Have you decided on your tipple yet? A velvety merlot, perhaps, or a crisp cosmopolitan?
If you’ve done Dry January and made it through the working week with no booze, chances are you’re counting down the hours until your first Friday night drink of the year tomorrow.
To which I say, congratulations – and how about holding off a bit longer?
Because while a month off the sauce may feel like an age, extending your period of sobriety could end up radically recalibrating your relationship with booze – transforming you from the kind of drinker who can’t imagine socialising sober, and for whom one never feels enough, to someone who can take it or leave it.
At least, that’s what happened to me.
Until four years ago I saw drinking as an integral part of my identity – as essential to take the edge off a stressful day as it was to sparkle at a party. For almost three decades, I drank most weeks, often to excess, and until the age of 43 I assumed I would forever.
However, three sober stretches over the last four years have changed my drinking habits completely. And with every period of abstinence, I’ve wanted to drink less when I do start up again. Now 47, I abandoned my second margarita after three sips last Saturday – something that would have seemed impossible.
I’m convinced that ‘intermittent drinking’ has curbed my craving for alcohol in a similar way intermittent fasting has been shown to reduce longing for unhealthy food.
I’d recommend it to people who don’t fancy ditching drink, but who recognise they’d benefit from cutting back.
Indeed, since I started writing about my relationship with alcohol, several women have told me they too have lost much of their desire for drink after long periods without.
I don’t believe one month off booze is enough to break the decades long psychological link between alcohol and socialising, stress relief and self-care entrenched in mid-life women like me.
For a start, cravings have been shown to increase before they subside. One study on inpatient alcoholics showed they were highest after 60 days of abstinence.
Another study found it took an average of 66 days of consistent repetition for a daily habit become automatic.
Among sobriety experts, 100 days is often cited as a sensible milestone, because it’s long enough to have to learn to enjoy life without alcohol.
Like many, for years I did Dry January as an exercise in self restraint. It wasn’t until January 2022 when, burnt out after a particularly boozy Christmas, I listened to my body and acknowledged I was enjoying the better sleep and calmer mood my sobriety afforded.
So I carried on, treating my sobriety as an adventure. I learned to socialise sober, to switch off with loud music instead of sauvignon, to sit with my feelings without freaking out.
I never planned to quit drinking forever, but with surprisingly little effort, that one month turned into two years.
But our relationship with alcohol can be more complex than those who espouse the benefits of complete sobriety suggest. After a while, being sober felt like another form of perfectionism to beat myself up over.
I knew the pedestal I had put myself would be more painful to fall from the longer I abstained. I began to consider moderation instead.
I was worried I’d revert back to binging when I started drinking in January 2024.
But I no longer experienced the same urge to drink. Midweek drinking disappeared and the link between Friday evenings and wine had been severed. Alcohol often tasted unpalatable and I found myself going for weeks without.
The handful of occasions I got drunk that year were driven mostly by curiosity; the hangovers were a reminder the pain was rarely worth it. My tolerance to alcohol had plummeted, even a glass scuppered my sleep and the initial buzz quickly gave way to irritability, so last January I stopped again for 100 days. The break felt more like self-care than sacrifice and I grew even more ambivalent about booze when I started drinking again.
A third alcohol-free stint from September to December was less effort. It wasn’t going to be forever, after all. And of course there are other benefits to intermittent drinking, from plumper skin and lower blood pressure, to improved focus and a more balanced gut.
While there are no studies into whether repeated periods of abstinence diminish desire, my behaviour is what Stanford psychiatrist Dr Anna Lembke has described as ‘self-binding’ – putting barriers in place from compulsions whether our goal be abstinence or moderation.
Afterwards, I have a heightened sense of how alcohol makes me feel – usually talkative, then cranky, then lethargic. I know if I drink when I’m feeling sad I will soon feel worse and when I’m stressed it will only delay my panic.
Drinking to celebrate still makes sense, although a single glass of wine was enough to see in the New Year. As I sipped it I marvelled at a psychological pivot I’d thought impossible, but now believe is open to most.
