the remedy to these mid-day crashes was quitting alcohol. The strange thing was the results were nearly immediate. Within a few short weeks, the mid-day crashes were gone. In general, I noticed higher levels of energy and alertness.

Finances

After cutting out alcohol, I noticed a surplus of discretionary income since I wasn’t buying alcohol on a weekly basis. One of my largest issues prior to cutting out alcohol was impulse spending, particularly at the bar. For whatever reason, I would become very generous and buy friends, and everyone within a 10-foot vicinity any drink of their choosing.

As one could imagine, this habit would become very costly over the years. Another issue I would have was impulse spending on food after a night of binge drinking. As previously mentioned, I would eat a large amount of food which became an expensive habit over time. I also noticed how drinking was costly in other ways that were more subtle.

The various Uber rides to and from a location, parking, impulse shopping, cover charges, events and delivery fees are all a few of the many ways drinking has negatively influenced my finances. Instead of spending money on all these various circumstances that surround drinking, I have been able to make appropriate financial decisions that better suit my life on items and experiences that I genuinely enjoy.

Time

Aside from more discretionary income, I also had more time on my hands. At the beginning of this journey, having more time was difficult. Initially, I spent more time thinking about drinking and alcohol. I also felt a great deal of FOMO and loneliness. But as time went by, I began to seek out activities I had never tried but was interested in such as adult soccer and kayaking.

I also had time to do small tasks over the weekend that made my weekdays much easier such as planning, cleaning and general household chores that would typically amount over time. I used my additional time to study for and pass my real estate licensing exam. I even started an ETSY page where I sell digital art, prints and templates. The days we drink seem to fly by, but the time and money add up. Cutting out drinking gave me additional time which I used to find activities that have greatly benefited my life.

Post 4 Month Hiatus

Alcohol re-entered my life when I felt ready to have a drink. I didn’t have a set date in mind, or even a burning desire to force alcohol back into my life. But I wanted to have a drink when the time felt most comfortable. My first drink from my four-month hiatus from alcohol was in early June while at a baseball game with friends. I tried out two flavors of Truly’s.

I remember having a very dull, uneventful buzz after these drinks. A few weeks later I had a couple drinks during a friend’s birthday celebration at a bar and was accompanied by that same dull and boring buzz. Having a few drinks every other weekend with friends became my new norm. I have since noticed that drinking just doesn’t have that same euphoric and warm sensation that I was so accustomed to feeling.

Has my mood been enhanced? Sure. But do I have this overwhelming craving to drink? Not at all. Since I began drinking again, alcohol has more of a “meh” feeling to it. It hasn’t been great, but it hasn’t been bad. The experience has just been okay.

This is how I wish to view alcohol going forward — as something that is just alright. Alcohol shouldn’t become a crutch that I desperately need to feel alive. I feel alive when I have genuine experiences where I live in the moment. I am not naïve and understand that my relationship with alcohol must be monitored very carefully. I am open and ready to accept a day if and when I will need to avoid drinking for good.

For now, I feel comfortable proceeding with my relationship with alcohol with immense caution for the rest of my life. For years, alcohol served as a vehicle that once took me out of the moment and to a place where reality didn’t exist. I have since arrived at a point in my life where I thought it would take years to achieve. This is a point where I have taken back the control that alcohol once took from me.