How Dry January Reshaped My Relationship With Drinking
Key takeaways:
In 2023, Liz Carey decided to try Dry January to break her cycle of drinking.
Instead of craving her old habits when February rolled around, she realized cutting back on drinking had changed her relationship with alcohol.
It also improved her sleep, increased her energy, and left her feeling better overall.
My Journey is a series of personal essays about what it’s like to cope with a medical condition.
I don’t think I meant for Dry January to put a near end to my drinking, but it did.
At the end of 2022, like so many women of a certain age, I decided Dry January would be a way to head into the new year with a new outlook. Going without my nightly wine would be a piece of cake, I thought.
“Surely, I can make it a month,” I thought. “When it’s over, I’ll just ease it back to one or two glasses a night.”
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Developing a drinking habit
Since my 20s, I’ve been a drinker. I grew up in a no-alcohol household. But, once I hit college, drinking became a habit. Like going to classes and attending football games, drinking was a part of my weekly life.
Later, as a single professional woman in Cincinnati, I co-managed a wine store and got used to having a glass (or three) every night with customers. Once I settled down, my husband and I would go out often and share a few drinks with friends. Pub crawls, wine festivals, dinners out — there was always something to drink. At one point, one of my co-workers said she just couldn’t imagine me without a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
For the most part, I kept it under control. But in 2015, as my marriage started to fall apart, everything felt darker and I found myself drinking more and more. A few glasses became a bottle a night. I told myself I needed it to cope with daily struggles. But the nights without a drink became rarer and rarer.
I wasn’t drinking during the day, and I wasn’t getting fall-down drunk from hard alcohol. In my mind, it was just a few glasses of wine or a couple of beers to take the edge off at night. It didn’t seem to me like a problem. But my doctor said it was. I was hitting the CDC’s maximum of seven drinks a week for women within 2 days.
A turn for the worse
After my divorce in 2019, I moved into an apartment on my own and faced the pandemic alone. At the height of lockdowns, one bottle a night sometimes became two. Even buying cheap bottles, I was shocked when I realized I was spending more every month on wine than I was on gas for my car.
I was becoming someone I didn’t want to be. Everywhere I went, I had a drink. When I got home, I’d have a drink. When I was happy, I’d have a drink. When I was upset, I would have a drink. When I watched TV, I’d have a drink. When I spent nights doomscrolling on my phone, I’d have a drink.
Even though people were celebrating women drinking everywhere I looked, I was worried I was not the mom my sons needed me to be. They are adults, but I still wanted to be there for them. When I realized I’d be too drunk to offer any assistance if they were in a wreck at night, it was an eye-opener.
So, I tried to cut back. I decided I would only drink after 9 in the evening. That only led to staying up until 2 to finish a bottle. Then, I decided I’d take two nights off from drinking every week. But I was back to drinking every night in no time.
I knew I had to do something. Dry January for 2023, I thought, would be a way to break that cycle.
Navigating Dry January
I spent most of the first week of January planning how to navigate a month of sobriety. The first 4 days were hard. I was irritable and edgy. It was harder to concentrate. And I had a hard time getting to sleep. To combat that, I started taking melatonin before bed, along with one night-time ibuprofen. I also moved up my bedtime by an hour, so I could spend time relaxing with a book instead of watching television and doomscrolling — activities I associated with drinking.
Inevitably, within 2 weeks, something popped up at work. But instead of reaching for the pinot grigio, I headed to a meditation app. To distract myself at night, I took on some volunteer projects to fill up spare time.
By the end of the second week, I felt more comfortable reaching for a cup of tea or a glass of sparkling water instead of pouring myself a glass of wine. While I spent the first week thinking about what I was going to drink on February 1, I found that, by Day 15, I wasn’t concerned with that as much. By Day 28, my next drink wasn’t even on my radar.
When February 1 rolled around, in fact, I found I didn’t want to have a drink. Internally, I was wondering how long I could go without one.
The aftereffects of cutting back on drinking
Doctors say that when you quit drinking you lose weight. At 57, I didn’t see a lot of weight loss, but that may have had something to do with food tasting better. I did find that I had more energy, however. I slept better. I was in a better mood. I got more done. It was like a curtain had lifted and the sun was shining all around me.
I did go back to drinking occasionally. However, I’ve never gone back to the one bottle of wine a night that had been my habit for so many years. Instead of worrying about how many bottles I have in my wine rack, I make sure I’m stocked up on sparkling water and tea bags. I may have a couple of glasses of wine one or two nights a week, but it’s usually on the weekends.
I do notice that, when I have those drinks, it takes a day or two for me to get back to normal. And every now and again, I’ll find myself with a glass in hand, scrolling through social media at 2 in the morning. But those occasions are outliers and not the norm. More often than not, when I reach for the wine opener, I find I’m dreading the hangover instead of looking forward to the buzz.
Forcing myself to take a break from drinking during Dry January helped me to find a way out of a bad habit. I believe that if I hadn’t taken that break, and made myself drink something else, I’d still be drinking a bottle of wine a night — to the detriment of my health, my mood, and my work.
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